debatepedia

Debatepedia is a wiki project of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA) and Georgetown University students and alumni with the mission to act as the "Wikipedia of debate and deliberation". It improves your ability to think through the complicated issues and debates you care about, take a confident stand, and take action as a citizen. An important way to take action is by participating as an editor on the site, where you can create new debates, build and organize pro and con arguments, and present supporting evidence (quotes, studies, links) from your readings all so that you can better deliberate. Your efforts, in turn, will also improve the ability of a wide audience of citizens, leaders, and decision-makers to deliberate and draw reasoned conclusions. As such, we believe Debatepedia will help fix an apparent deficit of balanced reasoning and deliberation within the public and among leaders today. Get started Debatepedia is endorsed by the United States' National Forensic League.

YouTube - Frost over the World - Benazir Bhutto - 02 Nov 07

YouTube - Frost over the World - Benazir Bhutto - 02 Nov 07

Score One for the Webs Don Quixote - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Score One for the Webs Don Quixote - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Carl Malamud’s quixotic mission to free government information took a step closer to reality on Wednesday morning when he struck a deal with Fastcase to electronically publish a free archive of federal case law.

Mr. Malamud, an Internet radio pioneer who set up public.resource.org in March with the idea of making “public works” accessible via the Internet, wants to force the federal government to make information more widely available.

In August he began using optical scanning technology to copy decisions that have been generally available only on paper in law libraries or via subscription from the Thomson West unit of the Canadian publishing conglomerate Thomson and from LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier, based in London.

The two companies now dominate the $5 billion legal publishing market.

However, Fastcase, a smaller player based in Washington, D.C., decided that Mr. Malamud’s idea had merit. The company has provided him with its database of federal case law from 1950 to the present and the earliest Supreme Court decisions. Fastcase and public.resource.org have placed the archive in the public domain.

The archive includes 1.8 million pages of federal case law. Ed Walters, the chief executive of Fastcase said that the contribution was a way for the company to expand its reach beyond lawyers and make legal information available to the general public.

“I said I would put all federal case law on line and this is a huge chunk,” said Mr. Malamud.

Still missing are the Federal district court filings, but he said that volunteers are now beginning to place current legal decisions online on sites like Altlaw.

“It’s not LexisNexis, but the raw data is there,” he said.

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration.

Crooks and Liars » Bush League Justice: Partisan Corruption of the DoJ

Crooks and Liars » Bush League Justice: Partisan Corruption of the DoJ

Dan Abrams continues his series on how the Bush administration (in particular, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove) has wreaked havoc on the Department of Justice with a look today at how corrupted and nasty partisan prosecutions have become, with the DoJ going after more than five times the number of Democrats as Republicans and using party and Bush loyalty as the overriding criteria for hiring attorneys.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse:

The Bush administration forgot that the sign outside says “United States Department of Justice” not “Bush Administration Department of Justice.” And the cost to us has been as a country and the cost to the department in particular has been terribly high.

Arianna Huffington: HuffPost's "The Bush Years" Posters: A Powerful Political Stocking Stuffer - Politics on The Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington: HuffPost's "The Bush Years" Posters: A Powerful Political Stocking Stuffer - Politics on The Huffington Post

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Global Neighbourhoods: The SAP Global Report--Part One

Global Neighbourhoods: The SAP Global Report--Part One

[For those of you new to this blog, I have been working on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media since June. It has been a massive, revealing and entirely enjoyable project for me, which will be continued before year end.

I submitted a lengthy report on my findings so far, earlier this month. I am working also on an Appendix summarizing what the participants told me.

The report has been favorably received by SAP who has given me permission to publish the report, minus my specific recommendations to them. Upon completion, I will also publish the Appendix.

I will be publishing the report here in chunks over the next several days. This is the first part.]

1. Overview

My assignment was at once simple and monumental. Investigate and report on the state of social media in the world. Do it in three months and report to SAP on what I found.

I would approach the assignment, not as a traditional researcher, which I am not; but as a social media champion who has co-authored a book on business blogging transparently on my blog.

Instead of asking the same series of checkbox questions to a large number of people then compiling numbers onto a spreadsheet, I talked to just 48 people, residing in 25 countries, posting 53,000 words of interview results on my blog. The interviewees were a diverse group, ranging from celebrity bloggers to high schoolers; from South African ERP consultants to Ukrainian citizen journalists, from Cambodian NGO workers and Kenyan orphans to China’s most famous serial entrepreneur.

In giving me this assignment through The Conversation Group, SAP’s Mike Prosceno told me a primary goal was to help SAP become a social media thought leader. That’s a daunting goal but the survey in itself became a significant step down the path required toward achieving it. The transparent approach we took made thousands of people aware of SAP’s interest. By sharing our findings, SAP has already demonstrated it understands that to be a social media leader, one needs to be generous. By doing our work publicly, the public wants to know more. To date, I’ve received six requests to speak on the SAP survey. Mike has so far been asked to speak with me twice.

The process further demonstrates yet another important lesson of social media. Not only must a company be both generous and transparent, it must also understand that control is slipping from its clutches of organizations into the hands of its constituencies. When, I began the SAP Global Survey, as it has come to be called, I thought I was in control, when in fact I was not.

My very first survey respondent, Hugh MacLeod, author of the wildly popular Gaping Void and a Microsoft consultant, posted his answers on his blog rather than mine. Then Tom Raftery, an Irish IT blogger who was not on my list at all, copied Hugh’s questions, then answered them on his own blog. This was followed by Ken Camp, a Microsoft consultant, whom I had never talked with who posted to his own site. However, he apparently didn’t like one of my questions, so he replaced it with one of his own, answering it. A little while later, Joe Thornley, a Canadian PR executive would answer my emailed questions with a video post which appeared on Facebook. This was followed by a couple of people taking it upon themselves to ask questions from the survey on both Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 100 people served up answers.

I had obviously lost control, and the SAP Survey benefited greatly by that loss. It demonstrated two central assumptions of social media and why it is so powerful. People are wired to collaborate and most people perform better when you don’t attempt to impose excessive controls over the process.

Of course, the results of these findings are what is of the greatest value, not just to SAP, but to the general public with whom we will share them. As a social media professional, I will admit that the findings provide very few surprises to me. However, the survey adds hundreds of data points to the general body of knowledge. These confirm arguments that have been previously based merely on guesswork.

[NEXT: Seven Key Findings.]