Mc Kinsey is running a competition in Second Life. You can get financed in Linden, Second Life virtual currency, to start your own business. We decided to take part in the competition, to run a social experiment in Second Life, using MyPacis.com social network platform as support. Working on several projects, we are short on time, so we will try our best to respect deadlines. As usual, this blog is the place to check for updates about MyPacis.com and related projects.

If you want to take part in the competition yourself, check: http://vvc.mckinsey.com/

Deadline to form a team (at least you and one more partner, up to six members) and submit the initial business idea (one page text) is August, 31st. There are some participants from Europe and USA, but the majority of them (or at least the most active in the forum) is from China. Second Life is an ideal platform to try social experiments, and find out what motivates people to enhance their “first life” with an additional one. From campers hanging out on benches to get paid a few linden every ten minutes to socially-motivated volunteers, in SL you find all types of people with different motivations to be there.

Good luck if you take part in the competition! If you see there is room for synergies among our teams, drop us an email.

Hello!

We are almost ready to launch a blog carnival, open both to users of our blogs and bloggers hosted elsewhere. We will all be blogging about peace, and share posts here on MyPacis.com and blog carnival aggregators.

As usual, the main point of our initiatives and campaigns are not to give ready-made answers, but to increase awareness and ignite discussion about peace. If you have a blog, or are going to get one, stay tuned for updates! We should be ready by Sept. 1st.

For now, keep enjoying the social network services and please drop a mail or comment here if you have ideas, questions, etc. Thanks for your support, that is what makes a difference!

How can Web 2.0 services support Open Society? This is the question we would like you to raise with this post Web 2.0 are second generation web-based communities, social-networks, wikis, folksonomies, etc. These services have one benefit in common: to facilitate collaboration and sharing between peers. We strongly believe that Web 2.0 can be a useful tool to support Open Society.These are some potential uses of Web 2.0 to support Open Society:
- social networks: create an open social network, which can facilitate users in keeping current connections; extend their network of peers; foster discussion about democracy, human rights and Open Society at large, especially in countries which are not yet open societies.
- wikis: to share facts, possible explanations and forecasts about Open Society.
- shared bookmarks: to identify already existing useful resources about democracy, human rights and Open Society at large.
- forum: to promote an open, responsible and fair debate among users, regardless of their opinion.
- blogs: to ensure sources independent information, even where freedom of press is not protected.
- online activism tools: to identify meritable projects, and then channel our energies to support them.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA, (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is counted among the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Popper is perhaps best known for repudiating the classical observationalist-inductivist account of scientific method by advancing empirical falsifiability as the criterion for distinguishing scientific theory from non-science; and for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism which he took to make the flourishing of the “open society” possible.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defence of the ‘Open Society’ and liberal democracy. Historicism is the theory that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. Popper argued that this view is the principal theoretical presupposition underpinning most forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He argued that historicism is founded upon mistaken assumptions regarding the nature of scientific law and prediction. Since the growth of human knowledge is a causal factor in the evolution of human history, and since “no society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge”, it follows, he argued, that there can be no predictive science of human history. For Popper, metaphysical and historical indeterminism go hand in hand.

In the same book, he defines an “open society” as one which ensures that political leaders can be overthrown without the need for bloodshed, as opposed to a “closed society”, in which a bloody revolution or coup d’état is needed to change the leaders. He further describes an open society as one “in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions” as opposed to a “magical or tribal or collectivist society”. In this context, tribalistic and collectivist societies do not distinguish between natural laws and social customs. Individuals are unlikely to challenge traditions they believe to have a sacred or magical basis. The beginnings of an open society are thus marked by a distinction between natural and man-made law, and an increase in personal responsibility and accountability for moral choices. (Note that Popper did not see this as incompatible with religious belief). Popper argues that the ideas of individuality, criticism, and humanitarianism cannot be suppressed once people become aware of them, and therefore that it is impossible to return to the closed society. Attempts to do so would necessarily involve brutal and anti-humanitarian measures.

Popper’s concept of the open society is epistemological rather than political. Based on his theory that knowledge is provisional and fallible, it implies that society must be open to alternative points of view. Claims to certain knowledge and ultimate truth leads to the imposition of one version of reality. Such a society is closed to freedom of thought. In contrast, in an open society every citizen needs to form his or her own view of reality and that requires freedom of thought and expression and the cultural and legal institutions that can facilitate this. An open society also has to be pluralistic and multicultural, in order to benefit from the maximum number of viewpoints possible to the given problems.

