Technologies of Governance

Yesterday’s Washington Post reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is introducing an element of peer production into their patent examination process: The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to [...]

Perhaps it is because I don’t own a car, but I’ve always been fascinated by traffic jams. Especially at intersections, it can be great fun to watch myriads of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists approaching the bottleneck at the same time. Sometimes people get hopelessly stuck, but most of the time they somehow manage to avoid [...]

Sounds pathetic, but our blogs seem to be finally up and running again! Sorry for the tohubohu in this space during the past couple of days. A major hardware problem knocked out the entire OII blogosphere. By now, everything should be working again. I re-added the (lost) comments from Google cache with original date stamps [...]