An Open Letter from MediaLab-Prado

April 10, 2014 No Comment Stacco Troncoso read

Yesterday we spoke about MediaLab-Prado‘s plight in the face of its threatened enclosure. Today we’re republishing an Open Letter pleading for help, penned by José Luís De Vicente, director of the Visualizar Program for Data Culture and part of MediaLab’s defense collective. Along with the letter, there’s a video from a year ago featuring international figures showing… Continue reading →

Economy and Business Open Innovation P2P Research

The Partner State for Science: The Government as radical, patient innovator

April 10, 2014 No Comment Michel Bauwens read

Stewart Brand in a summary of a talk by Mariana Mazzucato: “The iPhone, Mazzucato pointed out, is held up as a classic example of world-changing innovation coming from business. Yet every feature of the iPhone was created, originally, by multi-decade government-funded research. From DARPA came the microchip, the Internet, the micro hard drive, the DRAM… Continue reading →

Commons Economy and Business Ethical Economy P2P Technology P2P Theory Peer Production

How the marginal cost revolution is aiding the emergence of post-capitalist commons economics

April 9, 2014 1 Comment Michel Bauwens read

Republished from Jeremy Rifkin: “The capitalist era is passing… not quickly, but inevitably. A new economic paradigm — the Collaborative Commons — is rising in its wake that will transform our way of life. We are already witnessing the emergence of a hybrid economy, part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons. The two economic systems… Continue reading →

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Global solution networks

April 9, 2014 No Comment Javier Arturo Rodríguez read

Republished from Don Tapscott: (for a more extensive explanation, see here) “We are in the early days of a completely new approach to solve global problems. This is good because traditional global institutions are increasingly ineffective. Throughout the twentieth century, nation states cooperated to build global institutions to facilitate joint action and address global problems…. Continue reading →

Ethical Economy P2P Business Models Videos

A second exploration on P2PValue with Sensorica’s Open Value Accounting

April 9, 2014 No Comment Michel Bauwens read

Ignasi Capdevila writes: “We did a second Google Hangout with members of the OVN platform (with Sensorica) and of the P2Pvalue project. It allowed us to know both projects better (goals and scope) and to start analyzing potential grounds of collaboration. The video of the hangout is here:

Activism Anti-P2P Campaigns Commons Culture & Ideas Empire Open Innovation Open Models P2P Collaboration P2P Foundation P2PF Articles P2PF network articles Peer Property Politics

The Commons at Stake: The Enclosure of MediaLab-Prado

April 9, 2014 7 Comments Stacco Troncoso read

The Commons is under fire in Madrid, and we need help. To give you some context to understand what’s happening right now, we’re reposting this article written by Bernardo Gutiérrez, which originally appeared at Guerrilla Translation. MediaLab-Prado, located here in Madrid, is on the cutting edge of investigative practises related to Free Culture and the… Continue reading →

P2P Hierarchy Theory P2P Money

First generation crypto-currency (Bitcoin) vs. second-generation crypto-currrencies

April 8, 2014 4 Comments Michel Bauwens read

Republished from Eileen Workman: “As I compare Bitcoin (1st generation crypto-currency) to some new ideas for second-generation crypto-currrencies that will be asset-backed and don’t have upper limits to their creation, what jumps out at me are these thoughts: Bitcoin is created out of thin air (not backed by anything tangible or relatable to human society)… Continue reading →

Commons

Can Private-Investment Community Land Trusts increase local autonomy and respect for the commons?

April 8, 2014 No Comment Sepp Hasslberger read

The private-investment community land trust is an alternative system for private land-holding, for generating community revenues, and for encouraging better land use. Essentially, land users lease the land, rather than purchase it, from a land trust. The trust then uses lease revenues to pay investors, to provide community services, to rebate taxes levied against occupants… Continue reading →

Collective Intelligence Culture & Ideas Economy and Business Ethical Economy Gift Economies P2P Money

The Rise of the Cryptocurrency Gift Economy

April 8, 2014 1 Comment Stacco Troncoso read

Here’s Brett Scott, our favourite Heretical Finance Hacker, talking about the ways cryptocurrencies can amplify the scope of the gift economy. Interestingly, Charles Eisenstein explores the concept of anonymity in gifting and its downsides in his book, Sacred Economics. I’ll post the relevant extract in the comments below, to amplify the discussion. Brett’s article was… Continue reading →

P2P Science Urban Commons Videos

TEDxHamburg – Elisabet Sahtouris – “Celebrating Crisis”

April 7, 2014 No Comment Øyvind Holmstad read

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris is also an elder and an early supporter of VillageTowns! From the Village Forum: Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris – A renown evolution biologist, Dr. Sahtouris is an early supporter of VillageTowns who articulated and provided the concept of biological systems that enabled the VillageTown concept to make an intellectual jump from the conventional… Continue reading →

Cognitive Capitalism Culture & Ideas Economy and Business P2P Development

Jobs we will lose to automation

April 7, 2014 No Comment Stacco Troncoso read

It’s fascinating to see mainstream publications like Business Insider catching on to the consequences of automation of the workforce. Rather than proposing the relocalization of production or a basic income, they’ll happily detail whether your job, no matter how relevant, will be at risk or not. Very interesting reading, nonetheless. The full article was written… Continue reading →

Collective Intelligence Commons Copyright/IP Culture & Ideas Economy and Business Events Featured Content Featured Video Media Open Content P2P Collaboration Videos

Ecuador’s FLOK Project: what can we learn from the ‘really existing knowledge economy’

April 7, 2014 No Comment Stacco Troncoso read

The Floksociety.org project wants to create the conditions for a fully fledged open-knowledge based commons society, or ‘social knowledge economy’. But this economy already exists, and we must learn from it. In this presentation, Michel Bauwens outlines, for a group of researchers working in Ecuador, what we know about the functioning and institutionalization of this… Continue reading →

Cognitive Capitalism Commons Economy and Business Ethical Economy Open Models P2P Business Models P2P Manufacturing P2P Technology P2P Theory Peer Production

Jeremy Rifkin: 3D Printing may usher in an era of “free”, commons-oriented, material production

April 7, 2014 No Comment Michel Bauwens read

Summers and DeLong glimpsed that as marginal costs approach zero, “the competitive paradigm cannot be fully appropriate” for organising commercial life, but admitted “we do not yet know what the right replacement paradigm will be”. Now we know. A new economic paradigm – the collaborative commons – has leaped onto the world stage as a… Continue reading →

Cognitive Capitalism Culture & Ideas Featured Content Featured Project Featured Tool Technology

Project of the Day: Friend Inspector

April 6, 2014 No Comment Stacco Troncoso read

This article, originally published in the MIT Technology Review, talks about Friend Inspector, a new game aimed at raising awareness about people’s privacy settings (or lack of thereof) in Facebook. Do you know who can see the items you’ve posted on Facebook? This, of course, depends on the privacy settings you’ve used for each picture,… Continue reading →