Date archives "May 2008"

Gilberto Gil on Brazil’s Peeracy Policy

Gilberto Gil: We have brought digital multimedia studios and access to the internet (peer to peer culture) to about 700 hundred grassroots communities all over Brazil. Via Joi Ito: Speech of Gilberto Gil, Brazilian Minister of Culture, for Google Zeitgeist: “Since 2003, when I took office as Minister of Culture of Brazil, we have been… Continue reading

Building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate

Smary McCarthy of the Icelandic Fablabs has a recap of some of our mailing list debates about the possibilities for open hardware, and which licenses are optimal, in a long contribution on his blog. He starts the entry by asking himself: How should one go about building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate?… Continue reading

Consumer owned enterprise – Do we really need entrepreneurs?

In Can Consumers Collectively Own ‘Producers’? the argument is made that if consumers could own the means of production for what they consume, they could buy what they need “at cost” and would be much better off for that. Profit, argues AGNUcius, should be considered an investment on the part of consumers, who would then… Continue reading

How open can proprietary platforms be?

Gigaom presents a comparative overview on the portability initiatives recently taken or promised by MySpace, Facebook, and Google. Neither truly open nor entirely closed, they fall somewhere in between control and ultimate user freedom, and Gigaom gives us some criteria to judge the degree of openness. Stacy writes: “There’s open source (really open in that… Continue reading

Event announcement: Barcamp on government 2.0, Amsterdam, June 7th

The Barcamp idea is slowly maturing. I had the privilege to participate at one in London hosted at Google’s offices back in January 2008. The crowd was filled with government officials, freelancers, geeks and outside interest groups. This is a call to people in Europe or with easy access to NL to drop by and… Continue reading

Wikimedia Foundation board refuses community participation

Wikipedia is definitely showing itself to be a good example of what happens when peer governance goes wrong. To quickly recall my vision of peer governance: the commons-oriented peer production format combines the self-aggregation of effort by self-governing communities, and a for-benefit institution which should preserve and develop the infrastructure of cooperation. In the community,… Continue reading

The Tilaphos project

The public information belongs to the citizens. So do the forests. These are only some of the messages that the promising, ongoing Tilaphos project aims to spread over the Greek society (see the Tilaphos blog and the Tilaphos reforestation platform). Tilaphos experiments with the collective participation and social collaboration organized through the Web, trying to… Continue reading

Pursuing the Common Good (5): Stefano Zamagni on new directions for thinking about a civil economy

I’m continuing the reporting on the Vatican Conference on Pursuing the Common Good, still focusing on the representatives of Catholic social thinking, especially those with a detectable socially-progressive bent. After our discussions of the work of Pierpaolo Donati on the relational society and Luigino Bruno on the ecology of communion, here is a review, based… Continue reading