2 posts categorized "Current Affairs"

Where Do You Go For Breaking News?

I am not calling this fun friday as I normally do, because what is going on in Boston right now is dead serious.

I am hanging out on Twitter, following a few people who are tweeting out the latest news coming out of Boston. The folks listening to the police scanner and tweeting it out are particularly good to follow.  I am also browsing around the web to other places like Reddit and Hacker News where people are discussing the news as it unfolds.

It makes me wonder what everyone else does when big news is happening. Does anyone watch TV anymore? Does anyone use the traditional media sites like NY Times, Boston Globe, NBC, etc?

Where do you go for breaking news?

Hacking Society

Today, from 10am to 4:30pm eastern, USV will be hosting an event called Hacking Society. This is one of our "sessions events" that we do from time to time.

Hacking Society brings together a small group of thinkers and doers to discuss how networks are transforming our economy and society, and what this means for the future of innovation, competition, regulation and policy advocacy. A list of the attendees is here.

Over the course of the day, we will:

  • Discuss how the economics of networks might help solve challenging social and economic problems.
  • Examine how incumbents use their influence over the current policy process to stave off competition from networks.
  • Define a proactive, network-friendly “Freedom to Innovate” policy agenda.
  • Examine how “net native” policy advocacy works and how it can be harnessed to promote a positive agenda as well as overthrow bad policy and bad regimes.

We will record the event and make the audio available live here. We will also be livetweeting the event and invite everyone to join us at #hacksociety. We will make the audio and video recordings available on the web under a Creative Commons Attribution License (their most liberal license).

The format of a USV sessions event is a small group of folks (less than 40) around a big table talking with each other (not at each other) about a big issue that we are trying to wrap our heads around. Because the group is designed to be small, we cannot invite everyone to attend. But we hope that the stream, the tweetstream, and the recordings will allow others to participate in this event, and more importantly take the themes we are exploring forward with their own thoughts and actions. That's why we are publishing the recordings of the event under a creative commons license.

I hope you can listen in, follow the event on twitter, and engage with us on these important issues.