Citizen participation, access to information and action usher in much needed reforms. The process to engage citizens is easy to describe but hard to achieve. So how do you grab and keep the attention of community stakeholders and keep them informed?

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Innovative Solutions to the Collective Action Problem: Participedia

Two brilliant speakers visited the World Bank last Friday: Beth Noveck , the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and Head of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative and Hans Rosling , Swedish Professor of International Health and famous for his bubble graphics of complex development statistics. They commented on the World Bank ‘s recent Open Data initiative that brought 17 data sets with more than 2,000 indicators from World Bank data sources online and into the public domain.

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Open Data, Open Knowledge

Rand Paul Strikes Back At Mainstream Media Smear Machine MSNBC devotes a full day to branding anti-establishment candidate a racist bigot Steve Watson www.prisonplanet.tv Friday, May 21st, 2010 Related: Desperate Establishment Launch Baseless Racist Attacks On Rand Paul Related: The Establishment Is In Full Blown Panic Over Rand Paul Would be Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has hit back at a desperate and sustained mainstream media attempt to smear him as a racist extremist following his historic primary victory earlier this week. Paul appeared on ABCs Good Morning America today to make it clear that the attacks against him regarding views he expressed on the Civil Rights Act, which we covered in our article yesterday, are red herrings and part of an establishment effort to trash his campaign. Ive just been trashed up and down and they have been saying things that are untrue.

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Paul Watson Talks with Jason Bermas About Cnn’s Racist Propaganda Attack on Rand Paul 1 3

Rand Paul Strikes Back At Mainstream Media Smear Machine MSNBC devotes a full day to branding anti-establishment candidate a racist bigot Steve Watson www.prisonplanet.tv Friday, May 21st, 2010 Related: Desperate Establishment Launch Baseless Racist Attacks On Rand Paul Related: The Establishment Is In Full Blown Panic Over Rand Paul Would be Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has hit back at a desperate and sustained mainstream media attempt to smear him as a racist extremist following his historic primary victory earlier this week. Paul appeared on ABCs Good Morning America today to make it clear that the attacks against him regarding views he expressed on the Civil Rights Act, which we covered in our article yesterday, are red herrings and part of an establishment effort to trash his campaign

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Paul Watson Talks with Jason Bermas About Cnn’s Racist Propaganda Attack on Rand Paul 2 3

Rand Paul Strikes Back At Mainstream Media Smear Machine MSNBC devotes a full day to branding anti-establishment candidate a racist bigot Steve Watson www.prisonplanet.tv Friday, May 21st, 2010 Related: Desperate Establishment Launch Baseless Racist Attacks On Rand Paul Related: The Establishment Is In Full Blown Panic Over Rand Paul Would be Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has hit back at a desperate and sustained mainstream media attempt to smear him as a racist extremist following his historic primary victory earlier this week. Paul appeared on ABCs Good Morning America today to make it clear that the attacks against him regarding views he expressed on the Civil Rights Act, which we covered in our article yesterday, are red herrings and part of an establishment effort to trash his campaign.

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Paul Watson Talks with Jason Bermas About Cnn’s "Racist Propaganda Attack" on Rand Paul 3/3

Rand Paul Strikes Back At Mainstream Media Smear Machine MSNBC devotes a full day to branding anti-establishment candidate a racist bigot Steve Watson www.prisonplanet.tv Friday, May 21st, 2010 Related: Desperate Establishment Launch Baseless Racist Attacks On Rand Paul Related: The Establishment Is In Full Blown Panic Over Rand Paul Would be Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has hit back at a desperate and sustained mainstream media attempt to smear him as a racist extremist following his historic primary victory earlier this week. Paul appeared on ABCs Good Morning America today to make it clear that the attacks against him regarding views he expressed on the Civil Rights Act, which we covered in our article yesterday, are red herrings and part of an establishment effort to trash his campaign

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Paul Watson Talks with Jason Bermas About Cnn’s "Racist Propaganda Attack" on Rand Paul 2/3

Rand Paul Strikes Back At Mainstream Media Smear Machine MSNBC devotes a full day to branding anti-establishment candidate a racist bigot Steve Watson www.prisonplanet.tv Friday, May 21st, 2010 Related: Desperate Establishment Launch Baseless Racist Attacks On Rand Paul Related: The Establishment Is In Full Blown Panic Over Rand Paul Would be Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has hit back at a desperate and sustained mainstream media attempt to smear him as a racist extremist following his historic primary victory earlier this week. Paul appeared on ABCs Good Morning America today to make it clear that the attacks against him regarding views he expressed on the Civil Rights Act, which we covered in our article yesterday, are red herrings and part of an establishment effort to trash his campaign.

