Written by Chris Dixon: “The Maine town of Sedgwick took an interesting step that brings a new dynamic to the movement to maintain sovereignty: Town-level nullification. Last Friday, the town passed a proposed ordinance that would empower the local level to grow and sell food amongst themselves without interference from unconstitutional State or Federal regulations…. Continue reading
Silke Helfrich: Connecting Commoners Across Continents
I work with Silke within the Commons Strategies Group and have learned to admire her work and dedication to the Commons. Here is a nice profile from On The Commons, reproduced from Jay Walljasper’s book, All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. “If there is one thing that Silke Helfrich has learned… Continue reading
A (Weberian) critique of the consensus view of peer production
Christopher Kelty has read an important essay critiquing a purported ‘peer production consensus’: * Article: Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. 2010. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13:243-259. Kelty summarizes these neo-Weberian critics view of the consensus, adding his own comments…. Continue reading
The State of the Art of Complementary Currencies and its Open Source Software in 2010
“The International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR) has produced a special edition which details some of the recent developments in the field of complementary currencies. It contains fifteen short papers which encompass discussions of the wider field, geographic reviews and reports on new forms of currency innovation. The edition highlights the growing range of… Continue reading
The paradox of corporate platforms as tools of social revolution
Excerpted from Becky Hogge, who in the full article asks, could there be another way? “The web tools of the Arab renaissance are very far from those of the cyber-utopians. Facebook is a hierarchy, not a network. Twitter is a hierarchy, not a network. Gmail is a hierarchy, not a network. Yes, those of us… Continue reading
Ugo Mattei on the State, the Market, and some Preliminary Question about the Commons
All this, evidently requires the jurist’s attention to the difficult and urgent task of constructing the new foundation of a legal order capable of transcending the property-state dualisms inherent in the current order. Given the dominance of private property, individualism, and competition as the basis of the current legal order, the new order must correct… Continue reading
Riace – Complementary Currency helps integrate asylum seekers, refugees
Riace, a small town in southern Italy perhaps best known for the Riace bronzes, two splendidly well preserved life-size Greek bronze statues that were found in the Mediterranean sea off the coast there, is making history of a different kind these days. The Mayor of Riace, Domenico Lucano, has found a way not only to… Continue reading
An updated assessment on the ‘hacking the state’ strategy (2), by ‘Poor Richard’
Excerpted from Poor Richard’s blog: Poor Richard: “On the Hack the State site, Toni Prug writes: Armed revolutionaries and anarchists hate the state. Social democrats want to be the state. I say we better hack it. [W]e need to Hack the State (hack as reuse by clever re-purposing of what’s already here), to make it… Continue reading
The Five Protestant Solas and the Hacker Ethic
Excerpted from a 2007, BA Sociology dissertation on Free Software, by Toni Prug: “The basic theological points of the Reformation are called the Five Solas. The first one, Solus Christus (Christ alone) refuses Pope and church as Christ’s representatives and preaches that Christ, and no one else, mediates between God and man. The second one,… Continue reading
The swarm as a method of work organisation
Excerpted from Bob Cannell: “It is possible to organise communications in a better way. One that utilises the collected intelligence of the agents (people) in the network rather than suppressing intelligence into the obedience necessary to operate a business process production line (and then moaning about your workers for not obeying the rules). The most… Continue reading
Dutch twitter-based anti-bonus campaign sets an example for the world
Excerpted from the Guardian: “A growing Dutch political storm could end with a blanket ban on bonuses to financiers who work for institutions bailed out by the taxpayer. ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The… Continue reading
Josef Jacotot’s Peer to Peer Pedagogy of Equality
Reproduced/excerpted from the new commons-oriented, and strongly recommended, political magazine called “Stir To Action”: Nina Powers presents: * ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’, Jacques Rancière, published as Chapter 1 of Jacques Rancière, Education, Truth, Emancipation, by Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta (London, Continuum: 2010), pp. 1-24. “Rancière’s rescue of the historical Jacotot has proved to be enormously… Continue reading
Re-using market and state forms (planning) with p2p purposes in mind
State and market are real abstractions fetishised in capitalist society. But let us think, one moment, that we can disaggregate state and market instruments, de-contextualise and re-assemble them for new purposes This contribution from a Turkish socialist author is also interesting from a p2p perspective: Excerpted from the Nights of labour blog: “Planning has been… Continue reading
The four rules of a Open-by-Rule Community
Excerpted/reproduced from Simon Phipps, this is a very concise description of the minimum characteristics of peer governance, as applied to free software production: Simon Phipps: “What does authentic open source community governance look like? An open source community will involve many people gathering for their own independent reasons around a free software commons with source… Continue reading
An updated assessment of the ‘hacking the state’ strategy
An assessment of Toni Prug’s project by Patrice Riemens, written in May 2010: “In my original idea, hacking the state was quite simply about motivating people to acquire the necessary knowledge of the ways – both open and covert – the state is functioning and apply this knowledge to make, or even force, the state… Continue reading
Business models for DIY Craft
Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available on openp2pdesign.org, and it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. I’m now reposting it here, since the text is under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0… Continue reading