For the growing ranks of monetary reformers worldwide, long-time expert Greco’s deeply-researched new book is essential reading. This gripping blend of theory and practicality lays out all the options for creating saner money and credit systems …and the real possibilities in today’s information age, of electronic trading and exchange, at last, without the need to… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2009"
Peer governance and Wikipedia (1)
I am going to reproduce here parts of my paper “Peer governance and Wikipedia”. The following text deals with some tentative proposals regarding the problematic side of Wikipedia’s governance, departing from the battle between inclusionists and deletionists. — The main characteristics of peer governance are equipotentiality, heterarchy, holoptism, meritocracy, participation, openness, networking, and transparency. “The… Continue reading
Moving towards open design and open manufacturing
Robin Good and his crew at Master New Media have republished our overview article for We magazine on open design and distributed manufacturing, and as usual, they have done a stellar job in the presentation, which makes the message a quantum leap more powerful I think. The new version is entitled: How Peer Production And… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Critical Essays on the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons
Book: Critical Essays on the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons: The Conceptual Foundations of Today’s Mis-Education by C. A. Bowers, 2007 The following is an excerpt from the introduction to a very important book, which deconstructs our liberal and ‘progressive’ biases, which undermine a correct understanding of the crucial importance of the cultural commons as… Continue reading
Russian cyberspace as an alternative social sphere
The Russian Cyberspace Journal has an excellent first issue (Issue 1. Virtual Power: Russian Politics and the Internet) dedicated to how the internet changes, or not, power structures, which concludes that in Russia, the internet fails as an activist tool, but it has created an alternative social sphere. This matches with our approach at the… Continue reading
Three myths about peer review
Excerpted from a longer article by Michael Nielsen: (other arguments, as well as links to ‘open peer review’ trends, are listed here; general material about open science is here) “Myth number 1: Scientists have always used peer review The myth that scientists adopted peer review broadly and early in the history of science is surprisingly… Continue reading
P2P Answers the Meltdown: Nathan Cravens
When we forwarded news (to our p2p-research mailing list) on the publication of Dougald Hine’s proposals to use p2p-inspired strategies to at least mitigate the effects of the meltdown, we put forward a call to our community, to send in their own findings and proposals. The first reply came from Nathan Cravens, which we reproduce… Continue reading
Technologies of humility for a second enlightenment
Andrew Maynard discusses 3 important articles and essays by Sheila Jasanoff, who argues we need a Second Enlightenment based on “Technologies of Humility”, which marries the expertise of the scientists and democratic guidance from the citizens that will used them in a sustainable society. The articles are: * Sheila Jasanoff. Technologies of Humility: Citizen participation… Continue reading
Ideas for a radically distributed start-up
Digital fabrication pioneer Smári McCarthy has some ideas to create a ‘radically distributed start-up’. Give him feedback here. Smári McCarthy: * Everybody at the company works on a contractor basis, including executive staff. Executives put up bounties and assign them to “fixed contractors” (what would be employees normally) or to less regular contractors who may… Continue reading
Defending Wikipedia’s methodology
Chris Watkins send us two excerpts from reactions to the special edition of Episteme on Wikipedia’s epistemology, which we mentioned last week Chris: “Found these interesting – addressing some specific concerns about Wikipedia. I basically agree with these two posts: Sage Ross blogs about “Wikipedia in theory“, “For the last few days I’ve been stewing… Continue reading
Will 2009 be a year of hunger?
We can live without credit. We can live without oil. We cannot live without food. This article by Eric deCarbonnel, predicts a catastrophic fall in food production, partly based on objective factors such as droughts, strongly related to trends in climate change: “After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina,… Continue reading
Pirate Bay trial update (2)
For all those that did not follow this most important trial, an update from Ernesto in TorrentFreak, after the closing statements from both parties: “Yesterday the prosecutor called for jailtime, while the prosecution presented its closing statements. Today the defense had its say and the trial officially ended. The Pirate Bay trial started on February… Continue reading
For a solidarity-based theory of public goods
Milton Fisk of Indiana University says the standard theory of Public Goods is flawed, because it overemphasises self-interest and ignores the value of solidarity. Source: Global Public Goods and Self-Interest. Milton Fisk. Milton Fisk: “There are really two independent parts to the standard concept of public good. This concept plays a prominent role in the… Continue reading
In the long run, open data may be more important than open source
An important argument by Ian Davis: “Data outlasts code … therefore open data is more important than open source. First, it’s important to note what I did not say. I did not say that open source is not important. On the contrary I said that open source was extremely important and it has sounded the… Continue reading
Peer-funding journalism through collective licensing?
Crowdsourcing expert Jeff Howe examines the crisis of journalism, now that the funding for a advertising-based print model is drying up. He starts by re-iterating the stillborn dreams for micropayment, then reviews proposals for creating “endownments” (the ‘trusts’ model), finally adding his own five cents with a collective licensing proposal. 1. The endowment proposals: “Yale… Continue reading
Why central banks have lost their leverage
Samuel Brittan wrote this in 1999, but it rings ever more true today. In this editorial he explains why central banks lost much of their power, because of the increasingly small supply of money that they effectively control. He refers to the following paper: The Future of Monetary Policy, from Benjamin Friedman. By the way,… Continue reading