Recording from a talk for the Ministry of Agriculture in the Netherlands (Ministerie LNV, Open Koffie), on March 23, 2010: Open Koffie Speciaal – Michel Bauwens from Davied on Vimeo.
Date archives "April 2010"
The reconstruction of a resilient peasant economy in the 21st century
Andreas Exner alerted us to a very important text describing the deep changes taking place in agriculture. It is without a must read essay. It describres in detail the divorce of the farmers with enterpreneurial farming, and how the seeds of a new model are being sown. Article: Douwe van der Ploeg, Jan(2010) ‘The peasantries… Continue reading
Commons, Market, Capital and State (3): the really really free market approach?
Part 1 and 2 features a text from the social ecology tradition, expressed by Andreas Exner, which opposes markets and commons. But the U.S. counts a left libertarian tradition, (not to be confused with the right libertarians who always defend the interests of capital), who see free exchange as emancipatory. It is the tradition of… Continue reading
The best open standards are simple open standards
An excerpt from a contribution by John Willbanks: “The standard that works best tends to be the least powerful solution to the problem, especially if it’s an openly released solution. This can be counterintuitive – why wouldn’t we want the most powerful one? – but it’s been proven again and again. In technology, standards propagate… Continue reading
Social dynamics and rankism behind the Thai crisis
“George Harrison” (I’m guessing that’s not the real name) has an insightful commentary in Prachathai on why the red shirts won’t go away. It’s a good picture of the rankism so prevalent in thai society, and how it is now seriously challenged. “A decade ago, a foreign volunteer was placed with one of the Agricultural… Continue reading
Resilience: Patterns for thriving in an uncertain world
by Jonathan Dugan On Saturday, April 10, 2010, a host of about 100 people held an open space conference on the idea of “Resilience”. The event was organized by Neal Gorenflo and Sharable.net, and held at the Hub Bay Area, a shared workspace in Berkley, CA. While open space meetings have a unique positive energy –… Continue reading
Obstacles to open source hardware (4): the public patent proposal
A proposal to solve the patent issues holding back Open Hardware development, by Jon Phillips: “There are two parts I believe we need for whatever we want to call OPEN/PUBLIC patents. I’m preferring the PUBLIC PATENTS concept right now, basically to try and make easier/more clear patents so that anyone can use them and not… Continue reading
P2P healthcare cost sharing amongst conservative Christians
Report from the American Prospect , which also adds a critique. Excerpt: “Since the health-care reform bill passed last month, Lansberry has become a hot commodity on the conservative talk-radio circuit where he sings the praises of health-care-sharing ministries (HCSMs), Christian nonprofit organizations through which members agree to cover each others health-care costs. As president… Continue reading
Kachingle – do voluntary payments to blogs have a chance?
Michel Bauwens asked me to take a look at an article that describes a micro-payment system to blogs. Kachingle: The Future of Free? Here is how It Works, according to the article on sharable: Users who feel that a handful (at the least) of the content they interact with online has monetary value to them… Continue reading
Four scenario’s for the 21st century
Jon Husband writes: “Michel Cartier, is in my opinion is the francophone world’s answer to Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan rolled into one. In this video, at the end Michel offers a brief glimpse of four possible worlds in which we may want to live .. consumerist, a (renewed) participative democracy, an environmentally conscious world,… Continue reading
What does an open source approach to education look like?
Excerpt from a contribution by Miles Berry: (the full original article has many links) ‘Access to the source code’ surely implies a willingness to adopt transparent approaches in education, in which freedom of information requests about school curricula, schemes of work and policies are never needed, as these, and perhaps other, documents are shared as… Continue reading
How essential is anonymity to peer to peer relationality?
Marina Garcés asked me to write this article for a Spanish magazine on Urbanism: Metropolis. Though I’m not an expert, I submitted the following text: How essential is anonymity to peer to peer relationality? I believe answering that question becomes easier if we look at the historical development of relationality and that such a review… Continue reading
Commons, Market, Capital and State (2): Commoning as resistance and disruption
Article: The „Great Transformation“ to „Great Cooperation“. Commons, Market, Capital and the State. By Andreas Exner | 9. April 2010 A translation from a important German-language blog contribution to the debate on the commons, from a more radical ‘anti-market’ point of view. The title refers to the classic ‘Great Transformation’, from Karl Polanyi, in which… Continue reading
A premature obituary of online video sharing and amateur video culture
Christian Sandvig had an interesting lecture, The Television Cannot Be Revolutionized, in which he predicts that online video will become much like TV, and claims there is an ongoing loss of freedom of long tail alternative video-making. While the lecture, and his analysis of ‘distribution bottlenecks’ of online video is worth reading, the dismissal of… Continue reading
The collapse of complex societies, and what it means for media in a p2p age
Matt Boggs really likes this insightful essay by Clay Shirky, and I concur: “Clay Shirky’s “The Collapse of Complex Business Models,” is a thoughtful and provocative piece on the way that “high quality” products (which are also complex and expensive) reach diminishing returns, where they are being made ever-more complex without any rise in value,… Continue reading
Commons, Market, Capital and State (1): The commons as system-confirming paradigm
Article: The „Great Transformation“ to „Great Cooperation“. Commons, Market, Capital and the State. By Andreas Exner | 9. April 2010 A translation from a important German-language blog contribution to the debate on the commons, from a more radical ‘anti-market’ point of view. The title refers to the classic ‘Great Transformation’, from Karl Polanyi, in which… Continue reading