As in all democracies, the right to vote in elections is a fundamental one in the United States Of America as well. However, contrary to other countries with a more centralized approach, the rules for exercising this right in the USA are incredibly complicated, and cumbersome to follow. First of all, you have to be registered to vote. The state does not register you when you become of a voting age, but you have to do it on your own. When you move you residence, you have to register again. If you declared that you vote for a given party, in its primary election, and change your mind, you have to register again. Rules change with each state, and vary depending of the type of election. Etc., etc. It sounds very complicated, and it is.

More than half of the visitors of the English version of this website come from the US, so I am addressing these. Please, register to vote, and please go, and vote for the coming general elections for the President.

Currently about 30%, or almost 60 million people of the total having right to vote are not registered.

All elections matter: they are the way people can concretely demonstrate with democratic tools their positions. But the forthcoming US Presidential elections matter even more in my opinion than others have in the past.

When I was recently in Los Angeles I had the chance to meet and chat with Linda Pollack, an artist and activist, who has an installation called Habeas Index downtown, and who is also active in asking people to register. I went with her in Chinatown to see what happens when people are confronted with the question “Are you registered to vote?”

It was a very interesting experience. From young couples who didn’t seem to care, to old Chinese men who’d smile but didn’t even speak English, or Latinos who appeared to be afraid of the question, there were all kinds of reactions. Linda was able to register several people that afternoon, and she is going to continue her drive up until the deadline of a month before the elections.

Take also a look at David Brin’s arguments for getting people to vote, and getting the ‘ostriches’ raise their head from the sand.

Here is the video of our conversation:

Barack Obama is a choice for a desirable future.

It also helps that, according to the Washington Post’s political compass survey, my views are strongly aligned with his.

The planet is intertwined, connected, unavoidably influencing its different parts with political and economical decisions, which today are not in turn influenced but by those who happen to live within what are called ‘national borders’. We have no mechanism in place to make sure that in a rightly nuanced and well defined manner the needs of those who are not within those borders are also taken into consideration. In the future we will need these tools, and we might then see elections that happen on a global scale, even without a worldwide government. Many of us would have wished to be able and vote in the US elections in the past two rounds, at least. And there a millions of people whose lives have been strongly impacted by their outcome. If it were possible, I’d vote for Barack, in the name of change.

Tomorrow is the day in the primary elections in the US when it’ll be seen if Obama or Clinton is going to become the Democratic candidate in the general elections… that is why I am writing this today.

I have been invited to hold a lesson at the California School of International Management‘s course on Strategic Marketing. The lesson will be delivered online, via Skype, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Wednesday, February 6, starting 2PM PST (11PM CET). If you would like to attend just let me know in the comments, or write me an email a tweet, or anything else that you fancy, and I will be very happy to have you with us.

During the seminar I will concentrate on analyzing the role of brands and strategic messaging in the future, drawing a parallel with what these concepts might have meant in prehistoric times, and concluding that today we have to speak with the same immediacy, and spontaneity that has formed the basis of communication then.

Thanks, Marc, for the invitation and the organization of the event!

The printed edition of the ‘Corriere della Sera‘ has an article today about the unintended side effects of the site filtering system that Vodafone put in place recently to supposedly protect minors from adult materials while browsing the web using the Vodafone Live! application suite.

As reported in Italian by Stefano, the author of Quinta’s Blog, among Italy’s most read, the censorware used by Vodafone is also impeding the access to the websites of several political parties. It is often, if not always, the case, that the dumb filters are unable to do their ill-defined jobs, and at the same time stop people using the internet in an unfettered manner to communicate.

The Italian Government has just fallen a few days ago, and the level of discussion, both among politicians, and with the voters, is intense. This is not the time to artificially restrict what people can say on a medium, like mobile phones, which in Italy is actually much more widespread than PCs!

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

There are also some videos that I shot, photos

Your comments are welcome here, or on the discussion group we created!

The UN has started the final procedures to put to a vote in front of the General Assembly a resolution for a universal moratorium on the death penalty. While not binding, the adoption of a resolution like this would be a further step towards an understanding how civilization ought to evolve in a complex environment that ill tolerates aggression at any level and from any source. And we should better want to be part of the solution then part of the problem ourselves.

A wonderful video at TED by Steven Pinker, ‘A History Of Violence’, illustrates how fallible we are in our evaluations on how the use violence changed in our societies at all scales. Its dramatic decline is illustrated in Pinker’s talk, and should serve as a guideline to politicians as strong as Moore’s law is to engineers as they stumble towards our shared future.

Then there is Sens, which takes further steps, and boldly declares that the invention of death, attributed to that of sexual reproduction a few billion years ago, is also a mistake, which we must correct.

Follow the link to the Metasocial Web video on YouTube if you don’t see the embedded video…

Well, that was fast. I thought of the Metasocial Web a few days ago, and looks like I will be delivering a speech about it at Web2.0 Ignite in Berlin tomorrow.

A lot of what the Metasocial Web should be is in flux, naturally, so it will be good to get the feedback from the audience, and compare notes on how to quickly progress towards it. The core of the argument is that we are ready to pull together information from public data repositories, and use crowdsourced effort to manage the data to get a better dynamic understanding on how our political, social, and economic systems interact. The goal is to be able and build as much second order knowledge about these systems as possible, in order to operate them at a higher level of efficiency then possible before.

I am calling this the Metasocial Web, or Societal Software, as social networks concern themselves with individuals, and their groupings, while the Metasocial Web is concerned about societies, and their possible competitive comparisons. My idea is that countries that adopt a Metasocial Web are going to be much more effective in allocating their tax resources, and that given this competitive advantage, all countries are going to be pushed towards it quickly.

See the video on MetaSocial Software I prepared for the Web2Open Conference in Berlin: