Steve Gillmor makes an interesting case in a rather dense blog entry: “Social advertising doesn’t work because users are there for friends, not buying stuff.” As Sam Rose summarizes the argument: “I think the basic insight stems from the fact that the average person sees well over a thousand advertising messages a day So, people… Continue reading
Open Source in Asia faces special hurdles
Food for thought, via IP Watch: “Gen Kenai, business developer for the open-source company Mozilla, spoke about the difficulty of expanding the open source movement into Asia. Technology news service CNet asked in January 2008 “where is Asia’s contribution to open source?†said Kenai, and added that when Linus Torvald, who started the open source… Continue reading
Overview of peer-based business models
I have published an article in the January 2008 Canadian “Open Source Business Resource”, a site which promotes open source based business models. It has an excellent archive of articles mediating the understanding of open communities with the needs of OS-based companies. For those familiar with my modelling work, this is a good summary of… Continue reading
Participatory Design in India: Urban Typhoon workshop
Announcement: The Urban Typhoon workshop is a multicultural, multidisciplinary and multimedia experiment in participatory design. It is organized by the residents of Koliwada and a global collective of researchers and activists. Architects, urban designers, planners, artists, anthropologists sociologists, photographers, media artists, activists and other creative people from India and abroad are invited to Koliwada for… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on possession (not property) as the basis of the commons
Only one more to go in Christian Siefkes summary presentation of his research on the material peer economy. Here, he focuses on replacing the notion of property by possession. Christian Siefkes: “Peer production is based on _commons_ and _possession,_ not on _property._ As long as you _use_ something (by yourself), there is no obvious difference… Continue reading
Companionism: introducing democracy in the corporation
On the book by Madoc Batcup. Companionism: why companies need democracy as much as countries. Exposure Publishing, 2007 Interesting proposal to introduce democratic governance in the corporate world, featured in Open Democracy. Madoc Batcup: “Democracy is a form of political governance. But it is also a principle, an idea about the best way for a… Continue reading
Marcin Jakubowski: A call for open engineering and a commons coalition for P2P Energy
Two items here. 1) A call by Marcin that is important enough to reproduce 2) remarkable work by Japanese researchers for a P2P infrastructure for local sustainable production 1: Marcin Jakubowski: “How many times have you heard the like of, “When solar cell companies develop cheaper panels, then we’ll switch to solar power.†Instead of… Continue reading
Ministry of Truth
Michel asked me to republish my comments on OpenCalais. On the Kendra mailing list I read an interesting posting about the OpenCalais system, developed by Reuters. According to their website the Calais initiative seeks to help make all the worlds content more accessible, interoperable and valuable via the automated generation of rich semantic metadata, the… Continue reading
Promoting open and free video and television platforms in Europe (Miro tour)
Nicholas Reville announces the Spread Miro European Tour Here is the text: Know someone in Europe we should meet with? Let us know! PCF’s Holmes Wilson will be in Europe in late February through early April meeting with people about Miro. He’ll be passing through several cities, attending some excellent conferences, and wants to meet… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on Decision Making and Conflict Resolution in Material Peer Production
This is the third and last part of Christian Siefkes second installment on material peer production, which tackles the general topic of free cooperation. After having introduced distribution pools and local associations as mechanisms, he now tackles the governance issue. Christian Siefkes: “How will projects and associations make decisions, how will they resolve conflicts? I… Continue reading
Case Study: Florence Devouard, Wikia, and the Wikipedia admins
By Michel Bauwens (published by me as he had dodgy adsl connection in Thailand this morning) Seth Finkelstein brings to the attention of his readers, an interesting case at the Wikipedia, which concerns the efforts by Florence Devouard (handle: “Anthere”), Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, to change the content of… Continue reading
Proposed OSE specifications aim to guarantee truly open physical peer production
What do we need to have “economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts”, i.e. true Distributive Production? Proposed by Marcin Jakubowsky and the Open Source Ecology project: “We like to be clear about the meaning of open, or open source,’ as used in this work for items of physical production. By open source, we mean… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on Local Associations for organizing material peer production
In the second part of his contribution on free cooperation, after introducing his concept of distribution pools, Christian Siefkes tackles the issue of local cooperation. Christian Siefkes: “There are things that concern all the people living in a specific area, such as the providing and maintenance of infrastructure and of public services (e.g., health and… Continue reading
Why Danah Boyd is depressed and angry, and so am I, about scientific lockdown by publishers
Danah Boyd is depressed and angry, because she has written a marvellous essay on Facebook privacy, but it is locked down between a paywall, by her own publisher Sage. She writes: “I’m deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it. It is not because you aren’t interested (although many of… Continue reading
Solidarity-based productive chains
I have come in contact with Brazilian network-theory author Euclides André Mance, who is studying how to use the network form for human emancipation, but, unlike our own focus on distributive peer production, focuses on the extension of the collaborative production in the context of what is increasingly being called solidarity economics. It’s an area… Continue reading
Christian Siefkes on Distribution Pools
As a trendwatcher with a larger overview of trends than people spending less time on this, I’m often frustrated that I see various initiatives emerging, each working independently, often re-inventing the wheel, and not coordinating on standards and interoperability. A lot of energy is wasted in re-doing things that have already been done and could… Continue reading