An issue many organizations face is how to keep innovating in an environment of economic and skill scarcity. Open source changes that equation in regard to the development process. With open source comes abundance — more than 500,000+ projects are freely available today, and that number’s growing rapidly. Open source and innovation are locked in… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2011"
Brazilian Petition to support OER policies
From Carolina Rossini: During the next two weeks representatives from the OER-Brazil Project and sister communities (such as volunteers from Wikimedia-Br, Free Software and Open Data), will participate in two conferences: Digital Culture Festival (http://culturadigital.org.br/en/o-festival/) and EduTec (http://www.edutecrio.org.br/en/), which is organized by the Ministry of Education in Brazil. In both of them, we will be… Continue reading
Global Chokepoints: new activist coalition monitors censorship through global copyright enforcement rules
A global coalition of activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation have created “Global Chokepoints” a worldwide initiative to monitor censorship arising from copyright enforcement. Global Chokepoints will document the escalating global efforts to turn Internet intermediaries into chokepoints for online free expression. Internet intermediaries all over the world—from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to community-driven… Continue reading
Why America Doesn’t Need More Tech Giants Like Apple
Hugh Pickens writes “Optimists says that if only America produced more companies like Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook, the country’s economic problems would be fixed — America could retrain its vast, idle construction-and-manufacturing workforce, and our unemployment and inequality problems would be solved. But Apple’s $1 billion new data center in North Carolina… Continue reading
#OccupyWallStreet as an Augmented Revolution
Excerpted from Nathan Jurgenson: “Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent occupation movements around the United States and increasingly the globe might best be called an augmented revolution. By “augmented,” I am referring to a larger conceptual perspective that views our reality as the byproduct of the enmeshing of the on- and offline. This is opposed… Continue reading
What we can learn from the pirates
Excerpted from Kester Brewin: “In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from St Paul’s, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates went on sale, and became an instant hit. Though pirates’ bodies were hung in gibbets along the banks of the Thames… Continue reading
RespectMyNet: Internet Restrictions on the Table of EU Regulators
La Quadrature du Net met with European body of telecommunications regulators BEREC, which is currently listing Internet access restrictions imposed by telecoms operators across the EU, as requested by the EU Commission. Thanks to the RespectMyNet.eu platform [1] and thanks to the participation of citizens from all over Europe in unveiling these harmful practices, BEREC… Continue reading
When does #OccupyWallStreet’s consensus-based governance model become dysfunctional? Some insights from chaos theory.
an integral container” – a social environment and group process that includes as much as possible without destroying itself. The challenge is to find ways to include those voices, to let them speak, but in ways that do not degrade the ability of the group to reach good decisions in a timely way. Commentary BY… Continue reading
#OccupyWallStreet Art & Design
You can tell a lot about social movements from the art and culture they produce. The Occupy movement is no different. It has inspired artists and designers all over the world. Their work reflects the spirit of diversity that has characterized the movement, its inspiration and its aspirations. I was very excited when I came… Continue reading
P2P History (6): The technology of the Revolutions of 1848 and the evolution of augmented action up to #OccupyWallStreet
The revolutions of 1848 can therefore be understood as augmented revolutions, albeit augmented in a different sense than we experience now. They were ideologically fueled by the intermeshing of humanity and technology, and once they had begun, they spread through that intermeshing, through communication via print and the very expansion of the conceptual world. The… Continue reading
The Soundscape of the #OccupyWallStreet Protests
It has been fascinating to witness the politics of sound deployed by and against the Occupy movement. As I write, there is some confusion about what the movement will become as the weather gets colder and cities less welcoming. The question might be restated: What might happen if the movement becomes silent? What if there… Continue reading
P2P Partner State Theory vs. TIMN Network Theory
David Ronfeldt has continued his exploration of the partner state concept, from the vantage point of his own network forms theory: (excerpted without the sourced links) “The P2P blog’s ideological orientation is to the Left of my own. For purposes of developing TIMN, I’d like to find an additional blog (or other material) that is… Continue reading
Can Social Media Help us Predict the Future?
There has been a fluffy of articles online about how close analysis of the masses of data generated by social media and other digital technologies may allow a means of predicting the future, for example: [There] is an emerging industry aimed at using the tweetstreams of millions of people to help predict the future in… Continue reading
P2P History (5): a history of protest camping
Excerpted from Tim Gee: “On the face of it, camping does not seem like the most likely tactic to bring about the transformation of power relations in society. But it has frequently played a role in movements for change. More than a century ago, in the context of a financial crisis, thousands of people camped… Continue reading
George Monbiot on the psychopathologies of the 1%: a review of the scientific evidence
Excerpted from George Monbiot: “The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that… Continue reading