Date archives "December 2006"

Peer property as a really new form of property

I’m not sure that many people really understand the innovative nature of the new forms of peer property that are used in peer production. These new forms have at least 3 characteristics: 1) they are aimed against the private appropriation of the commonly created value 2) they are aimed at creating the widest possible usage,… Continue reading

OpenID-Decentralized Open Standards For Online Identity

Slashdot | The Case for OpenID In the wake of the Internet Identity Workshop 2006, people are talking more and more about the idea of an “identity commons” and basing identity around open standards. Cooperation in online environments is largely based around trust, and reputation. Reputation itself is rooted in (relatively) verifiable identity. If your… Continue reading

Dutch police opens up cold cases to peer-based problem solving

In september this year, I had the opportunity to explain peer production developments to an audience of police officers, and one of the audience members was Frank Smilda, who had a fantastic overview of how the Netherlands had various cases where citizens had put criminal justice case information online, leading to breakthroughs in the investigation…. Continue reading

Hacking democracy

This is a little bit untimely, as the American mid-term elections are over, but here we see a small clip uncovering weaknesses in the electronic voting collection systems used in the recent US electoral process. This cautionary documentary exposes the vulnerability of computers – which count approximately 80% of America’s votes in county, state and… Continue reading

Segolene Royal as a peer to peer politician: a short profile of her web strategy

Is it possible that, like Howard Dean before her, Segolene Royal derives her success in part from a successfull application of peer-to-peer based web strategies? After hearing Benoit Thieulin, Segolene’s internet strategist, speak at a fringe meeting on commons-oriented policy-making during the European Socialist Party Meeting at Porto on December 8, I have some grounds… Continue reading

Freedom License innovation at the Creative Commons

Interesting info from Lawrence Lessig’s regular letters: “One very difficult issue we’ve faced from the start is making understandable the freedoms our licenses are intended to provide. We’ve made that task more difficult by emphasizing in the names we’ve given to our licenses the limits on the freedoms, rather than the freedoms themselves. Thus, we… Continue reading

Open the Future: Second Life, Economic Evolution and the CopyBot

Open the Future: Second Life, Economic Evolution and the CopyBot The Economy of Second Life is demonstrating that, for media and knowledge products, the model of scarcity and control of property through control of access is breaking. The nature of the bit medium, and the file-copying nature of computers in general, turns digitized media content,… Continue reading