Humanitarianism, equality and political freedom are fundamental characteristics of an open society. Another important characteristic of an open society is competition for social status. Indeed, social mobility is sometimes used as a measure of the ‘openness’ of society. The importance of social mobility for an open society was recognised by Pericles’, a statesman of the Athenian democracy, in his funeral oration: “…advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life.”

Democracies are examples of the “open society”, whereas totalitarian dictatorships and autocratic monarchies are examples of the “closed society”.

Popper’s influence, both through his work in philosophy of science and through his political philosophy, has also extended beyond the academy. Among Popper’s students and advocates at the London School of Economics is the multibillionaire investor George Soros, who says his investment strategies are modelled on Popper’s understanding of the advancement of knowledge through falsification. Among Soros’s philanthropic foundations is the Open Society Institute, a think-tank named in honour of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which Soros founded to advance the Popperian defense of the open society against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. We also provide more detailed informationa about George Soros.

Credits: Wikipedia (edited as necessary)

Some inputs for discussion about how Web 2.0 can contribute to a better society. Let’s make a step back and start from the theoretical foundation of Open Society with Henri Bergson.

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson developed the concept of Open Society, as a society based on political freedoms and human rights, with a responsive and tolerant governmen, plus transparent and flexible political mechanisms. In an Open Society, the state keeps no secrets; as a non-authoritarian society, all are trusted with the knowledge of all.

This a profile of Henri Bergson, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica; for clarity, the text may been edited. Henri-Louis Bergson French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was also a master literary stylist, of both academic and popular appeal, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

Through his father, a talented musician, Bergson was descended from a rich Polish Jewish family—the sons of Berek, or Berek-son, from which the name Bergson is derived. His mother came from an English Jewish family. Bergson’s upbringing, training, and interests were typically French, and his professional career, as indeed all of his life, was spent in France, most of it in Paris.

He received his early education at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where he showed equally great gifts in the sciences and the humanities. From 1878 to 1881 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the institution responsible for training university teachers. The general culture that he received there made him equally at home in reading the Greek and Latin classics, in obtaining what he wanted and needed from the science of his day, and in acquiring a beginning in the career of philosophy, to which he turned upon graduation.

His teaching career began in various lycées outside of Paris, first at Angers (1881–83) and then for the next five years at Clermont-Ferrand. While at the latter place, he had the intuition that provided both the basis and inspiration for his first philosophical books.

He wrote the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness), for which he received the doctorate the same year. This work was primarily an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time, as opposed to what Bergson viewed as the spatialized conception of time, measured by a clock, that is employed by science. He proceeded by analyzing the awareness that man has of his inner self to show that psychological facts are qualitatively different from any other, charging psychologists in particular with falsifying the facts by trying to quantify and number them. Fechner’s Law, claiming to establish a calculable relation between the intensity of the stimulus and that of the corresponding sensation, was especially criticized. Once the confusions were cleared away that confounded duration with extension, succession with simultaneity, and quality with quantity, he maintained that the objections to human liberty made in the name of scientific determinism could be seen to be baseless.

The publication of the Essai found Bergson returned to Paris, teaching at the Lycée Henri IV. In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger, a cousin of the French novelist Marcel Proust. Meanwhile, he had undertaken the study of the relation between mind and body. The prevailing doctrine was that of the so-called psychophysiological parallelism, which held that for every psychological fact there is a corresponding physiological fact that strictly determines it. Though he was convinced that he had refuted the argument for determinism, his own work, in the doctoral dissertation, had not attempted to explain how mind and body are related. The findings of his research into this problem were published in 1896 under the title Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Matter and Memory).

This is the most difficult and perhaps also the most perfect of his books. The approach that he took in it is typical of his method of doing philosophy. He did not proceed by general speculation and was not concerned with elaborating a great speculative system. He began in this, as in each of his books, with a particular problem, which he analyzed by first determining the empirical (observed) facts that are known about it according to the best and most up-to-date scientific opinion. Thus, for Matière et mémoire he devoted five years to studying all of the literature available on memory and especially the psychological phenomenon of aphasia, or loss of the ability to use language. According to the theory of psychophysiological parallelism, a lesion in the brain should also affect the very basis of a psychological power. The occurrence of aphasia, Bergson argued, showed that this is not the case. The person so affected understands what others have to say, knows what he himself wants to say, suffers no paralysis of the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This fact shows, he argued, that it is not memory that is lost but, rather, the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it. From this observation Bergson concluded that memory, and so mind, or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to carry out its own purposes.

