David Bollier gave a great speech in April 2008 about commons-based value creation and what public authorities could do to stimulate it, by focusing on a fourfold strategy framework. Bollier wrote that: “Government should actively support the commons, just as it supports the market. Government does all sorts of things to help markets function well…. Continue reading
Participation Camp: Change the Rules – New York City and Online – June 27th and 28th
Participation Camp is a two-day conference in New York focused on improving citizen participation in government. Since the means to making a truly participatory democracy are not obvious or well-defined, we’re focusing on making the event fun and exploratory. Here’s some text from ParticipationCamp.org. Democracy is a game in which we all make the rules…. Continue reading
Can Twollars become a ‘real’ internet currency?
Twollars, a name made up of Twitter and Dollars, aren’t ‘real’ money – at least not yet. (http://p2pfoundation.net/Twollars) (http://twollars.com/) The Twollar is an appreciation unit that can be given by simply tweeting a worthy recipient, specifying how many Twollars you want to give. More than that, though, it’s a harbinger of things to come. My… Continue reading
A Hue and Cry over Fan Labor
From a discussion on the IDC mailing list, about the nature of the exploitation and emancipation of labour in online platforms. The occasion is an upcoming conference on Digital Labor in New York in November 2009. Pat Kane tells the story of his music band Hue and Cry. Pat Kane: “In terms of a debate… Continue reading
Thomas Greco on the End of Money (3): Towards A Complete Web-Based Trading Platform
In our first treatment of Thomas Greco’s new Book of the Week, we presented the book with the critique of the current system, while last wednesday, we showed his analysis of why present alternatives are not yet working. Today, Thomas Greco brings us recommendations for a new integrated post-monetary exchange system, using the features of… Continue reading
A vision-logic for the p2p age?
In order to fully take advantage of peer to peer modes, we need to upgrade our skills, both intrapersonally as individual persons, as well as inter-personally through our relational intelligence. We follow tools and methods that can help us achieving this in our wiki sections on Facilitation and Collective Intelligence. We just added an important… Continue reading
A typology of online journalism: journalists as facilitators
In the French journal Esprit, “Laurent Mauriac and Pascal Riché, members of the team behind French politics website Rue89, explain how they attempt to bridge the gap between print and the Internet by encouraging contributions from experts and web users, but using journalists to coordinate, direct and edit this participation.” Here’s an excerpt in which… Continue reading
Does Google search practice an oligarchic algorithm?
Intriguing suggestion by Andrew Lehman: “It was clear to me that in preparation for going public, Google was actually seeding its searches with inefficiencies in order to encourage profits. Regarding commercial searches, it’s only got worse with time. By embedding top 10 positions with Wikipedia entries, videos and other tangentially related content, commercial businesses continue… Continue reading
The governance of Twitter
it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code. Stowe Boyd’s remarks were triggered by an earlier report that Twitter staff are mostly following their close colleagues and hence not in touch with the broader developer and user communities:… Continue reading
Peer producing agriculture with Crop Mobs
The idea is bigger than barn-raisings, more technical than workshops, more thoughtful than textbooks. It is guerrilla agrarianism in the information age. Maybe that isn’t an apt description, but when I watch shovels hitting dirt on a foreign farm with a crew assembled using email, social networking and word of mouth, it surely feels like… Continue reading
Four types of human practice
Tom Haskins continues to refine his modelling of relational and governance models First the graph: Tom Haskins comments: “By combining the Cynefin and TIMN models together, I’m exploring a different set of questions about practice. I’ve been wondering about the following four questions: * What tribal practice(s) handle unknowable, chaotic situations better than institutional, market… Continue reading
Thomas Greco on the End of Money (2): Why Exchange Alternatives Fail to Thrive
The following text, The State of the Alternative Exchange Movement, by Thomas Greco, is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of our book of the Week: The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. Please note the book can be ordered here. Thomas Greco: “Exchange alternatives are not entirely new. Indeed, in times past, there… Continue reading
Peer Money
Christian Siefkes denies that money and markets are “more or less neutral tools which can be used for non-capitalist purposes,” arguing that since money and markets were never the primary means of organizing production in a non-capitalist society, money “cannot become the dominant social form outside of capitalism.” . I would note, in passing, that… Continue reading
From pirate enclaves to utopian communities
I missed this when it came out, but this first (soon to be followed by a second volume I was informed) issue of Affinities journal, has an extraordinary collection of really interesting essays examining the workings of the Zapatistas, Italian social centers, and other alternative movements. Abstract: “From pirate enclaves to utopian communities, from communal… Continue reading
From Unnovation to Innovation
Umair Haque writes that: “Most innovation, well, isn’t: it is “unnovation,” or innovation that fails to create authentic, meaningful value. The biggest stumbling block to innovation is unnovation: most companies are too busy unnovating to ever learn how to truly innovate. In the race to innovate, most organizations forget a simple but fundamental economic truth…. Continue reading
The Need for New Theories of Money
It seems we will have quite a few open money items this week, so I asked for some special contributions. Ryan Lanham sent the following editorial: “Economics might be summed up as the field that studies allocation of resources. It might also be seen as a the field that studies the nature and flow of… Continue reading