“There is no direct link between Open Design and the following environmental criteria: In this thesis, it is shown that promoting local production by users and easy assembly are the main potential of OD for the environment. Moreover, it is argued that these trends could be used in different phases of product lifecycle; by involving… Continue reading
Peer-to-Peer Science: The Century-Long Challenge to Respond to Fukushima
Solving the Fukushima nuclear crisis will require rethinking our whole approach to science, social media, and public diplomacy. By Layne Hartsell and Emanuel Pastreich: (published previously in: Foreign Policy in Focus, this is a version without links) “More than two years after an earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc on a Japanese power plant, the Fukushima… Continue reading
Project of the Day: ANOSI Volos Volunteers
ANOSI Volos Volunteers “ANOSI – Volos Volunteers – the group of people who set up and keeps running the ‘no middlemen’ food and basic industrial goods distribution in Volos. They link producers with consumers, using an online ordering system. All orders are fulfilled directly by vendors, during monthly distribution meetings, held at the parking lot… Continue reading
On the Centralized Bias of Renewable Energy Transition Plans
Lakis of the City of the Future Blog has read different transition reports and offers an important critique: “For me, the most pressing and unspoken question each of these plans raise is: to what degree is it necessary, possible or desirable to rely on a massive, state, national or global-scale infrastructure build-out to save us… Continue reading
Why the Apache Foundation should delist Accumulo, the NSA project
Excerpted from Tom Slee: “The Apache Foundation hosts the Apache Accumulo project, which is a data storage and retrieval system for big data created by the NSA in 2008 and submitted to Apache in 2011. Derrick Harris at GigaOm describes Accumulo as “The technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis perspective”;… Continue reading
Bill McKibben on the recent leaderless rebellions (2): the experience of 350.org
Excerpted from Bill McKibben in TomDispatch: “We may not need capital-L Leaders, but we certainly need small-l leaders by the tens of thousands. You could say that, instead of a leaderless movement, we need a leader-full one. We see such leaders regularly at 350.org. When I wrote earlier that we “staged” 5,200 rallies around the… Continue reading
The Government and industry have betrayed the internet: what should we do now?
I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA’s actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of… Continue reading
#OccupyWallStreet Documentaries (1): Occupy The Movie (the movement two years on)
Kelly McCartney writes: “In Occupy: The Movie, Corey Ogilvie chose to narrow his focus to ground zero for the Occupy movement — New York City. Industry accountability, systemic corruption, government oversight, and consolidated media all are glimpsed through the lens of activists, journalists, and scholars, including iconic progressive thinkers Noam Chomsky and Cornel West. And… Continue reading
Research: special issue on Working Online
* Working Online. Special issue of Work Organisation Labour & Globalisation. From the abstract: “It is often argued that ‘digital labour’ or ‘virtual work’ is fundamentally different from traditional forms of labour carried out offline, with ‘work’ and ‘play’ collapsed together to become ‘playbour’ and new forms of value creation that do not fit traditional… Continue reading
Tom Slee’s critique of Peers.org as ‘astroturf’: on conflating the interests of sharers and sharing companies
How about banding together to protest when a TaskRabbit customer posts a job to do four loads of laundry and it’s actually 10 or 15 loads covered in cat diarrhea? No: if you do that, you’re fired. The company (a partner of Peers.org, natch) also takes steps to prevent its TaskRabbits from meeting because “They… Continue reading