By creating an environment in which banks can not hide data and where the public can review the rules which are meant to be enforced by regulation authorities, open source banking could help restore confidence in global financial system. From an interesting editorial from Jean-Paul Smets and Pavel Solyak of ERP5 Banking: “The role of… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2008"
Is the internet subsidized by the poor?
We reproduce an intriguing critique by Roberto Verzola: “It was appropriate technology advocate E.F. Schumacher, author of the widely-acclaimed book Small is Beautiful, who once said that technologies often carry a built-in ideology which is so deeply embedded that one can’t have a technological transplant without getting at the same time an ideological transplant. Among… Continue reading
Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide… Continue reading
List of things wrong with OLPCs Operating System
Leigh Blackall participated in a One Laptop One Child workshop in Tuvalu, and came away less than impressed by how it worls ‘on the ground’. Here are his, rather harsh, conclusions: “Despite all that I’ve said here, I still love the OLPC – the ideas in it at least. Like I said originally, back in… Continue reading
Paul Graham’s variation on the Peak Hierarchy Theme
Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious,… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Liberating Voices (2): the Public Domain
Book: Douglas Schuler. Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution. MIT Press, 2008 We continue and conclude our treatment of the book about patterns for social liberation, with a second excerpt on Public Domain Characters, provided by the author Douglas Schuler. Douglas Schuler: “Public Domain Characters (John Thomas and Douglas Schuler) is discussed in… Continue reading
Legal and free TV over the Internet
If you would like to learn why popular TV shows and movies are being made available legally on the Internet for free and how we can get them to our televisions, this interview is for you. During my last lecture tour in the Northeastern US, I stayed with University of Illinois PhD student Daniel Araya… Continue reading
Yerzies: advanced user manufacturing
According to the Mass Customization & Open Innovation News blog, Yerzies is a new site that brings user manufacturing to a substantially new level of complexity. MCOIN writes: “Beyond printed tee shirts, Yerzies enables the creation of stitched sweatshirts and mixed-media designs that include many advanced processes to create apparel which more closely resembles the… Continue reading
Bernard Lietaer: the most urgent actions to be taken now that the banking crisis of 2008 has hit
Echoing David Bollier’s theme that large centralized financial systems are failing us, as evidenced by the meltdown, Bernard Lietaer proposes we turn to mutual credit systems as a peer to peer inspired solution, and he has a number of key documents on his website explaining the topic. You can find there: * White Paper on… Continue reading
Umair Haque on the new kind of capital we truly need
Next-generation businesses are built, instead, on human, social, natural, and cultural capital. An excerpt from an important editorial. Umair Haque: “The value equation of industrial-era capitalism was toxically imbalanced. Why is industrial era business so destructive – why does it slash and burn rainforests, endanger entire species, vaporize culture and community, marginalize the poor and… Continue reading
Douglas Schuler’s Liberating Voices: Patterns for Change from the Grassroots
Book: Douglas Schuler. Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution a call for social change based on a peaceful revolution in grassroots information and communication. Inspired by the vision and framework outlined in A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander’s classic 1977 book about architecture and urban planning, Liberating Voices presents a pattern language containing 136… Continue reading
David Bollier on the financial meltdown as sign of Peak Hierarchy
David Bollier engages with our Peak Hierarchy hypothesis in his remarkable On the Commons blog. Peak Hierarchy is the hypothetical inflection point at which time at which distributed organizations become stronger and more versatile than centralized hierarchies. Bollier asks: what if the financial meltdown would be a sign of this happening? He states: “The fall… Continue reading
Hacking the wii remote for global whiteboard learning
Interesting video showing how a whiteboard can be realized for 40 EURO. “Using infrared (IR) light pens and the Wii Remote, it is possible to create very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboards and multi-point tablet displays. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. The software can be downloaded at http://johnnylee.net”
Free software as a counterpoint to the dangers of transhuman technologies
From Christian Einfeldt of the Digital Tipping Point, in a debate on the dangers of transhuman technologies, including quantum computing: “Most of these issues can be resolved by assuring the right to fork the code and wise management of commit privileges over the code. If a trusted community has commit privileges, then we know what… Continue reading
Population and climate concerns
This is a video by Paul Ehrlich, who 40 years ago wrote the classic but controversial “Population Bomb”. He reflects on what was wrong and right in that book, in the light of what we know today, concluding that his predictions were much too optimistic. A good summary of the critical state of the planet.
Freemium, part 2
Freemium, a business model for P2P (This is part two, for a basic description of freemium, see part 1) Freemium is not a magic ward that will work for every company or organization. For some companies, it may not be a good idea to employ it at all. Nevertheless, several companies across various sectors could… Continue reading