We continue our fascinating conversation with polymath Eric Hunting (for the first part, see here). Based on that prior question, I formulated my third question thusly: First of all, I’m not sure I understand the distinction you make between property and propriety? Perhaps you could elaborate. Second, do you have any ideas about a possible… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2008"
What to think of Damanhur?
Prompted by Eric Hunting’s remarks on the innovative role of spiritual communities in designing a post-industrial future, I started digging a little bit more. I am sorry that I failed to visit the place last May when I was close by in the north of Italy. In any case, the result is a new page… Continue reading
How informal peer to peer learning can enhance formal learning
Via Digital Natives. David Kosslyn of StudyBuddy about how studying online can either aid or hinder a digital natives learning process. Here are more student sharing resources.
How world-changing are the culture and politics of free software?
Geert Lovink interviews Christopher Kelty on the issues covered by his book Two Bits, before Kelty’s joining of the UCLA staff in August 2008. This is a really grand interview that poses all the right questions and issues, and I may engage with it further in the future, but here is just the text of… Continue reading
Background to the Global Village movement
Franz Nahrada recently wrote a letter to Claude Lewenz of the Village Forum, which contains useful background information on new participatory architectures and urban visions. Lewenz wrote the book “How To Build a Village” in which he has applied pattern theory to create a flexible and parallel village scheme to be realized around the world…. Continue reading
Open source and the military
We have recently launced a topic area on security in our wiki, and we regularly monitor P2P Warfare developments through a specialized tag in Delicious. James send me an interesting article from the Open Anthropology blog which is a critique of the usage by the military of open source information. The article is interesting, though… Continue reading
Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development
George Dafermos, our favourite Peer Governance researcher at the TU Delft, has kindly provided me with some research papers in that area, which allows us a much-needed update of our Governance section. I will be abstracting/excerpting a number of them. The first one is already quite a gem. Article: Motivation, Governance, and the Viability of… Continue reading
Eric Hunting on the historical origins of peer to peer architecture
This is the start of a fascinating interview with polymath Eric Hunting. In the first question, while reviewing his interest in sustainable building, he mentions a number of modernist antecedents, while the second question is the occasion for a more lengthy disgression on the p2p aspects of traditional community architecture. Question: I have been impressed… Continue reading
Companies, user innovation, and the governance of online communities
The Journal Industry & Innovation, (Volume 15 Issue 2 2008), seems to have published a timely special issue on a theme dear to our heart: Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation. Only the introduction is in free access and we quote from it: “Online communities, therefore, can constitute an important external… Continue reading
The “Donate Bandwidth” project
Reference to this project was suggested to us by Leon Benjamin, the author of “Winning by Sharing“: Here’s a short description, for more please go here. “Building on our experience with the Poor Man’s Broadband system, we are currently developing systems for users in the developing-world to share their unused bandwidth to accelerate download for… Continue reading
‘Friends’… your new enemies
or how ‘closed’ may become the new ‘open’… * (see note at end of article) I have a friend, who up until recently, was quite a good friend, but then something strange happened. His dark, mischievous sense of humor, which had always been one of the qualities that made him unique and often terribly funny,… Continue reading
The Codex Alimentarius and the danger to food and health freedom
I don’t know enough about the topic to offer any judgment, but though the lady sounds extremely serious and well documented, it also sounds too alarming to be true. (pro and con sources of the Codex are listed here) It’s a video which is knowing substantial viral success over the internet and of course the… Continue reading
Has open microblogging arrived?
I did not report on this when the first open microblogging implementation (i.e. identi.ca, laconi.ca) was announced and this will not be news to twitterfans and specialist geekdom. But, it is a crucial new achievement for interoperability and open standards, and seems to be speeding up. So here is the rundown on the importance of… Continue reading
Seeing 3D printing at work
Via The Scientific Indian: 1. Fab@Home 2. Shapeways For updated news on fabbing and 3d printing developments, see the Fabbaloo blog.
The subprime patent crisis
I don’t know how Glyn Moody of opendotdotdot does it, to produce such a stream of high quality news and commentary items on open developments … Another gem, taken from Alberto Barrionuevo, which compares the inflation in innovation-stopping patents to the subprime crisis caused by ‘fake’ financial instruments. In summary: “Many patents work in the… Continue reading
Does peer production destroy profits?
Via Glyn Moody. Members of this community and readers of the P2P Foundation blog are probably familiar with the thesis of Adam Arvidsson and myself on the crisis of value. In my own formulation it says that we now have a society, where the creation of use value grows exponentially, but the growth of monetization… Continue reading