I. Commons and Worlds

Commons exist within worlds. Long before private property showed its ugly head and started to devour territories, people created what today we call commons as a principal strategy to enact their worlds. These worlds, made up of human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, material and spiritual beings and forms woven together in inextricably entangled ways, have continued to persevere nevertheless.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1984) describes how the introduction of barbwire for cattle ranching in the Caribbean Coast region of Colombia at the dawn of the twentieth century interrupted flows of people and animals, regularized landscapes and even desiccated wetlands and lagoons in some areas. Despite these challenges, the region’s people had a resilient culture and strove time and again to reconstitute their commons. They sought to recreate the sensual wholeness that Raoul Vaneigem describes as a casualty of the economy:

The economy is everywhere that life is not….Economics is the most durable lie of the approximately ten millennia mistakenly accepted as history….With the intrusion of work the body loses its sensual wholeness…work existed from the moment one part of life was devoted to the service of the economy while the other was denied and repressed (Vaneigem 1994:17, 18, 27, 28).

And so, and against all odds, and like many other people throughout the world, the Caribbean people described by Fals go on enacting a world of their own, creating with every act and every practice worlds in which the commons – indeed, commoning – still find a breathing space and at times even the chance to flourish. Commoners are like that. They refuse to abide by the rules of the One-World World (OWW) that wishes to organize everything in terms of individuals, private property, markets, profits, and a single notion of the Real. OWW seeks to banish nature and the sacred from the domain of an exclusively human-driven life (Law 2011).

Those who insist on commoning defy this civilization of the One-World (capitalist, secular, liberal, patriarchal, white) that arrogates for itself the right to be “the world” and that reduces all other worlds to nonexistence or noncredible alternatives to what exist (Santos 2002). Vaneigem is again instructive:

Civilization was identified with obedience to a universal and eternal market relationship….The commodity is the original form of pollution….Nature cannot be liberated from the economy until the economy has been driven out of human life….(From the moment the market system minimizes the fruits of the earth by seeing them only in terms of the fruits of labor, the market system treats nature as its slave)… As the economy’s hold weakens, life is more able to clear a path for itself (Vaneigem 1994).

This reality has always been evident to most of the world’s peoples-territory (pueblos-territorio).¹ An activist from the Process of Black Communities of Colombia said: “The territory has no price. Our ancestors cared for the territory with a great sense of belonging. This is why we have to create our economies not from the outside coming in but the other way around: from the inside going outwards.”² The world this activist talks about has persevered, again despite all odds. Let us visit this this world for a brief moment.

II. Yurumanguí: Introducing Relational Worlds

In Colombia’s southern Pacific rainforest region, picture a seemingly simple scene from the Yurumanguí River, one of the many rivers that flow from the Western Andean mountain range towards the Pacific Ocean, an area inhabited largely by Afrodescendant communities.³ A father and his six-year old daughter paddling with their canaletes (oars) seemingly upstream in their potrillos (local dugout canoes) at the end of the afternoon, taking advantage of the rising tide; perhaps they are returning home after having taken their harvested plantains and their catch of the day to the town downstream, and bringing back some items they bought at the town store – unrefined cane sugar, cooking fuel, salt, notebooks for the children, or what have you.

On first inspection, we may say that the father is “socializing” his daughter into the correct way to navigate the potrillo, an important skill as life in the region greatly depends on the ceaseless going back and forth in the potrillos through rivers, mangroves and estuaries. This interpretation is correct in some ways; but something else is also going on. As locals are wont to say, speaking of the river territory, acá nacimos, acá crecimos, acá hemos conocido qué es el mundo (“Here we were born, here we grew up, here we have known what the world is”). Through their nacer~crecer~conocer they enact the manifold practices through which their territories/worlds have been made since they became libres (i.e., free, not enslaved peoples) and became entangled with living beings of all kinds in these forest and mangrove worlds.

