Dave Pollard has another one of his classic life-changing blog entries, which is really worth reading and pondering on. The article starts with an amazing graph analyzing optimal decision-making processes and with a discussion of the Wisdom of Crowds model by James Surowiecky. I’m only reproducting the conclusion, which differentiates between complicated and complex problems,… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2006"
Author-Pay a misleading alternative for Open Access journals
The OpenBusiness blog publishes an opinion contrasting the author-pays open access model to the commercial model of scientific publishing. This immediately provokes the ringing of an alarmbell, as I find the author-pays model, which requires the author him/herself to pay for publication of a scientific article, to have serious problems of equity. I asked Peter… Continue reading
Some P2P Foundation Milestones
I just wanted to share with our readers some of the qualitative changes that are taking place at the P2P Foundation. First of all, it seems clear that it is evolving from a personal project, to a collective project, from a team of collaborators that can recognize their own ideals and values in the P2P… Continue reading
From Direct Democracy to the Direct Economy
Bruno Giussani recently summarized the important ideas of Xavier Comtesse on the Direct Economy. He writes: “Could “direct democracy” provide a proper metaphor to describe the current economic transformation? Are we heading towards a “direct economy”? In a system of direct democracy, sovereignty is lodged with the citizens – or at least, with those among… Continue reading
Mass Collaboration: from bioteaming concepts to swarmteam technology
We recently discovered the research of Ken Thompson on Bioteaming, which he defines as: “Bioteaming is about what we can learn from the teams in nature in our organisational teams. It is about how we can base our teams on natural principles, which have developed and proved themselves useful through millions of years of evolution…. Continue reading
Winning by Sharing™, by Léon Benjamin
Winning by Sharingâ„¢ is the first publication from Business For Good (BFG), founded by Anna Pollock and Léon Benjamin. As described on their website, Winning by Sharingâ„¢ is about the dramatic changes in the nature of work, the emergence of the network economy and its implications for corporations, employees and portfolio workers. It describes the… Continue reading
Define your collaborative project
(reblogged from Lifesized) A UK group called Involve do some great work on collaboration, the highlight being their publication of "People and Participation". This publically funded UK think-tank and research center, is another wonderful example of some of the good work coming out of Europe in this area. I used a lot of the concepts… Continue reading
On The Commons: What we can learn from the “Nollywood” Model
Link: OnTheCommons.org | The Improbable Success of Nollywood. David Bollier has a blog post at Onthecommons.org that takes a look the rising Nigerian film industry, and their more decentralized and more “open” distribution practices. (quote): “Every week, about 30-40 new films are released. They are all sold by street vendors, directly to consumers, on videocassettes…. Continue reading
P2P Governance for Sustainability
From commons-management scholar Elinor Ostrom: Policies That Crowd out Reciprocity and Collective Action “Thus, instead of proposing highly centralized governance systems, the best empirical evidence we can bring to bear on the question of building sustainable democratic systems for sustainable resource use is to design polycentric systems…. The essential elements of polycentric systems are mechanisms… Continue reading
A Swarm of Angels: Open Business Meets Peer-Produced Film Making
What?: A Swarm of Angels is about making a £1 million movie and giving it away to one million people in one year. By using the Internet to gather together 50,000 people willing to pay £25 to join an exclusive global online community–The Swarm–the project’s ambition is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and… Continue reading
Alfred Schutz, F2F, Social Software, and Streams of Consciousness
This might seem off topic for this blog, or it might be digging a bit too deep. Nevertheless, I found some passages in an old sociology text, one of the most important texts, in fact, by Alfred Schutz. He’s from the “meaning” tradition. Meaning that he believed that something called meaning did in fact unfold… Continue reading
Audiovisual section of the P2P Wiki updated
A major update to the Audiovisual section of the P2P Wiki is now finished: Online Audio (Publishing) & Online Media/Art Communities Tour. A lot of smaller edits and updates including work on the overall structure of the text have been done as well. Enjoy!
Matt McAlister » Challenging why (and how) people tag things
Link: Matt McAlister » Challenging why (and how) people tag things. Matt McAlister writes about Bradley Horowitz’s influencer pyramid: “…[it] is a great visualization of how tagging can add value for the rest of us. At the top is the person who makes extra effort to evaluate, filter, categorize and socialize things. This is the… Continue reading
Debian experiments with funding group to release ‘etch’ on time
Link: Computerworld | Debian experiments with funding group to release ‘etch’ on time Dunc-Tank: “Basically, Dunc is an experimental project to try out ways of funding Debian development. Not paying for servers or bandwidth, or reimbursing expenses and flight costs, but actually paying people to sit down and do useful Debian work rather than some… Continue reading
Stefan Meretz reporting from Berlin: Wizards of OS 4
Stefan Meretz from Oekonux: “I participated at the WOS 4 confrence and I was really positively surprised. The german online news mag Heise brought these reports about the conference, mirroring quite well what was debated. From my view now some additional remarks. What was only a fantasy at first Oekonux conference in Dortmund (2001), has… Continue reading
P2P interview, continued
Just before I undertook the P2P seminar tour in The Netherlands, Richard Poynder published the second part of an extensive interview on peer to peer, which focuses more explicitely on its political and world-changing aspects. While I was travelling, a kind of miracle happened. The two-part interview has been translated in Spanish by Roberto Martinez,… Continue reading