From an interview by Miren Gutierrez (IPS) of HAZEL HENDERSON, sustainability metrics pioneer, on recent proposals by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen. Excerpts: IPS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked award-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, and 20 other experts to find new ways to measure growth. The panel issued a report that says that… Continue reading
The social enterpreneurs controversy
Cause Global reports on the charge of elitism against social enterprise funding and control. Excerpt: “There’s a growing debate in the social enterprise world, not only about who’s a social entrepreneur but about who’s being left out of the club. True, the exceptions and misconceptions abound, but the debate settles around two main points —… Continue reading
Eric Hunting on Defining Post-Industrial Design
Looking at the different Maker blogs, I could see that there was an emergent set of information standards forming ad hoc by a popularity-driven process of selection as well as limitations -chiefly in graphics as people generally can’t produce their own drawn illustrations so resort to photos and video. The people who first started publishing… Continue reading
The toll of inequality
The excellent political magazine Soundings (UK) dedicates a special issue to inequality. A summary: “Inequality can quite literally be lethal, writes Göran Therborn in Soundings. One study, of 18 000 Whitehall civil servants, has shown that the risk of early death closely followed the office hierarchy: “After age, smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol concentration and a… Continue reading
Hazel Henderson on Green Finance
Great intro by Hazel Henderson to developments in sustainable and socially responsible investing, green sustainability metrics, and the necessary overhaul of finance and business education. By Hazel Henderson: “Marking the 20th Anniversary of SRI in the Rockies offers more than an opportunity to review the hard-won progress of investors to prove that socially responsible investing… Continue reading
Leapfrogging towards post-industrial development
That is the opportunity that the development of Africa presents. Rural Africa missed out on the industrial revolution that raised the living standards of the industrial nations. It is a fresh canvas where we can paint a new picture of development. We can work together, learning from the mistakes of the past, using the sustainable… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Cooperative economics from an evangelical point of view
As Wendell Berry says, we live in an economy that is based on the seven deadly sins. Book: God’s Economy: Redefining the Health & Wealth Gospel. By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. Zondervan, 2009 An intriguing book, so I asked the author, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a number of questions, to which he gracefully responded. Interview: “1. Why exactly do… Continue reading
Student support for open access reaches 5 million
The incredible growth of the student interest in Open Access, especially the depth of their commitment to advocacy, sends a strong signal that this movement is here to stay. Heartening news: “The student Right to Research Coalition, a group of national, international, and local student associations that advocate for governments, universities, and researchers to adopt… Continue reading
A tribute to the Levellers, True Levellers, and The Diggers of 1649
The start of a 3-part fiction on this historical movement of commoners is below. First, a short intro (more here): “The Levellers were a relatively loose alliance of radicals and freethinkers who came to prominence during the period of instability that characterized the English Civil War of 1642 – 1649. What bound these people together… Continue reading
Has Leviathan been open-sourced?
A paragraph from a draft paper of mine titled “After the crisis: Towards a new social contract” for an April 2010 conference at Tallinn University of Technology: ….. Has Leviathan been open-sourced? One can articulate that all this relatively new theoretical universe successfully replaces Levathian with open source, collaborative production models, which motivate and elevate… Continue reading
“Forge lock in” is not the problem. It’s the choices that people make, that are the problem.
(the following is derived from ongoing conversation among Sam Rose, Paul B Hartzog, Rick Adler, and Keith Smith [and probably others I am currently forgetting about) At http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1282 Eric S. Raymond writes: The worst problem with almost all current hosting sites is that they’re data jails. You can put data (the source code revision history,… Continue reading
A P2P Revolution in Healthcare?
Insulin-dependent diabetics, for example, quickly learn how to manage their blood glucose levels at home by matching their insulin dosage to changes in their diet and physical activity. Many diabetics have also joined online communities to share information and advice, sometimes viewing each other as more trusted advisors than their own doctors. Diabetics who take… Continue reading
Conflict in Adoption of Collaborative Networks: Call for Papers
Via Athina Karatzogianni: Call For Papers for The Inaugural Conference of the Virtual Communication, Collaboration and Conflict (VIRT3C) Research Group at the University of Hull VIRT3C@Hull 2010: Developing the Virtual Society: Conflict in Adoption of Collaborative Networks 19-20 March URL = http://virt3c.wordpress.com/ Public Keynote speaker: * Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures and University of… Continue reading
Revisiting Social Welfare in P2P
An important research paper from the p2p team at T.U. Delft: Report: Revisiting Social Welfare in P2P. Rameez Rahman, Michel Meulpolder, David Hales, Johan Pouwelse, Henk Sips. Delft University of Technology, Parallel and Distributed Systems Report Series More info via [email protected] Abstract: “Extensive work has been done on studying freeriding and incentivizing cooperation in peer-to-peer… Continue reading
Cory Doctorow. Makers
Cory Doctorow. Makers (Tor, 2009). The major themes I’ve written about here lately — the decline of traditional mass-production industry, the crisis of value and shift of production outside the cash nexus, the rise of micromanufacturing (see “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution“), the digital/network culture — are all central to Makers. And given my research and… Continue reading
P2P Foundation Online Influence Markers
It’s always nice to hear that one’s work has some kind of real impact, even if it’s only online impact, since this presumably influences real people with real life actions. Topsy claims to have highly accurate influence algorythms. You may want to have a look at http://topsy.com/s?q=P2P+Foundation, Which concluded that we reached nearly 4,000 retweets… Continue reading