rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.

Lu’s grandpa, Agong, who is 97 years young, asked me why the American elections take so long. This is a daily occurrence here in Guangzhou, especially in the south of china, as many are convinced that some form of democracy or rule by the people is coming. It is just a matter of time. This is one of the unwritten rules of China: the farther you get from the capital, the more people speak their minds. You could also say the further people get away from Beijing, the more lawlessness, but that is another story altogether (I would also say the other unwritten rule is that as long as you phrase anything in terms of business, you are better off with the government. So instead of addressing problems with GFW in terms of censorship of free speech, address it in terms of increased transactions costs and bad business — in what business is getting 70% of your order ever okay?)

Anyway, I didn’t have a great answer to Agong this time, and conceded that this battle between Obama and Clinton has gone on way too long. Look at the intrade charts! Come on!

2008 US Presidential Elections

Source: Dynamic, compound prediction market charts from InTrade

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2008 US Presidential Election Winner - Individual

And, while yes, I agree that Obama is elitist, my daily read of the commercially focused American media is compared against the intrade charts.

SO, at the end of the day I told Agong, “Obama has already won the democratic nominee and the presidential race is a lot closer.” Of course, something abominable could happen to derail this prediction market, but it is super crucial to get Hillary out of the race now and focus all conceptual and ideological nukes onto McCain. Geez, does McCain represent you? Obama! Obama! Temporary Dictator is the best of the worst as I’ve previously pushed At least there is some feeling that the common persons efforts are connected to the presidential selection compared to selection of the temporary dictator in China. So with that being said, that is the most nationalism you are going to see out of me, quite unlike the red-guard-like red nationalism inside of China directed at CNN and French-connected Carrefour.

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!)“:

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 - August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!