Links to other conversations

JNNURM, NREGA, and other development projects in Modern India

Leo saldanha on the politics of co-optation in development projects: [1]

FUTUROLOGY

Institutional Sites The Univ of Hawai'i at Manoa has a famous institute for Futures Studies. Debora Halbert does some good activist/feminist stuff there. An overview of the field IN THIS PDF [2]

The Institute for Alternative Futures makes this into a money-spinning consultancy gig! I can't quite figure out the politics of how this kind of pro-poor work actually functions: [3]

SF and Future Thinking The SF-encyclopaedia has a page on Futures Studies. It's not very well footnoted, but it makes useful links, pointing to the often-conservative politics of future-oriented thinking (from Thomas Malthus to Donella Meadows), and linking it to Science Fiction, as well as to a military-industrial-imperialist set of political concerns [4]

OPEN SOURCE

Open Source Education [5]

Open Source Design

If The Economist is onto it, you know it's mainstream now! And no surprises, they want to figure out how to profit:

"The big question is how to profit from all of this fevered making. Does open-source design risk breaking the link between intellectual property and value, and doing to designers what the internet did to music and journalism? http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/11/open-source-design?fb_ref=activity

SOPA

I'm looking for good close readings of the Stop Online Piracy Act. I'd like to figure out SOPA through an analysis of its legal discourse + critical close reading. Any suggestions?