Date archives "November 2012"

Essay of the Day: White Paper on Fractional Scholarship

Report: The Rise of Fractional Scholarship. Jon Wilkins and Samuel Arbesman. Kauffman Foundation Context by Jon Wilkins: “I’ve been working with the incomparable Sam Arbesman to write up some thoughts on the concept of “fractional scholarship.” Basically, the idea is that there are a lot of people out there who have the expertise and the… Continue reading

Are Coops Outdated in a Network Age?

Excerpted from a Facebook discussion by Tiberius Brastaviceanu: “I think the coop is as outdated as the corporation. It adds more democratic processes into our economy, and democratizing the economy will definitely have an impact on our governance systems, making our representative “democracy” more democratic. But coops aren’t well- equipped to extract value from the… Continue reading

Eric Garland on The Economically Out-of-Date Nation-State and the emerging global networks

Excerpted from Eric Garland in HBR: “The world’s major economies have been engaged in a strategy of irreversible interconnection for so long that there’s no turning back. The future of prosperity will be in investing in new economic and democratic networks, not in hoping that business can somehow reform itself to defend the now moribund… Continue reading

Book of the Day: Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy

* Book: Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies. Janelle Orsi. SELC, 2012 Obviously focused on the U.S. , but a pioneering effort for the defense and advocacy of sharing and commons approaches, which are often under legal assault: “To most law students and lawyers, practicing… Continue reading

Towards a Commons Accounting Revolution

A text by Thomas Olsen: (references are here) “With a few clicks on your computer’s keyboard you can access news that reveals the most horrifying examples of poor management, taking place in broad daylight, in the so-called ‘developed world’. Let’s take the now virtually bankrupt airline SAS (in the past known as Scandinavian Airlines) as… Continue reading

Organizing P2P Organizations

[Revised repost. I probably should have titled this “Hacking the Organization”. What follows is not a primer of organizational design but simply a back-of-the-envelope sketch of how a number of organizational design and management ideas might be applied to peer-to-peer (P2P) organizations. My intention is for these ideas to be adapted or “hacked” for P2P… Continue reading

The World of Hardware Hacked Knitting Machines

By the Year of Open Source: “Becky Stern and Lada Ada (Limor Fried) built on Steve Conklin’s disk emulator and knitting machine resources to allow their modern computers to work with the ancient microcontroller of a 1980s knitting machine. This meant that they could now knit designs made with modern tools, too complex or tedious… Continue reading

‘People to People’: an alternative way of delivering humanitarian aid in Aceh, Indonesia

Republished via Azwar Hasan: ‘People to People’: an alternative way of delivering humanitarian aid “The tsunami of 2004 struck Aceh in Indonesia with particular force. Some 130,000 people were reported dead and 37,000 missing, and over half a million lost their homes. Economic losses across Indonesia have been put at nearly $5 billion. In response,… Continue reading

Guilding the Lilly? (using p2p guilds for public regulation)

Executive Peer-to-Peer Summary: This essay is partially in response to Whither government regulation in a highly complex age? which questions the ability of a hollowed-out, privatized government to effectively cope with the increasing complexity of social and environmental crises such as global warming. What follows assumes some prior familiarity with the basic ideas of p2p… Continue reading

Book of the Day: Tweets and the Streets

* Book: Paolo Gerbaudo. TWEETS AND THE STREETS: SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONTEMPORARY ACTIVISM. Pluto, 2012. Publisher’s summary: “Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the ‘indignados’ protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise… Continue reading

Transition from Crisis 1: The Digitized Civil Society as a Force

Excerpted from Jaap van Til: ““Quo Vadis?”. That is what most recently appointed Cabinet ministers in Europe, China, and the USA will ask themselves during the endless quarrels over money and budgets they have to attend. Where do we go from here? Centuries of violent clashes between empires have passed, each trying to impose dominance… Continue reading