I’m republishing this very important and crucial argument by St. Peter, who has one of the landmark blogs about the public domain. We recommend reading his explanation on the linkage between copyright and the public domain, which is also a how-to guide on how to place your creative work directly into the public domain. Please… Continue reading
A meditation on abundance and scarcity
I wrote this for the European Center for the Experience Economy, which just published a related contribution on the law of asymmetric competition. Text: We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite… Continue reading
The Prosper Lender Rebellion, and the US Credit/Borrowing Black Hole
(via P2P-Kredite) The P2P Lending enabler-site http://prosper.com is experiencing a rebellion by it’s lenders, mostly found on it’s forums: See: â€FLASH:Prosper bans $100.000 lender“, “Prosper Mng. Living Under a Rock“, “Shooting the Messenger“, “What happens if Prosper goes under?“, “I am done lending on Prosper“, “Hello Prosper Moderator“, “Lender’s WHO are DONE with Prosper“, “My… Continue reading
Gregg Lahood on spiritual projection (P2P in Australia 6)
Gregg Lahood, a transpersonal psychologist I had the opportunity to contact during my last lecture tour in Australia, has paid us a visit in Chiang Mai, and this was the occasion for some fascinating conversations on spiritual authoritarianism. I would like to share one of the texts found on his website, dealing with the link… Continue reading
Video: 2012 – The Return of Quetzalcoatl
Michel asked me to post this video, “We often argue that peer to peer is not just a cause, but also a result of an already changing human consciousness, though our previous engagement with integral theory leads us to belief that such change is differentiated amongst many different groups of people. It is because of… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Structures of Digital Participation and Object-oriented Democracy
James Burke alerted me to a new article and soon to be published book: Structures of Digital Participation, ed. Joe Karaganis, SSRC Books, 2007 – written with participation of Warren Sack. Here’s a short excerpt with Warren’s commentary on the concept of Object-oriented democracy, orginally derived from Bruno Latour: Concept by Bruno Latour, presented by… Continue reading
Why Google and/or Unesco should support this extraordinary cultural gem
Throughout my life and my travels, I regularly would visit the offices of the Union of International Associations, and have conversations with Anthony Judge and his wonderful staff. A Cultural Gem and Global Resource for Humankind Apart from producing useful but traditional directories on international associations, they also produced an absolutely remarkable collection of information… Continue reading
An open design project for renewable energy
This seems a significant project: The SHPEGS Open Energy Project is an open design project to design and build a system that uses a combination of direct and indirect solar collection to generate electricity and store thermal energy in an economical, environmentally friendly, scalable, reliable, efficient and location independent manner using common construction materials. The… Continue reading
Revisiting the cathedral/bazaar metaphor: Why both Eric Raymond and Nicholas Carr got it (partly) wrong
Pat Kane send me an interesting question: “Is Nicholas Carr right here when he says “If Eric Raymond made a mistake in his paper, it was in drawing too sharp a distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar. They’re not two different and incompatible approaches to innovation. Their relationship is symbiotic. Without the bazaar, the… Continue reading
How the law of asymmetric competition should affect innovation policy
I was just alerted, by our resident neonomad pattern recognizer Dante, of a research disseration regarding competitiveness in a knowledge base economy. The full title is: The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy. I’m listing the abstract below, and though I have not read it yet, it seems to take a innovative and… Continue reading
European researchers are developping true peer to peer systems
Publicly funded research remains useful. It gave us not only the Web and Netscape, but European researchers have been quietly developing true distributed peer to peer systems, which fullfill the promise of equal users. Please do check out: Tribler : http://www.tribler.org Peerple : http://www.peerple.net Wipeer : http://www.wipeer.com Our friend and expert Gwendal Simon can explain… Continue reading
Towards Open Sphere structures for p2p organizations? (P2P in Australia 5)
I just arrived in Brisbane, the last leg of my trip in Australia. I have met so many interesting people here and been so well received, that I’m tempted to conclude that Australia is a true P2P country! The following is quite an intriguing and pioneering experiment in peer to peer governance. I’m reproducing the… Continue reading
Updates on intellectual property
Here are some interesting items we received recently: 1. American University’s Center for Social Media and Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property are undertaking a multifaceted project. “Copyright and Fair Use in Participatory Media,†to promote standards for the use of copyrighted materials in user-generated media that is broadcast over the internet. 2. This… Continue reading
Meta market launched for immaterial social web valuation
Burak Arikan has launched a first private alpha version of the Meta Markets project. This means you can only participate if you are invited by someone already in. Burak writes that: Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading shares of socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Ravi Batra’s New Golden Age
We recently mentioned that Lawrence Lessig was playing down his advocacy of free culture, in order to focus his next ten years on understanding the causes of the corruption of (and not just ‘in’) the political process. An author who has preceded him is Ravi Batra in his new book: The New Golden Age: The… Continue reading
P2P Learning in Thailand: Jan Orsini on the Success Case Replication system
On the occasion of a speech for a Global Happiness and Public Policy conference in Bangkok, I had a wonderful encounter with a development workers Jan Orsini, and I discovered a successfull peer to peer learning scheme, which functions without technology, but embeds all the p2p principles in its approach. Here is the description of… Continue reading