“Hacking Health is a hackathon that is focused on social innovation more than technical innovation. Our approach to improve healthcare is to pair technological innovators with healthcare experts to build realistic, human-centric solutions to front-line healthcare problems”. In Tim Review, Jeeshan Chowdhury relates their experience: “With the urgent need for disruptive innovation in health and… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2012"
The Social Meltdown in Athens, Greece
Very touching documentary .. there is hunger on the streets of Athens: “Dr Dimitris Dalakoglou explains the social meltdown which took place in Greece between May 2010 & June 2012 that is on going. This film contains videos and photos shot on the streets, often containing violence and paints a portrait of widespread economic hardship… Continue reading
Slowing down for the (UK) commons
we should like to return to the old ways on common land, with motorists encouraged to appreciate that commons are special, that they represent an era when the pace of life was more leisurely—and that we slow down for commons. Excerpted originally from the Headline Environment website, On the Agenda, 12 October 2012. “Responding to… Continue reading
Danah Boyd and Doc Searls on the Value of Cyber-Utopianism
Source: Future Tense “Call someone a ‘cyber utopian’ and it’s likely to be taken as an insult, according to leading media theorist Ethan Zuckerman. But we’ll meet some self-confessed utopians (of the digital variety) who are out of the closet and proud! While they concede cyber utopianism can get a little disconnected from reality, that’s… Continue reading
What the Pirate Party has already done for Europe
Excerpted from Rick Falkvinge: “In short: Without them, there would now be a “three-strikes” scheme in Europe, and ACTA would most likely have been in global effect. Instead, the political support for copyright monopoly reform has grown by orders of magnitude, and finally, there are subtle but very important changes in the language used by… Continue reading
Beyond Corporate Open Innovation: Commons-Oriented Peer Production
This month we are serialising the report “Synthetic overview of the collaborative economy”, coproduced by Orange Labs and the P2P Foundation. Today Chapter 4: Beyond Corporate Open Innovation: Commons-Oriented Peer Production. And don’t forget the “Ask Me Anything” session with Michel Bauwens over on reddit. (Of course if you can’t wait you can download the… Continue reading
Lawrence Taub on Russia: the Polario hypothesis
A few years ago, I had the chance to read, “The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and the Last Caste.”, by Lawrence Taub. While I found plenty to disagree with, I found the book stimulating and Larry eventually visited me in Chiang Mai, and we became friends. Here is his most recent article which appeared in… Continue reading
The University of the Commons initiative in the Bay Area (U.S.A.)
“The University of the Commons creates opportunities for learning, camaraderie, and critical thinking by and for the diverse San Francisco Bay Area community. Activities include classes, lectures, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, teach-ins, and art and activist interventions. The University of the Commons aims to inspire participants to evolve more equitable and just societies and live more… Continue reading
Project of the Day: WikiHouse, An Open Hardware Building System
The WikiHouse team created a blueprint that would allow everyday people to build their own homes using open sourced designs and locally sourced materials Here is the official description, followed by an analysis by Eric Hunting. “WikiHouse is a contribution to the debate on Open Hardware and Open Design by 00:/, Momentum Engineering, Espians, Beatrice… Continue reading
‘Common-Sense Commons’ as a guiding vision for a Self-Caring System & Thrivable World
Source: Helene Finidori Our World is in crisis. Much of what we care for and depend on in the various dimensions of our lives is being put under critical threat by the excesses generated by the application of reductionist theories and models that have been pushed to their limits, resulting in the explosion of addictions… Continue reading
The Commons is the Human, Inter-cultural & Intellectual ‘Rainforest’
After discussing the Commons with Thomas Leif Olsen, a scholar on democracy, he wrote the following to illustrate his understanding of the commons: “Human (rainforest); because it invites truly diverse, raw and uncensored participation, where only the more durable and/or creative participants prosper over time, while the less durable and/or creative ones remain marginal, and/or… Continue reading
The ‘Res Communes’ initiative – an alternative vision of economics for, by and of the people
Over the next year a group of us will be publishing a draft Res Communes manifesto for post-growth, post-capitalist change. We will be open-sourcing this for anyone who wants to help us produce our final vision and manifesto for change. Watch this space and get involved……… Excerpted from the Flourishing Enterprise blog, by ‘Jules’, from… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Essays about Pirate Politics
Book: No safe harbor: essays about pirate politics. Reykjavik, Iceland: United States Pirate Party; 2012. Summary “An anthology of 20 selections about issues central to the concerns of the U.S. Pirate Party, divided into three categories: (1) government and corporate transparency and accountability; (2) privacy; (3) intellectual property. A good resource for seeing how the… Continue reading
Should the Government Help Grow The Sharing Economy? – or get out of the way?
Excerpted from Ariel Schwartz: “In an article for The Urbanist, a publication of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, laid out a policy agenda for the burgeoning sharing economy. The most important thing, he says, is for governments to stop hindering progress. “The government needs to… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Shareholder Value Myth
Book: The Shareholder Value Myth. Lynn Stout. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 2012 Ben Schiller[1]: “Stout’s book The Shareholder Value Myth looks at the pervasiveness of the “shareholder value” idea, and finds it has more basis in intellectual fashion than the law. She traces it back to an article by the economist Milton Friedman in 1970, which said… Continue reading
WebRTC: real connectivity at the edges of the internet – browser to browser communication and sharing
Based on HTML5, WebRTC is a new standard that will allow direct browser-to-browser communication and sharing, without the necessity of any central server intervention. It looks like the Internet is about to change significantly. The center of activity in the future will no longer be a server-based commercial service but real connectivity around the edges…. Continue reading