P2P Foundation

From Marvin Brown’s Blog:

As members of the civic we have much in common.  We live in the same time.  We live on the same planet.  All our grandchildren will inherit the future we leave them.  Still, if we switch our view from the civic to the social, we see great differences.  Some have much more than they need and others have much less.  This contrast between the civic and the social raises issues of fairness or justice. So what should we have in common and when should we allow some to have more than others?
Of course we cannot and never will want to all have the same amount of all the same things. Still, from a civic perspective, private ownership would be a good idea only if it promotes the just distribution of provisions better, or at least as good, as other means of allocating resources.  Civic justice is grounded in the notion of our common civic membership.  To begin our reflections on justice from a civic perspective is to begin not with what people have but with what people share, or the commons.
The Commons
            We live in a historical context that has been enriched by the… Continue reading »

This is based on David Braden’s organiclandscapedesign site, which is a documentation of efforts to learn how to build self sufficient communities.

Community sufficiency technologies are described as methods of achieving self-sufficiency, but rather than practicing this as a family, it is the community that works to achieve greater independence from the production of others.

Imagine a system of gardens and greenhouses that produced enough food for the entire neighborhood (Neighborhoods already own much of what is required). Imagine that anyone in the neighborhood could get a share of that food by doing what they enjoy . . . fixing cars, reading to kids, cooking, sewing, carpentry, home repair, gardening, making cheese . . .

Once you start an integrated system of production, it gets better the more things you can integrate . . . and, instead of labor being a cost, in this system, the more people that contribute, the less each person has to do.

Now here is an example of this from the world of beekeeping…

Bee Hives for Swarms

“In 2011 Don, our bee keeper team member, was a part time entrepreneur trying to break… Continue reading »

An analysis of voter choices correlated to social position suggested that the Pirates strongest constituencies are amongst workers and the unemployed, where they took 14% and 15% of the vote respectively. Interestingly the two parties most likely to lose votes to the PP were the Greens and the FDP (liberals), but the basic lesson of this research is the capacity of the PP so far to gather voters from across the ideological spectrum.

In Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW), with the German Pirate Party winning an estimated 7.8% of the vote, what does it mean for the copyright debate? An analysis by Alan Toner:

“In response to the electoral emergence of the PP the debate around copyright in Germany has restarted in earnest. On Thursday the weekly newspaper Die Zeit published a letter titled “We are the Creators” where they condemned the ‘profane theft’ of intellectual property – characterised as a ‘great achievement of bourgeois freedom against the dependency of feudalism’ – defended the role of the publishers and other intermediaries commercially exploiting copyrights, and decried those who would use the net as an excuse for ‘stinginess and malice’. The coordinator of the letter campaign is himself not a ‘creator’ but rather a… Continue reading »

Website: repository.alt.ac.uk/2208/

New (media) tools for self organized learning environment (SOLE) and for progressive inquiry.

Description

From FLOSSE:

“The self organized learning environment (SOLE) is a model to adapt school space to facilitate inquiry based learning. The idea is simple and powerful: “A teacher encourages their class to work as a community to answer questions using computers with internet access“.

In practice the SOLE class should work according to five simple rules: (1) students will form groups of about 4, (2) students may choose their own groups, (3) students may change groups at any time, (4) students may go and look what other groups are doing and may bring this information back to their own group, (5) students should prepare to present for the class their answers to the question(s). The SOLE is developed by Sugata Mitra and his colleagues.

I see in it some similarities with the progressive Inquiry and Future Learning Environment research we have been working with for many years.

The progressive inquiry is a pedagogical model where teachers are facilitating knowledge building that characterizes scientific research community and expert-like working with knowledge. To facilitate this we designed and developed the Fle3 – software. Later there has been other tools for… Continue reading »

via David de Ugarte

On May 7, 2012 Grupo de las Indias started a campaign calling for a P2P directed local re-industrialization swarming action.

They sent personal emails to more than 300 local and social leaders, including a mini-dossier in Spanish that shows how P2P industrialization could help stop the growth of unemployment in those local economies.

makeitcoop

Spanish unemployment is the largest in Europe with around 24,44% of the general population unemployed and one out of every two young people looking unsuccessfully for a job.

The cooperative is offering to send out consulting teams to show how this P2P re-industrialization could be put into practice in any local setting. The hope is that this will become a real swarming action that can reverse the economic downturn that has gripped the Iberian peninsula. There is a campaign page in Spanish. A translated version of that page which also has a translation of the mini-dossier is here.

