Two items here. 1) A call by Marcin that is important enough to reproduce 2) remarkable work by Japanese researchers for a P2P infrastructure for local sustainable production 1: Marcin Jakubowski: “How many times have you heard the like of, “When solar cell companies develop cheaper panels, then we’ll switch to solar power.†Instead of… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2008"
Ministry of Truth
Michel asked me to republish my comments on OpenCalais. On the Kendra mailing list I read an interesting posting about the OpenCalais system, developed by Reuters. According to their website the Calais initiative seeks to help make all the worlds content more accessible, interoperable and valuable via the automated generation of rich semantic metadata, the… Continue reading
Promoting open and free video and television platforms in Europe (Miro tour)
Nicholas Reville announces the Spread Miro European Tour Here is the text: Know someone in Europe we should meet with? Let us know! PCF’s Holmes Wilson will be in Europe in late February through early April meeting with people about Miro. He’ll be passing through several cities, attending some excellent conferences, and wants to meet… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on Decision Making and Conflict Resolution in Material Peer Production
This is the third and last part of Christian Siefkes second installment on material peer production, which tackles the general topic of free cooperation. After having introduced distribution pools and local associations as mechanisms, he now tackles the governance issue. Christian Siefkes: “How will projects and associations make decisions, how will they resolve conflicts? I… Continue reading
Case Study: Florence Devouard, Wikia, and the Wikipedia admins
By Michel Bauwens (published by me as he had dodgy adsl connection in Thailand this morning) Seth Finkelstein brings to the attention of his readers, an interesting case at the Wikipedia, which concerns the efforts by Florence Devouard (handle: “Anthere”), Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, to change the content of… Continue reading
Proposed OSE specifications aim to guarantee truly open physical peer production
What do we need to have “economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts”, i.e. true Distributive Production? Proposed by Marcin Jakubowsky and the Open Source Ecology project: “We like to be clear about the meaning of open, or open source,’ as used in this work for items of physical production. By open source, we mean… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on Local Associations for organizing material peer production
In the second part of his contribution on free cooperation, after introducing his concept of distribution pools, Christian Siefkes tackles the issue of local cooperation. Christian Siefkes: “There are things that concern all the people living in a specific area, such as the providing and maintenance of infrastructure and of public services (e.g., health and… Continue reading
Why Danah Boyd is depressed and angry, and so am I, about scientific lockdown by publishers
Danah Boyd is depressed and angry, because she has written a marvellous essay on Facebook privacy, but it is locked down between a paywall, by her own publisher Sage. She writes: “I’m deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it. It is not because you aren’t interested (although many of… Continue reading
Solidarity-based productive chains
I have come in contact with Brazilian network-theory author Euclides André Mance, who is studying how to use the network form for human emancipation, but, unlike our own focus on distributive peer production, focuses on the extension of the collaborative production in the context of what is increasingly being called solidarity economics. It’s an area… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on Distribution Pools
As a trendwatcher with a larger overview of trends than people spending less time on this, I’m often frustrated that I see various initiatives emerging, each working independently, often re-inventing the wheel, and not coordinating on standards and interoperability. A lot of energy is wasted in re-doing things that have already been done and could… Continue reading
Peer production is distributive, not just collaborative
There is a dense but very high quality essay on Mute, by Simon Yuill, that delves into the history of open/free and collaborative art practices of the last decennia, showing how the musicians and other examples of art communitues pioneered much of what was later also expressed in the free software community, and based on… Continue reading
UnMoney Convergence: landmark meeting between open money and digital identity advocates
The ‘unMoney Convergence – a conference on money, liberation and systems change’ has just been announced. It takes place April 14-16 in Seattle and will be mostly organised using Open Space Technology methods. You can view the pre-conference wiki here: URL = http://unmoney.wik.is/ For background, here is Michael Linton, predicting everyone will be using open… Continue reading
Ecomm 2008 conference will report on wireless revolution in the making
The readers of this blog will probably know that I’m not a geek in any sense of the world, and that technology is a tool, albeit important, for something else, which is human emancipation. So I do not regularly report on technical conferences. However, here is one that, despite its technical nature, I would like… Continue reading
Raoul Victor on peer to peer and extensive global development
Last year, I wrote an editorial on P2P and the feudal transition. It’s main thesis was that if we want to understand the transition from the current system to one that is dominated by the peer to peer logic, it is best not to look at the feudal to capitalist transition, characterized by many political… Continue reading
Video: Inconvenient Stories, an interview with Human Rights Watch at DLD
Good review on the human rights perspective on many countries over 2007, in regard to censorship and abuse. Discussion of how the use of inconvenient stories can shame governments into change. Libya is an especially poignant example and success story.
Umair Hacque: when data is valueless, open beats closed, and good beats evil
This is a crucial issue is the new economy which I have touched upon a number of times before, and I’m not sure I’m totally understanding the mechanics of it yet. The key point I have been making is: openness creates value, but enclosure captures it. The crucial issue therefore is,thinking as an entrepreneur or… Continue reading