The price of nominating the very people who where responsible for the deregulatory meltdown (Lawrence Summers and crew) is becoming apparent, writes Krzysztof Rybinski in Open Democracy, $2.5 trillion will be used, not for the productive economy, but to keep alive zombie banks that have been sucking the productive economy, with real risks for hyper-inflation… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2009"
Joytopia: a German thank-you money
After seeing our item on the Twollars in our wiki, George Pleger lets us know that there are preceding initiatives in the German-speaking world. George Pleger: “Joytopia is an long term project coordinated by Bernd Hückstädt, Germany. The new sustainable money system ”’Lebensgeld”’ (“vita money” or “life money”) is the core part in what is… Continue reading
Rufus Pollock on progress and obstacles to Open Knowlege
Rufus Pollock, co-founder of one of the most active advocacy organisations in our field, has been extensively interviewed by Jed Sundwall on Netsquared. We select 3 questions that tell us more about the role and achievements of OKF: Jed Sundwall: What is the Open Knowledge Foundation? “Rufus Pollock: We were founded in 2004. At the… Continue reading
Vivarium – A Proposal for a Modest Experiment in P2P Architecture
Eric Hunting on the Drive To Build: There is an instinctive compulsion to architecture in the human being. Left to their own devices, as children more often were in the recent past, they build. Growing up in the suburbs of the NY metropolitan area at a time when American children were not quite yet relegated… Continue reading
Argentinian professor risks jail for spreading the texts of Derrida
As reported by Carolina Botero: (access to all links here) “Last week I reproduced in my blog a post by argentinian blogger Patricio Lorente who was telling of another “piracy” related criminal suit. The special situation in this case is that the criminal offender is a professor at an Argentinian university that has been doing… Continue reading
Does money need a back-up? The Petro as Value Standard
An ongoing debate in complementary currency circles is whether money can be based entirely on trust, or needs some objective standard or even physical back-up. In this context, Open Capital advocate Chris Cook explains his ideas on using energy as a “Value Standard”, in the form of the “Petro”. Chris Cook: “First, there is a… Continue reading
New Financiers for global financial reform
“The new financiers will show why the old financiers and central bankers can no longer have a monopoly on money and its creation. Information-based currencies and trading platforms will operate wherever necessary for evolving human communities so as to match needs with resources and create jobs – from local and regional to national and international… Continue reading
Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc. is (almost) out
Coming from Douglas Rushkoff, it can only be an excellent book. Pre-order here! A short description: the book explains the history behind corporate-sponsored crisis in which we have found ourselves: who invented the economic rules we now take for granted, why they did it, how they sold them to us, when we internalized them and,… Continue reading
Dale Carrico on Obama as P2P President
To what degree does p2p change traditional organisations, and to what degree do traditional forces change p2p, to the point of corrupting its promise, is the broad quesdtion addressed here, by one of my favourite political commentators. Can partisan organization and actual governance be democratized via the internalization of p2p formations and thereby be rendered… Continue reading
Jeff Vail’s call for a scale-free energy policy
An excerpt from a fascinating policy proposal by Jeff Vail: 1. “Scale-free design describes a process that operates similarly at any scale, at any level of organization, that is fractal in structure. It is neither grass-roots nor top-down, but rather consciously, simultaneously “all of the above.” More than that, rather than merely a collection of… Continue reading
Reconstituting a distributed manufacturing base after the meltdown
given the existing, widely distributed facilities that could be expanded into local manufacturing bases, it’s a safe bet that some sort of decentralized manufacturing economy would survive the transition even in the worst case Book: Island in the Sea of Time. S.M. Stirling. Volume 1 of the Nantucket trilogy. If the current meltdown indeed morphs… Continue reading
Volunteer (or pool) needed to save P2P Research list
Dear friends, After the November 2007 2nd P2P Foundation meet-up at Nottingham Trent University, we set up a mailing list for communication on p2p ‘research’ topics, which was voluntarily and expertly moderated by Ned Rossiter. The info page is here at http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org and the archives page is at http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/ Last week, Ned has notified us… Continue reading
See Michel Bauwens in Milan 19th March
Dear friends, If you have p2p friends in the Milan region, let’s meet up!!
The economics of open source hardware need a OSHW bank
Open Source HardWare requires a lot of time and it takes money too. It can’t work with only one, and not the other. If you throw a lot of time at making a project schematic, it doesn’t become a real thing unless you also throw money at it. Likewise, you can’t just throw money at… Continue reading
Emilia-Romagna as a model of sustainable manufacturing
This region in Italy is often cited as an example of a well-working ‘cooperative capitalism’, as also argued by Kevin Carson. Below, a more substantive description by a group of visiting coop leaders from North America. We added both to our growing collection of ‘cases’ in our wiki. Kevin Carson: “The closest existing model for… Continue reading
The Art + Politics of P2P in Bristol on March 24
Thanks to Geoff Cox for inviting me: Event: The Art + Politics of P2P. 24 March, 19.00. Arnolfini, Bristol, UK Respondents: Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova The presentation introduces the work of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives – a clearing house for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented initiatives. The interest is in how P2P networks challenge… Continue reading