Part One: Intro by Michel Bauwens This might be a little difficult to follow for most of our readers, but it is an important issue that relates to: is there a participatory spiritual life? There are an increasing number of people like myself, who have been at some point in their life very active in… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2007"
Book of the Week: Xavier Comtesse’s Direct Economy, part 2
We continue our exploration of Xavier Comtesse new report/book with a selection of examples. Information on Xavier Comtesse’s work can be found here. Excerpts: LAST November, engineers in the healthcare division of General Electric (GE) unveiled something called the “LightSpeed VCTâ€, a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart…. Continue reading
Slaves have never been this cheap!
by way of actics.blog Since the end of the cold war system, slavery along with organized crime has been on the rise. There is an unprecedented supply of potential slaves in the substantial share of the world’s population that live in absolute poverty ($ 1 a day or less), in Africa and, increasingly, the most… Continue reading
A new proposed P2P-based business model: collaborative content distribution
Is it possible to have a business model that rewards the 3 parties involved in collaborative content models, i.e. creators, platform enablers, and consumers? Some time ago, Manu Sporny CEO and President of Digital Bazaar, Inc. – creator of the Bitmunk digital content distribution service, published an essay explaining a new “collaborative content distribution†system…. Continue reading
Book of the Week: Xavier Comtesse’s Direct Economy
Xavier Comtesse has released a report on what he calls the direct economy, and which I would consider the view of participatory economics from the point of view of the corporation seeking hyperproductivity. His report contains insights, analysis, and interesting cases studies, as well as a model of levels of participation, which we are quoting… Continue reading
The sceptical arguments against open hardware
Janet Hope’s PhD thesis on Open Source Biotechnology, also has an interesting summary of the arguments against the likelyhood of successfull open hardware projets. Excerpts: “Open hardware, like open source, has its share of ideologues and sceptics; here we are interested in the sceptics’ view. Sceptics of open hardware have made a number of points… Continue reading
New book: Digital Dharma
Here is a pre-announcement of a book by our friend Steven Vedro, slated for publication in October 2007: Digital Dharma. A User’s Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere. Steven R. Vedro. Quest Books, 2007 “There is an Infosphere, an electronic web produced by our multiple telecommunications technologies, pulsating all around us. These technologies, as… Continue reading
Open sourcing pharmaceuticals: how realistic is it?
Janet Hope has written a very interesting PhD thesis on the prospects for Open Source Biotechnology, which by the way, has an excellent review of Open Source Business Models. Here is an excerpt from her conclusions, as to what the chances are that pharmaceutical companies would eventually go open source in a more full way…. Continue reading
From Walled Garden strategies to Community Switching Costs
Very interesting guest contribution by Robert Young of Weedshare in the GigaOm blog, which focuses on the shift in power from businesses to communities. He takes the right approach, which is neither to say that communities and individuals are simply manipulated in commercially mediated platforms, nor that communities are fully autonomous, but that it represents… Continue reading
Five myths about Linux?
I would like to recommend the reading of this critique of Linux. It goes extensively into five arguments. 1) Linux isn’t a unified product, so what you should compare with Microsoft are the specific distributions of it, and they are often not user-friendly 2) Linux is not secure because the credentials of the people working… Continue reading
A friend to friend infrastructure for an altruistic economy
I recently discovered the website of the Altruists.org organization, who want to develop a decentralized accounting infrastructure for human exchanges. It’s part of a whole series of similar projects which I have started to compile on this page on P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects. The Friend2Friend project, writes Robin Upton, “is suitable for a gift economy,… Continue reading
Report from NSF
In case you’ve not seen it, the final report from the National Science Foundation’s Innovation and Discovery Workshop can be downloaded here: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf0725 It brings together multiple disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and engineering. What I found particularly rewarding was the report’s recommendations on the different areas of collaboration between various disciplines. The… Continue reading
creativity hypes
Two collections of texts, most of which were presented at the MyCreativity conference in Amsterdam this fall, take up and critically examine the present hype about creativity, the creative industries and the reality of creative work. A couple of texts stand out as particularly illuminating: Angela McRobbie on ‘The LosAngelization of London’ , she described… Continue reading
Top 5 P2P Books of the Week
Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source, by Henrik Ingo Via: Enterprise Open Source News Desk ‘Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source’ is a newly published book about Open Source ideology and business models. It is divided into 4 parts covering the topic from different angels. Part one introduces the general concept of openness,… Continue reading
Ubiquitious computing: video of Ben Cerveny at LIFT on “the luminous bath”
A fascinating exposition of what is happening as internet connectivity and human awareness collide. Ben chooses a biological metaphor to discuss and explore what is happening as objects gain basic awareness and how how information is quickly aggregating much like primordial oceans. Mashups are described as ‘crystallization’ of information, while ‘decanting’ is what happens when… Continue reading
Next Layer: new book in progress on Open Source Culture
The Next Layer is a book project by Armin Medosch about Open Source Culture. Passages of this text are informed by an extensive study into free software hackers and open source activists. Materials will be released in due time at http://theoriebild.ung.at/ Here’s an excerpt explaining Open Source Culture. In some ways, Armin’s conclusion, which is… Continue reading