I was wondering how I was going to explain the importance of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services? , from Autonomo.us, a group of political hackers close to the free software movements, which includes people like Benjamin Mako Hill. But luckily, Glyn Moody has done the work for me: “There is a… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2008"
Reducing carbon without the government
Mark Pesce has a rant against the government, and says we can do without it. I differ with him on this topic, but nevertheless, the editorial contains a great example of what a self-aggregated community could do in terms of distributed energy, without any assistance from the state. Mark Pesce: “An example will help to… Continue reading
Distributed biological manufacturing, here we come: making your own fuel
Missed this article in the New York Times, which asks: “WHAT if you could make fuel for your car in your backyard for less than you pay at the pump? Would you?” The details: “the E-Fuel Corporation … soon will announce its home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler. It will be about as large… Continue reading
The role of hierarchy in open source governance
Book: Multi-Stakeholder Governance and the Internet Governance Forum. Jeremy Malcolm. Terminus, 2008 I have long looked for an overview of the forms of governance of the open source projects, here we finally have it!! Jeremy Malcolm has written a remarkably researched book about the history, present and future of internet governance. Chapter four is especially… Continue reading
Public surpport for value creation through the commons: 4 principles and 3 institutions
David Bollier gave a great speech in April about commons-based value creation and what public authorities could do to stimulate it, by focusing on a fourfold strategy framework. I’m excerpting his proposals below, and add my own proposals, for a three-fold infrastructure of public institutions which could support such actions and strategy. Bollier’s speech is… Continue reading
Carbon farming: eating a hamburger against global warming?
A counter-intuitive idea being proposed in the reportage by David Bollier at On The Commons. Moving herds actually sequeter carbon, so chaning the eating habits towards food from such herds, would reverse the damaging effects of contemporary agriculture. The whole essay is worth reading. Carbon farming is an attempt to recreate the natural conditions of… Continue reading
Recursive Publics as a challenge to the State
Felix Stadler has an interesting essay in First Monday, unfortunately titled Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies. It describes two countervailing tendencies: self-aggregating publics that are challenging traditional politics centered around a public sphere, and the tendency by authoritarian state forces to use data capture as an enforcement and control mechanism. Midway, he also has a… Continue reading
Real independent news from the United States: Democracy Now!
Whether you life in the United States or anywhere else you probably can’t escape the mainstream news machinery bringing you the latest, too often one sided information about what is going on in American politics – and this of course is news that affects all of us in one way or another…. While the international… Continue reading
The Benefits of Distributed Power
I have asked Benjamin K. Sovacool, a Research Fellow in the Energy Governance Program at the National University of Singapore, for a recap of why we need to move towards distributed energy. This is an area which we follow on our wiki here, where you’ll find a number of introductions. Here is Benjamin’s editorial: “Today,… Continue reading
5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G
Via the Free Software Foundation. “The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G: * iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can’t be on everyone’s phones. * iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology. * iPhone exposes your whereabouts… Continue reading
What kind of movement is the open movement?
Interesting contribution by David Eaves: He starts his argument by stressing that the Open Web is not just a desirable physical infrastructure but a social value: “The open web is a social value. It’s not a fact, it’s not necessity, and it’s not a requirement. It’s a value – one that a growing community of… Continue reading
When crowdsourcing is exploitation
Amongst the three forms of the new peer-informed economy (next to sharing and commons-oriented peer production proper), crowdsourcing is the most ‘capitalist’, and therefore could arguably be the most exploitative. I have indicated elsewhere the differences between peer production and crowdsourcing, but perhaps it bears repeating: Peer production is defined by: – voluntary engagement for… Continue reading
P2P Word Cloud
I played around with Wordle, which can generate different kinds of wordclouds, and this one represents the Delicious tags. The number of tagged items recently surpassed the 15,000 mark, but it is very much a collective endeavour as I draw a lot on the findings of the p2pfoundation network, that can be accessed through the… Continue reading
The cooptation of peer production (2): digital sharecropping
The following is an interesting complement to yesterday’s article about the cooptation of open source. I will be quoting the same Tim Slee, whose key argument is that networked production, when done on private platforms, is a form of exploitation of free labour. I do not disagree, but in the contribution below, I think he… Continue reading
Is the internet still end to end?
Very interesting essay by Geoff Huston on the current state of the internet infrastructure, which he says is no longer end to end, because of the dominance of middleware. The article starts by an extensive review of the end to end origins of the internet. Then he explains how it has changed: “So the question… Continue reading
Structural conditions for creating the Open Mesh
Mark Canter has an extensive investigation of what we need to build the open mesh. It gives the names of individuals and organizations, and of standards and existing tools and products, that can serve, or need to be developed still, to achieve it. Some citations excerpted to highlight the main points, but first the overview… Continue reading