” the extension of the term of copyright was defeated. However, the #noal218 movement did not take the victory as an end in itself, but as the beginning for a positive agenda on access to culture and copyright. The Uruguayan copyright law is extremely restrictive: it penalizes everyday socially accepted practices and it is in… Continue reading
New Publication – The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis
“Can the ethical turn that we are presently witnessing among corporations, consumers, investors, employees, activists, and other stakeholders – their desire to address a number of concerns beyond the profit motive – become a basis for a new “social contract” in which the interests of business and the interests of society can coincide? In other… Continue reading
Seeing Food as a Commons
Excerpted from David Bollier: “What would the world look like if we began to re-conceptualize food as a commons? Jose Luis Vivero Pol of the Centre for Philosophy of Law at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium has done just that in a recent essay, “Food as a Commons: Reframing the Narrative of the Food… Continue reading
Open Science Tour Diary (4): Celya Gruson-Daniel
Introduction During the Summer of 2013, Celya Gruson-Daniel, Founder of Hack Your PhD (HYPhD) went on a tour of Eastern Canada and the United States seeking open science advocates from Montreal to Boston to San Francisco to Seattle. She has kindly provided us with excerpts from her diary, complete with links to various interviews and sources. P2P… Continue reading
Events: Giftival Istanbul 11th-15th Oct
Giftival 2013
Three Competing Societal and Economic Models in the Age of Peer Production
A summary of my p2p ideas, written on September 21, 2013, in Quito. This is a draft which I am continuing to update here. I distinguish Three Models of Value Creation, Redistribution and Economic Development, with the following characteristics: 1. Under conditions of proprietary capitalism * Workers create value in their private capacity as providers… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: the Open Venture Movement
Co-founder Indy Johar, of the Hub Launchpad (at the Hub, Westminster, in London, UK) writes: “Our hypothesis 1. Venturing + Activism = one of the best instruments democratic instruments for changing the world 2. Open is both; Open as in radically transparent + Open as in (Openly Shareable + Openly Editable + Openly re-shareable) =… Continue reading
On the Need for a Integrative Framework for the Provisioning Economy
Pat Conaty, responding to a paper by Marvin Brown: “Thanks for sharing your paper on new vocabulary. You raise here such a key issue. Vocabulary does matter and indeed it is foundational to co-constructing the Commonwealth paradigm that all of us on this list in somewhat different and complementary ways share as a vision. I… Continue reading
Crowdfunding the The Open Hand Project: A Low Cost Prosthetic
5 days remaining to help fund the Open Hand Project. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-open-hand-project-a-low-cost-robotic-hand The Open Hand Project aims to make advanced prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees. The Dextrus hand is the realization of this goal, it’s a low-cost robotic hand that offers much of the functionality of a human hand. Ultimately, these hands will be sold… Continue reading
The prospects for open hardware as a business ecosystem
Legacy industrial players are not taking up open hardware, but in emerging niche industriels, it is already the dominant model, writes Simone Cicero in this interesting analysis: * The most obvious monetization strategy: Manufacturing The most obvious monetization strategy for open source hardware is that of manufacturing. Indeed as is it for closed source hardware… Continue reading