Though Rick Falkvinge’s understanding of the left seems primitive and erroneous (the left does not demand ‘sharing with the poor’ but rather structural fairness), this is an eloquent statement of the values and ‘ontology’ (state of being) that are the characteristics of the Pirate sensibility. It is excerpted from a keynote to the German Pirate… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2012"
Trend of the Day: Cognitive Policy
Description “There are two aspects of every policy: a cognitive policy and a material policy. Material policies consist of the nuts and bolts, what is to be done in the world to fulfill policy goals. For example, the details of a health care plan, or a plan for getting out of Iraq. Material policies each… Continue reading
Why we need professional amateurs in citizenship
After the emergence of ‘citizen scientists’ and ‘citizen journalists’, what we need now are ‘citizen citizens‘, argues Eric Liu: Excerpt: “The work of democratic life — solving shared problems, shaping plans, pushing for change, making grievances heard — has become ever more professionalized over the last generation. Money has gained outsize and self-compounding power in… Continue reading
How #OccupyWallStreet’s MayDay radicalized the U.S. unions
Excerpted from David Graeber: “The US press seems to have decided that the Occupy movement is no longer a story. Pretty much no matter what we do. In New York, on May Day, something between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched through the streets – we don’t know the exact numbers because most papers didn’t report… Continue reading
Project of the Day: My Arms Wide Open Community Business Model
By Warren Te Brugge: “My Arms Wide Open® is a Canadian Federally registered foundation that I established to work with mothers, children and youth to crate change in the communities by creating sustainable community based businesses, education systems and infrastructure built entirely around the needs of their communities. We start within each community by facilitating… Continue reading
Making a living through Open Source Fashion: an interview with Zoe Romano of OpenWear
Zoe Romano is one of the founders of the OpenWear project. She is interviewed here by Costa Rican design and fashion researcher Oscar Ruiz Schmidt: ORS: Do you think that designers resign to authorship by making their work methodology open? ZR – That’s one of the main thing we need to clarify: open-source doesn’t mean… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Neighborhood in the Internet
Book: The Neighborhood in the Internet: Design Research Projects in Community Informatics. John M. Carroll. Routledge. 2012. Overview Today, “community” seems to be everywhere. At home, at work, and online, the vague but comforting idea of the community pervades every area of life. But have we lost the ability truly to understand what it means?… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: The Massive Open Online Professor
Source: Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt The challenges faced by higher education around the world are daunting and cannot be met by the traditional institution-based education system. For the current model to meet the needs of future generations, we would need to build and fund thousands of new universities. And yet the past ten… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Young Lawyers Lower the Bar to Sharing Economy
Neoliberalism as a failed response to the declining advantages of scale
With the perspective of the current crisis, we can understand the set of neoliberal policies that have left their mark on the world since the Eighties as a Big Capital’s conscious reaction to, and an involuntary accelerator of, the reduction of the optimum scale of production, and therefore, to the transition towards a P2P production… Continue reading
Graphic of the Day: Media concentration infographic
By Frugal Dad: I’m concerned with the integrity of the news and entertainment my family and I consume every day. Who really produces, owns and airs the shows my kids are glued to every evening and which companies select the stories I read with such loyalty each morning? I’ve always advocated for critical consumption, and… Continue reading
Global May Manifesto of the #OccupyWallStreet Movement
Publication was delayed because of my travels, but this text is still significant: Excerpt: We do not make demands from governments, corporations or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt. We speak to the people of the world, both inside and outside our movements. We want another world, and such… Continue reading
Civic membership, the Commons and Justice
From Marvin Brown’s Blog: As members of the civic we have much in common. We live in the same time. We live on the same planet. All our grandchildren will inherit the future we leave them. Still, if we switch our view from the civic to the social, we see great differences. Some have much… Continue reading
Community sufficiency technologies – the example of beekeeping
This is based on David Braden’s organiclandscapedesign site, which is a documentation of efforts to learn how to build self sufficient communities. Community sufficiency technologies are described as methods of achieving self-sufficiency, but rather than practicing this as a family, it is the community that works to achieve greater independence from the production of others…. Continue reading
What the German Pirate Party wins mean for copyright in Germany
An analysis of voter choices correlated to social position suggested that the Pirates strongest constituencies are amongst workers and the unemployed, where they took 14% and 15% of the vote respectively. Interestingly the two parties most likely to lose votes to the PP were the Greens and the FDP (liberals), but the basic lesson of… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Self Organised Learning Environment
Website: http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2208/ New (media) tools for self organized learning environment (SOLE) and for progressive inquiry. Description From FLOSSE: “The self organized learning environment (SOLE) is a model to adapt school space to facilitate inquiry based learning. The idea is simple and powerful: “A teacher encourages their class to work as a community to answer questions… Continue reading