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The People Power Research
Download the Papers
About the Author




thanks to:
Swing Digital
 
The People Power Research

GNU.FREE was originally developed as part of a joint project at the University of Warwick Department of Computer Science and the Warwick Business School. The project was examining the impact of the Information Revolution on activism and the political process.

I had originally started looking at this area due to an interest in the impact of the Information Revolution on modern day conflict. After having written a research paper on this (and absorbed reports from people like RAND, IBM etc etc) I realised that civilians were increasingly important in conflict be it war or political or social.

For example: When the US military realised the importance of a strong, robust information infrastructure in the case of InfoWar they began to look at what could be done to imporve resilience. They were shocked at how much of this important resource was totally handled, owned and secured by civilians. So if the military want to succeed in the InfoWar they must work closely with and become very dependend on parts of the civilian world.

So I began to look at other ways the growth in Information Technology were impacting the influence, importance and role of civilians in the large nation state structure.

One major impact that people have been predicting for years is electronic voting, but during my research it became apparent that all the current implementations were pretty flakey and also commercial. I felt this was an unacceptable state of affairs so I set about making a system that would be useful with today's technology and could be released under the General Public License. GNU.FREE is the result.


Download the Papers

The papers are provided in Postscript format. GSView (Mac|Win|Unix) is probably the best way of viewing them.

People Power Essay. Looks at the increasing role civilians and thus NGOs play in decision making due to technology and where this could go in the future.
Stuffit file 2,440k or Zip file 2,289k

People Power Technical Documents. Describes and explains the design decisions for FREE before reporting on problems faced during implementation and testing.
Stuffit file 125k or Zip file 117k

Feel free to quote this work though, of course, they need to be properly referenced.
The People Power papers are ©1999-2000 Jason Kitcat.


About the Author

Jason is co-ordinator of the FREE e-democracy project and a founding partner of Swing Digital, an Internet consultancy.

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