Hyve Design

we vote every few years but most of the big important, far reaching and critical decisions get made out of our hands, by the cabinet, “faceless men” and whatever influences them the most at the time.

sometimes the influence is the media which we do not control
sometimes it is get-up and other advocacy groups which is more divested but again out of my direct influence on most issues
sometimes it is just them and their current head space.
sometimes it is lobby groups, think tanks and other top end big money

rarely is it me.

so is it a democracy? I know I can, and i have written letters, signed petitions, attended marches etc but their are limits to what i can do. I can’t even tweet or blog on every issue. I get caught up and tired.

So i am reasonably happy most of the time with our oligarcy but don’t call it a democracy until I and all the people can have regular conversations with my representatives.

I guess this would support the argument for more power to smaller more local governments. I need to consider what this would mean in practice and what involvement it would require of me and what i could contribute to real democracy.

interested in your thoughts.

There are so many things that we all should be focusing on to improve or fix as individuals, groups or governments. What are the most important? Can they be ordered sensibly? Would ordering them assist or encourage people to engage in activities to address the top few. Is ordering by volume of votes useful or does “expert” opinion need to be factored into this (or both)?

Some important things, in no formulated order,  are:

• Human impact on the biosphere. Can there be any planning for progress in a world that will be dominated by Climate Change?
• Massive and increasing economic imbalance. Poverty is a constructed condition.
• Access to water. Lack of clean fresh water available to hundreds of millions of people, mostly in African countries
• Child abuse. damaging the young is unconscionable and very expensive to remedy.
• Illegal drug trade. Destroys lives and maintains crime.
• Parenting skills. Caring for children is more difficult with modern, disconnected communities.
• Education. again, critical for the basis of all progressive sustained modern society.

I recieved an invite to the preview Google Wave system and eagerly got on and created a wave. This was simple enough and I soon exhausted most of the built in functions as seen in the looong [sic] video. They all worked pretty nicely and there were no obvious glitches.  I’ll allow some speed and performance issues in the beta.

There definitely is potential gold in this system but I see it taking some time before it becomes mainstream.

• it will require a volume of users – not just on Googles but on other installations (Federations)
• it will require robust security validation. The security model is good but does it stand up?
• it is very complex underneath the covers. Hardcore techs will eat it up but Web hacks like me will struggle to make the same sort of impact we can achieve now with a good JavaScript framework or XML application. Maybe the tools will become easier and some good tutorial waves ripple out.

It won’t be too long before enough small dynamic IT shops take it on internally and develop enough useful robots and extensions to get the critical mass of users it needs. There will be some lag though until bigger corporates and the real tech gatekeepers (kids) can take it mainstream.

wave me at stevebhyve

We are just restarting our site as a blog. Hoping to add categories for the House and Garden, art , technology and more.