Date archives "December 2008"

Vermont’s Cloud Law: New legal form for online business collaboration

imagine if a group of self-organized individuals could come together on the Internet to create valuable products and services – and to establish their own “operating agreement” among themselves, according to their specific goals — and yet still receive the benefits of “legal personhood” that corporations enjoy. This is now possible thanks to a new… Continue reading

Community mapping and the sensor citizen

Receiver magazine (published by Vodafone) has a remarkable special issue on the state of geolocation services and the Geospatial Web. Amongst the many interesting articles is the one by Anne Galloway on community mapping: “We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements… Continue reading

A Critique of the Abstraction and “Numbers Only” Approach of Mainstream Economists

Steve Talbott, of the Nature Institute, (dedicated to neo-Goethean ‘wholistic’ science approaches) is a very thoughtful author on technology, who publishes a stimulating newsletter called Netfuture. In the December issue, he reflects on the meltdown and what has been wrong with the justifications of the economists. Here’s only the introduction. The full text is well… Continue reading

Film in the age of vernacular video

This post is a reflection on Tom Shermans essay ‘Vernacular Video’ and my weekend at Different Directions film festival – http://www.differentdirections.ie/ Manifesto on Art / Fluxus Art Amusement by George Maciunas, 1965 – “ART To justify artist’s professional,parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s indispensability and exclusiveness, he must demonstrate the dependability… Continue reading

Wikimapia: P2P mapping tool in beta release

Wikimapia is a tool that allows users to freely annotate maps in either satellite or streetmap view. The beta release (www.wikimapia.org/beta/) became available some three months ago. Its main features are 1. Two main interactive layers – Wikimapia map and Wikimapia satellite (outlines on satellite map). 2. Adding information to the map: -places (with real… Continue reading

Douglas Rushkoff initiates new radio show

an application of the hacker ethic and net collectivism to everything Important announcement: “This participatory radio show looks at both sides of Life Incorporated: how life has been literally “incorporated” by business and economics, and how can we incorporate LIFE back into our world: local commerce, community, social currency, and other emerging forms of participatory… Continue reading

Research on social entrepreneurship

Book: The Search for Social Entrepreneurship. Paul C. Light, Brookings Institution Press 2008 The author of a new book investigating the successes and failures of social enterpreneurship is interviewed by the Cause Global blog. Excerpt with the first two questions: “Why did you write this book? I’ve been monitoring management reform in nonprofits and government… Continue reading

The city as a (p2p) grid: appeal for research assistance

This is a project started by Florent Thiery on our p2pfoundation wiki. Here is just the introduction: “This transversal article is a mere attempt to isolate items of the emerging shapes of a globally, distributed p2p-oriented city model. It is intended as a placeholder for resources linked to a hypothetical City-as-a-grid model, where resource creation… Continue reading