Citizen Exchange Program

Citizen Exchange Program

I have long floated the idea of a "Citizen Exchange Program" for the Bahamas.

In this, we would agree with various countries that, on passing tourist visit requirements, citizens from differing, participating countries can trade places.

Want to move to Canada to live and work? Simple, just find a Canadian who wants to live and work here. Go down and make your exchange intentions known and away you go. The only time this could be blocked is if one of the people could not visit the other country as a tourist for criminal or similar reasons.

This should eliminate the "letting people in to take our jobs" objection to a large extent. This should also make it easier for people to try living in various countries without the current levels of red tape.

Thoughts?

Edit: I have always before thought of this in light of people wanting to exchange on a long term or permanent basis. Just after initially posting this here this morning though, I wondered if it might also work on a much shorter term basis. Say you were a US band and wanted to play a gig in the Bahamas. Just hook up with a Bahamian band wanting to play a gig in the US and away you go with nothing more than tourist visiting ability and notification of intent needed because of the reciprocal nature of the situation.

drew

Money and Demotivation

Money and Demotivation

Money is often seen as a motivator, but how often do you consider its ability to demotivate.

Kompoz has just made some changes (Kompoz 2.0) that will allow for possibly making it easier to make some money with the music we make there.

I think some of us who love what we have found at kompoz instinctively know that this can be a dangerous time. Brannon started this discussion in the recording and engineering group: Can you mix and master? and in a blog post: Money is here.

I have started thinking of money as a motivator and as a demotivator and as a uniter and as a divider or sower of discord.

Some links found while searching the web:

Q: What sort of bonuses should we pay?

Motivation Myths

Motivators & Demotivators of Life

An old post of mine elsewhere with some more links

Don't Let These 3 Deadly Demotivators Defeat You

I hope to write more on this soon. Time is passing way too fast this morning.

drew

Publicly Funded Copyleft

Publicly Funded Copyleft

OK, I posted this initially in response to this at BoingBoing:

All publicly funded content should be in the public domain.

Not sure if they will accept my anonymous post so I am posting here and hopefully expanding this soon.

"Given it receives public funding, I say it should rather be Free and Copyleft. Keep it away from monopoly plays in the future until the copyright runs out.

Also: More Bang For Your Donation Buck!
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-bang.html

For a real contrarian possibility, how about we start treating the public domain as a copyleft commons owned jointly(?) by the public where anyone can build on what is in it for further copyleft works but if you want a traditional copyright on a work you have to start from scratch or from other copyright works that start from scratch.

drew"

Fixed a few typos too.

drew

More Bang For Your Donation Buck!

More Bang For Your Donation Buck!

Do you support the arts? Here is an idea that you may want to consider. You can perhaps make your support go further and do more good this way.

Make it a condition of your support for artists (I am really thinking here of struggling, up and coming artists looking to catch their first break and make a name for themselves, but perhaps it makes sense for all of them) that they license the copyrights to their *supported* works to the world under a Free and Copyleft license such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

This way, your donation will not only go to support the artist in question right now, it will also provide something to the people of the world until...

If you wonder if you should jump into this at the deep end with all of your donations to the arts and wonder if it makes sense, perhaps start by allocating a certain percentage of your arts funding, say 10% or more for such a project until you get a feel for how it works and if it makes sense for your support goals.

all the best,

drew