from the website : A view from the Radical Middle
I am a former Executive Director of the World Bank (2002-2004) for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain and Venezuela, and I write this blog to try to echo my voice and my noise. Though I know that many will only be able to read it in yellow or blue, I do make an effort to write it in green. The Radical Middle or the Extreme Center is not any wishy-washy place to be, in a world where swimming to any of the ideological shores provides for a much calmer shelter. Sunday, June 10, 2012 _We might need a Global Web Constitution, and Inspection Panels, to get along well with the Googles and Facebooks of this world_ (http://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2012/06/we-might-need-global-web-constitution.html) The role of a Constitution is foremost to defend the citizens from government abuses. In this respect, and since one of the most important issues of our time is how to guarantee acceptable relations between us, the small users, and they, the gigantic information and or knowledge dissemination machines that govern so much of how we communicate, and handle so much of private information on us, like Google and Facebook, one could say that we are in a dire need of a Web Constitution. Also, “Don’t be evil”, is for instance, a company motto of Google and which supposedly precludes them from manipulating rankings to put their advertising or content partners higher in their search results. That sounds great… exactly how it should be… but, how can we make certain that the supposedly is for real and that a company follows its mottos and declared principles, and that we can trust it as much as we should, for ours and theirs benefit? Perhaps Google and Facebook should establish something like the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, which is there to guarantee, to the rest of the world, that the World Bank follows the rules and principles it has itself declared to follow. Joint speculations by Alexandra Kurowski (daughter) and Per Kurowski (father) PS. And, for me, when managing knowledge, it is also extremely important to make sure that does not pose any treat to the biodiversity of knowledge development… as we can never know where the next world saving idea can come from. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
