I’ve just finished a paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. I’ve been looking at three different examples of these new business models, Zopa, Kiva and Open Capital, considering to what extent these organisations are challenging established practices.

The full paper is available as a PDF. As soon as I’ve got my LaTeX/HTML conversion working I’ll post that too.

How I would have rigged the Goldsmiths College Student Elections and some recommendations for the future.

There are many ways of rigging an election and, with increased abstraction and dispersal of the act of voting, influencing the outcome of ballots gets easier and easier.

Let’s just think for a moment what takes place when a student votes. First of all, the student needs to be co-present with the ballot! This is a given and the only part of the process that can not be virtualised. The student presents some ID before being given a ballot paper. The ballot is privately completed and cast into the ballot box.

The Goldsmiths College Students Election e-Voting was extremely vulnerable to exploitation by someone with malicious intent. The e-voting mechanism virtualised the ballot paper instead of virtualising the whole process. Anyone visiting the goldsmithsstudents.com website was able to download a Microsoft Word file. This file used a macro to capture the input of the user; in this case the ranking of the preference of candidates. A student was expected to complete the form, save it, then send the file as an attachment from their college email account to su@gold.ac.uk

The most vulnerable part of the whole process is that single file made available for public download.

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Well… today was last day of term for two @smiths courses: Beyond All Reason and Culture, Globalisation and Power.

I’ve just finished uploading all my Beyond All Reason mindmaps… use with caution…. Click on for some links…

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I’ve invested a lot of time in researching and testing tools to support my studies. i wanted to to break away from so-called ‘productivity tools’, as in all my years of using software like Visio, Word, Outlook, I’ve never really been productive: too much of my time and effort has been wasted in taming the application, or repeated manually generating my desired formatting - perhaps counter-productivity tools would be more accurate.

I’m in my third year of studying for a BA. I’m researching my subjects and my ideas, reading lots, annotating my reading, working on assignments, editing and revising my work. I work in different locations and at different times and I want access to my work where and whenever I am. As such, a piece of hardware, a laptop or a pda is not the whole answer to these needs, I need software to support my study too.
bring on the tools.
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I’m interested in starting an e-journal of politics essays written by Goldsmiths students - want to help make it happen? The only requirement for publishing being that the essay received a First when marked. Publishing would be under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License. Drop me an email at my goldsmiths account (ss601rd@…) or leave comments here.