A contribution by Sam Rose of Forward Foundation: “Those online communities that are driven by the needs of users succeed. There is no recipe for success in online communities. The metrics are the evidence that people on the individual scale are drawing value from the community. The metrics are not traffic, clicks, or even the… Continue reading
Deliberative democracy as an antidote to the deficiencies of mass participation?
Book: Jim Fishkin. When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation. Oxford University Press, 2009 From a review by Stuart Weir in Open Democracy: “Fishkin’s essential argument is that ‘mass participation’ – that is, the participation of a full electorate – in policy making is flawed and open to manipulation for a variety of… Continue reading
The state of desktop manufacturing
Make magazine dedicates its 21st issue to the state of advancement of the various aspects of desktop manufacturing (3D printing and scanning, personal fabrication, etc..). The articles are not available without subscription, but one article that is available represents the views of sector pioneers. The statements were collected by Gareth Branwyn: “* Aaron Nielsen, Oomlout,… Continue reading
Abundance Creates Utility But Destroys Exchange Value
What’s variously called the “cognitive capitalism” model, or Paul Romer’s New Growth Theory, assumes that technological progress and increased efficiency will lead to “economic growth” in the sense of the total volume of monetized economic activity. But this presumes the use of “intellectual property” and other forms of artificial scarcity to capitalize efficiency improvements as… Continue reading
Open Book Management at the Springfield Remanufacturing Company
This case description is part of an extented meditation on the relationship between equilibrium in markets, as necessarily conditioned by the existence of equity and distributive justice, in part inspired by Pope Benedicts latest encyclic on the ethical economy, Caritas in Veritate. It’s a recommended read in its full version. The author, John Medaille, is… Continue reading
A sensible approach to the state?
Yesterday, we presented John Medaille’s presentation of distributism as an economic doctrine. I’m not sure if there is a total linkage between distributism and catholicism, but cleary, John Medaille’s version is, hence the many references to the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. Further browsing through this Distributist Review, I found this distributist treatment of… Continue reading
Collaborative Virtual Environments and Immersion in Distributed Engineering Contexts
Interesting paper on distributed manufacturing infrastructures. You can obtain the full version from one of the co-authors: * Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Faculty for Mechanical Engineering, Institute for Ergonomics, Manufacturing systems, at [email protected] (other co-author is Marc Pallot, Centre for Concurrent Enterprise, Nottingham University Business School) Abstract: “Distributed Manufacturing is mostly associated with computing features… Continue reading
Issues of scale in industrial vs. peer production
* Centralized hierarchies should not be too rudely rejected, but should be seen as effective methods of production during specific periods when connectivity is low. Only as technology makes cooperation among large numbers of people possible does decentralization become a feasible alternative. * Because closed groups have to support their developers and open groups do… Continue reading
Discovering Distributism
Part of the P2P Foundation’s remit is to monitor movements that share a family ressemblance to some aspect of the peer to peer ethos; in addition, one of my pet projects is monitoring neotraditional economic approaches, i.e. approaches rooted in the pre-capitalist spiritual traditions of mankind, whose immaterial focus has a relation to our emergent… Continue reading
Jeffrey Smith on the Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods
Really great lecture: (what is particularly interesting for our p2p audience is how Jeffrey Smith focuses on tipping points to obtain victories against toxic food producers) “Expert Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the #1 GMO bestseller Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette, entertains a wildly appreciative audience with shocking facts about how genetically modified organisms… Continue reading
Local Motors, the first open source car to hit production
Chris Anderson visited the plant and has new details about this landmark project. However, before you get too enthusiastic, also read the debunking article by Joel Johnson, here. The essential thesis is that all these distributed manufacturing efforts are all still in the hobbyist sphere, while in real manufacturing, it’s still ‘business as usual’. Excerpt… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Renewing our relationships with other natural beings
Just as nature is under assault, so a promising countermovement has emerged based on renewed totemic kinship with animals. This is a wonderful book that I strongly recommend to anybody: Book: A Reenchanted World: The Quest For A New Kinship With Nature by James William Gibson. Metropolitan Books, 2009 (you can purchase it directly here)… Continue reading
Horizontal gene transfer at the basis of natural evolution
A P2P correction to Darwinian theory? Excerpts from an extensive treatment by the New Scientist, from Mark Buchanan: 1. “JUST suppose that Darwin’s ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of… Continue reading
Paul Hartzog on Managing the Commons and their Contradictions
Brilliant lecture: As the embed code does not work, go here at http://www.archive.org/details/HowardRheingoldIFTFStanfordHumanitiesLabPaulHartzog
An ethical critique of pollution as a right
From the distributist author John Medaille: Excerpt: “Capitalism itself is being proposed as the solution, through the means of establishing pollution as a property right. This is the meaning of the “cap and trade” system. Government will give the biggest polluters the biggest rights to pollute, and then slowly withdraw the rights, leading to a… Continue reading
Outlaw biologists vs. DIY bio-hackers
We’ve gone from a post-industrial economy organized around big, hierarchical corporations that had informal but powerful ties with big but sparsely policed Universities, to a world of small start-ups and fluid venture capital, huge collaborative efforts to pursue an “industrial biology” and vastly increased federal power to influence, control and even prohibit research. We’ve gone… Continue reading