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.

The Day

Good evening. This is a digest of the major stories on the day.

• The Twitter-Frontline #aras11 story continues with Sean Gallagher asking Rabbitte to consider a full RTÉ inquiry

• In London Kenny met Cameron to discuss the future of Anglo-Irish relations

"He was in hospital from Monday right through until the weekend and probably lost a couple of kilos of weight,” said team manager Michael Kearney today. Read on...

• The Ireland management expect Seán O’Brien to be available for selection for the final Six Nations game against England at Twickenham on Saturday. The Leinster flanker was forced to sit out the 32-14 win over Scotland at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday after succumbing to a skin infection in his foot

• The Government has announced a €1.5 billion programme to build 106 primary schools and 43 secondary schools over the next five years.

• New York is No. 1, Dublin is 27th, in a new ranking of most competitive cities in the world.

• A businessman has sued Friends First Life Assurance Company over allegedly threatening to pursue him for almost $10 million

• A woman was jailed today for killing her neighbour, a 66 year old father-of-four, by crushing him with her car.

• The Leaning Tower of Pisa will turn green for St. Patrick’s Day, the latest in a series of world landmarks to sign up for the “Global Greening” to mark the day.

• Two dogs rescued from the pound pawed their way to top honours this weekend at the largest annual dog show in the world

Your most shared article today: Nike's new 'Black and Tan' sneaker. Read on...

• The two most shared stories on the site today were Nike puts its foot in it with ‘Black and Tan’ sneaker and Adventures of Biolbó Baigín set out as Gaeilge in ‘An Hobad’

• A surprising statistic about traffic in Dublin: in the last ten years people are driving less

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.