Date archives "August 2010"

Some Remarks on Open Business Models and the Economy of the Commons

Transcript of a video interview of Michel Bauwens by Robin Good of masternewmedia.org “What we do at the P2P Foundation is study: Peer production, peer governance, and peer property. In other words, all the modalities where people can aggregate around the Internet using collaborative platforms and produce something of value together. This has an application… Continue reading

Against ‘left’ cyber-utopianism

Dale Carrico (excerpt): ““The Internet is antithetical to commerce.” With this declaration, science fiction novelist and technology writer Cory Doctorow began an editorial essay for the O’Reilly Network (the online home of the key publisher of technical computer books and manuals as well as an organizer of important conferences on media and technology issues) in… Continue reading

Dale Carrico’s critique of libertarianism

Dale Carrico (excerpts): “Libertarianism in this idiosyncratic, “anarcho-capitalist” denotation tends to have three primary characteristics: First, these curious market-fundamentalist libertarians take an appealing commonsense Millian (or, I suppose, even more broadly, “Golden-Rulian”) commitment to a general Non-Initiation of Force as if it represented a kind of axiom, and then treat that axiom as the foundation… Continue reading

Openness has no ROI and needs new customer-value oriented metrics

Philipp Mueller, a supporter of planetary policy-making, has an interesting comment on why openness should not be calculated in Return on Investment terms. Excerpt: “If we look at the most successful 2.0 projects of the last years, we see a pattern, where the ROI is not a relevant indicator to evaluate the project. One of… Continue reading

Eric Hunting on the Open Structures Project

An evaluation of the Open Structures Project by Eric Hunting: “In recent years a large number of Open Source hardware projects have emerged, exploring the potential of community based technical development that was once largely the province of software. Among these, some of the more interesting are those that pursue platforms or modular systems for… Continue reading

Karatani: The two forms of resistance in the the spiritual counter-economy: circulation boycott and associationism

Turning again to Chauvet and his textual analysis of the Eucharistic Prayer, I will outline how the Eucharist not only offers a possible form of resistance to capitalist exploitation, but is rather an actual witness to, and participation in, the divine economy of grace that restores and redeems the exploitative relationships between production and consumption…. Continue reading

The spiritual gift as the basis for the counter-economy

Interesting article within the context of christian theology. Here is the first part which usefully distinguishes three modalities of exchange, how they are interconnected, and how the capital-nation-state can only be overcome if tackled together: Geoffrey Holsclaw: “But now the money changers no longer need to be driven from the Temple of God because they… Continue reading

Introducing Dadamac: enabling networked learning, mostly in Africa

A contribution from Pamela McLean: 1. What we do “Dadamac’s work is about enabling collaboration (mostly, but not only, between between UK and Nigeria) and is usually about networked learning of one kind and another. We could never have come together and collaborated before the existence of the Internet. http://www.dadamac.net/about-us. Minciu Sodas (Lithuanian for Orchard… Continue reading