The Essai had been widely reviewed in the professional journals, but Matière et mémoire attracted the attention of a wider audience and marked the first step along the way that led to Bergson’s becoming one of the most popular and influential lecturers and writers of the day. In 1897 he returned as professor of philosophy to the École Normale Supérieure, which he had first entered as a student at the age of 19. Then, in 1900, he was called to the Collège de France, the academic institution of highest prestige in all of France, where he enjoyed immense success as a lecturer. From then until the outbreak of World War I, there was a veritable vogue of Bergsonism. William James was an enthusiastic reader of his works, and the two men became warm friends. Expositions and commentaries on the Bergsonian philosophy were to be found everywhere. It was held by many that a new day in philosophy had dawned that brought with it light to many other activities such as literature, music, painting, politics, and religion.

L’Évolution créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution), the greatest work of these years and Bergson’s most famous book, reveals him most clearly as a philosopher of process at the same time that it shows the influence of biology upon his thought. In examining the idea of life, Bergson accepted evolution as a scientifically established fact. He criticized, however, the philosophical interpretations that had been given of it for failing to see the importance of duration and hence missing the very uniqueness of life. He proposed that the whole evolutionary process should be seen as the endurance of an élan vital (“vital impulse”) that is continually developing and generating new forms. Evolution, in short, is creative, not mechanistic. (See creative evolution.)

In this developing process, he traced two main lines: one through instinct, leading to the life of insects; the other through the evolution of intelligence, resulting in man; both of which, however, are seen as the work of one vital impulse that is at work everywhere in the world. The final chapter of the book, entitled “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion,” presents a review of the whole history of philosophical thought with the aim of showing that it everywhere failed to appreciate the nature and importance of becoming, falsifying thereby the nature of reality by the imposition of static and discrete concepts.

Among Bergson’s minor works are Le Rire: essai sur la significance du comique (1900; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic) and, Introduction à la metaphysique (1903; An Introduction to Metaphysics). The latter provides perhaps the best introduction to his philosophy by offering the clearest account of his method. There are two profoundly different ways of knowing, he claimed. The one, which reaches its furthest development in science, is analytic, spatializing, and conceptualizing, tending to see things as solid and discontinuous. The other is an intuition that is global, immediate, reaching into the heart of a thing by sympathy. The first is useful for getting things done, for acting on the world, but it fails to reach the essential reality of things precisely because it leaves out duration and its perpetual flux, which is inexpressible and to be grasped only by intuition. Bergson’s entire work may be considered as an extended exploration of the meaning and implications of his intuition of duration as constituting the innermost reality of everything.

In 1914 Bergson retired from all active duties at the Collège de France, although he did not formally retire from the chair until 1921. Having received the highest honours that France could offer him, including membership, since 1915, among the “40 immortals” of the Académie Française, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

After L’Évolution créatrice, 25 years elapsed before he published another major work. In 1932 he published Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). As in the earlier works, he claimed that the polar opposition of the static and the dynamic provides the basic insight. Thus, in the moral, social, and religious life of men he saw, on the one side, the work of the closed society, expressed in conformity to codified laws and customs, and, on the other side, the open society, best represented by the dynamic aspirations of heroes and mystical saints reaching out beyond and even breaking the strictures of the groups in which they live. There are, thus, two moralities, or, rather, two sources: the one having its roots in intelligence, which leads also to science and its static, mechanistic ideal; the other based on intuition, and finding its expression not only in the free creativity of art and philosophy but also in the mystical experience of the saints.

Bergson in Les Deux Sources had come much closer to the orthodox religious notion of God than he had in the vital impulse of L’Évolution créatrice. He acknowledged in his will of 1937, “My reflections have led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism.” Yet, although declaring his “moral adherence to Catholicism,” he never went beyond that. In explanation, he wrote: “I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted.” To confirm this conviction, only a few weeks before his death, he arose from his sickbed and stood in line in order to register as a Jew, in accord with the law just imposed by the Vichy government and from which he refused the exemption that had been offered him.

