Date archives "December 2012"

Looking at Makers with the Prism of Community

Excerpted from a review of the book “Makers”, of Chris Anderson, by Martin Pasquier: “Chris Anderson’s “Maker : the new industrial revolution” is a brilliant book, one of the kind you can’t close without DOING something. And it really matches with all my current thoughts on a community-based world (may sound familiar for US readers,… Continue reading

Franco Accordino on Policy Making 3.0 in the EU Futurium

Policy Making 3.0 is prototyped by a participatory foresight platform called Futurium. We are launching the Futurium, our online lab where stakeholders, experts and non-experts, can co-create ideas for future European policies by drawing inspiration not only from today’s trends, but especially from desirable futures. Franco Accordino: “Time to experiment with new policy making models?… Continue reading

CALL FOR PAPERS – Special Issue of the Journal of Peer Production: Value and Currency in Peer Production

Call for Papers Special issue of the The Journal of Peer Production: Value and Currency in Peer Production Edited by: Nathaniel Tkacz, Nicolás Mendoza and Francesca Musiani. The marriage of cryptography and the dynamics of open-source have now produced a working distributed currency system. Bitcoin, as the most notable example, can be understood as a… Continue reading

Eugenio Tisselli interviewed on the Sauti ya wakulima project

(via Furtherfield.org’s Marc Garrett) I met Eugenio Tisselli in Edinburgh at the Remediating the Social conference in November 2012. Eugenio gave a presentation on the project Sauti ya wakulima, “The voice of the farmers”: A collaborative knowledge base created by farmers from the Chambezi region of the Bagamoyo District in Tanzania, and “by gathering audiovisual… Continue reading

Do we need p2p to help markets deal with complexity, or does p2p get us beyond markets?

John Robb launched the following debate: “Modern economic systems were first organized by bureaucracy and scientific management. The limits of the complexity it could organize was limited, as we saw with the USSR/China. Next, we’ve seen market/bureaucratic hybrids develop (the US/China model). Those hit the limit recently, as we saw in the latest series of… Continue reading

Shift Change: a new documentary on worker-owned cooperatives

Here is the preview: Hannah Miller reports in Shareable: “A new documentary by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work, delves into an entirely different way of working – worker-owned cooperatives – finding companies that may not look different on the surface, but whose structure changes the way people work, and… Continue reading

Book of the Day: The Lost Science of Money

Book: The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money, the Story of Power by Stephen Zarlenga. American Monetary Institute, 2002. Dr. Michael Hudson writes: “The history of money is critical to understanding the greatest problem the third millennium will face. Stephen Zarlenga’s Lost Science of Money book provides the needed background for seeing the… Continue reading

Monitoring Bitcoin: In France, The First Officially Recognized Bitcoin Bank

Text by Sepp Hasslberger: According to a post in the Bitcoin Forum, titled Bitcoin-Central, first exchange licensed to operate as a bank. This is HUGE Bitcoin-Central (https://bitcoin-central.net/) “is getting, through a partnership with Aqoba and the Credit Mutuel, allowed to operate as a bank, (or more precisely a PSP which is basically the same as… Continue reading

Networked Democracy as a Mindset: Brazil’s Rio del Sul shows the way

“Democracy in network is first and foremost a mindset”, an article republished from @bernardosampa. Bernardo Gutierrez: “The political structures must change. But the replacement will emerge as people act and communicate in the present, not talking about the future.” The phrase is from the book Open Source Democracy, from Douglas Rushkoff, published in 2003. The… Continue reading