Commentary from Sam Rose: “Not only is urban agriculture an emerging movement for individuals, it is also being pursued as part of a sustainable urban renewal strategy throughout the midwest. Some examples include: http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/SweetWaterFishFarming/HomePage Sweetwater organics Aquaponics fishfarming in Milwaukee WI self sustaining urban food production in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit http://localfoodsystems.org/lfs-storytellers Efforts in Chicago… Continue reading
Participatory Leadership
We have started to separately collate material on the new forms of leadership that are emerging in networked communities. You can find our tag here. Our latest find is this table by Chris Corrigan, which contrasts the new requirements with those of classic hierarchical industrial firms and bureaucracies. Traditional ways of working Participatory leadership complementing… Continue reading
Independent Film Company Responds To BERR Consultation | TorrentFreak
TorrentFreak have just published this response to the BERR consultation on file-sharing in the UK. Read the full post here to check comments etc. Written by enigmax on August 27, 2009 This week the latest news in the Digital Britain debate caused a wave of protests as it was revealed the government is considering disconnecting… Continue reading
How p2p Works: An Introduction
A simple guide, with videos, illustrating how the concept of p2p works.
We need a p2p architecture for money too!
How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O’Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don’t let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t… Continue reading
Cyberspace as a military commons
Cyberspace is a kind of collective good, even a global public good. It also means that access to, if not command of, this new commons is essential for America’s power in the world, and that cyberspace must be defended against state and nonstate threateners. David Ronfeldt is on a roll here, and his longer blog… Continue reading
2065: P2P vs. Hollywood
Book: The Caryatids. Bruce Sterling. Del Rey, 2009 Review by Kevin Carson: “By way of caveat, let me get out front with the admission that this review involves mainly aspects of the “future history” scenario I find most intriguing, rather than with the story line or characters. While I can get into a good story,… Continue reading
Responding to the Maghrebi/Genovese challenge
Ignacio de Castro has written a fine trilogy on medieval p2p-like practices, that is somehow framed as a challenge to our p2p approach. It describes the practices of jewish maghrebi traders in the Middle Ages and their international support network, and wonders why they ultimately lost against their Genovese more ‘capitalist’ competitors. Ignacio asks: could… Continue reading
Technological inventions and human history
Kevin Kelly continues his interesting investigations into the Technium. True, to some, including me, his approach may appear sometimes as technological determinism. In this text, Kevin Kelly makes the point that individual changes in consciousness matter little, because they don’t scale up, but that changes in tools and technologies change the brain circuitry of millions… Continue reading
The power of affinity: there’s nothing virtual about online communities
Every Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW) avatar is a person pouring time and resources into community, that every tweet by every tweeter through every Twitter handle is a person who has taken finite time and resources and poured it into community, and every blog post by every blogger are time, energy, and… Continue reading
John Heron: there can be no participatory epistemology without mutuality
Below, John Heron reacts to the article, Participatory Perspectives on Counselling Research, by David Hiles, which we presented before. John Heron: “From my perspective a fundamental weakeness of the paper is that Hiles attends exclusively to the epistemic wing of participatory inquiry, that is, to the nature of a researcher’s participatory knowing, and not at… Continue reading
How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories
HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead! The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that… Continue reading
The persistence of scarcity in virtual worlds
There is no reason to believe that the role that virtual worlds like Second Life will play in the economic, political, and cultural innovation will be anything short of monumental, but it is imperative that we keep in view the ways in which such spaces,while transforming how many resources for us are arrayed and available,… Continue reading
Chinese group buying explained
The Chinese Internet is more developed from a social perspective than in the West. There are more people who are participating in these kinds of conversations, and they are more active. Nice article on Tuangou, Chinese ‘group buying’, and why it is not (yet?) working in the West. Excerpts from Lara Farrar: “Welcome to China’s… Continue reading
Crowdsourcing in Government: the Next Stop Design Bus in Utah
Via Henry Jenkins. Daren C. Brabham: ” Next Stop Design asks the crowd to design a bus stop for Salt Lake City, Utah. With Thomas W. Sanchez and a team of researchers from the University of Utah, we’re working in cooperation with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) and funded by a grant from the U.S…. Continue reading
Twitter’s intersubjectivity
This is really one of the best explanations I’ve seen on the underlying dynamics of Twitter! Kevin Marks: “Flow: At it heart Twitter is a flow – it doesn’t present an unread count of messages, just a list of recent ones, so you don’t have email’s inbox problem – the implicit pressure to turn bold… Continue reading