Call for Panel Proposals and Abstracts Please submit to [email protected] by 1st March 2013 More information at www.icird.org and www.facebook.com/ICIRD Building on ICIRD 2011 and ICIRD 2012, the objectives of the conference are: From a theoretical and applied perspective, provide a forum for debate between scholars, practitioners, civil society and community representatives on current development,… Continue reading
Coming out soon: a major book about value in a contributive economy
“That a generalized, technology-enhanced capacity for manifold cooperation has become the main productive force means that there is no longer any contradiction between ethics and economics. On the contrary, the ethical ability to open up to and share with others has become the most fundamental quality of a successful economic agent.” We strongly recommend pre-ordering… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens in Milan, February 14
A scenario for a high-road transition to P2P: Fracking prepares the way for Solar ???
I’m a big fan of Vinay Gupta, because he always provokes for deeper and unexpected layers of thinking. Vinay is a born provocateur, talking about open source guns to Irish ecovillages and about Gandhian non-violence to intelligence officials, but his provocations are never gratuitous and he has an uncanny eye for the law of unintented… Continue reading
Against the simplistic conservatism of Evgeny Morozov: a network-theory critique
Con: Morozov sees decentralization as a leisurely, unnecessary, and incompetent social experiment by people unwilling or unable to engage in the serious work of reform. I suspect such attitudes say more about Morozov’s social circle than the subjects he claims to study. Moreover, he’s convinced that the trial runs we’ve seen by the groups identified… Continue reading
Redesigning economics for ecological realism: 3 areas of advancement
Economics as we know it today is broken. Unable to explain, to predict or to protect, it is need of root-and-branch replacement. Or, to borrow from Alan Greenspan, it is fundamentally “flawed”. But where do we look for inspiration in facilitating what is the mother of all paradigm shifts? Interestingly, the most insightful and strikingly… Continue reading
From resilience to thrivability
Excerpted from Jean Russell: “Thrivability transcends survival modes, sustainability, and resilience. Thrivability embraces flow as the sources of life and joy and meaning, adds to the flow and rides the waves, instead of trying to nullify the effects. Each layer includes and also transcends the previous layer, expanding both interconnections as well as expanding system… Continue reading
Meet the people and the community behind the Pirate Bay
The full version of the newly launched Pirate Bay documentary, well worth seeing for showing the human side behind the project, is available in HD on YouTube: (in Swedish, with english subtitles)
The failure of the Pirate Party’s direct democracy based on the Liquid Feedback system
Excerpted from Evgeny Morozov: “Where exactly would Johnson’s “liquid democracy” lead us? In a footnote, he notes that “the German Pirate Party has implemented ‘liquid democracy’ techniques with some success in recent years.” “Some success” is a gross overstatement, as their unlikely success in Germany appears to have been rather short-lived. Yet in many ways,… Continue reading
Mapping the newly emerging alternative economic approaches
Tom Atlee’s Co-Intelligence Institute is starting a new wiki to map ’emergent economy’ approaches. Here is a first tentative cartography:
The problem of Inequality – and why we need “equipotentiality”!
Republished from Ray Podder: “If there is any one fundamental idea standing in the way of a bright future for all, it is the idea of human inequality. The idea that someone is above you or that someone is below you. It is the most confused and most dangerous idea in our existence borne from… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Types of Control in Open Source Projects
* Going Open: Does it Mean Giving Away Control? By Nadia Noori and Michael Weiss. Technology Innovation Management Review, January 2013. From the Abstract: “Nadia Noori, a graduate from the Technology Innovation Management (TIM) program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and Michael Weiss, an Associate Professor and TIM faculty member, move beyond a community… Continue reading
A thrivable humanity with a 2 hour working day: is it really possible?
Yes, says the team of Open Source Ecology. Watch this video with their basic argumentation:
Does the left need a p2p narrative?
An article in Open Democracy notes the paradox of the only relative success of the ‘radical left parties (RLP)’ in post-crisis Europe. (for a p2p context, see our editorial in al jazeera, with our appeal for a grand coalition of the commons, which could include both RLP’s and social liberals) First a recap of the… Continue reading
How to increase the trustworthiness of Citizen Science data
Excerpted from John Gollan: “Citizen science occurs when data for scientific research is collected by members of the public in a voluntary capacity. Public participation in environmental projects, in particular, has been described as a global phenomenon. But there is a stigma associated with these types of projects. The data collected are often labelled untrustworthy… Continue reading
Against the Internet-Centric Totalizing Anti-Hierarchy and Anti-Centralization Ideology
Challenging power requires a strategy that in many circumstances might favor centralization. To reject the latter on philosophical grounds rather than strategic grounds—because it is anti-Internet or anti-Wikipedia—borders on the suicidal. This antipathy to hierarchies and leaders is part of a broader Internet-centrist backlash against institutions; they are believed to be incompatible with the logic… Continue reading