A short essay (co-authored with Michel Bauwens) which serves as a point of departure for a P2P Lab‘s oncoming research project: Bitcoin emerged as an incarnation of the fantasy of “apolitical” money, i.e., a currency of the people, by the people, for the people, as Varoufakis eloquently puts it. We are not going to describe… Continue reading
Protest Analysis (1): Why protests without politics means derailment for the benefit of the elites
the European revolutions of 1848, which were also led by middle-class reformers and offered the promise of a democratic spring, but had as good as collapsed within a year. The tumultuous Paris upheaval of May 1968 was followed by the electoral victory of the French right. Those who marched for democratic socialism in east Berlin… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Footprinted
Excerpted from Jorge Zapico: “Environmental impact information should be accessible and easy to use. That’s why we have developed Footprinted.org, says Jorge Zapico from the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communication (CESC). Footprinted is a web-based service applying the concept of open linked data to environmental impact information. In Footprinted, environmental research results are available free… Continue reading
Axiomatization of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organizing Institutions
* Article: Axiomatization of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organizing Institutions: Concepts, Experiments and Challenges. By Jeremy Pitt, Julia Schaumeier et al. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, December 2012. Comments excerpted from David Bollier: “Our knowledge about what makes digital commons work is terribly under-theorized. Yes, there are famous works by Lawrence Lessig and Yochai… Continue reading
The Rationale for Public Service Commonification
A summary excerpted from Tommaso Fattori: * No private profit from services which belong to everyone Commonification of public services means firstly managing the resource to which the service is connected outside of market and profit logic, as a commons to which everyone must be able to have fair access. The objective of the service… Continue reading
The Collaborative Economy as Territorial Development Policy: Bordeaux goes forward
“Cette initiative de la Communauté urbaine de Bordeaux et du Conseil général de la Gironde a pour vocation de mieux comprendre les contours, valeurs et défis de l’économie collaborative. Il s’agit aussi de réfléchir collectivement à la façon dont cette nouvelle économie peut apporter des alternatives durables aux entreprises et territoires en recherche de nouveaux… Continue reading
Project of the Day: the Open XC Platform, “an API to your car”
‘Currently, this program is obviously led by Ford, but Prasad noted that this is an open-source project and that the company is open to working with other manufacturers and OEMs.”* The Open XC Platform allows developers to access metrics from Ford cars’ internal network The site explains: “OpenXC is an API to your car –… Continue reading
Towards a p2p society in the Basque region
Bilingual (spanish-english) video collage of a P2P event in Bilbao, oriented towards economic and social development, co-organized by InnoBasque:
A Case for ‘Open Source’ Law?
* Article: A Case for ‘Open Source’ Law? By Ionnis Avramopoulos and Nikitas Konstatinides. Crisis Observatory, May 2013 “In the context of the institutional reengineering underway in Greece, we believe that the advent of the Internet can allow citizens to take direct ownership of and to coordinate over the design and construction of more inclusive… Continue reading
The fear of engagement within open source
Building a thriving open source community for hardware, science and technology is going to take some intrepid folks who follow their passion instead of following their fear. Excerpted from Greg Austic: “Here’s the big fears I’ve seen and some thoughts on pushing through them: * Fear of failure. Once you put your project out there… Continue reading