I participate in the Hangwa Forum, which is a kind of Davos Forum for western China, focused both on disaster recovery (in the context of the 2004 earthquake), and with the aim of creating international cooperation between China and the rest of the world. I am co-chair, along with a rotating Chinese colleague of the… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2012"
Video of the Day: Four Ways to Manufacture Open Hardware
This video very concretely answers the question: How does open hardware get made?
The crucial role of open hardware in the emergence of distributed manufacturing
A useful reminder, excerpted from Brian Profitt: “Arduino’s openness means that the micro-controller board can be found in the heart of a lot of open source hardware devices today, including 3D printers, toys and thousands of projects within the maker community. Commercial vendors and do-it-yourselfers alike are picking up Arduino boards and customizing them for… Continue reading
Collapse now to avoid the rush?
A provocative thought capsule from John Michael Greer: “First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the… Continue reading
Governance: Closed and Proprietary, or Open and Bottom-Up?
David Bollier comments on the essay: “The Commons and World Governance,” by Arnaud Blin and Gustavo Marín. He writes: “I recently encountered a bracing essay, “The Commons and World Governance,” by Arnaud Blin and Gustavo Marín. Blin is a French historian and political scientist, and Marín is a Chilean-French economist and sociologist who is Director… Continue reading
P2P Production and new institutional design
* Essay: The political economy of information production in the Social Web: chances for reflection on our institutional design. Vasilis Kostakis. Contemporary Social Science. June 2012 Our P2P Foundation Greece collaborator has published a new scientific paper: “This paper is based on the idea that information production on theWeb is mainly taking place within either… Continue reading
Ben Dyson on Positive Monetary Reform
“I popped over to the PositiveMoney.org HQ this week, to talk to Ben Dyson about their monetary reform campaign. They are seeking to wrest the power of money creation away from the banks, and put it under democratic control – no more of that debt based money please! We talk about the origins of our… Continue reading
ACTA Is DEAD After European Parliament Vote
Source: TorrentFreak Today at 12:56 CET, the European Parliament decided whether ACTA would be ultimately rejected or whether it would drag on into uncertainty. In a 478 to 39 vote, the Parliament decided to reject ACTA once and for all. This means that the deceptive treaty is now dead globally. This is a day of… Continue reading
Overturning local anti-resilience legislation should be a priority
John Robb highlights one of the big scandals of our time: “Everywhere I look, I’m finding the same thing: In some of America’s poorest towns, it’s currently illegal to become resilient. Wow. This means that the people who can benefit the most from vigorous self-help are being denied the freedom to do so, by towns… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Dirk Bezemer on Creating a Socially Useful Financial System
Most of our credit system does not support economic growth in the sense of supporting transactions in goods and services,” he explains. “Most of our finance system, most bank loans, support increased asset prices, which have a number of detrimental effects on the economy.” Debt going to asset markets can be helpful at a low… Continue reading
Social business design and the software revolution
Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale. Businesses that redesign their processes around software collaboration, are almost invariably… Continue reading
Four Principles for a Just Transition to a Sustainable Economy
The following is excerpted from a report on the Strategies for a New Economy conference, by John Wiseman. The original article has many links. More information on p2p-related policy-making is to be found here. “The following principles as the framework for a rapid transition to a more just, sustainable and democratic economic future. 1. Replacing… Continue reading
The New Monastic Individuals as the change agents for this transition period
Excerpted from Kingsley Dennis: ‘As we know from the life of social cycles, real change occurs when the “anomalies” — another word for the change agents — become too numerous to be absorbed into the incumbent system. That is why individuals and groups “doing their own thing” are so important right now. All great ideas… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Mediating Democracy Through Proxy Voting and Shadow Parliaments
Excerpted from Smari McCarthy‘s contribution to the book Redvolution: “Societies are messy. They are complex. Wherever people meet, there are interpersonal relationships, resource feuds, social problems and political strife. All of this complexity is managed on regional and global levels, on municipal and international levels, by everybody, all of the time. As it turns out,… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Inside Wikispeed Seattle
“Wikispeed’s Joe Justice takes us on a tour of a 20×40 foot storage unit in Seattle — a licensed light-industrial space used by the company as a prototyping facility for cars that can get more than 100 miles per gallon.”
What’s Cooking in the ChokePoint Project kitchen (and a request for help)
Source: ChokePoint Project Well it’s been pretty quiet around here on the blog front, but things have really been cooking behind the scenes: Hosting is now set up and data is being processed ready for the forthcoming beta launch of what we are calling the (dis)Connection State Map (alpha version from the EU Hackathon here)…. Continue reading