Although it did not give rise to a Bergsonian school of philosophy, Bergson’s influence has been considerable. His influence among philosophers has been greatest in France, but it has also been felt in the United States and Great Britain, especially in the work of William James; George Santayana; and Alfred North Whitehead, the other great process metaphysician of the 20th century.

George Soros is the son of the Esperanto writer Teodoro Schwartz. Teodoro (also known as Tivadar) was a Hungarian Jew who was a prisoner of war during and after World War I and eventually escaped from Russia to rejoin his family in Budapest.

The family changed its name in 1936 from Schwartz to Soros, in response to the Fascist threat to Jews. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because it has a meaning. Though the specific meaning is left unstated in Kaufmann’s biography, in Hungarian “soros” means “next in line, or designated successor”, and in Esperanto it means “will soar”. Tivadar wrote of his ordeal to survive in Fascist Hungary, and help many people escape it, in his book Maskerado.

Born August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, as György Schwartz, George Soros is an American stock investor, philanthropist, and political activist. He peacefully promotes democracy in USA and abroad.

Currently, he is the chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and is also a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. His support for the Solidarity labor movement in Poland, as well as the Czechoslovakian human rights organization Charter 77, contributed to ending Soviet Union political dominance in those countries. His funding and organization of Georgia’s Rose Revolution was considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial to its success, although Soros said his role has been “greatly exaggerated.” In the United States, he is known for having donated large sums of money in a failed effort to defeat President George W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 2004.

Soros has a keen interest in philosophy, and his philosophical outlook is largely influenced by Karl Popper, under whom he studied at the London School of Economics. His Open Society Institute is named after Popper’s two volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Soros’s ongoing philosophical commitment to the principle of ‘fallibilism’ (that anything he believes may in fact be wrong, and is therefore to be questioned and improved) stems from Popper’s philosophy. Some critics argue that Soros’ static political beliefs appear to conflict with the critical rationalism espoused by Popper, though Soros argues that these beliefs were arrived at through such rationalism.

Soros’ writings focus heavily on the concept of reflexivity, where the biases of individuals are seen as entering into market transactions, potentially changing the fundamentals of the economy. Soros argued that such transitions in the fundamentals of the economy are typically marked by disequilibrium rather than equilibrium in the economy, and that the conventional economic theory of the market (the ‘efficient market hypothesis’) does not apply in these situations.

Whether Soros is theoretically right or wrong on this issue, he certainly has the market credentials and proven track record to effectively maintain that his theory of reflexivity is practically relevant in the marketplace — at least for him. Soros has popularized the concepts of dynamic disequilibrium, static disequilibrium, and near-equilibrium conditions.

Reflexivity is based in three main ideas:

(1) Reflexivity is best observed under special conditions where investor bias grows and spreads throughout the investment arena. Examples of factors that may give rise to this bias include (a) equity leveraging or (b) the trend-following habits of speculators.

(2) Reflexivity appears intermittently since it is most likely to be revealed under certain conditions; i.e., the equilibrium process’s character is best considered in terms of probabilities.

(3) Investors’ observation of and participation in the capital markets may at times influence valuations AND fundamental conditions or outcomes.

Soros argues that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries. Soros blames many of the world’s problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism. His opposition to many aspects of globalization has made him a controversial figure. Victor Niederhoffer said of Soros: “Most of all, George believed even then in a mixed economy, one with a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest.” Soros draws a distinction between being a participant in the market and working to change the rules that market participants must follow.

Credits: Wikipedia (edited as necessary)
Links:
George Soros Official Website
Open Society Institute and George Soros Foundation Network
George Soros: recent interviews
George Soros: video interview at Google
George Soros: MP3 interview on “The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror”

User-interface for MyPacis.com ( http://www.mypacis.com/ ) has been quite stable during the current week. We are testing a brand new release for our social network, evaluating version 6 of Boonex Dolphin. Boonex developers have been providing, as open source, their excellent online dating platform; instead of going for the “quick buck”, they decided to satisfy consumer (they have their own dating site) and organizations/businesses for free, building their business model on additional services (installation, configuration, etc.).

