* Book: From Nations to Networks. by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gomez, and Arnau Fuentes. A very important book, that I strongly urge the P2P community to read!! Summary and structure Key thesis is summarized in this citation: “Esperanto, the bearer of a universal humanist ideal, showed in practice, probably definitively, that the… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2010"
The emergence of the New Corporate Venices
According to David de Ugarte, the new crop of truly transnational, hence no longer ‘multi-national’, corporations, shows the way forward for what a new type of peer production network could become. David de Ugarte et al.: 1. Transnational Companies based on corporate blogospheres “The economy of the network society is essentially an information and services… Continue reading
Silke Helfrich on the International Commons Conference in Berlin
Excerpt from a profile and extented interview by Richard Poynder, on the occasion of the upcoming Berlin Commons Conference: Interview excerpts: “RP: Would it be accurate to say that the commons encompasses components of a number of different movements that have emerged in recent years, including free and open source software (FOSS), Creative Commons, Green… Continue reading
Digital Zionism as distributed, de-territorialised socialisation
“At this point, some of them start to live for theirselves: the objective of the community becomes the community itself, not the original cause that made them to meet. They dream the possibility of a completely virtual life with their real community. Sometimes it takes the form of virtual countries, other times of exclusive social… Continue reading
Thimbl – enabling distributed social networking
Thimble is billed as a piece of software that will enable Free, open source and distributed micro-blogging. Its tagline: Be followed at your own domain Like diaspora and the appleseed project, thimble is one of the pieces of a mosaic that is coming together just at the right time, just as facebook, the major social… Continue reading
Manfred Max-Neef on the Five Principles of Economics
Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, a Right Livelihood laureate, from a recent interview by Amy Goodman. Excerpts: “First of all, we need cultured economists again, who know the history, where they come from, how the ideas originated, who did what, and so on and so on; second, an economics now that understands itself very clearly as… Continue reading
Venessa Miemis reviews Collaborative Consumption
A book review by Venessa at Emergent Design, the original has many links. * Book: What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers (Fall, HarperCollins), 2010 Venessa Miemis: “The general theme of the book is that we’re shifting away from a society of hyper-consumption and equating personal self-worth… Continue reading
Is the ‘splinternet’ for real?
Michel Bauwens pointed me to a discussion that happened in late January this year, and asked me to report on what Josh Bernoff at Forrester, an internet analysis and consulting company, called the “splinternet”. Bernoff’s contention was that with the ever greater number of proprietary (mobile) platforms out there, and with some content on the… Continue reading
The Network Aspects of Tea Party Movement
In-depth discussion of the Tea Party as a non-hierarchical organization, by Jonathan Rauch: Excerpts: “The tea party began as a network, not an organization, and that is what it mostly remains. Disillusioned with President Bush’s Republicans and disheartened by President Obama’s election, in late 2008 several dozen conservatives began chattering on social-networking sites such as… Continue reading
The Facebook and Social Network Privacy Mess: Why we need a Open Social Web
10 minute video intro on the issue, by Henry Story and Bye Bye Big Brothers:
The Interface of the Commons and the Private Sector
This introduction about the relationship between commons, market and state, is republished from the Anthroposphere Institute: “In an interdependent world the issue is not whether one sector will replace the others. The commons, along with the private and public sectors, are all needed. The key interface at this historical juncture is between the private sector… Continue reading
Transparency as a Competitive Advantage for Alternative Currencies
Another interesting contribution on the open money debates, by Gregory Rader, who we also featured yesterday in a long post about asymmetric accounting: Excerpt: “The conventional wisdom regarding money is that privacy should be respected. People don’t like to talk about how much money they make or how much monetary wealth they possess. This shyness… Continue reading
Tackling debt pushing, not money creation, through Jubilee Shares
Steve Keen, my favourite economist, in his (moderate) critique of the American Monetary Act, makes some very interesting argument about monetary reform: “The proposal itself is functional: it would convert our current banks into institutions like building societies, which when they lend money to a borrower, have to decrement an account they hold at a… Continue reading
Replacing Corporations and Cooperatives by Discovery Networks?
“A Discovery Network (DN) is an organic, open, network-type organization that can include commercial, academic, governmental and independent entities, collaborating together and coordinating their efforts to enrich society with new material goods and services, and extracting some value from doing so. The DN is mainly a knowledge and a logistical organization, it processes information and… Continue reading
Janelle Orsi calls for Sharing Lawyers
Excerpts from Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, from Yes Magazine: Janelle Orsi: “What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities? That sounds like the beginning of a lawyer joke, but actually, it’s the beginning of new field of law practice. Very… Continue reading
Book of the Week (2): The power of networks and “cyberthrongs”
“The main idea underlying this book is that the key to understanding most of the new social and political phenomena lies in grasping the difference between a world in which information spreads through a decentralised network and a world in which information spreads through a distributed network.”
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