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Paul Watson Talks with Jason Bermas About Cnn’s "Racist Propaganda Attack" on Rand Paul 1/3

Lorna Simpson talks about her career, including her recent practice of appropriating and restaging mid-20th-century photographs.

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Artist Talk: Lorna Simpson

At the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 in Santiago last week, I was able to gather a wealth of information and ideas regarding the use of ICT for accountability. In a session on this topic I had the chance to discuss with people who actually implement citizen media projects on the ground and shared their experience and insights. A number of very interesting and useful ideas came up: Accountability needs “bottom-up transparency”.

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ICT for Accountability: Transparency "Bottom-Up"

If the earthquake in Haiti and the tsunami off Indonesia in 2004 have shown us anything it is that large scale natural catastrophes are not rare. Calamities that claim tens of thousands of lives happen with regularity (about every four years on average). Many others claim a smaller number of lives but are equally devastating to local communities

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Avoiding Disaster After the Disaster

I wish to share some thoughts on the design of a new governance tool that I recently came across – Grievance Redress and Complaint Handling System, which entails a genuinely focused bottom-up methodology that instills permanent strength to demand-driven accountability.

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Complaints Handling: Small is Beautiful

In the general slander of public opinion and public opinion polls (” leaders who pander to public opinion lose respect “, see John Kay in the Financial Times ), people often mistake attitudes for opinion. It’s a technical detail, but from a governance reform view it makes all the difference. Attitudes are predispositions.

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Attitudes, Opinions, and Why Dinner Matters

I was passing through Accra recently and while walking through the lobby of the hotel was stopped by a poster for a regional conference on Freedom of Information and at the same time ran into several colleagues and old friends. It was an interesting exercise to be very aware of an issue and personalities but be on the outside looking.

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FOI: Through the Looking Glass

When President Jimmy Carter opened the Africa Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information in Accra on February 7, 2010, he explained why the Carter Center had organized the conference. The main reason, he pointed out, was that with regard to access to information ‘Africa has lagged far behind’.

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Why is the Transparency Revolution not Taking off in Africa?

Last week, the field of communication lost one of its most eminent figures, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann , who died on March 25 at the age of 93. A German public opinion scholar, Noelle-Neumann has had a powerful influence on the study of public opinion and political communication worldwide

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RIP Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

If there is one historical personage that all finance ministers – or treasury secretaries – need to know, he is Jacques Necker (1732-1804). He was the finance minister of France in the 1780s. He was credited with popularizing the phrase ‘public opinion’ ( opinion publique )

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The Wisdom of Jacques Necker: A Note on "The Road from Ruin"

This, my very first public talk, took place on March 24, 2010 in the lecture hall at the National Museum of Iceland. Sorry for the bad camera handling

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For the Picture Tells Me So: Men and Pornography in the Public Sphere (2/2)

This, my very first public talk, took place on March 24, 2010 in the lecture hall at the National Museum of Iceland. Sorry for the bad camera handling. It was his first time recording a lecture.

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For the Picture Tells Me So: Men and Pornography in the Public Sphere (1/2)

Many of the papers and discussions at the Hate Symposium seemed to focus on the heterogeneity of ‘hate.’ Distinctions between types of hate were made often, and the commonsense binary of love & hate was attacked from numerous directions, often in the recognition that it is possible to hold both of these (supposedly contradictory) attitudes towards the same thing at the same time.

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Footnotes to the Symposium on Hate, Part 2: Towards an Anatomy of Hate

CommGAP’s latest book, Public Sentinel , outlines the role of the news media in governance reform, which is of course all about the roles of journalists in society and political systems. The book identifies three main roles – agenda setters, watchdogs, and gatekeepers – that journalists should, ideally, fulfill in order to strengthen good governance

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Good Luck, and Be Careful When You Cross the Street