The BBC's Reith Lectures started this morning, with development economist Jeffrey Sachs describing a world 'bursting at the seams'. I was privileged to be asked to be a lead questioner in the last lecture, at Edinburgh. I've written a Guardian Comment is Free column this morning, with my reactions to the lecture, and some further thoughts on how Sachs' anti-poverty agenda could be made more persuasive to Western audiences. I close with an appeal to developers and moguls in the Web 2.0 era: what are the 'life-saving' apps (rather than 'killer' apps) they could devise that would make participation and commitment to Sachs' (and others') world-healing agenda a natural part of our 'play with networks'?
Any ideas yourself, folks? (There have already been a few useful exchanges on the CiF comment pages). As a minor addendum, I really like Becky Hogge's column in Open Democracy today, which asks whether we need to solidify the value-base that underlies the open-source and participatory web:
What most agree on, though, is that the evidence in support of open standards and a generative, bottom-up internet - one that is the expression of the creative powers of the global community - is justification enough for a struggle for internet freedom. Yet...some underlying values would certainly not go amiss. As the validity of this new way of doing things asserts itself, I feel for the first time that the absence of an obvious, shared set of values might be a barrier to progress.
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