There is an obvious contradiction between hoping that the decentralization of taste (watch this video on the topic) leads to more diverse and better choices, and the obvious reality that the most popular choices in participatory platforms are not of the highest quality. Is hoping for the Long Tail therefore illusory? Chris Anderson, responding to… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2007"
What do children need to know?
While working on regularly updating the P2P Learning pages, one of the more developed topical areas of our P2P Foundation wiki, I always had in the back of my mind the necessity to define the new generation of skills needed to participate in the new networked learning environment. So it is with great interest that… Continue reading
Third Enclosures update: can they really enclose relationships in a Process Economy?
Revenue-sharing is an always recurring debate in the blogopsphere and concers the possible expropriation of value from the user-producers (i.e. the Third Enclosure process). There are several arguments that would conspire not to make this a central issue. I just want to review a few of them here. The most important one for me is… Continue reading
Francois Rey: focusing on the attributes of knowledge, rather than people
Francois Rey sent us the following comment, as reaction on our own comments on the Wikipedia/Citizendium experts debate: “I have not fully delved into this problem of experts vs. credentials. I can understand the differing points of view but I cannot say whether Citizendium will succeed or fail. In fact I wonder if this discussion… Continue reading
The Ethics of Participation, response to Trebor Scholz
Trebor Scholz has written an important call for an ethics of participation, which I strongly recommend to read here. It’s an update to an earlier essay on the challenge of participation. After documenting his argument mainly through the YouTube buy-out, he presents the following conclusion: “How can our immaterial labor be turned into an autonomous… Continue reading
Kevin Carson reacts to our entry on Peer Property
We recently augmented our P2P Foundation Encyclopedia entry on
Power, control and the internet of things
It is worth reading this essay on Ctheory, which deals with power and control in the age of the internet of things: For context, see the following entries on the evolution of power, in my own manuscript, and in our wiki. In these comments, I make the point that after the evolution from disciplinary to… Continue reading
Scott Karp on The Death of the User
We are reblogging part of this commentary by Scott Karp, which critiques the concept of User-Generated-Content, as it is still based on the duality between publisher and user. See our entry on the User-Generated Ecosystem. Excerpt: “There has been a leveling of the playing field that renders largely meaningless the distinction between “users†and “publishers  Continue reading
More comments on the prospects of an open design world
Sam Rose’s comments to my previous posting on the limits of peer production warrant re-publishing as a separate entry. Sam Rose: The fact is that the barrier is being significantly lowered in design, rapid prototyping, distribution, fabrication, manufacturing, finance, and marketing. We are not yet at the point where people can put all of these… Continue reading
Can design be separated from production?
This entry is inspired by the following spanish-language comments. One of the key arguments in my presentation, when I talk about the extension of peer production to the physical field, is that design can be separated from production. The reason is that design is knowledge production, and can be more easily configured in a context… Continue reading
The Audience 3.0 mediascape
We continue our excerpting of an upcoming essay in Audience 2.0, which continues our last entry on social innovation, but applied to the media landscape: The various quotes are from Umair Haque at Bubble Generation. “Application of social innovation to the Media field The above general peer production model, in its 3 scenarios, can easily… Continue reading
Three scenario’s for social innovation
A recent blog commentary points to a presentation by IBM Vice-President Linda Sanford, where she mentions a study that shows that both internal R&D and universities are no longer the main sources of innovation, instead, the own employees, business partners, and customers are key. This echoes a consistent theme at the P2P Foundation, about the… Continue reading
Decentralized production technology
A must read for the new year, Kevin Carson has pre-published a new draft chapter of his book in progress. Theme: decentralized production technology. Of course, we at P2P Foundation would use the term distributed, rather than decentralized, which from our point of view, refers better to different power centers, rather than to true bottom… Continue reading