In the last few days I have had the occasion to explore and communicate with Rich Carlson, who is part of team maintaining a very high quality website on Science, Culture, and Integral Yoga, which brings informed ‘postmodern’ reconstructions of the integral theory of Aurobindo. (see as an example, his masterly treatment of Ken Wilber… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2008"
Announcement: Call for Papers: Free Software and Beyond: The World of Peer Production
Call for Contribution to the 4th Oekonux Conference (in collaboration with P2P Foundation) Invitation: During the past decade the phenomenon of Free Software has become successful and well-known. It is still amazing how in the realm of software the creativity of so many volunteers leads to products which are useful for the whole mankind. In… Continue reading
Raoul Victor: P2P in the material world (2): how would a P2P society look like
We continue serializing Raoul Victor’s reply to an Oekonux text by the ‘two Stefan’s” Today, Raoul Victor asks: Can we imagine what could be peer material production? Raoul Victor: Part 3 of the text reads: “Today it is hard to see how material production can be organized according to the logic of information goods… It… Continue reading
Market economy and peer economy: talking about sustainability
I start publishing parts of the paper “Laser Theory and Peer to Peer”. Although that it carries considerable flaws, I hope that you will also find some interesting seeds of thought in it. Biello [2007] admonishes of the danger that the planet Earth cannot support the demands humanity is placing on it, as the environmental… Continue reading
The P2P Power that’s rocking Korea
Alerted via SmartMobs to this very enthusiastic article on the background to the mobilizations in Korea. From the TechnoKimchi blog: “How did it happen so quickly? This is the fun part. Lee is a very conservative guy, who still believes in “control”. What he did was, when numerous protests broke out around the country, he… Continue reading
Raoul Victor: P2P in the material world (1): true vs. false rivalry
Raoul Victor has written a long reply to a theoretical text (draft) by Stefan Merten and Stefan Meretz on peer production and its potential to become embedded not just in the production of informational goods, but as the dominant system for material production as well. We are serializing this reply in three parts. Raoul Victor:… Continue reading
The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy
Adam Arvidsson, Nicolai Petersen and myself (Bauwens), have jointly published an expanded version of the Crisis of Value article for the Journal of Future Studies . This May 2008 issue is not yet online, so feel free to request an author’s copy. The essay was written by invitation of one of the editors, Sohail Inayatullah… Continue reading
From feudal to participatory spirituality
We are starting a discussion in our Ning community site, about what should be the formal principles of an open, participatory, commons-oriented spiritual search and practice. It’s inspired by a draft of principles proposed by Lawrence Wollersheim. Please join us and tell us what you think about them. For a background, there is also a… Continue reading
The P2P movement as politically integrative
The P2P Movements as an integrative political movement Starting point of this thoughtpiece is a review by Brian Martin of a book by David Hess, Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry . David Hess categorizes political and social movements in a fourfold typology: opposition movements, construction of alternatives, localism, and access movements. See the quote… Continue reading
Book ofthe Week: Developing a Mediacology for a Media Permaculture
How should we approach literacy in a digital age? For Antonio Lopez, it’s not just about using new types of media, but recognizing the different ways our brain deals with information, and that this is media-dependent but also inserted into the larger ecologies of our life, which must be sustainable. Hence the link between the… Continue reading
From Worldview 1.0 from Worldview 2.0
Via the Designing for Civil Society blog, originally from Jack Martin Leith, who also distinguishes a Worldview 3.0. The text comes with a great graphic. Excerpt: Worldview 2 sees the “world is seen as an ecosystem. These are some of the main features of W2: * Effective when the environment is complex, turbulent, unpredictable *… Continue reading
How is the web changing politicians?
As readers of this blog know, we monitor the effects of P2P on Politics on our Wiki, where we have collected a nice collection of quotes, which I recommend for your perusal. Here is a summary of what the changes mean for politicians, subjectively and in their practice, by Prof. Stephan Coleman: “So, point one:… Continue reading
Video: Bank of Common Knowledge – knowledge generation and transmission among citizens
I discovered this scintillating project on the WMMNA blog by Regine Debatty, which provides an overview of sensitive and promising practices emerging from Platoniq‘s work with volunteers in Spain. Burn Station “The Barcelona-based group Platoniq (aka Susana Noguero, Oliver Schulbaum, Ignacio García and Joan Villa Puig) gained world fame a few years ago when they… Continue reading
Slowth vs. growth
In the Cluster interview on participatory city planning, which we featured yesterday, there is also an interesting passage on the role of time and speed. Some things, like physical growth, need to slow down, while informational feedback processes, need to go faster. John Thackara and Sunil Abraham: JT. “Speed or slowth are not lifestyle choices…. Continue reading
Xavier Comtesse on Value Chain 2.0
“When customers are no longer in a passive or self-service mode, but have become active — i.e., operating in a do-it-yourself, co-design or co-creative mode –, the traditional value chain of Michael Porter is no longer effective.” Introduction: Swiss “P2P Business” thinker Xavier Comtesse, whose modelling efforts on the direct economy we have covered before,… Continue reading
Ernst Lohoff: information goods are not commodities
Translation, then comments, from Stefan Meretz of Oekonux. In `issue 31`_ of the magazine krisis_, Ernst Lohoff published a very interesting article_. Title: “Der Wert des Wissens. Grundlagen einer Politischen Ökonomie des Informationskapitalismus” (“The value of knowledge. Fundamentals of a political economy of the information capitalism”). It discusses the question whether digital information goods are… Continue reading