A bitcoin for your toughts

While I pack my stuff in order to start my journey to Istanbul today, where I will be participating in the CoP2013 meeting (ICTs, Governance and Conflict), I am also downloading a good amount of collateral material and things I have written in the past, in order to better prepare myself for the event. After all, there will be long waiting hours between flights and I usually don't sleep too much inside planes. One thing the technology development still owe us is the teletransport, and this doesn't seem to something we will see too soon.

While reading a report I have produced for the Finnish Minister of Development Aid in the beginning of 2003, sponsored by OneWorld.Net, I highlighted one of my conclusions:

"It is very difficult to ensure transparency when someone doesn't want to provide information. When this is government information, it should, in principle, be readily available for the public this government rules and represents."

It seems quite odd, after ten years, this sentence still sounds current. Most recently, in a blog post, I wrote:

"In Brazil, the Ministry of Planning issued a normative instruction saying all federal agencies must use free software whenever there is a free software solution for a given problem. There are plenty of free software solutions for education and healthcare and yet, if you pay a visit for almost all of the public health and education facilities in Brazil you will see how few are actually using them. This normative instruction and several other initiatives -- regarding free software -- by the Brazilian government are just a smoke screen, a way of saying things are being done. They are not. People with very good intentions are being intentionally squandered. This very good people are not actually aware of this."

I know my tablet battery won't last the whole trip. So I am bringing Richard Branson's newest (paper) book with me, Screw Busines as Usual. I try to keep up with what millionaire capitalists can teach us, even neo-capitalists, 24902 capitalists. Branson says in his book's foreword:

"Luckily we now live in a new world where one of the great benefits of technology is that people are now directly connected to those suffering as a result of this unfairness and are no longer prepared to accept that it's OK."

I dare to say we were always connected to one another and now, thanks to ICT, we do not have the same (artificial) need we once (believed we) needed for representation or representatives. The Kenyan Michael Onyango, economist at the Africa Creative Hub says "Let's not think inside or outside the box. Forget the box. Take the box completely out of the context". Lots of times I think we dream about making a better world while thinking outside the boxes of existing governments and financial systems. Haven't we reach a point where we should just start thinking about screwing governments as usual, screwing the financial system as usual?

A bitcoin for your toughts!



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