TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld on Google Takeout:
"Lost in all the buzz around Google+ is an important new feature rolled out alongside it that makes it way easier to take all your data out of Google. It is called, appropriately enough, Google Takeout. It’s got it’s own separate site and is also part of settings within Google+. In settings, you click on “Data Liberation” and then you are given the option to download all of your profile data, stream data, photos from Picassa, Buzz data, Circles and Contacts."
The Data Liberation Front about itself: "The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products."
California is experimenting with processes similar to what I have in mind for the Volksrat project, which will attempt to establish
dynamic facilitation based
processes in a more regular, institutionalized way as part of the Consultation Procedure system in Switzerland (Art. 147 of the Swiss Constitution).
More than 400 scientifically randomly sampled Californians gathered in Torrance at the end of June for an experiment in deliberative polling. Jim Fishkin of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University and creator of the Deliberative Poll format, is enthusiastic about the experience:
"I have never seen engagement and excitement like last weekend," said Fishkin. "Californians are willing and able to engage when they trust their government and believe there will be a high level of transparency and accountability, I am hopeful these results change the dialogue in Sacramento and spur real change."
An initial analysis found:
Strong demand for greater transparency and accountability
Clear lack of trust in current system
Strong desire for solutions
Unwillingness to abdicate control to the legislature, but a recognition that the legislature needs tools to solve problems
Specifically, the poll found the following changes in opinion after deliberation:
Creating a formal review process to allow an initiative's proponents to amend an initiative following public input" support rose from 59% to 76% after deliberation.
Publishing the top five contributors for and against each ballot measure in the ballot pamphlet" Support rose from 82% to 91%
Allowing the legislature to amend an initiative that has already passed, subject to a public review and the agreement of the initiative's proponents" Opposition increased from 44% to 51%
Data are still preliminary and full results gathered from the deliberations are forthcoming, tackling aspects such as tax and fiscal reform; initiative process; reforming the way the legislature represents voters and reforming the way programs and services are delivered with more emphasis on local accountability and control.
This is interesting in more ways than Gunter Pauli intended. At 23:15 he claims to have learned the lesson of how collateral damage is unacceptable, the story about EcoVer he had told us about at 10:50. Then at 25:00 into the video, he talks about "Nature's MBA", "substitute something with nothing". But at 40:00, shaving our skin is apparently something that is not on the list of what could simply be eliminated, and instead he wants to replace the metal shaver blades with 100'000 tons of additional silk production, with the collateral damage of mass farming 250'000 hectares of mulberry trees (as opposed to regenerating the top soil of arid land with permaculture) and boiling 500'000'000'000 cocoons to death just before the adult moth is about to emerge. Collateral damage?
Has he learned his own lessons? Isn't that exactly "the type of compromises that isn't getting us forward"? "Ich habe es nicht gewusst"? It's a good illustration of how hard it is not to become part of the problem when trying to be part of the solution.
Gabriel Walt talking to David Nüscheler about Adobe's
Customer Experience Solutions,
it's involvement in Open Source software and the Apache Software Foundation in particular, and the importance of context in the context of Customer Experience Management.
Tim Anderson: "Adobe has made several big acquisitions over the last few years, starting with the Macromedia merger in 2005 that really formed a new Adobe, bringing together digital publishing and the Flash platform. In September 2009 Adobe acquires Omniture for web analytics, and in October 2010 Day Software. This last one seems to be having a huge impact. Day’s product is called CQ5 Web Content Management and is built on CRX, a content repository which conforms to JCR 2.0 (Java Technology API 2.0), a Java API."
Ben Watson: "The core of the platform now becomes the repository that we got from the Day acquisition. We are also following their leadership around the use of RESTful technology, so changing how we do our web services implementation, how we do our real time data integration into Flash using data services. There’s really four technologies at play here. There’s CQ5, Adobe LiveCycle which is all the business process management on the back end, the online marketing suite with Omniture, and Creative tools which allow to both design and develop all of this content and assets … We had two Java platforms and we brought them into one."
