Michel Bauwens is the Founder of the P2P Foundation. He presents a 30 minute keynote entitled “Infrastructure, Communities and Corporations: is There a Middle Way Between Open and Closed?” at the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference held in Mountain View, California, on Friday 14th March 2008. Telecom operators take note!
Date archives "April 2008"
Experiencing the Experience Economy: Lego’s participative army marches on ..
As a frequent speaker on peer to peer issues, there is always a temptation to settle into routines, and if you do so many lectures, there is always a danger that your memory turns originally distinct experiences into a single blur. There is one event in the year where I think this will not happen,… Continue reading
“Philanthrocapitalism”: An oxymoron with promise?
Writer Micheal Edwards’ recent book http://www.justanotheremperor.org/ takes a critical look at the hype surrounded the emerging phenomenon that some are calling “philanthrocapitalism”: using business and market systems to affect social change. The main criticism from Edwards can be summed up in his opendemocracy.net article: “My worry is that the hype surrounding philanthrocapitalism will divert attention… Continue reading
Video: Matt Mason on the ‘pirate’s dilemna’
“Matt Mason’s keynote on The Pirate’s Dilemma, his book on how to compete with piracy, filmed at The Medici Summit, March 3rd 2008, Scottsdale, Arizona. Mason discusses why piracy can be an opportunity as well as a threat, how pirates innovate outside of the marketplace and how legitimate businesses can respond. Using examples from music,… Continue reading
Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus that drives the emergence of participation
We’ve never even talked about Clay Shirky’s landmark book Here Comes Everybody. I guess the reason is that it was already so present everywhere, that I did not feel it needed added backup from our own limited means. Nevertheless, it is of course a hugely important book. To give you an idea, here Clay introduces… Continue reading
Does peer production hamper the monetary economy?
Does peer production hamper the monetary economy? With Adam Arvidsson, I have been developing the concept of a crisis of value that will increasingly affect the workings of the current money-based system. The way I interpret this trend, is that while peer production causes the creation of use value to grow exponentially, only a part… Continue reading
Graffiti Research Lab – The Movie
My computer finished downloading the Graffiti Research Lab Movie Sunday morning. I stuck it on for a quick look and ended up watching the whole thing. The film is a testament to the cultural value of the hacker ethic and a free and open source approach in cultural production. GRL are an art group dedicated… Continue reading
Announcement: conference on sustainable hospitality exchange
From Kasper Souren: “You heard about the SHE-conference? SHE stands for Sustainable Hospitality Exchange and is a conference that organised during the last weekend of June in Amsterdam (27-29 June). It is based in a local former squat that can host a hundred people and more. The goals of SHE is to increase exchange of… Continue reading
Open Festival: Let’s the audience determine the details of a music festival in Scotland
“Last week Tennent’s Lager launched Tennent’s Mutual, a new music venture that will ultimately result in a live music festival this fall, in which fans select artists, debate locations for gigs and call the shots on ticket prices. To kick off the effort, Tennent’s created a start-up fund of GBP 150,000. Fans who sign up… Continue reading
Video: Hans Rosling – New insights on poverty and life around the world
And of course a link to the software, now available online, as a web application: Gap Minder. Also, not surprisingly, Hans Rosling’s Gap Minder software was bought by Google in 2007. via TED
Announcement: Digital Action Group for Gaia
Announcement from the Digital Action Group Digital Domain’s New School of Thought: The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek earth goddess, this hypothesis postulates that all living… Continue reading
An update on P2P technology, Education, and Virtual Worlds
A review of a recent email exchange: Robert Shepherd is ” interested in 3D virtual networks and I would like to know more about how P2P might be incorporated to support them. Perhaps you could pass this info on to someone who might be able to help me. Since I am organizing Symposia via my… Continue reading
Announcement: P2P Infrastructure Workshop 1P2P4MM
From jean-yves le moine: This first workshop on peer to peer architectures for multimedia retrieval (1P2P4mm) is arranged by the CHORUS Coordination Action at Infoscale 2008 to discuss what challenges must be met and what bottlenecks must be addressed by research and engineering efforts in the near future, and what the respective roles of industrial… Continue reading
The eComm 2008 transcripts are available
Lee S Dryburgh has started to put the transcripts of the eComm 2008 conference, which examined the disruptions at play in our telecommunications infrastructures and business and policy models, online. Amongst the material available already is the keynote from Jonathan Christensen who is the general manager of audio and video at Skype. My own keynote… Continue reading
The mutual interdependency of Business and the Commons
David Wiley, who just founded the open textbook company Flat World Knowledge, and is known as an open education activist, comments and quotes from an article on philanthrocapitalism by Mark Surman. He quotes the following factoids: “Who are the top funders of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite. Who funds… Continue reading
The trouble with Ourselves
A friend of mine recently wrote: > At what point did > someone say, “let’s all get jobs, and spend all of our time away from our > family just to put a roof over our head that we could just build ourselves? > And food on the table that we could have grown ourselves?”… Continue reading