Below is an explanation from a EU centered campaign against the enclosure of life NO PATENTS ON SEEDS AND ANIMALS: Stop the expropriation of farmers and breeders “The continuing patenting of seeds, conventional plant varieties and animal species leads to far-reaching expropriations of farmers and breeders: farmers are deprived of their rights to save their… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2009"
The Long Tail of Respect
Well, the Media Ecologies conference in Manchester, UK, was (in my opinion) a rousing success. Of particular interest was discussion around of the importance of getting ourselves engaged in activities that work in tandem with our thinking minds. As I was contemplating this, I realized the following. With so many minds and bodies jiggeting around… Continue reading
On the Open Design of Tangible Goods: 6 case studies examined
Article: On the Open Design of Tangible Goods. By Christina Raasch, Cornelius Herstatt and Kerstin Balka. R&D Management. Volume 39 Issue 4, Pages 382 – 393 Excerpts below are from the preprint version in fulltext. Kerstin Balka has extra documentation here. Abstract: “Open source software development has received considerable scholarly attention, much of which is… Continue reading
Beginning to Rethink the Ethics of Higher Education in Light of P2P
A contribution from Ryan Lanham: Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article suggesting that universities are fairly conservative when it comes to the capacity to change in the face of financial crisis. Not much of a surprise. In other breaking news, Wales still wet, and head lice found in kindergartens. Indeed the Chronicle… Continue reading
Special Issue: NeoGeography and Web 2.0
(via the Digital Urban blog, which has all the source links: I missed this when it came out in August, perhaps you have to?) Special Issue: NeoGeography and Web 2.0. Journal of Location Based Services. edited by Sanjay Rana and Thierry Joliveau. Summary: “The current issue of the Journal of Location Based Services is a… Continue reading
On Defining a Post-Industrial Style (3): Emerging examples
The last of our 3-parter on post-industrial design, by Eric Hunting. Today we conclude with examples that incorporate the precepts Eric introduced yesterday. Eric Hunting: Examples: “Let’s now consider some examples of artifacts that exhibit characteristics of Post-Industrial design sensibility. We’ve already discussed one of the prime examples; The personal computer: The PC represents the… Continue reading
Social networks for sentiment analysis
A contribution by Mark Andrejevic, via the IDC mailing list: “The familiar framing of submission to various forms of online monitoring in terms of the logic of exchange (we submit to the collection of information about ourselves in return for access to “free” goods and services) needs further interrogation: not just in terms of what… Continue reading
Special Issue: Open R&D and Open Innovation
Special Issue: Open R&D and Open Innovation. Edited by Ellen Enkel, Oliver Gassmann, and Henry Chesbrough. Volume 39 Issue 4, August 2009. This seems a closed academic journal, but the folllowing sample articles should show the articles are very promising: * Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon. By Ellen Enkel, Oliver Gassmann and… Continue reading
On Defining a Post-Industrial Style (2): some precepts for industrial design
This is the point where peer-to-peer theory starts to become very important to our discussion. If we except the proposition that a design becomes a social construct through, basically, the reverse-engineering of the user experience and then add in the option for a community of users to pro-actively participate in that design evolution, then we… Continue reading
A sophisticated treatment of code politics in Web 2.0: from black box platforms to constrained worlds
Web 2.0 actualizes the universal platform, a constructive space independent of hardware. …. The challenge, then, lies in formulating alternatives that make use of specific protocological articulations and divert them so that they are not about stabilizing a system, but rather about creating other possibilities. Essay: Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical… Continue reading
The Free Culture Forum in Barcelona: towards a People’s charter for cultural freedom in the digital age
I was very privileged to be invited by Simona Conservas of the Spanish EXGAE, one of the key organizers of the Free Culture Forum (together with Wouter Tebbens of the Free Knowledge Institute and other groups such as Networked Politics), to attend and participate in this event, a founding moment for the politisation, or shall… Continue reading
On Defining a Post-Industrial Style (1): from Industrial blobjects to post-industrial spimes
Today we recognize that a new set of cultural paradigms are emerging to supplant those of the Industrial Age, driven by an emergent and progressive demassification of culture amplified by digital communications and paralleled by a similar demassification of industrial production by virtue of digitally enhanced machine tools. A 3-parter by Eric Hunting. Today: from… Continue reading
Massively collaborative science: the success of the Polymath experience
The Polymath Project differed from traditional large-team collaborations in other parts of science and industry. In such collaborations, work is usually divided up in a static, hierarchical way. In the Polymath Project, everything was out in the open, so anybody could potentially contribute to any aspect. This allowed ideas to be explored from many different… Continue reading
Cory Doctorow on Shareable Publishing
Via Shareable magazine: “In this PublishingPoint interview, Cory describes a new shareable book project he’s launching in which he serves as author, publisher, distributor and bookseller–and involves dozens of collaborators. “He also shares his thoughts about the ways in which traditional roles in publishing are becoming blurred,” says PublishingPoint. “And he touches on strategies that… Continue reading
Internal adoptions of open source practices by companies
A case study by Vijay Gurbani and his colleagues shows how companies can benefit from applying open source practices internally. Gurbani and his colleagues developed an internet telephony server at Lucent using an open source approach. Through multiple stages, the initial research project evolved into the backbone of multiple commercial products, all based on the… Continue reading
Towards a Global Emergency Infrastructure
Patrick Philippe Meier, an expert in crisis mapping, believes a global superorganism for disaster response is in the works, which would consist of a combination of the following services. Some of them are in design phase, but none of them is consciously interconnected at the present time. Read the whole presentation with explanatory graphics here…. Continue reading