E.R.T. is the Greek television and radio broadcasting company that is part of the public sector and is supervised by the minister of state. Every Greek citizen has periodically (several times per year) to pay a certain fee (it is incorporated within the electricity bill) so that ERT can secure a sufficient budget to run…. Continue reading
Book of the Week: Towards an Economy of Contributions (2)
We continue the publication of some extra excerpts from Christian Siefkes important book on physicalizing peer production: From Exchange to Contributions. Today we start by discussing Problem 2: How to Allocate Limited Resources and Goods? Note that Stefan Meretz offers an alternative explanation to this process of Task Auctioning here. Christian Siefkes: Generally, sharing does… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Towards an Economy of Contributions (1)
Book: Christian Siefkes. From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. 2007. (download) We mentioned and introduced this book on a number of occasions, but given its importance, we are giving it some extra attention as book of the week, with two excerpts. Today, author Christian Siefkes presents the first ‘hard problem’,… Continue reading
Jon Garfunkel’s work on a Autonomous Reputation Framework
One of the interesting people we should be meeting tomorrow at the Yale Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace is Jon Garfunkel of Civilities.net. He’s main concern are the defense of privacy and reputation against malicious attack, for which he uses a Autonomous Reputation Framework. This framework includes: – Comment Management Responsibility – A Protocol… Continue reading
What the Web 3.0 really means: from the WWW to the Giant Social Graph
Tim Berners-Lee has a critically important posting which gives a key understanding to the totality of post-WWW technological evolution. Tim Berners-Lee proposes a three-phased evolution of the internet/web: 1. The internet (III = International Information Infrastructure) as the interconnecting of computers 2. The web (WWW) as the interconnecting of documents 3. The GGG (literally: Global… Continue reading
Decoding Liberation: On the political implications of free software
Decoding Liberation is a new book that is creating a lot of buzz in different mailing lists. It is written by Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter, both of the City University of New York. Because of the obligatory huge price tag on academic books, it has generated a huge discussion about the need to… Continue reading
Using the P2P-based cyberinfrastructure as a weapon against global warming?
The general internet infrastructure that we love so much because it enables peer to peer dynamics, is also itself part of the problem in causing global warming. How can we preserve this important infrastructure under the pressure of the environmental cost? This issue is causing some p2p-advocates sleepless nights, so it is with great joy… Continue reading
Towards Reputation Rights
As part of the Yale Symposium on Reputation Economies, participant Auren Hoffman, who is also CEO of Rapleaf, proposes a set of 3 reputation rights worth defending and fighting for. Auren Hoffman on Consumer Control in a Data-Driven World: “The amount of data collected on you increases every year. And recently, the slope of the… Continue reading
Johan Soderbergh on Hacking Capitalism
Johan Soderbergh’s new book is out and available via Amazon. While very pricey, which is really contradictory for such a topic, I have no doubt that this will be a significant book, as I’ve had the chance to read and hear Johan before. We hope to feature excerpts in our P2P Book of the Week… Continue reading
Some general comments on reputation economies
I’m far from being an expert in this topic, but I have been invited to participate in the Yale Information Society Project Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace, where I will speak in the panel on “Making a Name Online”, based on our experiences with launching the P2P Foundation from scratch. Part of the exercise… Continue reading
Launch of the Equal Dignity Group in Norway
Invitation to the Equal Dignity Group Launch Seminar Betsy Kawamura, (e-mail: [email protected], tlf: 97 00 28 19) and Rune Kvist Olsen (Rune Kvist Olsen, e-mail: [email protected], tlf. 90 09 45 58) forwarded an invitation for the free launch seminar of the Equal Dignity Group. Date: December 12, 2007, Time 12:00 to 16:00 Place: Norsk Taiji… Continue reading
The real social media spammers: Hollywood and the music industry…?
Big media is scared of social media There is another aspect to the recent TechCrunch stories (first one, follow up) about social media spamming that has not been focused on yet: the young entrepreneur/student who does all the dirty work has, as it seems, high profile clients paying him to do this. Comment no. 23… Continue reading
On the four stages of freedom and the need for Triple-Free approaches
One of the other interesting presentations during the Nottingham Peer Production Workshop was Tere Vaden’s intriguing presentation entitled a “Critique of Cybercommunism”. This title is misleading as Tere Vaden actually points out that people in favour of free and commons oriented approaches shouldn’t be satisfied with using tools owned by centralized corporations. Tere makes an… Continue reading
Daniel Pinchbeck on a Tantric approach to social change
Daniel Pinchbeck has posted a stimulating analysis on how we could and should approach social change. His longish posting is well worth a read. Here, I’m posting the conclusion, as he proposes a non-confrontational approach which “engages and absorbs the enemies”. My own contributions to a renewal of the emancipatory tradition have been posted here… Continue reading
Is there an enemy in peer production? 1) Stefan Meretz
Interesting contribution which appeared on the Oekonux mailing list, by Stefan Meretz: “To me the term “antagonist” seems to be an holy term of traditional working class movement, at least a religious term (Marx: “fetish”). It says, that the struggle can only be “solved” by transcending capitalism. So if you fight inside capitalism, say for… Continue reading
Abundance vs. scarcity: some distinctions
Richard Poynder asked me an interesting question: “What are your views on artificial scarcity in virtual environments like Second Life (which now has its own patent office)? Does this imply that in a world of molecular manufacturing we will see the same thing? That we will never realise a post-scarcity economy?” My reply is the… Continue reading