Via Weblogsky. When Doc Searls went to the last Consumer Electronics show, he saw the tide turning, a kind of P2P Tipping Point if you like: “I saw some subtle but sure signs that Linux was the new CE standard, and that lock-in with proprietary tech was a business strategy of increasingly marginal use. Open… Continue reading
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
Adam Lindemann on the Harmonious Age
Beautifully said. Via Yihong Ding and from Adam Lindemann. What do you think? Text: “Before the 1800s there was a feudal society where wealth was stored in land and real estate. After the 1800s and the industrial revolution wealth began to be created on a massive industrial scale. In this industrial capitalistic society, wealth was… 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
Virtue in peer production (3): P2P and the social doctrine of the Catholic Church
We continue our exploration of ethics and peer production, with further and concluding excerpts from our contribution to the conference of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The full essay was entitled: Par cum pari: Notes on the horizontality of peer to peer relationships in the context of the verticality of a hierarchy of values….. Continue reading
Virtue in peer production (2): overview
After presenting the approaches of Yochai Benkler/Helen Nissenbauw and of Julian Fox yesterday, I’m taking the opportunity to publish excerpts of my essay for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which was entitled Par cum pari: Notes on the horizontality of peer to peer relationships in the context of the verticality of a hierarchy of… 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
Julian Fox on peer production, the digital commons, and virtue
I have been very late in discovering an important essay by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum, Commons-based Peer production and Virtue. I have asked a Salesian brother, Julian Fox, whom I met virtually in preparing my intervention for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and who is himself the author of a book on Digital… Continue reading
How political is hacking?
This is a reponse to Jonathan Zittrain‘s critique, related to his latest book on the Future of the Internet, which claims that hackers are too unpolitical and unreactive to the threats to the internet. Biella of the Interprete blog wants to set the record straight, claiming that hackers are indeed political and have proven to… 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
The peer production of terrorism
This is from an extensive conference report on a Politics 2.0 conference, by Roman Tol, at the Network Cultures blog, part of which covers this still under-reported topic, presented by Maura Conway and Lisa McInerney (Dublin City University, Ireland). Roman Tol: “An interesting approach of the history and categorization of terrorist video propaganda was set… 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
Book on the new agrarianism
An announcement from Steve Talbott, whose thoughtful approach I have always appreciated: “The University Press of Kentucky has this month released a new book that Nature Institute co-founder Craig Holdrege and I have co-authored: * Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering*. The book is part of the new “Culture of the Land” series… Continue reading