Date archives "August 2006"

We are the media: how to participate in autonomous media production?

If you are familiar with the resources that we are collating at the Wiki of P2PFoundation.net, you know that the middle column is dedicated to topical pages. One such new page is one P2P Audiovisual Concepts and is maintained by Valentin Spirik. He has done an absolutely marvelous job of collating the best how-to resources…. Continue reading

Two-sided networks as an open business model

Open Business has an interview with Marshall van Alstyne, professor at MIT’s E-Commerce centre, who has done some thinking and research on open business models, and is developing a new free license model. We’re quoting the part on two-sided networks as a business model: “OpenBusiness.cc looks into how some of these “open projectsâ€? can be… Continue reading

User generated content and gaming

“I love the fact that thanks to organizations like Valve, Maxis, and Bioware, user-generated content is attracting tremendous attention from industry and media alike. Still, coverage typically revolves around a single point of interest, i.e. “UGC makes games more interestingâ€? or “UGC can help drive sales.â€? So I thought I’d compile a (by no means… Continue reading

Dale Carrico on transhumanism

 From http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/07/posthuman-terrains.html “I have long thought that when Aristotle defined “man” [sic] as the “political animal,” this formulation constituted a fledgling kind of cyborg manifesto written many centuries before Donna Haraway’s own. Aristotle’s definition amounts to the claim that human animals become different in their “essential naturesâ€? when they live together in cities. (…)”… Continue reading

The Openness Aversion

[via Boing Boing] James Boyle’s article in Financial Times addresses what he is calling a “cognitive bias” in our culture against “open” systems, like open source software development, Wikipedia, and other commons-based intitiatives and resources. Boyle’s article actually shows how two different ways of solving problems collided in the digital medium over time. The “closed”,… Continue reading

The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy, by Richard N. Langlois

John Hagel of Edge Perspectives writes on Langlois and the Vanishing Hand: In a recent blog posting, Langlois pointed to his new book The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy that will be coming out shortly – for a limited time, the full text of the book is available online here.… Continue reading

Wireless Internet Commons

[via Cooperation Commons ] onthecommons.org has an informative post about Pierre de Vries of the New America Foundation and his working paper, â€?Populating the Vacant Channelsâ€? (PDF). The foundational idea of the paper is that, in the US, we can can use “whitespaceâ€?, or unused wireless radio spectrum to create an unlicensed networking commons. The… Continue reading

eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications, by Gary Alexander

Is this book for you? In the preface to this book, Gary Alexander writes, “However you have come to this book, I imagine you are likely to be in general sympathy with my starting points”: • A worry about the natural environment. You have a strong sense that human activities are destroying natural habitats, that… Continue reading

Symbiosis And Living Machines

[reblogged from Cooperation Commons] Human-Plant/Animal Species Symbiosis The nature of human cooperation with other species is now largely a based upon a symbiotic structure that has changed very little since the dawn of agriculture in early human civilization. This symbiotic relationship has consisted mostly of humans selectively breeding, raising and caring for different plant and… Continue reading

Dale Carrico on deliberative development

from http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/07/rethinking-democracy-among-experts.html : “A demand for more deliberative development is exactly as central to my own version of technoprogressive politics as is the demand for sustainable development. That phrase, “deliberative development,” may conjure up the facile and fussy image of “progress” by plan or by committee meeting, a vision of a domesticated development smoothed, controlled,… Continue reading