If they are not ready for what they need, give them the backbone for their future baby steps

Nuff said.

Been there, but haven't done that

long-distance-swimming-im-lac-de-st-croix

Unus Pro Omnibus - Omnes Pro Uno

independence: 1 August 1291
- de facto: 22 September 1499
- recognized: 24 October 1648
- restored: 7 August 1815
- constitution: 12 September 1848

tld: .ch

name: Eidgenossenschaft (oath cooperative)

official name: Confoederatio Helvetica (CH)

capital: de jure: none, de facto: Berne

head of state: undefined

head of government: none

executive branch: federal council with principle of collegiality

form of government: half-direct concordance-democracy, sui generis

official language: no particular one

nationality: none, actually, since the point of the confederation is a pact to swear that we do not want to belong to anything like that, la Suisse n'existe pas. Ok, foreigners refer to it as Swiss, but being swiss is a denationality and Switzerland is a denation.

sovereignty: it's not just about voting rights: the power is with the people, they are the army and they keep their guns at home. Sometimes these guns are used for ugly suicides, but hey, that is a right a sovereign citizen has, and since as a logical consequence assisted suicide is legal as well, there are usually less violant options available with the help of non-profit "exit" organisations. Anyway, what the guns are there for primarily, of course, is to ensure that the sovereignty can never be taken away from the people, not even by their own government. The guns are there as a dissuasion, to ensures that they will never be used after all.

solidarity: if your fellow citizens have guns at home and are trained to use them, you better show due solidarity. Plus, it's in the spirit of that oath, remember? Unus Pro Omnibus - Omnes Pro Uno.

subsidiarity: citizens delegate administrative processes and governance to the most local level possible: their community. The communities may further delegate issues that can not be appropriately handled at a local level to more distant levels, such as their districts, cantons or the confederation. That also means that, as a foreigner, you can't get the citizenship directly from the confederation, instead you have to be accepted by one of its communities as one of their own.

sustainability: only if we are willing to do the work. Sustainability is the double-process of living the system in ways sustainable for its environment while sustaining the system itself.

and btw, in case you noticed: the conceptual analogies are not coincidental - this confederation is political open source - feel free to copy the bits you like to improve its concepts as part of your own political systems. We'll be watching with interest and are eager to learn from your anarchistic development.

;-)

Hang You From the Heavens by The Dead Weather

Web-based editing of sandboxed server-side javascript apps

The puzzle pieces are starting to come together: Hannes' Helma NG screencast of a development environment running in the browser, with fine grained security and sandboxing. In other words, allowing untrusted users to write hosted serverjs apps using a web-based editor:

Helma NG - web editor and security from Hannes Wallnoefer on Vimeo .

PubSubHub against spam and walled gardens

PubSubHubBub, a simple, open, server-to-server HTTP-based publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to Atom. Exactly the way I would go about doing away with smtp and reinventing foaf, killing spam and walled garden social networks at one fell swoop.

CometD at a glance

Greg Wilkins gives a rundown on the features and extensions of CometD , the bi-directional low-latency messaging bus over long-lived HTTP connections, implementing the Bayeux protocol .

>>> Be part of the solution, not part of the problem