Excerpted from Umair Haque: “It’s well past time to begin imagining an organization of a radically different kind — one that takes a quantum leap beyond strategy, marketing, and finance into a novel galaxy of unexplored, untapped economic possibilities. Here’s what I think that organization — call it the Meaning Organization — might look it…. Continue reading
Open hardware summit conference review: the emergence of hybrid business models
Republished from Ruth Suehle: “If there was an overarching message from the speakers at last week’s Open Hardware Summit, particularly those in the first morning block, it’s that openness isn’t that critical. It sounds strange coming from a conference whose name starts with “open,” but speaker after speaker talked about hybrids and doing whatever worked,… Continue reading
A review and typology of Open Business Models
This month we are serialising the report “Synthetic overview of the collaborative economy”, coproduced by Orange Labs and the P2P Foundation. Today Chapter 6: Open Business Models. This is the final chapter, but on Monday we will post the in-depth Appendixes. The “Ask Me Anything” Q&A with Michel Bauwens from reddit has now been recorded as… Continue reading
Debating the Partner State (1): Wired’s arguments against government regulation of the sharing economy
In Wired’s binary California Ideology, it’s either ‘bad regulation’ or no regulation at all. The article contains gems like: “Profit is a much more powerful driver for quality than regulatory compliance.” Contrast this with the extraordinarily good work of Shareable magazine, in trying to make municipal regulations sharing-friendly and even sharing-constructive. Here is a neo-libertarian,… Continue reading
Special issue of TIM Review: Born Digital = Born Global
The October 2012 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review’s themes is Born Global. You can download it here. In This Issue: Editorial: Born Global Chris McPhee, Tony Bailetti What Technology Startups Must Get Right to Globalize Early and Rapidly Tony Bailetti To Internationalize Rapidly from Inception: Crowdsource Elnaz Heidari, Mohsen Akhavannia, Nirosh Kannangara Using… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The Grafitos Workers Council in Venezuela
EWAN ROBERTSON analyzes their experience in the context of the wider Venezuelan Worker Control Movement: “The struggle for worker control in Grafitos began in early 2009, when the former boss refused to negotiate a new collective contract with the workers’ union and tried to close the factory, taking the machinery with him. In response, the… Continue reading
Join EFF’s Efforts to Keep 3D Printing Open
Source: EFF Thanks to the open hardware community, you can now have a 3D printer in your home for just a few hundred dollars, with dozens of printer models to choose from and build upon. Community-designed printers already outclass proprietary printers costing 30 times as much. This incredible innovation is possible because the core patents… Continue reading
Stuttgart’s union-driven renewal of the Labor-Management Co-Determination System in Germany
Excerpted from Hilary Wainwright: “Something interesting is going on in the city of Stuttgart, one of the regional success stories of the German system of Mitbestimmung, or ‘co-determination’, where workers have a role in the management of companies. The dominant trend in Germany is of co-determination becoming ‘crisis corporatism’, in which the unions concede low… Continue reading
Iraq (and Iran): the monetary hypothesis behind the invasions
Excerpted from Rick Falkvinge: “The USD, being the world’s dominant currency, holds two immense advantages of being held in currency reserves: first, each dollar bought and stockpiled in a non-US country is one dollar that gave the US citizens (or government) that purchasing power against other nations for free. (If I print money for fun… Continue reading
Post-Fact Epistemology and a more divisive internet public sphere
Excerpted from Clay Shirky: “Here’s what the “post-fact” literature has right: the Internet allows us to see what other people actually think. This has turned out to be a huge disappointment. When anyone can say anything they like, we can’t even pretend most of us agree on the truth of most assertions any more. The… Continue reading