After spending a week on vacation in that perfect Utopia dressed in a dystopic outfit called Berlin (each time I go there I confirm it as my favorite place on this planet), I put a perfect end to the experience by reading the October issue (109) of EXBERLINER, the excellent English written Berlin culture and lifestyle magazine.
This issue is focused on technopolitics, so articles range from an overview of some outstanding Open Source projects being developed in Berlin, to an interview with Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot), passing by an interview to Germany's most famous net-activists couple, and an analysis of the first year of the Pirate Party in Berlin's parliament
One topic that keeps showing up in several texts is the idea of "liquid democracy" being pushed by the pirates. Leveraging the easiness of communication in our hyper connected world to increase people's involvement in state decisions does not seem like something much new, but what is new here is that they are really trying to implement it!
The interview with Anke and Daniel Domscheit-Berg touches many different points of interest, but I would highlight their musings about Grundeinkommen (basic income), leveraging technology to reduce the amount of time that people need to work daily, and the inevitable shift to a different economic paradigm ("Third Industrial Revolution")
As for the many Open Source projects mentioned, the winner for me is Wikidata, sort of a global knowledge database to be used among others by Wikipedia. Also, after seeing just the day before how one lady got fined in the tram due to her lack of a valid transport ticket (because of the "open doors" nature of Berlin's transport (same as in Vienna), it's tempting to want to try to save some money and it's also rather easy to forget about purchasing your ticket), the SchaffnerRadar (ticket inspector radar) Android App seems like pretty cool :-)
Well, not that it really has much to do with this post, but as it's related to Berlin... you can check here this album of mine about Berlin Street Art.
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