Article: FREE SOFTWARE AND HUMAN RIGHTS. By GianMarco Schiesaro. For the International Congress Free Software and the Democratization of Knowledge, Quito, 23 October 2008 In the Free Software and Education conference I attended in Quito, Ecuador last month, I met a most interesting person, GianMarco Schiesaro, who gave a very interesting presentation, entitled: Free Software… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2008"
Finance and Social Production
I’d like to expand a bit on a number of ideas that came out of a discussion with Christian Marazzi on the financial crisis, organized by the student movement at the University of Milano, last Friday. Marazzi has done a lot of innovative and thought-provoking work on the role of finance within the post-Fordist economy… Continue reading
Introduction to Adaptive Architecture, Collaborative Design, and the Evolution of Community
Is it possible to invent a new vernacular architecture adapted to the contemporary situation exhibiting these same functional and social qualities and serving as a medium of community cultivation? In this article we will explore some of the new building technologies that hint at this very possibility. Spontaneously adaptable building systems with quick low-skill assembly… Continue reading
ITQ’s for fishing: a market or a commons solution?
I would very much like the input of our readers to the following issue: Individual Transferable Quota’s give fishermen a share of the annual catch, in perpetuity but transferable if they wish. Is such a system a commons or not? Or is it a market solution, as the Economist argues below? Important considerations is that… Continue reading
A strategy for change based on the knowledge of alternatives and new values
This is from a very long strategic assessment by David Graeber and an activist collective related to the alterglobalization movement. I’m only republishing the end, because of its focus on some important elements, like the role of the middle classes, the importance of knowledge of alternatives in order not to become despondent in times of… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Bioteams
Book: Bioteams: High Performance Teams based on naures most successful designs. MK Press, 2008 This book by Ken Thompson is a detailed examination of how biomimicry based organisational models, like swarming, can be applied in business environments. The author calls his approach: “bioteams”. He writes: “There are three unique group behaviors discovered from research into… Continue reading
Open source in healthcare
The November issue of OSBR is out, devoted in full to open source in healthcare: “The length of Wikipedia’s list of open source healthcare software may come as a surprise to many readers. This issue of the OSBR provides an excellent introduction to the complexities and interoperability issues associated with healthcare software and the role… Continue reading
Massimo Menichinelli: Open P2P Design as enabling Open P2P Systems
01. Design and Open P2P collaborative activities for Open Innovation In the last years the “Design” word has become widely acknowledged outside the community of designers and as everyone agrees on its importance it is now used more than the word “project“. This has happened because a “project” cannot exist on its own, but it… Continue reading
Germ form theory (3): pitfalls of interpretation
We conclude our excerpts from the Oekonux text positing a five step transition from capitalism to a peer to peer society. In this concluding piece, we focus on the pitfalls interpreting too positively the stage already reached. Stefan Meretz and Stefan Merten: “The well known tendencies in contemporary capitalism, generally known as as neo-liberalism, support… Continue reading
Global Commons Goods as Policy Platform for a new global compact
“Over the centuries, commoners have evolved various forms of local self-governance. Some still celebrate the decentralization and spontaneity of our community commons and look upon broader regulation as a suppressive encroachment upon our individual freedoms. But the accelerating loss of our personal sovereignty to external global forces should not prevent us from embracing the larger… Continue reading
Thomas Greco on the Obama years
I’m getting the irregular newsletter of mutual credit advocate Thomas Greco, here is his take on the Obama election. Thomas Greco: “Irrational exuberance” is a phrase that has become stuck in the public mind ever since Alan Greenspan used it to describe the stock market boom of a few years ago. The exuberance attendant to… Continue reading
P2P and Utopia (v 0.1) in Greek
P2P and Utopia (v 0.1) in Greek “The FLOSS movement is just an example of the myriad ongoing cases of the peer revolution. A creative revolution that creates the society we want within the confines of the society we want to outrun”. In a nutshell, this is the message that the first video production of the… Continue reading
Obama and the high road to the peer to peer society
This then is the first ‘high road’ scenario in a nutshell: that the enlightened part of the current establishment, concerned with its systemic survival, ushers in a global compact for sustainability, in the form of green capitalism, and that this allows peer to peer dynamics, or in other words ‘participation’, to move from an emergent… Continue reading
Germ Form Theory (2): what stage for peer production?
Yesterday, we explained the five step theory of social change, based on an extended essay by Stefan Merten and Stefan Meretz, the founders of the originally german and now international Oekonux movement. Today, we excerpt the part of the essay which tries to determine which step has already been reached by peer production (and its… Continue reading
Abundance as a field of study (2): a typology
We continue our presentation of Roberto Verzola’s essay, ‘Studying Abundance‘. Following yesterday’s explanation of the different aspects of abundance, Roberto now formulates a typology distinguishes five different kinds of abunance. Roberto Verzola: “Taking into account these various ways of classifying abundance, we suggest the following tentative classification to highlight the differences among the various types…. Continue reading
SELF Coursebook: Introduction to Free Software
Via the Free Knowledge Institute: “A first book has been published by the SELF Project. Introduction to Free Software has been produced together with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) with a number of recognised authors on the subjects of Free Software. The book provides an introduction to the inspiring world of Free Software, covering… Continue reading