Date archives "April 2008"

Dale Carrico on peer to peer and the state

Dale Carrico, in the same post we mentioned yesterday in our discussion on the market, also tackles the issue of the relation between the state, democracy, and peer to peer: Dale writes that: “Violence inheres in human plurality as a permanent possibility, and human beings are always capable of retroactively justifying any conduct, however violent… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Decoding Liberation (1): the distribution of work and beautiful code

Book: Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. Routledge, 2007. We mentioned this book before, as it is a systematic inquiry into the liberatory potential of free software as a mode of production and governance, that could be applied in other domains. Here’s a review. As is… Continue reading

Dale Carrico on peer to peer and the market

Dale Carrico has an interesting response to a critique, that equates P2P and the Market: “Ironically, the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money is ‘p2p’ while basic income guarantee represents a centralized, ‘broadcast’ form of economic exchange.” He responds in the following way, stressing how markets are entirely depending on the institutional framework… Continue reading

Why is Creative Commons supporting proprietary DRM?

Martin Springer is unhappy that the Creative Commons leadership supports Adobe’s proprietary DRM format for metadata, rather than the open source alternative Chillout: He writes that: “What I don’t understand is that the Creative Commons developers support a development that will lead to a situation where content creators will have to pay license fees to… Continue reading

Creating an open sphere p2p structure alongside hierarchical institutional structures

Last week, I gave the first ever 2-day seminar on peer to peer and unlocking cooperation in an institutional framework, for the Ark Group in Sydney, and I was very happy on how it went, especially thanks for the brilliant facilitation work of Tim Gartside. His open sphere methodology is a great way to translate… Continue reading

From Synthetic Inequality to Real World Equality?

First Monday has a quite extraordinary special issue focusing mostly of what we would call Peer Governance, but also has a focus on the governance of gaming worlds. One article that catches my attention is Edward Castronova’s take on Synthetic Inequality in virtual or what he calls ‘synthetic worlds’. According to him, the dominant mentality… Continue reading

New links and highlights from the P2P Audiovisual Guide (April 08): Open-Source Mobile Options

Open-Source Mobile Options This month’s focus is on mobile phones – it now appears that Apple is overwhelmed by the interest in their iPhone as a platform and at the same time the official Apple iPhone SDK seems to bring some serious limitations for both users and developers – for the sake of a safe… Continue reading

Olivier Auber’s Game Over: Can internet governance be more distributed?

In preparation of the June 2008 ICANN congress in Paris, our friend Olivier Auber (along with Olivier Zablocki) is hoping to start a debate and intervention against the increased re-centralization of the internet/web infrastructure, and particularly around the less than democratic current governance processes, see here for the text (in French). Olivier is hoping and… Continue reading