Despite the recent setbacks and staff-cutting at the One Laptop Per Child project, Cory Doctorow remains adamant that laptop computers, and not just mobiles, are essential to emancipate children in emerging countries: I believe that the world’s poor will derive lasting, meaningful benefit from widespread access to technology and networks. And I believe that laptop… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2009"
Against Courseocentrism
Via Gerald Graff in Inside Higher Ed: Should university teachers be aware of each other’s courses? Excerpt only, the whole article is worth reading: “I believe that our experience of teaching in hermetically sealed classrooms makes us — to coin a word — “courseocentric.” Courseocentrism — like its ethno-, ego-, and Euro- counterparts — is… Continue reading
The emergence of Indie Games
Has the time of indie games come? New York magazine presents four such games and puts them in the following context of industry change: “Independent, low-budget movies changed Hollywood. Niche cable shows revolutionized television. Digital music toppled record labels. But for decades, console video games have remained overwhelmingly corporate—dominated by safe franchise sequels (Madden, Pokémon,… Continue reading
A handbook for ‘leadership from below’
Book: Leadership from below. By Trond Arne Undheim. Trond Undheim has written a book that is written not from the perspective of management, but for those who aren’t part of management, yet are leaders or are aspiring to be. And as he convincingly argues, we are now all in that situation, i.e. leaders/followers. The book,… Continue reading
Reflexivity before (bottom-up) action?
Book: Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World. F.David Peat. Via Peter Deitz at PopTech: “The recent book Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World argues that smaller, community-generated interventions — or “gentle actions” — should be considered before dramatic, top-down programs. The author, F. David Peat, is a physicist and… Continue reading
Mobiles for taxation in Africa?
Very interesting commentary from the ICTs for Development blog: (please also read in parallel this review of data that suggest mobiles may also impoverish populations in Africa) “Mick Moore’s argument (e.g. in the book, “Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries”: you can find on Google books) that state-building in developing countries is significantly undermined because… Continue reading
The Peer 2 Peer University
Article from Chris Watkins: The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. P2PU acts as a guide to open education materials that are already available and connects small groups of motivated learners. Rather than… Continue reading
What technology is appropriate for freedom?
A contribution by Marcin Jakubowski explaining the logic underlying the Open Source Ecology project. Marcin Jakubowski: “we are striving for a much more evolved state of existence – the integral approach of becoming truly productive human beings – whom we call Integrated Humans . This requires both high skill and appropriate equipment – which enables… Continue reading
The multiplication of Flash Causes
Via Marcia Stepanek’s Cause Global blog: (excerpt only) “Earlier this week, something happened involving Twitter that has convinced me and a lot of other social media watchers that on-the-fly “flash” advocacy—rapidly, self-assembled groups formed to instantly solve a problem—has already arrived, big-time. On Tuesday, a Chicago design executive, David Armano, posted an emotional tweet on… Continue reading
The (renewed) Prospects for Cyberocracy and the Nexus-state
Essay: Ronfeldt, David and Varda, Danielle,The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited)(December 1, 2008). Available at SSRN. Introductory comment: David Ronfeldt has updated his seminal 1992 essay on cyberocracy, which offered at a time a pioneering and refreshing vision on the new influence of the networks, and predicted the rise of a cyberocracy, a new elite of… Continue reading
Is Cliqset the new open social graph we’ve been waiting for?
I asked the P2P Research list for some reactions regarding the new Cliqset service. Is it the open social graph, i.e. user-owned data portability, we’ve been waiting for? Here’s the response from Marc Fawzi: “My own somewhat unique view on the social data debate has been that we need an encrypted Social ID card that… Continue reading
Peering with fairies in the Imaginal Commons?
To what extent is our imaginal world a house of mirrors reflecting our own fragmented self, and to what extent does it tap into the wellspring of Creation, the anima mundi, the Source of our very existence? Peer to peer is also an ethical stance, born from a desire to treat others as equals, and… Continue reading
From the meltdown to the bottom-up rejuvenation of our lives and the economy
I realized in early December that the “collapsing global economy” is just a story; a repetitive, debilitating conversation that lives in fear and insufficiency. Some quotes from an inspiring essay by Christopher Travis. Instead of meltdown panic, let’s construct the new! “Today I am creating another conversation that is more powerful, more fulfilling and more… Continue reading
The Most Important P2P Trends of 2008 and 2009
I looked for 10, but came up with the following 6, as the most important trends that originated in 2008, but will make themselves felt quite strongly in 2009. I was tempted to add p2p currency and p2p energy developments, but I think while there was a lot of discourse about it, I haven’t seen… Continue reading
A Podcamp Barcelona conversation in Spain
Chris Pinchen, a highly active Englishman living near Barcelona, did a podcast interview with me last month, which is now online. I was particularly pleased with having really smart questions from someone who really understood the logic of our p2p approach, so I think this conversation goes deeper than usual. It is in fact, in… Continue reading
Resisting the meltdown and home foreclosures from the bottom-up
Via: ” Across the country, working people are fighting back with eviction and foreclosure resistance. As Howard Zinn explains in A People’s History of the United States, this tactic helped save homes during the Great Depression. This resistance prompted government-imposed foreclosure moratoriums and led to the introduction of federal New Deal programs in 1933. Throughout… Continue reading