Tiago Peixoto explains the problem: “In my frequent conversations about open government and citizen participation, the subject of elite capture (or “how representative it is”) is almost unavoidable. Some go as far as evaluating participatory initiatives on the grounds of an ideal notion of representativeness: participants should perfectly mirror the socio-demographic traits of the larger… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Societing Reloaded
Book: Societing Reloaded. Pubblici produttivi e innovazione sociale. Curated by Adam Arvidsson and Alex Giordano. EGEA, 2013 Description The economy is in crisis, both in Italy and in the rest of the world. The system has to radically change to survive. The biggest problem is not in the lack of ideas (which are abundant on… Continue reading
Legal strategies for resilient communities
Janelle Orsi and her friends at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, have produced a short introductory video on the need for a legal framework for the resilient/sharing/p2p economy to thrive. Worth watching:
The differences between open source software and open source hardware: extra management challenges
Excerpted from Simone Cicero: “The main problem now with open hardware, is that to have something to what GIT and GitHub were for software is much more complicated. The main difference lies not so much in the management of files – many open hardware projects already manage all documentation via GitHub today – but in… Continue reading
Three p2p-inspired collaborative art projects by Furtherfield.org
* Article: DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology. By Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow – Furtherfield, 26/01/2013 The full article also refers to p2p-theoretical considerations before describing three concrete collaborative art projects with a specific p2p-inspiration: (source: Remediating the Social 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs University of Edinburgh. Pages 69-74) * Project… Continue reading
Open source credit rating agencies are needed NOW!
Republished from Marc Joffe: “Five years after the financial crisis, European and US regulators have yet to solve the problem of biased credit rating opinions. Moody’s downgrade of the UK’s credit rating and the recent US lawsuit against S&P remind us that credit ratings remain both consequential and controversial. More importantly, they are a byproduct… Continue reading
Lessons in horizontal work culture from the Valve Employee Manual
The MoreHuman Tumblr blog has a running commentary on the employee manual of the ‘bossless’ gaming company Valve. The Valve excerpts are preceded by the “-” sign. Discussion on Emergent Excess Social Capital and Value in Horizontal Networks Excerpts: “Conditional membership Biggest difference from emergent social networks like Occupy: conditional membership. The handbook focuses a… Continue reading
Review of Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty — The Resilience Imperative
Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty. The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy (New Society Publishers, 2012) 400pp. This book starts with a macroscopic analysis of where the existing corporate capitalist economy goes wrong — the pathological effects of debt-based currency, a GDP that counts waste as “growth,” etc. — and proceeds to outline… Continue reading
Rhizomatics for the People: from the meshworked mind to the meshworked civilization
“Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not… Continue reading
No Art Ecology without “P2P” Social Ecology
I’m extremely happy that our p2p theoretical work has inspired actual art curators and artists such as Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield. In this essay, they describe their projects in the context of p2p developments and theorizing. In our second installment we will present the actual art projects. * Article: DIWO: Do It… Continue reading