Let us travel to this river and immerse ourselves deeply within it and experience it with the eyes of relationality; an entire way of worlding emerges for us. Looking attentively from the perspective of the manifold relations that make this world what it is, we see that the potrillo was made out of a mangrove tree with the knowledge the father received from his predecessors; the mangrove forest is intimately known by the inhabitants who traverse with great ease the fractal estuaries it creates with the rivers and the always moving sea; we begin to see the endless connections keeping together and always in motion this intertidal “aquatic space,” (Oslender 2008) including connections with the moon and the tides that enact a nonlinear temporality. The mangrove forest involves many relational entities among what we might call minerals, mollusks, nutrients, algae, microorganisms, birds, plant, and insects – an entire assemblage of underwater, surface and areal life. Ethnographers of these worlds describe it in terms of three non-separate worlds – el mundo de abajo or infraworld; este mundo, or the human world; and el mundo de arriba, or spiritual/supraworld. There are comings and goings between these worlds, and particular places and beings connecting them, including “visions” and spiritual beings. This entire world is narrated in oral forms that include storytelling, chants and poetry.

This dense network of interrelations may be called a “relational ontology.” The mangrove-world, to give it a short name, is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by all kinds of beings and life forms, involving a complex organic and inorganic materiality of water, minerals, degrees of salinity, forms of energy (sun, tides, moon, relations of force), and so forth. There is a rhizome “logic” to these entanglements, a logic that is impossible to follow in any simple way, and very difficult to map and measure, if at all; it reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place. These experiences constitute relational worlds or ontologies. To put it abstractly, a relational ontology of this sort can be defined as one in which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it. Said otherwise, things and beings are their relations; they do not exist prior to them.

As the anthropologist from Aberdeen Tim Ingold says, these “worlds without objects” (2011:131) are always in movement, made up of materials in motion, flux and becoming; in these worlds, living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence; they “interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry.” (2011:10) Going back to the river scene, one may say that “father” and “daughter” get to know their local world not through distancing reflection but by going about it, that is, by being alive to their world. These worlds do not require the divide between nature and culture in order to exist – in fact, they exist as such only because they are enacted by practices that do not rely on such divide. In a relational ontology, “beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to their ever-evolving weave.” (Ingold 2011: 71) Commons exist in these relational worlds, not in worlds that are imagined as inert and waiting to be occupied.

Even if the relations that keep the mangrove-world always in a state of becoming are always changing, to disrupt them significantly often results in the degradation of such worlds. Such is the case with industrial shrimp farming schemes and oil palm plantations for agrofuels, which have proliferated in many tropical regions of the world. These market systems, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, aim to transform “worthless swamp” into agroindustrial complexes (Ogden 2012; Escobar 2008).

Here, of course, we find many of the operations of the One-World World at play: the conversion of everything that exists in the mangrove-world into “nature” and “nature” into “resources”; the effacing of the life-enabling materiality of the entire domains of the inorganic and the nonhuman, and its treatment as “objects” to be had, destroyed or extracted; and linking the forest worlds so transformed to “world markets,” to generate profit. In these cases, the insatiable appetite of the One-World World spells out the progressive destruction of the mangrove-world, its ontological capture and reconversion by capital and the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The OWW, in short, denies the mangrove-world its possibility of existing as such. Local struggles constitute attempts to (re)establish some degree of symmetry by seeking to influence the partial connections that the mangrove-worlds inevitably maintain with the OWW.

III. Territoriality, Ancestrality and Worlds

Elders and young activists in many territorial communities worldwide (including increasingly in urban areas) eloquently express why they defend their worlds even at the price of their lives. An activist from the Afrodescendant community of La Toma of Colombia’s southwest, which has struggled against gold mining since 2008, said: “It is patently clear to us that we are confronting monsters such as transnational corporations and the State. Yet nobody is willing to leave her/his territory; I might get killed here but I am not leaving.”⁴

Such resistance takes place within a long history of domination and resistance, and this is essential for understanding commoning as an ontological political practice. La Toma communities, for instance, have knowledge of their continued presence in the territory since the first half of the seventeenth century. It’s an eloquent example of what activists call “ancestrality,” referring to the ancestral mandate that inspires today’s struggles and that persists in the memory of the elders, amply documented by oral history and scholars. (Lisifrey et al. 2013) This mandate is joyfully celebrated in oral poetry and song: Del Africa llegamos con un legado ancestral; la memoria del mundo debemos recuperar (“From Africa we arrived with an ancestral legacy; the memory of our world we need to bring back”).⁵ Far from an intransigent attachment to the past, ancestrality stems from a living memory that orients itself to a future reality that imagines, and struggles for, conditions that will allow them to persevere as a distinct, living mode of existence.

