French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, gave the opening address to Davos yesterday. His message: this is not just a global financial crisis; it is a crisis of globalization. My overall assessment of his talk: A good job diagnosing the problems with today’s economy, but Sarkozy offers little in the way of novel or innovative solutions.
Not surprisingly, he [...]

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My quote of the day comes straight out of a political science textbook, but it rings so true today:
“The lesson that capitalist countries needed to combine the efficiency of markets with the broader values of community … did not come to them easily. It took the calamitous collapse of the Victorian era of globalization — [...]

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I love this example of participatory regulation. Marc Bohlen, an “artist-engineer” at the University of Zurich, has designed a floating public robot that makes assessing recreational water quality a transparent and participatory experience. The Glass Bottom Float, as he calls it, cruises along a beach shore, and offers itself as a resting spot in places it deems clean [...]

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In the past, natural resource conservation came down to the capacity of an authoritative, centralized body in a geographic territory to monitor and control the exploitation of a given resource, whether forests, minerals or fisheries. Said regulators would issue permits for exploitation, often acting from a distance and on the basis of very sparse and [...]

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Participatory regulation is arguably the best way to surface and defeat corruption in government and industry. I’ve highlighted a range of impressive efforts below. They range from Transparency International’s more top-down survey and index approach to the bottom-up Wikileaks site where anybody can post documents that uncover instances of corruption. You can add your examples [...]

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Here are some examples of participatory regulation where workers, employers, NGOs, and citizens collaborate to help monitor and enforce workplace health and safety rules. The initiatives I’ve documented below focus on worker’s rights in the furthest reaches of corporate supply chains for consumer items ranging from chocolate and confectionery to running shoes and other apparel.

Worker’s [...]

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Recent events have got me thinking about regulation and just how strained and ineffectual our current systems have become. It’s not just the global financial crisis, although this alone illustrates what can happen when both markets and regulators fail. Issues as diverse as climate change, emerging technologies, international trade, food safety, infectious disease, and human [...]

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Boing Boing picked up on this irreverant Henry Rollins rant on Internet freedom. I thought it was worth reposting here. Rollins was a teenager hero for me. He clearly hasn’t lost his edge. Not for the faint-hearted.

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My colleague Paul Artiuch just alterted me to a new Wiki initiative that aims to expose the secrets of the world’s oppressive regimes. The Wikileaks initiative is,
“developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, [...]

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A few weeks ago two U.S. congressional representatives — Rick Boucher and John Doolittle — proposed legislation to ostensibly protect the fair use rights of consumers in the wake of a sustained attack on these rights by various copyright lobbies. Much discussion ensued.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) predictably complained that the “FAIR USE [...]

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