Date archives "January 2015"

Stakhanov: the Big Data Oracle for a New Era

Source – http://www.artisopensource.net/network/artisopensource/2015/01/14/stakhanov-the-bigdata-oracle-for-a-new-era/ From Wikipedia: “In Classical Antiquity, an oracle was a person or agency considered to interface wise counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods.  The word oracle comes from the Latin verb ?r?re “to speak” and properly refers to the priest or priestess uttering the prediction. In… Continue reading

Essay of the Day: Peak Inequality and the Impoverishment of Society

The conditions for a peer to peer society are being severely undermined. * Essay: Peak Inequality: The 0.1% and the Impoverishment of Society. David DeGraw. The excerpt below is adapted from the book, The Economics of Revolution. The conclusion of the study about the evolution in the U.S. is clear: “the In the present economy,… Continue reading

Ignasi Capdevila on P2Pvalue and Surveying P2P Communities

P2Pvalue is an EU funded research project investigating value creation in P2P communities and exploring what powers P2P collaboration. The P2P Foundation is a partner in the project. Each month we feature an interview with members of the research team. Last month Karthik Iyer spoke with us about how notions of value in collaborative communities… Continue reading

How 3D printing WITH land reform could help to solve the housing crisis

Excerpted from Alistair Parvin: “In the current … model, the houses built by property developers are not actually designed as places to live, but as financial assets; to be sold to the mortgage lending market. The term “housebuilder” is actually a little misleading. A better description might be “land developer” a company that buys land… Continue reading

A critique of the Just Net Coalition’s defense of intergovernmental internet governance

The P2P Foundation recently joined an intiative that we understood as an ‘alterglobal’ alternative to internet governance. We were not aware that his coalition seems to support a purely inter-governmental governance of the internet, as we would indeed favour multi-stakeholder governance. The rest of the article focuses on personal matters, which are more difficult to… Continue reading

Jules Peck Introduces the Real Economy Lab

By Jules Peck Recently Transition’s co-Founder Rob Hopkins responded to a critique of the Transition movement by Ted Trainer. Trainer’s critique was much discussed at the annual Degrowth Congress in Leipzig which I have blogged about already.  Trainer’s critique suggested that there is little more to the Transition Towns movement than community gardens. Naturally anyone who knows much about Transition will… Continue reading

Project of the Day: Credibles

“Credibles crowd-funds small, sustainable food-related businesses. The re-payment of the funding is in-kind – edible credits, or Credibles. The Clearbon platform manages and balances the shared credits among multiple businesses, giving the funder more liquidity for redemption.” An explanation excerpted from Mira Luna: “Several years back a group of us currency geeks got together at… Continue reading

Journal of Peer Production Issue 6: Disruption and the Law

The latest edition of the Journal of Peer Production is now out. The disruption caused by new technologies and non-conventional methods of organisation – from a Western perspective at least – have posed challenges for the law, confronting regulators with the need to balance justice and an appreciation of new realities with powerful interests and… Continue reading

Call for papers: Interdisciplinary workshop on DIY networking

May 18th, Florence, Italy  / Hosting conference: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2015/  Source: http://diynetworking.net/cfp.php Wireless technology enables today the creation of local offline networks, which can operate outside the public Internet. Even when the Internet is easily accessible, such local wireless networks form an interesting alternative, autonomous, option for communication, which 1) ensures that all connected devices are in… Continue reading

Leading Churchmen in Britain call for a more equal and sharing society

The Church of England has spoken out in trenchant terms about the extreme inequality that defines modern Britain, arguing today that moral principles and sharing should underpin the foundations of society. In a new book of essays to be published next week, the archbishops of Canterbury and York warn that the poor are being left… Continue reading

From Copyleft to Copyfarleft: The need for a Commons-Based Reciprocity License

Reposted from our sister-site Commons Transition. The title of this post is an homage to Primavera de Filippi’s and Miguel Said de Viera’s excellent essay on the subject. Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (CBRLs or “CopyFair” licenses) are specifically designed to find a middle ground between the full-sharing Copyleft licenses, such as the GPL, the Non-Commercial… Continue reading