By the Year of Open Source: “Becky Stern and Lada Ada (Limor Fried) built on Steve Conklin’s disk emulator and knitting machine resources to allow their modern computers to work with the ancient microcontroller of a 1980s knitting machine. This meant that they could now knit designs made with modern tools, too complex or tedious… Continue reading
MOOC’s as a radical challenge to the traditional education model
Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public… Continue reading
‘People to People’: an alternative way of delivering humanitarian aid in Aceh, Indonesia
Republished via Azwar Hasan: ‘People to People’: an alternative way of delivering humanitarian aid “The tsunami of 2004 struck Aceh in Indonesia with particular force. Some 130,000 people were reported dead and 37,000 missing, and over half a million lost their homes. Economic losses across Indonesia have been put at nearly $5 billion. In response,… Continue reading
Guilding the Lilly? (using p2p guilds for public regulation)
Executive Peer-to-Peer Summary: This essay is partially in response to Whither government regulation in a highly complex age? which questions the ability of a hollowed-out, privatized government to effectively cope with the increasing complexity of social and environmental crises such as global warming. What follows assumes some prior familiarity with the basic ideas of p2p… Continue reading
Open Education in the School of Hope (Tamera/Portugal)
Escola da Esperança – Vision for a School of Hope (Tamera/Portugal)
Book of the Day: Tweets and the Streets
* Book: Paolo Gerbaudo. TWEETS AND THE STREETS: SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONTEMPORARY ACTIVISM. Pluto, 2012. Publisher’s summary: “Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the ‘indignados’ protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise… Continue reading
Transition from Crisis 1: The Digitized Civil Society as a Force
Excerpted from Jaap van Til: ““Quo Vadis?”. That is what most recently appointed Cabinet ministers in Europe, China, and the USA will ask themselves during the endless quarrels over money and budgets they have to attend. Where do we go from here? Centuries of violent clashes between empires have passed, each trying to impose dominance… Continue reading
The Evolution, Decline and Renaissance of Social Systems: an 8-part journey
A summary of processes of decay and renewal by Seb Paquet: “IN ORDER TO DESCRIBE a process through which something new emerges, we have to begin by examining the salient features and processes present in the old system that trigger the rise of the new. In this and the next post, I will offer a… Continue reading
The Rise of New Economic Cultures
Excerpted from a fascinating interview of Manuel Castells by Paul Mason, for BBC 4: Manuel Castells: “When I mention this alternative economic culture, it’s a combination of two things. “A number of people have been doing this for quite a while already because they don’t agree with the meaninglessness of their lives. Now there is… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Religion and Equality in Human Evolution
In my book Religion in Human Evolution and its sequel, a work-in-progress titled The Modern Project in the Light of Human Evolution, I have been exploring a new metanarrative by means of an extended hypothesis about religion and equality in human evolution — a hypothesis that is open to correction at every point and raises… Continue reading