Via Marcin Jakubowski: “In today’s episode, we discuss the OSE program for agriculture. What did we learn so far, and how can we apply this to creating local food systems? We are proposing the integration of perennial agriculture, living gene bank, open source equipment, and agroecology – or what we call open source agroecology –… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2009"
Hacking Heaven is Out!
A positive re-appraisal of the hacker with implications for faith and life today, especially in education and formation terms for today’s ‘digital natives’. I excerpted from Julian Fox’s book here. It is now also available for purchase at Lulu, with my own blurb, which I’m reproducing here below: “The Catholic Church is sometimes called the… Continue reading
Marvellous interview with Eric von Hippel on User Centered Innovation
On the occasion of the BugVonHippel from BugLabs, a marvellous conversation on the emergence of open design and manufacturing, and why it’s time has come. Eric is really the wise man of our movement and there’s nothing like the enthusiast young interviewer of Buglabs to enliven this interview.
Geospatiality and community
A critical mediation on the Google Earth experience, by Anna Munster. Excerpted from a recommended essay: “I want to ask two key questions throughout this essay about Google Earth. First, what kind of image or image set does it render for us in relation to contemporary information culture? Its updating, mutating and compositing set of… Continue reading
Raoul Victor on the Corporate Commons and other forms of hybrid peer production
I’m reproducing interesting comments from Raoul Victor on the Oekonux mailing list, who reacts to the following question/statement of mine: On 11jan09 I had written: “As free software moves from the margins to center stage, more and more corporations adapt to the model, and pay programmers to do such parts of the free software as… Continue reading
In a dematerialized economy, sharing is better than owning
In a dematerialized economy, sharing is better than owning!! The above is the thesis of an interesting thoughtpiece by Kevin Kelly. It explains the shift from private to social property, how it is related to the principle of dematerialization, and briefly reviews some different forms of socialized possession. Kevin Kelly: 1. Sharing is better than… Continue reading
Not a problem of ‘not enough’ liquidity, but of ‘too much’ of it
Brilliant piece of analysis by Herman Daly, the “steady state” economist: “The current financial debacle is really not a “liquidity” crisis as it is often euphemistically called. It is a crisis of overgrowth of financial assets relative to growth of real wealth—pretty much the opposite of too little liquidity. Financial assets have grown by a… Continue reading
Manifest for the recovery of common goods of humanity
An initiative from participants at the World Social Forum of 2009, at Belem – Pará, Brazil, which calls all citizens of the world and their organizations to engage in the struggle for the deprivatization and demercantilization of common goods. The undersigned of this Manifest pledge to exhaustively act to recover, for the common use of… Continue reading
The Long Descent (3): The failure of Lifeboat communities
Third and fourth “book of the week” excerpt “from John Michael Greer’s new book, The Long Descent (New Society Press), which argues that industrial society is about to undergo a “catabolic collapse,” a series of inevitable steps down toward a “deindustrial” future” Via Reality Sandwich The third excerpt continues the critical treatment of counter-strategies, faulting… Continue reading
Basement Interviews of advocates of open and free movements
Out of the 95 interviews that we have so far collated for our Interviews section in the wiki, quite a bit of the most valuable are references to the fantastic project by Richard Poynder, called the Basement Interviews. Before letting him explain the motivations behind this project, just mention that we just added a very… Continue reading
Clay Shirky on the New Style of Peer Leadership
Marcia Stepanek’s Cause Global blog is rapidly becoming the best blog to monitor peer to peer influenced politics and activism, and she has just announced a new podcast series. Here’s an advance transcript of an interview with Clay Shirky, with the usual insights, this time focusing on the new types of leadership required for social… Continue reading
Disintermediating YouTube: Mozilla’s steps towards Open Video
Nearly everything on the web is open but there is one exception to this, writes Christopher Blizzard of the Mozilla Foundation: “There’s one exception to this: video on the web.” He explains how Firefox developments my disintermediate YouTube: “Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don’t share the same democratized… Continue reading
George Monbiot explains complementary currencies
Radical journalist George Monbiot, gave a very accessible explanation of the case for introducing new types of currencies as an answer to the credit crunch. Via Common Dreams: “I want to introduce you to another way of negotiating a credit crunch, which requires no moral hazard, no hair of the dog and no public spending…. Continue reading
A new generation of digital cultural centers for cities
Manuel Castells has some great things to say about Citilabs, a digital cultural center in Cornella, Barcelona, which I had the occasion to visit two months ago, and fell in love with, because of the enthusiasm and solidarity of the staff, and the great combination of high digital culture with an integration in the working… Continue reading
Open Source INSOSHI – The Next Facebook?
As we get more and more connected through social networking services like Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and Facebook, the commercial nature of those services starts to intrude into the picture in a somewhat discordant manner. After all, what we are constructing here is the linked-up global intelligence of humanity and that should not necessarily be in… Continue reading
The Long Descent (2): The Survivalism of things vs. the Transmission of skills and values
Second “book of the week” excerpt from John Michael Greer’s new book, The Long Descent (New Society Press), which argues that industrial society is about to undergo a “catabolic collapse,” a series of inevitable steps down toward a “deindustrial” future” Via Reality Sandwich The first failed strategy we discussed on February 2 concerned ‘changing the… Continue reading