Call for Civic Hackists!

There is a strong community element to the Political Reform Scorecard idea because the weighting of the importance of different areas of reform will – or should be – determined by crowd voting. Also, the ongoing tracking of implementation and performance will rely on a flow of government data. We’re looking to build a site to support this – in parallel to other angles we’re working to get the political science angle and funding (to pay for publicity). Can you think of civic hacktivists, people who would get fired up enough about Irish political reform to help us build the site?

proposal for a Political Reform Scorecard

A colleague of mine, Joseph Curtin, came up with a simple idea: why not rank, and then track, optimal political reform measures? Building on that core I elaborated a second stage that would begin after the election of a new government, at which point the system would become a way for people to engage with monitoring the progress of governmental implementation of reforms.

Objects 2.0

This is an initial note on something I have been thinking about for a while, and which I am now writing on: “Objects 2.0″ and the “crowd manufacturing cycle”.

3D printing, and the cycle of iterative remixing of physical design that will come with it, are going to dramatically disrupt manufacturing. It promises adjustment challenges to physical industry that have hitherto been largely confined to the music and movie industry. At the same time it will dramatically accelerate innovation.