From an alert via Sepp Hasslberger, found here. Excerpt: “Trevor Harmon, James Marca, Pete Martini, and Raymond Klefstad of the University of California, Irvine, explain that one of the key failings of modern transport systems is the inept collection and distribution of usable traffic information. According to one US survey, they point out that less… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2009"
Between Digital Activism and Civil Resistance
Major civil nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to lead to sustainable democratic transitions than violent campaigns. This conclusion comes from a large-N statistical study carried out by my colleague Maria Stephan (PhD Fletcher ’06) and Erica Chenoweth. Recently published in International Security, the study notes that civil resistance movements have achieved success 55% of… Continue reading
Open Source Ecology status report
Our favourite open design and manufacturing project, Open Source Ecology, has launched a 1,000 True Fans funding drive, and uses the occasion for a series of overview videos explaining the product development so far. Here’s the second in the series. More explanations here and part 1 was already featured here.
Organic design for a P2P world
I rarely found a technical and design outfilt that was so congruent with the values and visions of the P2P Foundation, as witnessed in their Manifesto. Apart from that, the Organic Design site is mostly technical, concerned with actually building a p2p-oriented toolbox for everyone. I asked them for more details, so here is the… Continue reading
Will the Salesian teaching order become a congregation of hackers?
I have yet to read this new book in progress, but I can hardly contain my enthusiasm when my favourite Catholic author on digital matters, Julian Fox, is striking again. The first news is that his congregation’s Bosconet is becoming a fully interactive wiki. Julian is sharing his book in progress, Hacking the Way to… Continue reading
The three meanings of ‘open-ness’: legal, social, technological
When I’m uncertain that I can produce a new entry, I will go through my archives, and see if anything is still of interest to all the new readers that joined us since our beginning. This was our very first official blog entry (after an announcement of our existence by James Burke in November 2005… Continue reading
How did the P2P Foundation websites do in 2008?
This is an update on p2pfoundation statistics for 2008, as compared to 2007. The figures are from Google Analytics. 1. Our Blog We had 38,104 Visitors in 2008, responsible for 81,216 Pageviews . The growth rate compared to last year is 36.54%. Our home page was viewed was viewed 19,270 times Where do these people… Continue reading
The Economic Benefits of Localization
“Localization may describe production of goods nearer to end users to reduce environmental and other external costs of globalization. “Relocalization” is “…a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of Relocalization are to increase community energy… Continue reading
Are current networked protests disaggregating the disaggregators?
Has “the rapid diffusion of information communication technology has had any statistically significant impact on anti-government protests in countries under repressive rule?” The answer from researcher Patrick Meier: (details of the study’s methodology and results are here) We found that both variables, Internet and mobile phones, were statistically significant, and negative, with the mobile phones… Continue reading
The peer production of the iPhone
We continue our presentation of Kevin Carson’s important essay on decentralized production. In our previous summary, Kevin argued that we are ready for a ‘distributed’ neotechnic era of organization of production, that this format has been derailed, but is about to become dominant. The first sign of this, he argues, is what we see happening… Continue reading
We need protection against online eviction!
Via Identity Woman: “AOL has been shutting down its free Web services, in some cases with little or no notice to users, and they are not the only ones. This blog post on the coming “datapocalypse” makes the case that those who host Web content should be required to provide notice and access to data… Continue reading
The coming of the neotechnic era
“Production with small-scale, free-standing, electrically powered machinery was the defining feature of what Lewis Mumford called the neotechnic era, which in his periodization of technological history followed the paleotechnic era of steam, coal and Dark Satanic Mills.” Kevin Carson’s latest essay which we mentioned yesterday, contains an important argument about which form of technology is… Continue reading
Best Netlabel Music compilations
We dived into the deep ocean of free music and came back with this adventurous compilation. Explore with us music from all over the globe, from Indie-Pop to Techno to Drum’n’Bass to Ambient. Phlow Magazine has a number of compilations of the best ‘netlabel’ music out there. As Netlabelism wrote already quite a while ago:… Continue reading
The necessity of an actively ‘tagged’ digital public domain
“The purpose of copyright law has been to promote learning and the progress of knowledge. Two features of copyright law should provide the guide for how to respond to access concerns. First, copyright is an author’s right. This is definitional…. Second,…copyright is a time-limited right. Copyright expires so that the public may ultimately gain unlimited… Continue reading
Optimism as a Political Act
The two blockquoted citations are followed by a important and inspiring reflection on the role of optimism by Alex Steffen. Really worth reading. “Pessimism is a luxury we can only afford in good times, in difficult times it easily represents a self-inflicted, self-fulfilling death sentence. This insight, to me, is real Realism or real Realpolitik,… Continue reading
BitTorrent is not good for streaming video
The Peer-to-Peer Research Institute gives a review of technological developments. Go here for the full articles and the links. Excerpt: “As we have written about before on this blog, BitTorrent is not good for streaming video due to its rarest-first download ordering policy. In order to stream video, or music, or whatever – you want… Continue reading