· October, 2011

Stories about Ideas from October, 2011

Russia: Pirate Flag Over Novosibirsk City

RuNet Echo  31 October 2011

LJ-user dedmaxopka publishes [ru] pictures of himself placing a pirate flag over Novosibirsk city administration. “We just wanted to make nice pictures of the city,” explained the blogger to the police that identified him the same day. Blogger was charged with ‘petty hooliganism’ and had to pay a small fine.

East Timor: Investing in Creativity and Culture

  28 October 2011

Barcelona artist David Palazón ended up in East Timor as a break from his career. Now he is coordinating a project to research Timorese culture in hopes of creating a school for the creative industries, to stimulate jobs in the non-oil economy, small businesses, and tourism.

Open Access Africa: Spreading Knowledge, Increasing Collaboration

  28 October 2011

We celebrate Open Access Week with a special focus on Open Access Africa. As the internet lowers the bar for publishing and disseminating information, print-era publishing models still keep African researchers and students separated from colleagues in different countries and their ideas. How has Open Access changed scholarship in Africa?

Russia: Crowd-Sourced Citizen Lawmaking Platform

RuNet Echo  28 October 2011

The Economist writes about WikiVote (e.g. see projects dedicated to the laws on education, Sberbank, state-owned bank), Russian croudsourcing platform to comment and contribute to the creation of the laws. Pavel Burov, creator of the platform, claims his project can ‘prevent idiocy [in lawmaking] from happening.’

Sri Lanka: Working Towards Uniting the Nation

  28 October 2011

The 26 year long civil war in Sri Lanka has left many scars and it is an uphill task to bridge all divides and start the reconciliation to unite people. 'Sri Lanka Unites' is engaging the youth across the country to build good leadership with hope and reconciliation who will unite the nation one day.

Coworking Spaces and Nomad Workers in Japan

  23 October 2011

Coworking is a growing worldwide movement, and Japan is no exception. Surprising to see in a culture where the idea of physically being in the office at all hours is ingrained in the psyche of the salaried worker? Perhaps not.

Jamaica: I Think, Therefore I Am

  21 October 2011

Long Bench responds to a newspaper editorial suggesting that the “silent middle class must assert itself”, saying: “The term ‘well-thinking Jamaicans'…smacks of an elitism that is based in the editors’ sense of the moral superiority of some groups over others. Is ‘thinking’ supposed to allude to education level and capacity...

Japan: We're Losing to Apple, and Here's Why

  18 October 2011

Blogger Isseki Nagae considers the sorry state of the Japanese personal electronics industry in light of the recent success of Apple in Japan. Through the words of Steve Jobs, Nagae argues that Japanese manufacturers pay too much attention to the views of the average user rather than developing new ideas.

Madagascar: The Birthplace of the “Occupy Wall Street” Philosophy ?

  17 October 2011

Dan Berrett argues in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the ” Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar”.

China: No Clear Solution to the Wall Street Occupation

  17 October 2011

The occupation of Wall Street has gathered a lot of interest in China, as have three blog posts last week from an investment banker, a columnist and a Yale professor, none of whom seem too optimistic that a new economic vision will arise from the growing global movement any time soon.