We continue and conclude our presentation of the recommended book, Decoding Liberation, with 2 excerpts. If you want a copy of the book, drop the authors a line at schopra (or sdexter) AT sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu The first excerpt, a critique of classic computer science, is contrasted with its alternative, an open computer science, in the second… Continue reading
The principle of subsidiarity and the primacy of civil society
This post aims to create more background to our recent discussion on peer to peer and the state. It explains the principle of subsidiarity, which expresses the primacy of civil society, and is part of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. Excerpts (from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church):: ““a. Value… Continue reading
Dale Carrico on peer to peer and the state
Dale Carrico, in the same post we mentioned yesterday in our discussion on the market, also tackles the issue of the relation between the state, democracy, and peer to peer: Dale writes that: “Violence inheres in human plurality as a permanent possibility, and human beings are always capable of retroactively justifying any conduct, however violent… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Decoding Liberation (1): the distribution of work and beautiful code
Book: Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. Routledge, 2007. We mentioned this book before, as it is a systematic inquiry into the liberatory potential of free software as a mode of production and governance, that could be applied in other domains. Here’s a review. As is… Continue reading
Dale Carrico on peer to peer and the market
Dale Carrico has an interesting response to a critique, that equates P2P and the Market: “Ironically, the laissez-faire capitalist system of grassroots exchanges of money is ‘p2p’ while basic income guarantee represents a centralized, ‘broadcast’ form of economic exchange.” He responds in the following way, stressing how markets are entirely depending on the institutional framework… Continue reading
Why is Creative Commons supporting proprietary DRM?
Martin Springer is unhappy that the Creative Commons leadership supports Adobe’s proprietary DRM format for metadata, rather than the open source alternative Chillout: He writes that: “What I don’t understand is that the Creative Commons developers support a development that will lead to a situation where content creators will have to pay license fees to… Continue reading
Mark Choate on the competitive advantages of social software platorms
Mark Choate participated in the same issue of Cutter Journal, where I also published an article on the Entreprise 2.0 paradigm. In his article, he addresses the question, where is the competitive advantage in a platform, where in theory, people could leave rather quickly, but in fact, their past involvement and investment usually keeps them… Continue reading
Video: The peer to peer vision
During my last lecture tour, in the Bay Area, I had the chance to give a lecture to the Integrative Spirituality group, initiated by Lawrence Wollersheim, whose open source spirituality approach we have introduced a few weeks ago. Amongst the audience was Akasa Tseng, a Taiwanese-born performer of shamanic music. Supportive of the peer to… Continue reading
Creating an open sphere p2p structure alongside hierarchical institutional structures
Last week, I gave the first ever 2-day seminar on peer to peer and unlocking cooperation in an institutional framework, for the Ark Group in Sydney, and I was very happy on how it went, especially thanks for the brilliant facilitation work of Tim Gartside. His open sphere methodology is a great way to translate… Continue reading
Our new digital selves and their relational augmentation
One of the value phrases I use in the new visioning video just produced, is “alone we are a fragment, together we are whole”. This could easily be misunderstood as an appeal to new agey wholism or a return to some form of collectivism. But my view of the new relational or p2p self is… Continue reading
Tracking 2.0 and 3.0 concepts
I have created an overview page listing the entries on 2.0 and 3.0 concepts already curated in our wiki. I think this is a pretty good way to track the thinking about the transformative effects of technology usage. For example, here is a strong statement of Robert Cringely on how education is affected: “we’ve reached… Continue reading
Video: Do-It-Yourself Counterculture
Makers – A short-subject documentary about the Do-It-Yourself Counterculture from Brian Boyko on .
From Synthetic Inequality to Real World Equality?
First Monday has a quite extraordinary special issue focusing mostly of what we would call Peer Governance, but also has a focus on the governance of gaming worlds. One article that catches my attention is Edward Castronova’s take on Synthetic Inequality in virtual or what he calls ‘synthetic worlds’. According to him, the dominant mentality… Continue reading
New links and highlights from the P2P Audiovisual Guide (April 08): Open-Source Mobile Options
Open-Source Mobile Options This month’s focus is on mobile phones – it now appears that Apple is overwhelmed by the interest in their iPhone as a platform and at the same time the official Apple iPhone SDK seems to bring some serious limitations for both users and developers – for the sake of a safe… Continue reading
Olivier Auber’s Game Over: Can internet governance be more distributed?
In preparation of the June 2008 ICANN congress in Paris, our friend Olivier Auber (along with Olivier Zablocki) is hoping to start a debate and intervention against the increased re-centralization of the internet/web infrastructure, and particularly around the less than democratic current governance processes, see here for the text (in French). Olivier is hoping and… Continue reading
Do we need open source streets?
There is a marvelous essay by Dan Hill in the City of Sound blog. It reveals how our physical environment is already being enriched by an extraordinary amount of invisible data, and what this may mean for sociability in the near future. Here’s the start of the article, to give you a taste: “The way… Continue reading