It’s hard to keep up with the extraordinary social energy generated by a global renaissance of local food initiatives, which I’m monitoring through these two delicious tags: – P2P-Agriculture – P2P-Food We’re also creating a new wiki section, which should be growing in the coming weeks! Here’s a new documentary which spells out the priorities… Continue reading
The Innovation World Is Not Flat
Designing an innovative organization doesn’t necessarily mean a “flat” organization. We tend to believe that innovation and hierarchy are antithetical, but in truth, innovation often thrives in hierarchical organizations. Sam Ladner argues innovation and hierarchy can perfectly co-exist, provided a number of principles are adhered to. Below are excerpts only, the original article has links,… Continue reading
Peter Suber on five years of open access
Peter Suber, open access advocate and pioneer, interviewed by Reid Cornwell: Find more videos like this on The Center for Internet Research
Jeff Vail: 2010 as the year of the start of catabolic collapse
Excerpted from a longer article by Jeff Vail, advocate of the Diagonal Economy, on 2010 as a tipping point: “2010 is the year we commit to Catabolic Collapse–the concept that our civilization will experience a long, slow, and bumpy decline over the next several decades. We spent 2009 desperately scrambling to fabricate a recovery out… Continue reading
Update on the Collaborative Firm
Tom Haskins has completed his chapter by chapter reviews of the Adler/Hecksher book, The Firm as a Collaborative Community. Here are the links to the many new insights: * Chapter Six: Collaborative Learning Communities in Health Care * Chapter Nine: Collaborative tribal market hierarchies * Chapter Ten: Dead set against collaborating * Summation: A conspicuous… Continue reading
Could American Democracy survive 13 million foreclosures?
Bruce Judson discusses, in the first part of the article, the frightening newest economic inequality numbers, as reported by the Associated Press. (the second article quoted below gives even more detail about the catastrophic condition and prospects for the U.S. middle class) In the second part, he discusses the potential disturging political consequences, as well… Continue reading
Debate on the fossil to renewable energy (EROEI) transition
The Post Carbon Institute has published a detailed report to answer the following question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100? Their answer: “Contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from… Continue reading
Green New Deal and Climate Justice
I’m not going to attempt to summarize this interesting dialogue in Turbulence 5, between Frieder Otto Wolf, who advocates ‘hijacking’ the Green New Deal proposals, to create space for more radical social change; and Tadzio Mueller of Climate Justice Action, who rejects such an approach, stressing the direct relationship between capitalism and climate destruction. It’s… Continue reading
Collabforge’s report on government online engagement in Australia
Our friends at Collabforge in Australia, Mark Elliot and Darren Sharp, whom we visited during our lecture tour in Australia in June 2006, have become established as pioneering consultants in collaborative government. One of their most recent projects is a report on the relative success of online engagement projects by Australian government entities. You’ll find… Continue reading
Partnering community banks with state banks: the North Dakota Solution
Arianna Huffington just posted an article on the Huffington Post that has sparked a remarkable wave of interest, evoking nearly 5,000 comments in less than a week. Called “Move Your Money,” the article maintains that we can get credit flowing again on Main Street by moving our money out of the Wall Street behemoths and… Continue reading
Yochai Benkler on the emergent science of sharing
We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that’s not actually what we experience…. Continue reading
Towards open standards for (multiple) digital bodies management
Kalyia, in an excellent and thought-provoking interview with Jean Russell, explains the concept of digital bodies, why we need more than one, and why we should control them beyond the platforms: “Well lets start with physical bodies – we have just one of these. So when we walk around in physical space people recognize us… Continue reading
A collection of citations on peer to peer “selfhood”
For the full set of source references go here, where we explore the new age of relationality. * The Constellation Method of Social Change In spite of current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common… Continue reading
Why carbon taxes would be better than cap and trade
Overview of the argumentation by Robert J. Shapiro: “Cap-and-trade combines a regulatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions with a market-based scheme to trade as financial instruments the “permits” to produce those emissions. For all of cap-and-trade’s initial promise as an answer to climate change, the current financial crisis has made its vulnerabilities painfully clear. The… Continue reading
Co-workers as peers: the Mondragon principles of “Sovereignty of Labor”
Now that Mondragon is expanding into the U.S., is a good time to get to know the philosophical background of the experience. Excerpts from a series on Mondragon by John McNamara: “The Mondragon principle “Sovereignty of Labor” created departure from the cooperative movement. While the Rochdale Pioneers had good intentions, they abandoned worker cooperation in… Continue reading
Bolivia and Venezuela’s Achievements after reclaiming energy resources for public benefit
Though some American press might make you believe that the two countries discussed below are on the brink of collapse, two items quoted in this post show what the policies of the new governments in Bolivia and Venezuela have been achieving by retaking public control over energy resources and applying them to the benefit of… Continue reading