Michel Bauwens: “My short definition of Economies of Scope is very simple and should be understandable I think: “doing more with less”; and this is mainly achieved by mutualizing infrastructures, both immaterial (open source knowledge, code, design) and material (co-working, fablabs, carsharing, idle-sourcing …); for contemporary implementations we should add: using distributed machinery in distributed… Continue reading
Captured! Why money and payment must be open.
A contribution from Matthew Slater: “Since the dot com boom, online services have been delivered ‘free’ by venture capitalised projects to acclimatise and capture a user base before the real, revenue-generating business model kicks in. For services which depend for their value on the number of users it is especially important to arrive early in… Continue reading
Project of the Day: EveryVote.org
Mitch Downey: “EveryVote.org’s ultimate goal is to create a website where you can learn about, share your opinions on, compare your opinions with, and contact ALL of your candidates and elected officials via one convenient web page. This project is called ‘EVomni’, and you can check out the open source UI designs here. EveryVote.org is… Continue reading
Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes (Part 1)
Image: Voces con Futura Bernardo Gutiérrez Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratil – Guerrilla Translation! Original article at 20minutos.es. This is a two-part article. The second part can be found here. “The old protests, so dull and single-minded, have passed into obsolescence, and given rise to infinite possibility. We’ve rethought the concepts… Continue reading
Project of the Day: PEACH, Innovative Community-Based Cooperative Healthcare
Excerpted from Mira Luna: “Even more intriguing was my encounter with PEACH (Preservation of Equity Accessible for Community Health) at Sandhill Farm in rural Missouri. On a visit there, I asked the residents of this intentional community how they made it without health insurance and they glowed about the benefits and low cost of PEACH…. Continue reading
Is Ripple suffering from the same “inequality syndrome” as Bitcoin?
Comments on the following critique would be welcome: “The Ripple system is really interesting, but on one point I can’t help thinking part of it is a great scheme to make the founders (and OpenCoin) ridiculously rich. The reason that makes me wonder is that 100 billion XRP were initially created, and of these 20… Continue reading
A critique of Morozov’s intellectual methodology
Morozov’s criticism seems to me to be neither complex, nor realistic, nor moral. He is anything but a dialectician. He has little respect for anyone whose opinion deviates from his own—surely the first quality required of a real scholar. He maintains a pyrotechnically unfortunate Twitter feed, wherein he will totally yell at and abuse anybody… Continue reading
A proposal to micro-monetize and create an income for shared open designs
Excerpted from Adam B. Levine: A proposal for “Compensated Open Source Innovation for All“: “If you have a new, profitable idea and you patent it under the current system, that’s great! But how do you make money with it? You could sell it (if someone wants to buy it, ideas are cheap). If you want… Continue reading
The Personal Design Manifesto
Excerpted from Jan Borchers, René Bohne: “Personal Design, not Digital Fabrication, is the 3rd Digital Revolution. Affordable personal digital fabrication technologies only enable a third digital revolution of Personal Design whose potential impact on society reaches far beyond the previous PC and internet revolutions. “Personal Design Demands New UIs. To move from mere personal fabrication… Continue reading
An exemplary, publicly funded community incubator: the Medialab Prado in Madrid
MediaLab Prado is both a physical and a digital platform. Physically, it’s a space where anyone can walk in, while online it functions as a laboratory for connecting ideas. MediaLab Prado is an interdisciplinary workspace for creation and innovation. And here’s an important detail: its strength doesn’t reside in its own programming, put together by… Continue reading