For the sources, go here. * 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 cause and vision of what’s possible. – Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Freize… Continue reading
Dealing with (e-)waste, the scarcity of social equity, and the potential for abundance in the knowledge economy
Real economic abundance can come about only when the demand for a good is finite and the plentiful supply makes the abundant good affordable enough to all members of society. It lists an abundance-nurturing ethic as a major goal of abundance management, and encourages economists to make abundance together with scarcity their conceptual point of… Continue reading
John Wilbanks: how open science differs from open source software
I propose that the point of this isn’t to replicate “open source” as we know it in software. The point is to create the essential foundations for distributed science so that it can emerge in a form that is locally relevant and globally impactful. We can do this. But we have to be relentless in… Continue reading
Open Everything P2P Presentation for TEDx Brussels
With the help of the Prezi staff (thanks to lily fischer and zoltan especially), I am happy to be able to present my first presentation on “Open Everything” for the TEDx Brussels event at the European Parliament:
The emergence of algorithmic authority
Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority. … Algorithmic authority handles the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” problem by accepting… Continue reading
Strong IPR regimes counterproductive for climate change technology transfers
SciDev summarizes the conclusions from a new report undertaken by Asian research institutes: “The notion that climate technology cannot be transferred to a developing country unless it has strong intellectual property laws — a cherished belief among developed countries — has been called into question by a new study. Five Asian research institutes collaborated to… Continue reading
Car sharing as an example of post-capitalist cultural change
From a stimulating essay by Catherine Marie Simpson on the decline on car culture: Catherine Marie Simpson: “Car sharing shifts the dominant conception of a car from being a ‘commodity’, which people purchase and subsequently identify with, to a ‘service’ or network of vehicles that are collectively used. It does this through breaking down the… Continue reading
US Steelworkers team up with Spanish/Basque cooperative Mondragon
We missed this announcement a month ago, but it is still significant. Carl Davidson: “Oct. 27, 2009–The United Steel Workers Union, North America’s largest industrial trade union, announced a new collaboration with the world’s largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain. News of the announcement spread rapidly throughout the communities… Continue reading
The “Inner Democracy” of Leadingship
Rune Kvist Olsen has published a new paper, entitled: * The DemoCratic Workplace. Empowering People (demos) to Rule (cratos) their own workplace. Organizing Individual and Group Decision Processes through Personal Competence-based Authority. By Rune Kvist Olsen, 2009 It distinguishes leadership from leadingship, and traditional forms of representative democracy, considered as an “outer democracy”, including in… Continue reading
Measuring p2p Networks (Hint; It’s not easy!)
There have been recent reports about the supposed decline in p2p traffic and also talked about the difficulties in measuring p2p networks. There is an interesting paper by Stutzbach et al entitled ‘On Unbiased Sampling for Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks‘ – now the paper has some fairly technical bits in it, but you can still get… Continue reading
What is the impact of open education on the university?
Via: An interesting special issue of IRRODL on Openness and the Future of Higher Education is available now at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/issue/view/38. Please note the article: Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education. By Jan Philipp Schmidt, Christine Geith, Stian Håklev, Joel Thierstein From the introduction by David Wiley and John Hilton: “Once considered to be mostly… Continue reading
A Design for A Peer Comments System
I’ve had a read of ‘Robust vote sampling in a P2P media distribution system‘. It is a very interesting research paper. The idea that grabs me most is the one about using gossip-based network systems to decentralise metadata. Let me explain; if you think of a book on Amazon, it comes with lots of additional… Continue reading
Africa: the return of the Commons
Via Pambazuka news: (excerpt from original article which has references) Korir Sing’Oei: “I argue here that the choice of Ostrom for this important award is perhaps more significant for Africa’s poor than the recognition bestowed upon president Obama, our collective pride for the latter’s international respect notwithstanding. Since the 1960s, the predominant policy prescription for… Continue reading
Free Software and Free Culture in Brazil
Brazil is truly progressive in its embrace of Free Culture and Free Software. At the 2008 Forum Internacional Software Livre Brazil’s Ministry of Education unveiled the numbers for their ongoing Proinfo Project which aims to create 53,000 Free Software Labs by the end of 2009 supporting digital literacy and Internet access for up to 52… Continue reading
Book review: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America
John Curl, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009). Curl’s history of cooperative and communal movements in America is set against the backdrop of one overpowering trend: the transition from an almost completely self-employed work force at the time of Independence,… Continue reading
The peer funding of green ventures
We asked some questions to Marc Dangeard, founder of the Entrepreneur Commons: “Q: Some people suggest that there is already too much capital chasing green technology and renewables, that it is the next bubble in the making, yet we clearly need to move massively in that direction. How does this contradiction in perceptions arise? MD:… Continue reading