David Bollier: (excerpted from a review in On The Commons) “Author and essayist Rebecca Solnit’s new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, is an absorbing empirical rebuttal to the cynics who see only the worst of humanity. Her book is an answer to the economists and political leaders… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2010"
Human subjectivity and P2P Usage
A republication of a blog entry from 2006, linking ‘states of consciousness’ to particular perspectives-taking (and thus usage) of p2p networks: From Chris Lucas, who uses complexity sciences and the spiral dynamics system to distinguish nine different types of connectivity; it all seems very logical and plausible though I have the gravest reservations about coral… Continue reading
Portrait of a commoner: Silke Helfrich
Via David Bollier: “If there is one thing that Silke Helfrich has learned in her world travels, it is the cross-cultural appeal of the commons. As the director of the German-based Heinrich Boll Foundation’s office in Mexico City from 1999 to 2007, Helfrich and her team hosted one of the first major international conferences on… Continue reading
P2P and Communism
Recently on the P2P Research email list, Joss Winn raised the question of how P2P might dovetail with communist ideas. That’s a good question, because the principle of abundance is central to both P2P and Marxian communism. Marx’s model of a future communist society (e.g. “Critique of the Gotha Program”) was predicated on the assumption… Continue reading
Namibia’s successful basic income experiment
From Herbert Jauch: (thanks to Dante Monson for the reference) “Namibia, a vast country inhabited by two million people, is one of the smaller economies in Southern Africa. It adopted a market-based economic system after achieving independence from apartheid- era South Africa in 1990. Despite creating favourable investment conditions and its high levels of political… Continue reading
Identifying and Understanding the Problems of Wikipedia’s Peer Governance
Superb article from our friend Vasilis Kostakis, published in First Monday: Article: Identifying and understanding the problems of Wikipedia’s peer governance: The case of inclusionists versus deletionists. by Vasilis Kostakis. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 3 – 1 March 2010 Abstract “Wikipedia has been hailed as one of the most prominent peer projects that led… Continue reading
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter One
[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my forthcoming book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Over the next several weeks, I will post two excerpts from each chapter (one excerpt a week).] Chapter One. A Wrong Turn (first excerpt) Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization, divided the progress of technological… Continue reading
Community Gardens: are they effective?
From Eric Hess: “How does a community garden work? Typically, the city or program (some are run by private developers) sets aside a patch of land—portions of parks, undeveloped lots, etc—ranging anywhere from 2,000-200,000 sq. ft. in size. The land is parceled into individual plots ranging from under 100 sq. ft. to over 400. Individuals… Continue reading
Supporting The Minister of Science and Technology of Portugal’s statement
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The Minister of Science and Technology of Portugal, Mr. Mariano Gago, stated that Internet “piracy” on a wide scale brings some positive developments, such as an enormous increased value to producers who see their content distributed all over the world. Mr. Gago added that this is not surprising, since piracy has always been a source of progressand globalization. Pressure… Continue reading
An update on the Open P2P Design (dot.org) project
Via Massimo Menichinelli”s newsletter: openp2pdesign.org, a strategic project for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems “In May 2010, openp2pdesign.org reached a new milestone (version 1.5): from a personal blog to an open source community. It took a lot of work to change the website, but now we are ready to start (even if some functions and… Continue reading
A definition of freedom appropriate to the p2p age?
Proposed by Karl Widerquist: In: Freedom as the Power to Say No. Karl Widerquist. Basic Income, 2004. “A free person has the power to make or to refuse social interaction with other willing people. This definition is not meant to designate absolute or complete freedom but the difference between a person who is essentially free… Continue reading
Time Scales for P2P Oriented Change: the 2030 scenario
In my own writings on how and when I see the shift towards a p2p oriented society, I use a mostly historical reasoning, based on the Kondratieff cycles. Basically, given that 2008 is the Systemic Crisis (still unfolding through sovereign defaults), this can be given as the start of a new cycle, which, after a… Continue reading
Recommendations for the resurgence of civil society
Geoff Mulgan, Commission Chair for the Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, summarizes the recommendations of their report: Excerpt: “Today we can see the convergence of both long and short-term trends which could point to a major change in the position of civil society. The long-term trends can be traced back to many sources… Continue reading
Is the EU leading the world in eParticipation ?
The role of eParticipation projects “role is to establish publicly, accessible user-friendly web tools for providing information, exchange and presentation of opinions, articulation of arguments, development of solutions and participation in decision-making. This is a vision of a transparent and inclusive democratic political system in response to the social and environmental challenges of the 21st… Continue reading
The 100% Reserve Requirement for Banks: a proposal by Herman Daly
An excerpt from Herman Daly, steady-state economist, via: “Why should money, a public utility (serving the public as medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account), be largely the by-product of private lending and borrowing? Is that much of an improvement over being a by-product of private gold mining? Why should the public… Continue reading
Networks: what comes first, what comes last
Venessa Miemis has written a insightful meditation on what is going on in the world, where multiple transitions seemed to intersect. It reflects Venissa’s own learning curve and pattern recognition abilities and I recommend to read it in full. You have to read it in full to understand why the conclusion, “it all starts and… Continue reading