Evan Prodromou discusses what’s wrong with current social news sites such as Digg, the limitations of a number of alternatives that are considered more ‘open’, and what is truly needed to have an open distributed service that can work across different sites. Read the whole article here. Evan has a similar, though more technical article,… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2008"
Can open source innovate better than corporations?
What I’d like to see happen is genuine open-source innovation. But I’m afraid this cannot happen, because real innovation requires a lot of money, and corporations remain the best way to fund such innovation, in general with high hopes to make even more money in return. The above quote by Christophe de Dinechin, is challenged… Continue reading
The Music of Abundance
Forwarded by our friend Franz Nahrada: “A friend of mine, Karlheint Essl, has written the “Lexikon Sonata“. Its an abundant piece of music in the sense it never ends, it plays until the end of the universe, but it will hardly ever repeat despite all the things that Nietzsche said. I thing this is iconic:… Continue reading
Event: P2P and the Rise of Green Capitalism
Michel Bauwens will be in Illinois, USA at the University of Illinois, College of Education. Date: Friday, November 21 Time: 12pm – 1pm Where: College of Education, Room 42 A Just as the three quarters of oil engineers now agree that Peak Oil is in sight within the next decade (after that, oil production can… Continue reading
The common as an alternative to public and private ownership
Remi Nillsen interviews Michael Hardt, co-author with Toni Negri of the earlier Empire and Multitudes, on their new upcoming book, Common Wealth. Found via Facebook. Interview: “We need alternatives to the thought that our only options are either private or public ownership”, said Michael Hardt when he presented his and Antonio Negri’s forthcoming book Common… Continue reading
Revamping IntegralSpirituality.org away from integral orthodoxy
Lawrence Wollersheim is continuing to move the website on open and integral spirituality away from the Wilberian orthodoxy (if you can read between the lines). Here’s the announcement: “Our rapidly growing open source, integral spirituality community supports individuals seeking to integrate their personal spirituality with art, science and the best of the integral perspective. Our… Continue reading
Causewired: new book on peer to peer philanthropy
Via Bill Thompson: “in the book Causewired he (Tom Watson) shares his experience and understanding of the growth of what has been termed “peer-to-peer philanthropy”. The book’s strapline is “Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World”, and Watson offers a range of examples of the way in which the network is making new forms of… Continue reading
The war against abundance in the physical world (2): towards policies for abundance
We continue the presentation of the very important essay by Robert Verzola. This time, excerpts of what he has to say about a positive policy geared towards producing positive feedback loops of abundance. Roberto Verzola: 1. Marshalling the abundance of nature “Creating abundance is a matter of reproducing a good over and over again, until… Continue reading
The difference between peer production and open source
On the occasion of an email discussion, I asked Alex Rollin to specify his conception on the difference between peer production and ‘open source’. Below is his contribution, which in turn gives me the occasion to clarify my own thoughts. Alex Rollin: “Open Source is a number of things at once. When looking at Open… Continue reading
Obama and IP: what to expect?
Analysis by Adrian S. Cristobal Jr., director general of the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines. “It seems unlikely that US IP policy will change significantly under the Obama administration. The pharmaceutical industry remains a powerful lobby in the United States regardless of which political party is in the White House and Congress, and the… Continue reading
What use is intellectual property on a dead planet?
A call by Nalaka Gunawardene, director of TVE Asia Pacific, to open source climate documentaries, forwarded to us by Frederick Noronha. Nalaka Gunawardene: Films and television programmes about climate change should be made freely available beyond their initial broadcast, argues Nalaka Gunawardene. Films and television programmes about climate change should be designated a ‘copyright free… Continue reading
Spontankultur: a research report on Social Production and Cultural Policy in Malmö, Sweden
Together with the Swedish think tank fenomenal, Kesera has produced a research report for the Muncipality of Malmö, Sweden, on how to handle new, participatory cultural forms, like social production and citizen innovation. The abstract follows below, the whole report is available by contacting adam at adam [dot] arvidsson [at] unimi [dot] it This report… Continue reading
The war against abundance in the physical world (1)
1. Introduction Most people would assume that the digital commons is naturally abundant (even though it does take a physical infrastructure to maintain), but that natural and processed material goods are ‘naturally’ rival and scarce. We intuit and know that a market-based and for-profit based system is necessarily interested in maintaining scarcity, but it may… Continue reading
The Commons as a New Sector of Value-Creation
“I believe we are moving into a new kind of cultural if not economic reality. We are moving away from a world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights and hierarchies of credentialed experts, to a radically different order. The new order is predicated upon open access, decentralized participation, and cheap and easy sharing.”… Continue reading
From Cloud Computing to the One Machine
Kevin Kelly has been very productive lately. Here are three articles that we recommend for your reading and thinking pleasure. The first asks: Is There Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism? His hypothesis is as follows: “The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation… Continue reading
From Outsourcing to Commons Sourcing: the Third Wave of Business Transformation
If the first wave of industrial capitalism was based on vertical integration, i.e. in-sourcing, and the second on outsourcing, then we are now moving to a third mode, i.e. sourcing the commons. I find this a very valuable perspective, from an original article by Thomas Prowse in the Open Source Business Resource, and entitled: Treasury… Continue reading