The OpenBusiness Guide v1.0 is online! OpenBusiness.cc, an international initiative with partners in Brazil, South Africa and the UK, supported by the Open Society Institute, International Development Research Centre Canada, Ford Foundation and Arts Council England, has collected examples of new business models and processes that focus on: * lowering the costs of market entry… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2007"
From counterpublics to minipublics (P2P in Australia 1)
One of the advantages of touring the world for lectures, is that you are meeting many interesting people. Australia has been the occasion for a particularly rich series of encounters. Our first meeting was with Brian Martin at the University of Wollongong. Brian is an advocate for nonviolent tactics, with a particular interest in the… Continue reading
D.I.Y. online media publishing how-to: P2P Audiovisual Guide restructured – “one paragraph” overview
Our P2P Audiovisual Guide now with a “one paragraph” content overview, text restructured, updated and split onto subpages for a better browsing and reading experience. Let us know how you find it, what could be improved, what might still be missing… And if you find it useful: please link it in your favourite bookmark sharing… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Publicity’s Secrets. By Jodi Dean (1)
Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) The book discusses subjectification (how we become human subjects) in terms of a drive toward celebrity and is a critique of the role of media in technoculture, warning for the ideological usage of the drive for transparency. Today, we would like to introduce… Continue reading
Top 5 P2P Books of the Week
1) Social Ecology and Communalism, by Murray Bookchin (From the AK Press website) “We are standing at a crucial crossroads. Not only does the age-old ‘social question’ concerning the exploitation of human labor remain unresolved, but the plundering of natural resources has reached a point where humanity is also forced to politically deal with an ‘ecological… Continue reading
Video: “11th Hour” portrait of a planet in crisis
Quality control and the role of experts in social media
What happens when the quality control process moves from the front to the back end of content production, as it does with peer production of content? Here’s an interesting take on this topic by John Blossom: (we recommend reading the full entry, but here are the main arguments) “How does one address the need for… Continue reading
The P2P Foundation as a neo-nomad structure
My encounter with Franz Nahrada’s work on Global Villages, with quintessential nomad Dante, and the reading of this most interesting review of the neonomad meme by Thomas Jankowski (which I recommend reading in full), is leading me to the conclusion that the P2P Foundation itself is actually an instantiation of a neonomad structure. Neonomadism refers… Continue reading
Dmytri Kleiner proposes new commons-oriented license
Dmytri Kleiner has written a Marxist critique of both the limitations of the General Public Licene and the Creative Commons license (for Mute Magazine), which ends with a proposal for a new type of Copyfarleft license which would disallow commercial usage, but only by private firms. It is not similar, but reminds us of a… Continue reading
Robin Good TV: global p2p-tv with zero capital
A global video-based news channel, started with zero capital? Robin Good has been at it again! Marshall Kirkpatrick reports: “Robin Good, publisher of MasterNewMedia.org and a number of other excellent websites, is one of the most popular and prolific European tech writers on the web. Now he’s started a video network called RobinGood.TV with international… Continue reading
Social networking applications listed by Dave Pollard in a ‘taskonomy’
People-Connector Tools Examples Useful for Identifying & Finding This Kind of People What You Can Do Now People-Finders LinkedIn, Ryze, Orkut, Facebook1 People meeting selected search criteria or having a specified affinity with you Set up a just-in-time canvassing system2 Social Network Mappers InFlow People connected with others in an organization Read The Hidden Power… Continue reading
Video: Soma, a body-based peer to peer therapy from brazil
Launch of the Local Commons Survey Project
From David Bollier: “We’re inviting interested citizens and civic groups to conduct commons surveys for their hometowns. Each independently managed project will make a formal inventory of a community’s commons and assess the strengths and weaknesses of each. Then it will publish an interpretive report for the benefit of fellow citizens, the press, government bodies… Continue reading
Book of the Week: David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (2)
We continue our publication of excperts of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. In the first excerpt, David explained how humanity dealt with four principles of knowledge organization up to the digital era. Here, he describes the big changes that are in the offing. Excerpt: Three new strategic principles are emerging, severing the ties between the… Continue reading
Book of the Week: David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (1)
David Weinberger, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” (2000) and the author of “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” in 2002, has received many positive reviews for his latest “Everything is Miscellaneous‘. It’s a marvelous book for understanding the evolution of knowledge, both how we know things and how we organize our knowledge. We publish it as book… Continue reading
Kevin Carson on decentralized and re-localized production
Kevin Carson is continuing to publish interesting items. He’s been writing new chapters of his book on decentralized production, see here. Chapter 3 and 4 argue that state policies foster excessive scale and centralization. A discussion on the prospects of relocalized production. Here is a must-read critique of the very (legal) form of the corporation… Continue reading