This reminds me that society should reward individuals for doing good. For too long, being good has been seen as something you do in compliance to your own ethics and giving up opportunities that others, will different ethic standards, are taking anyway. Society should have a set of “hard” regulations and soft “peer-pressure” to make easy and convenient to do good, and difficult/expensive to harm.

One very practical example of people doing good: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/08/no-business-mod.html

The link takes you to Seth Godin´s blog, in this case a post about a community devoted to connecting professionals in Portland. Too many times (in too many movies? we have been shown the lonely hero, standing in the way of the “bad guys”. In reality, people who make the difference are the ones doing the best with what they have, on a daily basis, contributing to projects which make the world, or their local communities, a bit better and more inclusive.

BTW, Seth Godin is another of these daily heroes, or at least a leading role model for people who want to contribute to a better society. In his case, he works hard to bring marketers closer to their customers; 99% of marketing books written explains you how to grab your share of customers, while Seth shows you how to be successful by making your customers´ life (or their perception of it) better. I had a practical example that he does what he preaches a few days ago: he really replies to emails sent to him. The same applies to a very important and busy businessman and philanthropist, who has his staff replying to email  and who will be soon featured in this blog. Any guess?

Homework for the weekend: have you tried the same with your MP/congressperson? If not, give it a try and let me know if you got anything more than the automatic acknowledgment note.

An interesting discussion from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/06/1427214 Starting from Wired’s article “Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up” (http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net) users are discussing about openness of social networks.

People should be able to choose between openness and privacy. While I want to share with as many people as possible my opinion on world news etc., maybe I prefer to keep my appreciation for grandma’s cookies available only to relatives, because other people would not really care.

The way to balance it? It is enough to allow users to set “disclosure” values for blog posts. Also, more or less as Orkut does, users can be provided multiple “sheets” for their profiles: public, business, personal, etc. They can decide if they want to activate them all, or just one, and what to write in them. Information are disclosed depending on viewer’s status (anonymous, logged in, friend, etc.). Same for APIs.

Also, I think it is time for an open source social network, based on a “hub” with users profiles and decentralized tools, such as blogs etc., which can be syndicated by RSS etc. That is exactly what we aim to build here.

Since references to our site/project started to spread on social bookmarking/news sites, we received a few questions about MyPacis.com and. If you got here by clicking to the link we sent you as reply, keep reading and you will find all the answers

-  SmileGrid.com and OS in MyPacis.com

MyPacis.com is based on SmileGrid.com social network, which uses Boonex Dolphin, and several other open source solutions, as Pligg, WordPress Multi User, Scuttle, etc. Our goal is to provide a powerful tool to promote peace and freedom, in different languages and not just English. No need to reinvent the wheel, so we are going to achieve our goal by leveraging what already exists and improving it.

- OS MyPacis.com: why, what, where, who, when

As everyone familiar with karma knows, to reduce it to “street-smartness”: what goes around, comes around. So, following the example of the generous people who made this site possible (if you ever contributed to localize a WordPress .mo file or some codelines to Pligg, chances are your work is now one of the pillars in promoting peace and freedom) we want to contribute to a decentralized CMS and communication tool, empowering people to speak freely, wherever they are. For thir reason, developing a community devoted to promoting peace by linking people is not enough. Even the next step, hosting other communities on our platform, is not enough. Distributing the platform on open source basis is what we need to do. And, as soon as the core components are in place, you will find updates here and will be able to start using/testing/improving MyPacis.com OS.

- Further questions

Feel free to write us! The best way to understand a service is to use it, so feel free to register and use it yourself!

If you developed applications in PHP which you consider useful for this site and its audience, just drop us an email to:

php @ Our Domain Name (see it in the browser

Some examples of useful applications are:

- integrated userID: unified to login for Boonex Dolphin, Scuttle, Pligg, PHPBB, WordPress MU, etc.

- mash-up scripts: for merging different Web 2.0 services

- automatic translation: into languages currently not supported

Also, if you find useful scripts online and would like them integrated into your user panel, let us know. Same applies to localization of applications: if you wrote, or found, a good .MO file for WordPress MU or other translations, let us know. Themes are also welcome.

Just remember this is an open source platform: everything you donate for this site, may be used and redistributed to third parties who want to use this content management solution/communication tool. The reward is the same for all of us: we get a better MyPacis.com and support peace and freedom of speech, all around the world.