Just over two minutes, done in Barcelona in April this year:
Date archives "September 2009"
Book of the Week (2): Case studies of networked politics
Book: Transforming Power: From The Personal To The Political. by Judy Rebick. Penguin Canada, 2009 In this second and last installment on Judy Rebick’s book, we feature excerpts from chapter 13, entitled: “Is the Party Over?” Do the new movements point to alternatives to traditional political party organizing? Judy Rebick: 1. Spain “One of the… Continue reading
Distributed Manufacturing (1): the importance of modularity
The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production. The “physical production sphere” itself has become far less capital-intensive. If the digital revolution has caused an implosion in the physical capital outlays required for the information industries, the revolution… Continue reading
From pioneering Australia: E-participatory budgetting
Via Tiago Peixoto at TechPresident: “The government of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the economic downturn and stimulate local economies, has allocated the equivalent of US$30 million to the Community Building Partnership program. Aiming to support local jobs, stimulate growth and improve community facilities,… Continue reading
Social networking as a p2p endeavor
Social networking is at a crossroads. The choice is between the ease of use and ubiquity of commercial services such as myspace, facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter, and the desire to use a tool for social interactions that is not subject to the decisions of an anonymous board of directors of some for-profit company, to being… Continue reading
The cooptation of user participation
Article: Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. By José Van Dijck and David Nieborg. We mentioned this essay before, which is a critique of a number of business authors, such as Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics, Charles Leadbeater and others, for failing to see the cooptation strategies of business and the… Continue reading
Governance, labour and property modalities for outcome-based enterprise
I have not often seen detailed treatments of what kind of structural options exist for outcome-based enterprises. I often state that the key issue for peer production and shared design communities, who deal with abundantly shareable immaterial value, is how that they interact with allied enterprises that create scarce and rival but marketable added value… Continue reading
Estimating the Development Cost of Open Source Software
Via CMS Wire: “Black Duck Software (news, site) recently released a report stating that, by their calculations, the development cost of open source software is US$ 387 Billion. That’s roughly half of the US stimulus bill. Contributing to this value are over 200,000 open source projects with over 4.9 billion lines of code. Not only… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Judy Rebick’s Transforming Power
Given the failure of the Left, the labour movement, and the social movements to creatively resist neo-liberalism, it makes sense that when a new generation emerged to fight corporate globalization, they created horizontal structures and demonstrated an abhorrence of any kind of top-down leadership. Book: Transforming Power: From The Personal To The Political. by Judy… Continue reading
Centralized Grids as a condition for Distributed Energy
An interstate transmission corridor solves wind’s intermittency. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Simultaneous lulls in wind across the country hardly ever happen. So if we connect the sites, if Texas has a sudden lull, then North Dakota can fill in. Long distance interconnection lets unsynchronized peaks and troughs to cancel each other out; stabilizing… Continue reading
Between collapse and post-scarcity
Taken together, all of these human traits—intellectual, communicative, and social—have not only emerged from natural evolution and are inherently human; they can also be placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new an ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents… Continue reading
Shanzhai: Flexible Manufacturing for the Next Generation
The Chinese shanzhai phenomenon was featured recently in posts by Andrew “Bunnie” Huang and Tom Igoe. To me it’s striking reminiscent of the flexible manufacturing networks of Emilia-Romagna and the Third Italy. The literal meaning of shanzhai is “mountain fortress,” but it carries the connotation of a fortified area or stronghold outside the state’s… Continue reading
Kevin Kelly’s Information Mysticism
Another great thoughtpiece in Kevin Kelly‘s Technium series, about the role of extropy in the universe. He concludes with a presentation of his hypothesis of information mysticism: “Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a “spirit.”… Continue reading
Breakout Cornellà Beta 28/09/09 Everyone welcome!
Get-out-the-office day Do you need a break from work but without leaving work? Are you interested in new ways of communicating and working with internet 2.0? Do you fancy a coffee in the open-air getting to know where WiFi stretches to? On the 28th Sept. and 13th Oct. from 09:00-18:00 a team from CitiLab are having a first work and meeting… Continue reading
Empty archives: why do scientists have such a hard time with (data) sharing?
Commentary by Alessandro Delfanti: The September 10th issue of Nature contains a special part focused on data sharing in research which is freely accessible online. In the editorial of the special issue, Nature claims for a comprehensive approach: scientific institutions should invest more money in education and in hardware and software, in order to “create… Continue reading
Exploring the Diagonal Economy
Jeff Vail continues to explore the potential and trends around the emergence of a Diagonal Economy. Simply put, between the current centralized globalization model based on interconnecting big hierarchies, say the Vertical Economy, and the emerging Horizontal Economy of the Rhizome, it is most likely that the future will bring some kind of mix and… Continue reading