There have been positive reactions from local councils, activists and non profit organizations and expectations are running high that this will take off in a serious way.

Source: Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) advises developing countries against signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, BMZ official Frank Schmiedchen said during a meeting of the Committee of Petitions of the German Parliament yesterday.

The committee discussed a petition signed by over 60,000 German citizens calling for a stop to the ratification of ACTA by the German Parliament.

Currently, according to Max Stadler, state secretary in the German Ministry of Justice, there is no ratification process with the chances dwindling that ACTA would make it that far given the resistance in the European Parliament.

Stadler also said European Digital Commissioner Neelie Kroes’ recent statement that ACTA opponents could stop worrying about ACTA is an indication the agreement might fail.

Schmiedchen said BMZ came to the conclusion that there would be no negative effects to trade in generic drugs by non-signatory, developing countries with patent-related border controls excluded in the final agreement. With regard to border control measures against potential trademark infringement, this had already been imposed under current EU law and had resulted in a WTO complaint against the EU by India and China. As the Union… Continue reading »

Book: Open Source Intelligence in a Networked World. by Anthony Olcott. Continuum, 2012

Description

The amount of publicly and often freely available information is staggering. Yet, the intelligence community still continues to collect and use information in the same manner as during WWII, when the OSS set out to learn as much as possible about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan by scrutinizing encyclopedias, guide books, and short-wave radio. Today, the supply of information is greater than any possible demand, and anyone can provide information. In effect, intelligence analysts are drowning in information.

The book explains how to navigate this rising flood and make best use of these new, rich sources of information. Written by a pioneer in the field, it explores the potential uses of digitized data and the impact of the new means of creating and transmitting data, recommending to the intelligence community new ways of collecting and processing information.

This comprehensive overview of the world of open source intelligence will appeal not only to practitioners and students of intelligence, but also to anyone interested in communication and the challenges posed by the information age.

I. The Systematic Stupidity of Hierarchies

The intrusion of power into human relationships creates irrationality and systematic stupidity. As Robert Anton Wilson argued in “Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis,”

A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave “intelligently.”

The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist’s nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up), FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all redemption) and TARFU (things are really fucked-up). In less extreme, but equally nosologic, form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.

That same theme featured prominently in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which Wilson coauthored with Robert Shea. “….n a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so… Continue reading »

The electoral victory of the anti-austerity coalition of Syriza is extremely important for the future of Europe’s peoples. Here is a rundown of commentary. Please see the last contribution linking the electoral victory to the strategies adopted during the Syntagma occupations last year.

1. The Impact of the Greek Elections of May 6, 2012

Costas Lapavitsas:

“Syriza has caused an earthquake by denouncing March’s bailout. It has called for a moratorium on debt payments, an international commission to audit Greek debt, aggressive debt write-offs, deep redistribution of income and wealth, bank nationalisation, and a new industrial policy to rejuvenate the manufacturing sector. These measures are exactly what the Greek economy needs. Implementing them depends entirely on rejecting the recent bailout and stopping payments on the debt.

Syriza believes that the measures can be introduced while the country remains within the eurozone. It has been unwilling to call for Greek exit, thus increasing its appeal to voters who worry about the aftermath of exit and believe that the euro is integral to the European identity of Greeks. In my view, and that of many other economists, it would be impossible for Greece to stay in the eurozone if it went down this… Continue reading »

Excerpted from Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Institute, who discusses a new report by Ted Trainer.

“A new report has just been published which ought to provoke a Copernican revolution in dominant conceptions of renewable energy and of sustainability more generally. The message may not be one that environmentalists want to hear, but it is one that we must all take very seriously, or risk having our good intentions dedicated to goals that cannot actually solve the very real environmental crises that we face.

Most people, including many environmentalists, seem to believe that Western-style consumer lifestyles can be sustained and even globalised, provided the world transitions to systems of renewable energy and produces goods more cleanly and efficiently. This assumption is reflected especially clearly in political discussion on environmental issues, which consistently pushes the message that we can grow our economies while reducing ecological impact. This view relies heavily on the expectation that renewable energy sources can be substituted for fossil fuels, but very little attention is given to the question of whether that expectation is realistic. Environmentalists want to believe it, but of course merely wanting something does not affect the laws of physics.

With little… Continue reading »