Oregon has declared a state of emergency to make sure it has a functional online voter registration system in time for the 2010 election. “This 2009 Act being necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety,” reads HB 2386, “an emergency is declared to exist, and this 2009 Act takes effect on its passage.”
Oregon Declares State of Emergency to Build Online Voter Registration System
Posted in Internet, Nonprofits, Personal, Politics Tagged civic engagement, online voter registration, oregon, Politics, your revolution 1 Comment
How to read PDFs on the Kindle 2
One of the big drawbacks of the Kindle 2 is that it doesn’t have a native PDF reader. Instead, you have to convert them to an e-book format with a program like Calibre or Stanza.
I like my Kindle, but I mainly use it for reading articles, newspapers, blogs, and the like. Luckily, some clever coders have figured out how to make the Kindle display PDF without conversion. Here are the steps.
Reed College gets called out for excluding students who can’t pay full tuition
Uh-oh. A couple days ago, my soon-to-be alma mater, Reed, was featured in a New York Times article. The title was not good: “Reed College, in Need, Closes Door to Needy Students.”
The gist is that Reed’s endowment has taken a big hit in the last year. This loss has caused the college–which has never been entirely need-blind–to exclude an extra 100 students who couldn’t pay full tuition.
Lewis Hyde at Berkman, on “The Second and Third Enclosures”
[Liveblog of Lewis Hyde's talk at the Berkman Center. Apologies for incoherence and misunderstanding!]
The ownership of art and ideas: why they should be owned by the commons. That’s the subject of Lewis Hyde’s new book (currently, in spiral notebook form).
The commons: language that comes out of medieval Europe, now translated into modern settings. Commons is a kind of property, not something in opposition to property. (So what then is property?)
Property, actually, is a problematic term, and the crowd laughs when Lewis asks for a definition. Exclusive use seems to be important. (More complication: there’s such a thing as “public property.”) A nineteenth-century dictionary defines property as the “right of action.” If I have a cup of tea, for instance, I can choose to drink it, or to throw it at you–or to exclude certain rights of action.
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Posted in Berkman, Internet, Personal, Photography Tagged Berkman Center, copyright law, creative actor, early law, Lewis Hyde 1 Comment
New City, New Design
I just moved to beautiful Cambridge, MA to start work as a research assistant at the Berkman Center!
My blog needed renovation, so I’ve redesigned it and cleared out the old, impulsive, wordy posts. My summer resolution is to write interesting things that won’t make me cringe when I read them a month later.
More on what I’m doing soon.
Let me know what you think about the new design; I built during the road trip from Seattle to Boston. I finished it at exit 368 on I-90 in South Dakota, outside the town of Canistota. If I clean it up to release it as a WordPress theme, I think I’ll call it that.
Typology: Outlets
Inspired by the Bernd and Hilla Becher industrial typologies.
CauseWired: Rethinking Social Change
Tom Watson’s new book, CauseWired, makes a point that’s beginning to be widely recognized, but it’s worth making again in book form: the tools of the connected age are realigning the way social change happens.
This change touches all areas of socially conscious activity—nonprofit organizing, volunteering, philanthropy, and maybe most dramatically, small-donor fundraising. This shift is easy to sense, but tricky to pin down in concrete terms.
This book isn’t a handbook for nonprofits or foundations (despite the forward by Jean Case of the Case Foundation). It’s not a recipe book. But it gives a clear look at how the landscape is quickly changing, and how we’ll all have to adapt to cope with this new ecosystem. I think Tom is quite right to make the case that we’re seeing a real paradigm shift; with the Internet and a new set of Web 2.0 tools, our arsenal for social change is starting to look quite a bit different.
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Posted in Book Reviews, Internet, Nonprofits Tagged activism, Fundraising, Nonprofits, philanthropy, social media 1 Comment
Born Digital: Is Common Sense Enough?
Born Digital is the product of several years of research from John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, two law professors, web luminaries, and digital immigrants.
Posted in Berkman, Book Reviews Tagged Berkman Center, Born Digital, Digital Natives, Intellectual Property, Net Neutrality 5 Comments
Portland is officially an open city
This morning, Portland unanimously passed a resolution to make the city more open. The city will start publishing data in open, structured formats, support open standards for media, and encourage adoption of open source software for government.
There will also be a local app contest, à la Apps for America, to slice-n-mash the newly available city data.
Read more at Silicon Florist.