“A good example of manual curation vs. crowdsourced curation is the competing app markets on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phone operating systems. Apple fans complain that the Android marketplace has too many low-quality apps for any given task. They complain that it’s hard to find an “official” or “sanctioned” app. On the other… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2010"
New Unionism, the Precariat, and social networking
Essentially, the rise of the precariat and the parallel development of social networking technology leads unions closer and closer to a single watershed question: To what extent are we willing to entrust organizing to the members? In a lengthy article, Peter Hall-Jones argues that social networking can lead to a new unionism that makes use… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Gregg Lahood’s critique of new age narcissism
New Age transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical affirmation of individualism and transcendence. Relational spirituality (which is central to the emerging participatory-paradigm) swims against strong and popular currents in New Age-transpersonal thinking, belief, and practice which tend to see spirituality as an individual, personal, ?inner‘ pursuit (often) into Eastern/Oriental non-dualism… Continue reading
Family Educator Commons
Groundbreaking books, such as The World is Flat and A Whole New Mind, have suggested that a whole new kind of educational system is necessary to prepare today’s students with the 22nd century skills necessary for the emerging global knowledge economy. However, even the most innovative experiments within the public school system, such as charter… Continue reading
Why we need a wikileaks for social media: Marke Pesce on the launching of the Plexus project
Plexus creates your own, self-managed social network, both entirely self-contained, and also acts as a connected node within a broader network. Because Plexus functions as plumbing – wiring together social services that haven’t been designed to talk to one another – it performs a service that is badly needed, filling a growing void. Plexus is… Continue reading
Chomsky and McKibbon on Climate Change
Some basic truths recalled, via:
Whither government regulation in a highly complex age?
A contribution by Gordon Cook which was published in his Cook Report newsletter. “The speed of change in planning, action, and execution on all levels, that has been enabled by the Internet revolution in particular and ICT in general, is propelling us into a more complex and tightly coupled global system that none of the… Continue reading
Thomas Greco on post-meltdown investing after the “new normal”
Is this the end of an era? I think it is. My view on the matter is that the era of economic growth is over, kaput, finished. If you stop for a minute to think about it, you must admit that we live on a finite planet, that we are rapidly using up the available… Continue reading
Scientific Evaluations versus Peer-to-Peer Social Learning: developing South-South learning networks
The important point should be to foster direct and practical social learning by the doers about “what works and what doesn’t.” Such practical knowledge is hardly amenable to the RCT methodology that has academic cachet in the North and with the helper organizations adopting “scientistic” ideas about methodology in the human sciences. The best sources… Continue reading
Video interview: three aspects of peer to peer politics
Robin Good interviewed me in Rome last spring, and the videos with full transcripts are now online here. As usual, Robin adds great value to communication through the presentation skills of his team and himself, so I recommend going to the original. All the video excerpts are located there as well. Nevertheless, here are the… Continue reading
Book:The Mesh-Why the future of business is sharing
Seems as if this book release has got testimonials from a Who’s Who of technology business leaders and opinion makers. While the subject matter might be very familiar or even old news to readers of this blog, it’s possibly a refreshing re-contextualization of business and it’s adaptation to the network and peer practices. The Mesh… Continue reading
The new peer feminism of the radical homemakers movement
“A growing movement of “Radical Homemakers,” whose mission it is to promote ecological sustainability, social justice, and family and community well-being, see themselves as an integral part of the United States moving from an extractive economy to a life-serving economy. According to the activist and economist David Korten the goal of a life-serving economy “is… Continue reading
Digital Development Strategies as Though Local Economies Mattered
Michael Gurstein argues that wanting to imitate Silicon Valley imitations strategies will be counterproductive in many contexts, and argues for policies based on local innovation instead: Many (most) countries in the world have in the decade just passed, developed and at least partially implemented what may be called a “digital development strategy”. These strategies are… Continue reading
Mike Leung’s Worker Cooperative Credit Union project
Via Nicholas Roberts, who presents a project by Mike Leung: “We are organizing a credit union that will serve worker cooperatives in the United States. This group is in the process of applying for a federal charter. We currently do not have an active charter and are not federally insured. Worker cooperatives are businesses that… Continue reading
A critique of Matt Ridley’s meme-based social darwinism
History is not a process of continuous development, more one of recurrently punctuated equilibrium. In the long sweep of events, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the collapse of Northern Rock, or – in the history of the planet – in global warming. Discontinuity, not gradual change, is the norm. Rather than clinging… Continue reading
Nowtopia: Let a million urban farming flowers bloom
The following is excerpted from a lengthy conversation in Shareable magazine between the author of a very influential ecotopian novel in the 70’s, Ecotopia from Ernst Callenbach, and Novella Carpenter, the author of a multiple award-winning current underground bestseller, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Interviewer is from JAS, an initiative to monitor… Continue reading