Google’s clash with China raises some more fundamental questions. It’s now been 20 years since the June 4th incident in Tiananmen and political change has been, as Mao predicted, “like crossing a river, feeling for the pebbles one at a time.” The question, over the long term, is whether the ghosts of Tiananmen will come back [...]

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I was delighted to hear that Google has finally thrown down the gauntlet in China. No longer will it be complicit in denying freedom of information and expression to Chinese citizens. Google is now on the right side of the moral equation. But will it change anything?
Like Iran and Burma, China has modernized and adapted [...]

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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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Just over a year ago I wrote about how advocacy movements are increasingly harnessing the Web to reduce isolation, build far-flung networks, and co-ordinate collective action. Even iron-fisted government control over telecommunications in Burma could not prevent individuals from posting numerous grainy, and sometimes gory, videos on YouTube that exposed rampant human rights abuses throughout [...]

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Last week I gave a speech to a group of leaders from some of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) including World Vision, Oxfam, CARE, The Nature Conservancy, Red Cross, and others. The group was assembled to assess the possibility of putting together an industry standard for project design, monitoring and evaluation (DM&E) that could [...]

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Since September 19, thousands of Burmese protesters have poured on to the streets of Rangoon to demand freedom from military rule. On September 26, the Burmese military government responded with violence. Thousands of protestors have since been seized and taken away. Yesterday, campaigners in 30 cities around the world showed solidarity by organizing local demonstrations [...]

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New Paradigm colleague Paul Artiuch just tipped me off about this amazing new app on Google Earth. Google has teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create awareness of the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. Darfur, which has been labeled by the U.S. as the first genocide of the century, [...]

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