A proposal from Stephany Griffith-Jones , Jose Antonio Ocampo and Pietro Calice via Project Syndicate: “Multilateral financial institutions must maintain their central function in the international development architecture, and in particular in financing infrastructure investment. But regional and sub-regional financial institutions owned by developing countries can and should play an important and valuable complementary role…. Continue reading
Date archives "October 2008"
Community Supported Manufacturing – Careers in Global Village Engineering
Michel has asked me to provide a guest update on Open Source Ecology’s Factor e Farm developments. Here we will provide some details, which provide supporting information as to why Michel called us potentially the most important social experiment in the world. We also raise the discussion on right livelihood as a likely byproduct in… Continue reading
A voice for open engineering
Thanks to Franz Nahrada for alerting us to VOICED, which seems an important open design initiative: “The vision of VOICED is to create an engineering virtual organization that addresses the challenges of synthesizing innovative conceptual designs of increasingly diverse and competitive engineered products and systems through the reuse of existing design knowledge in a cyber… Continue reading
How the financial meltdown will affect peer production and social innovation
The bursting of the internet bubble in April 2000 caused the emergence of a thriving social innovation that became the Web 2.0 phenomenom. Similarly, we may expect the current crisis not to derail peer production and social innovation, but to actually stimulate it. Coming to a similar conclusion, but using the utilitarian language of pure… Continue reading
The computer metaphor of political struggle
Interesting little article by by Karl Palmås of Gothenburg University for Resistance Studies Magazine. It’s initial premise is that the tools we use affect our vision of the world: “Serres argues that as new types of machines enter the social world, they may end up changing our ways of seeing the world. The logic of… Continue reading
A typology of Living Labs
Via Ramon Sanguesa. Excerpt of Ramon’s discussion with a typology of Living Labs: “Open innovation has many forms and facets. Living Labs, have received a lot of attention lately. More or less, they are connected with user involvement in innovation. However, there is a whole world of possibilities under these two umbrellas and their intersection:… Continue reading
Geoff Cox’s Antisocial Notworking project: the Web 2.0 is not conflictual enough
(Thanks to Seth Keen🙂 What is required are strategies and techniques of better organization founded on different principles. Peer production offers one example of the opportunity to explore the limits of democracy and rethink politics. I think this is a really interesting area of activity that seems to be gathering momentum – as both an… Continue reading
Bottom-up Open Educational Resources
The future of the OER movement does not lie with large institutional projects, but with the students getting the support they need to take things in their own hands. Via Sharing Nicely, which reports on an inspiring student-run project in South-Africa: “Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio… Continue reading
Open source not a business model, but a development and distribution model
Glyn Moody reports and comments on a new report on open source software as a business. Glyn Moody: “At first sight, the findings of The 451 Group’s latest CAOS report, “Open Source is Not a Business Model“ might seem to be terrible news for open source: Open source is not a business model. It is… Continue reading
Perverse incentives and the U.S. housing crisis
At the P2P Foundation, we pay a lot of attention, to the social protocols governing human interaction, i.e. the decision-making processes, the collective choice systems, the incentives and metrics. Humans are sensitive to being nudged in one direction or another, and an optimal social system harmonizes individual and collective interests towards the common good. There… Continue reading
A Canadian call for openness and transparency in politics
A coherent set of goals and principles, which could be emulated elsewhere: “I Believe In Open is a national movement to increase government transparency in Canada. We’re organizing citizens to push politicians to make five commitments: 1. Support reforms that increase government transparency and accountability. Citizens have a right to know what their government is… Continue reading
Visualizing affordable housing in Spain
One of the most remarkable presentations I had the occasion to follow at UrbanLabs in Barcelona, was Las Casas Tristes. Because the speaker, Geraldo Kogler, was Austrian, I could actually follow his Spanish!! I’m reproducing an intro describing this fantastic collaborative open data project, which identifies and maps empty houses. It comes from an extensive… Continue reading
The individual and collective in networked collective action
This is a continuation of yesterday’s coverage of the Jeffrey Juris interview. One of the questions is significant to us, and asks the question: what is the right organisational form for networked action? Excerpt: “I would say the distributed network form of organization reflects a particular strategy for balancing individual and collective needs, interests, and… Continue reading
The madness of current Copyright legislation
A mother sees her 13-month old son dancing, films it, and puts the video on YouTube. Today she’s a criminal, and Universal wants her to pay up to $150,000 in copyright damages. This case study by Lawrence Lessig is described in the Wall Street Journal. We reproduce his conclusion: 1. “Universal’s lawyers insist to this… Continue reading
Cool or Cash? The emergence of Private Virtual Worlds
cool doesn’t bring in the cash Marketeer Mike Moran says businesses are leaving public virtual worlds for private ones, where they can control the interactions with customers. The excerpt is below. As examples he mentions Unisfair and Expos2. Mike Moran: “Sure, you can have a presence in Second Life that attracts attention no differently than… Continue reading
First french-language video on P2P?
As far as I know, this is the first publicly available ‘live’ French-language presentation on P2P. It is entitled: Production et Gouvernance entre pairs At least one person, Florence Meichel, seems to like it: “Dans cette vidéo, Michel Bauwens donne des clefs de compréhension des dynamiques en actes … son approche résonne avec mes propres… Continue reading