For many years now, societies have been limping on with broken institutions and splintered social contracts — right into the heart of this perfect storm. And I’d bet most of us have assumed that we’ll continue to “get by” — that we can wait for the economy to repair itself, for the next economic boom… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2011"
The 10% Tipping Point of Ideas in a Population
This is fascinating. According to research, once around 10% of the population believe firmly in an issue, then even though a minority, it is enough of the population to create a tipping point to influence a societal-wide change: Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an… Continue reading
Open Video Conference 2011
The Open Video Alliance and New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law & Policy are gearing up to present the third installment of the Open Video Conference, to be held at New York Law School September 10-12. OVC is a multiday summit of thought leaders from across the policy, technology, and creative spectrum coming… Continue reading
Freedom Conditions for Cloud Computing
Excerpted from Georg Greve: “It’s come to the point that I was asked to explain what I consider necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach towards what is often called “The Cloud” or also “Software as a Service” (SaaS). So what do I think constitutes a socially acceptable and sustainable approach to “Cloud Computing”… Continue reading
Do cyber-protests deserve years in prison?
Protest, often outside the realms of the law, is a tradition of politically active youth throughout the ages. Anti-apartheid protesters moved outside legal realms, as did those in the civil rights movements, and even those pushing for women’s right to vote. Today’s Marxist is tomorrow’s moderate: more than one member of the last UK government… Continue reading
Transforming corporate forms through currencies
Excerpted from Arthur Brock: “The failure of change agents to re-encode social systems (especially ones with as much influence on everything as money has), is what keeps us on this intolerable trajectory of destruction. So far, the biological equivalent to our most “successful” social organism pattern is cancer. Corporations are structured as a cancer. They… Continue reading
Open Object’s People Powered Database
It is said that every object tells a story. This is very true in our oft-branded world where the packaging and design of object are there to tell us the story the object’s makers wish us to see. Some of that information is helpful – what the object is, how it works, how much… Continue reading
Private Property is Not the Right Solution for the Natural Commons
Excerpted from a stirring speech by Maude Barlow, an advocate of commons-oriented approaches to natural resource issues. In this speech, she strongly stresses the link between the environmental crisis and social justice, and calls for an end to “silo thinking” on that issue. When I co-organized the International Commons Conference last October in Berlin, Maude… Continue reading
Umair Haque on the new corporate road to serfdom
Far from innovating our institutions in this time of historic, sweeping global economic crisis and social fracture, the very opposite seems to be happening–our institutions are diminishing, regressing, devolving, sliding back tens or hundreds of years at a time into economically prehistoric practices and beliefs. Two some rather amazing examples from Umair Haque, comforting the… Continue reading
Egypt and Beyond: the evolution of revolution
The first part is excerpted from Nadim Fetaih, a Canadian-Egyptian documentary maker. In the second excerpt, Ramesh Srinivasan reports on his conversations with Egyptian activists, about their perception of the role of social media. Nadim Fetaih: “Let me explain something that I learned about Egypt — something that I inevitably did not learn with my… Continue reading
John Robb on disastrous global central planning through corporate monopolization
Excerpted from John Robb: “The parallels between the rapid growth of US government bureaucracy and the Soviet bureaucracy is straight forward. As more and more of US economy was controlled by a narrow group of decision makers allocating government resources, the more sluggish the entire economy became (most of this was due to massive growth… Continue reading
26 propositions on networking, labour and solidarity under/against/beyond a globalised and informatised capitalism | P. Waterman
Excerpted from Peter Waterman: 1. Networking is becoming the dominant ‘relational form’ under capitalism; 2. It is a highly contradictory form which can, however, be more fully, creatively and democratically used by popular, radical-democratic and anti-capitalist forces; 3. Notions of networking and internationalism, understood as necessary for modernisation and/or human emancipation, can be traced back… Continue reading
Towards global policy frameworks: Eleven Structural Problems of the Current World System
One of the things I have been doing on the policy pages of our P2P Foundation Wiki is collecting ‘meta’ policy frameworks, To wit: # The Five Capitals Model # Seven Acupuncture Points for Shifting to Capitalism 3.0. Otto Scharmer. # David Korten: Seven Global Sources of Dysfunction and their Corresponding Corrective Actions # Christian… Continue reading
The maturation of the P2P Exchange Economy 2.0
Excerpted from Semil Shah: “A few years later, when I moved to San Francisco, it was Craigslist to the rescue, helping with initial sublets, furniture, stereo equipment, and the odd jobs I did to soften the transition. Without knowing it, I was stumbling through life fueled mainly by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and economy that… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Labor is not a commodity, but a commons
* Book: Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line. Tom Walker. Author Tom Walker explains the motivation in writing this important book, which considers employment as a common pool resource, i.e. advocates a labor commons: “The issue I grapple with in Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line is not so much “what is the best remedy… Continue reading
The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Written by Aaron Swartz, who faces 30 years in prison for copying scholarly article, in July 2008, Eremo, Italy Aaron Swartz: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being… Continue reading