Here is a very interesting, and positive take, on how the Mennonites and Amish react to new technologies, not by simply accepting or rejecting everything, but by selective adapting those technologies that do not underminde their community ethos. Read it here. Howard Rheingold earlier described the uproar caused by cellphones in the Amish communities.
Date archives "September 2006"
Please support the Panarchy.com fundraising drive
Paul B. Hartzog has been doing some important research on panarchy, which is largely a synonym for the concept and practice of peer governance, which we use here at the P2P Foundation. His site is here. After funding it several years by himself as a service for the community, Paul needs support in keeping the… Continue reading
Third Enclosures wrap-up: the new feudal economics of web 2.0
We recently introduced the concept of the Third Enclosure, to indicate how some Web 2.0 companies are expropriating the content created by those who submit to them. As an example, we referred to the license of the Dropping Knowledge initiative. The Publishing 2.0 blog has been monitoring this emerging conflict much more intensively than us,… Continue reading
John Hagel on the new marketing era
Interesting wrap-up on the new realities facing business by John Hagel at Edge Perspectives. This is just a selection: “We are in the early stages of a profound shift in the economics of business that will transform marketing (along with many other things). Three shifts in economics are occurring in parallel. First, we are moving… Continue reading
Questions and Answers
Dropping Knowledge recently launched as a responsible, social activist Question and Answer Engine. As much as i love the subject matter and cause, the interface was a little hard to use and text blurry (Firefox). Still harsh interaction design, petty pieves aside, I commend them for initiating this project. The subject matter of the questions… Continue reading
Expanding peer production to the physical realm, part two
Martin Springer, in his latest contribution in Repositorium, makes the crucial distinction between: 1) physical space, which consists of scarce goods 2) logical space: the immaterial social sphere of our thoughts, emotions, laws and regulations 3) digital space, which allows the encoding of logical space; can be used by logical space to extends its memory… Continue reading
Expanding peer production to the physical realm, part one
A crucial aspect of peer to peer theory, the attempt to produce a theory that aims to understand peer to peer processes, and also a key differentiator between the more liberal and the more radical interpretations, is whether peer producton, the common production through communities, as evidenced in free software, linux and wikipedia, can be… Continue reading
OnTheCommons.org | The Language of the Commons
OnTheCommons.org | The Language of the Commons Paul Hartzog is guest blogging at OnTheCommons.org, and has written a post that lays out a language and a human-nature model that describes how sharing economies arise in digital environments, and then how non-digital sharing economies adapt and refactor the social norms to non-digital commons. Paul describes the… Continue reading
MySpace users tell marketers get out!
You cannot disrupt social network spaces where the large majority of people share as authentic users with corporate profiles only wanting to sell. This is the clash between dolphins and sharks again. It must hard for MySpace to regulate what goes on with so many users, while keeping things open. “Yes, it’s happening as we… Continue reading
Open Content developments in the South
Peter Suber’s Open Access blog is an indispensable resource for monitoring open access, open content and open source developments, including for trends in the global South. I’m selecting two items to give you a taste of the kind of reporting that you can find there. Item 1: Making a commons of new and old knowledge… Continue reading
Creation of new P2P exchange: Give Get Nation
We’re forwarding an announcement from William Shanley, on a new P2P exchange site, which uses a karma-based reputation currency, originally proposed by science fiction author Cory Doctorow: the ‘Whuffie’: “GiveGet Nation‘s economy draws on principles of Pierre Bourdieu on the interchangeability of economic, political and culture capital in habitats, and is coherent with chaos and… Continue reading
Neighbornode: bottom-up wireless networks for neighborhoods
Interesting initiative: (For more info and context, see also this study of web-based neighborhood sites ) “Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and… Continue reading
Is a commons-based political economy at all possible?
Yesterday, we blogged about Dropping Knowledge by reblogging an item from the Repositorium blog. We since started emailing with its author Martin Springer, in which I discovered something of a soulmate. He has been reading my original essay on the Political Economy of Peer Production, and started his own reflection here. The key question he… Continue reading
How P2P affects publishing: Paul Hartzog
Paul B. Hartzog, the editor of the very stimulating Panarchy site, which specializes in peer governance, recently published some interesting comments on the Corante blog. Taking its clue from Cory Doctorow’s statement that the biggest problem for author’s is obscurity, not piracy, the entry examines how the dynamic of “publish, then select”, which replaces the… Continue reading
Firefox case study of peer production and governance
What is the exact interplay between an open source developer community, it’s extented user ‘fan’ base, the eventual nonprofit institutional framework that supports it, and corporate sponsors and supporters? This is a key issue to understand how peer production and peer governance work in real practice, rather than in a idealized or ideological version. We… Continue reading
Lucas Gonze on the decentralizaton of taste
This is from an older interview on the Read/Write weblog, with the founder of WebJay Lucas Gonze, but his comments on how P2P-systems can actually re-inforce the centralization of taste are of interest: “”’Where does WebJay fit into the ‘P2P system ecosystem’, in your opinion?”’ Lucas: Webjay decentralizes taste. This seemed to me to be… Continue reading