The following is a draft editorial I would like to see published in the mainstream press. In the meantime, here’s an overview of how a social innovation policy could mitigate the effects of the meltdown. I’m addressing this to a hypotethical Asian audience, but it could be applied anywhere. Michel Bauwens: According to the Asian… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2009"
Catalonian Parliament 2.0
Citilab reports on the new portal of the Calanonian parliament which was inaugurated this week: “The Parliament has begun a new website which represents an advance in the construction of a different type of politics. Parlament 2.0 is a catalogue of tools and initiatives which favour dialogue between citizens and politicians, and between the Parliament… Continue reading
MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository
From The Tech: Faculty voted unanimously this week to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. MIT plans to create a repository to make these articles available online. The resolution, effective immediately after it was passed on Wednesday, makes MIT the first university to commit to making… Continue reading
What drives growth: capital, profit, interest?
I asked the following question to an open money mailing list: With the people at Oekonux, I have a perpetual debate about open money, which they oppose, because the problem of infinite growth is not related to money, but to the functioning of capital itself. Though the Oekonux leadership is generally uninformed about monetary transformation,… Continue reading
EC2 for Poets – Dave Winer explains how to create a server in the cloud
ReadWriteWeb wrote yesterday about their experience folowing Dave Winer‘s step-by-step guide to creating a server on Amazon EC2. The post reported: EC2 for Poets is named after a class that Winer took at the University of Wisconsin called Computer Science for Poets, where the idea of “taking something that’s inherently technical, and instead of doing… Continue reading
March 18, 2009: the tipping point that signals the beginning of the end?
I’m realizing I’m on thin ice here, as I have no professional understanding of economics, but nevertheless, I want to relay a convincing scenario, that some of my p2p friends have been sending to my mailbox. Starting point is the recent creation of an additional $1 trillion of public debt by the Federal Reserve on… Continue reading
What free culture is about
free culture is nothing more than, and nothing less than, mankind’s natural propensity to communicate, collaborate and share. It is not a fad, it goes much deeper. Characterising it in narrow terms as a politically motivated cult, or as a commercially damaging movement is missing the big picture, for these things are not of its… Continue reading
Can Social Networking Change the Face of Public Health?
John Geraci writes on the the DIYcity site: DIYcity’s new app SickCity is on Daily Kos today, under the question “can social networking change the face of public health?” My answer to that is it can, it must, and it will. Why? Because the costs of public health mandate it. Costs of basic health services… Continue reading
An update on crowdsourcing and the spec model controversy
one difference between microstock websites and sites like crowdSPRING: the former sells generic work which means you can sell it to several customers. The latter sells customized work which means it’s designed for one potential customer only. In other words, plenty of designers come up with great work for nothing. Jeff Howe continues his work… Continue reading
Regulatory hurdles for the open source hardware bank?
There’s quite a bit of mainstream coverage on the creation of the Open Source Hardware Reserve Bank, which we covered before. Wired magazine in particular offers a warning on possible regulatory hurdles: Priya Ganapati: “A promising idea it may be, but in this case the geeks are likely to face serious opposition from the financial… Continue reading
Yochai Benkler on the new news infrastructure
The newspaper example suggests that even if we could completely shut down peer-to-peer networks, we should still expect the recording industry to decline over time as consumers gravitate toward more efficient and convenient sources of music. Piracy obviously accelerates the process, but the underlying problem is simply this: the recording industry’s core competence, pressing 1s… Continue reading
Themepunks by Cory Doctorow: the way new maker economy is already here …
Thanks to Kevin Carson for alerting us that Cory Doctorow’s upcoming science fiction novel, Themepunks, has been pre-serialized in Salon magazine, where it starts here. According to Kevin: ‘The serialized portion, the first third of the book, was excellent. It was an account of an explosion of desktop manufacturing, set against the background of an… Continue reading
DIY City: an Operating System for a User-Driven City
From the DIYcity website, John Geraci writes: DIYcity started off in October 2008 as a simple online community where people could talk about ways that they could use technology to make their cities work better. The idea was to get people talking about this together, trade ideas, discover best practices, and help stimulate change. I… Continue reading
The dark side of cybernetics: Pat Kane reviews Suburbia
Pat Kane continues to produce interesting thoughtpieces for his Play Ethic blog. For example, in his discussion on a commentary by William Davies, he wonders “whether the next stage of post-industrial capitalism is going to be a “playground”. A world where we “play” with our interactive tools, consuming, prosuming and creating; and the corporates watch… Continue reading
The New Proposed Telecoms Package. Who will control the Internet?
At this time and if we do not do anything to avoid it, the days are numbered for Internet as we now know it (open, free and of everyone/nobody’s). Its death knell has been sounded by the Telecoms Package, the revision to European framework law which governs networks and communications systems. What it should be… Continue reading
Derrick de Kerckhove on Citizen Innovation
Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program of Culture and Technology in the University of Toronto, recently visited Citilab-Cornellà to begin a joint project. In this interview recorded in Citilab he talks about citizen innovatation, the future or education and a new project he is beginning in the favela in Rio de Janeiro. Click… Continue reading