Within relational worlds, the defense of territory, life and the commons are one and the same. This is the ontological dimension of commoning. To this extent, this chapter’s argument can be stated as follows: The perseverance of communities, commons, and movements and the struggles for their defense and reconstitution can be described as ontological. At its best and most radical, this is particularly true for those struggles that incorporate explicitly ethno-territorial dimensions and involve resistance and the defense and affirmation of commons.

Conversely, whereas the occupation of territories implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often armed aspects, its most fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories and commons is a particular ontology, that of the universal world of individuals and markets (the OWW) that attempts to transform all other worlds into one; this is another way of interpreting the historical enclosure of the commons. By interrupting the neoliberal globalizing project of constructing One World, many indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and poor urban communities are advancing ontological struggles. The struggle to maintain multiple worlds – the pluriverse – is best embodied by the Zapatista dictum, Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, a world where many worlds fit. Many of these worlds can thus be seen as struggles over the pluriverse.

Another clear case of ontological occupation of territories comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific, around the port city of Tumaco. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Nonexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation – row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts – replaced the diverse, heterogeneous and entangled world of forest and communities.

There are two important aspects to remark from this dramatic change: first, the “plantation form” effaces the socioecological relations that maintain the forest-world. The plantation emerges from a dualist ontology of human dominance over so-called “nature” understood as “inert space” or “resources” to be had, and can thus be said to be the most effective means for the ontological occupation and ultimate erasure of the local relational world. Conversely, the same plantation form is unthinkable from the perspective of the forest-world; within this world, forest utilization and cultivation practices take on an entirely different form, closer to agroforestry; even the landscape, of course, is entirely different. Not far from the oil palm plantations, industrial shrimp farming was also busy in the 1980s and 1990s transforming the mangrove-world into disciplined succession of rectangular pools, “scientifically” controlled. A very polluting and destructive industry especially when constructed on mangrove swamps, this type of shrimp farming constitutes another clear example of ontological occupation and politics at play (Escobar 2008).

IV. Commons Beyond Development: Commoning and Pluriversal Studies

The ontological occupation of commons and worlds just described often takes place in the name of development. Development and growth continue to be among the most naturalized concepts in the social and policy domains. The very idea of development, however, has been questioned by cultural critics since the mid-1980s; they questioned the core assumptions of development, including growth, progress, and instrumental rationality. These critiques came of age with the publication in 1992 of a collective volume, The Development Dictionary. The book started with the startling claim: “The last forty years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary.” (Sachs 1992; Rist 1997) If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk about a “post-development era” in response to this question (Rahnema 1997). Degrowth theorists, notably Latouche (2009), contributed to disseminate this perspective in the North.

Postdevelopment advocates argued that it is possible for activists and policymakers to think about the end of development, emphasizing the notion of alternatives to development, rather than development alternatives. The idea of alternatives to development has become more concrete in South America in recent years with the notions of Buen Vivir (good living, or collective well-being according to culturally appropriate ways) and the rights of Nature. Defined as a holistic view of social life that no longer gives overriding centrality to the economy, Buen Vivir (BV) “constitutes an alternative to development, and as such it represents a potential response to the substantial critiques of postdevelopment” (Gudynas and Acosta 2011; Acosta and Martínez 2009). Very succinctly, Buen Vivir grew out of indigenous struggles for social change waged by peasants, Afrodescendants, environmentalists, students, women and youth. Echoing indigenous ontologies, BV implies a different philosophy of life which subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity and social justice. Debates about the form BV might take in modern urban contexts and other parts of the world, such as Europe, are beginning to take place. Degrowth, commons and BV are “fellow travelers” in this endeavor.

Buen Vivir resonates with broader challenges to the “civilizational model” of globalized development. The crisis of the Western modelo civilizatorio is invoked by many movements as the underlying cause of the current crisis of climate, energy, poverty and meaning. This emphasis is strongest among ethnic movements, yet it is also found, for instance, in peasant networks such as Via Campesina for which only a shift toward agroecological food production systems can lead us out of the climate and food crises. Originally proposed by the Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social (CLAES) in Montevideo and closely related to the “transitions to post-extractivism” framework, Buen Vivir has become an important intellectual-activist debate in many South American countries (Alayza and Gudynas 2011; Gudynas 2011; Massuh 2012). The point of departure is a critique of the intensification of extractivist models based on large-scale mining, hydrocarbon exploitation or extensive agricultural operations, particularly for agrofuels such as soy, sugar cane or oil palm. Whether they take the form of conventional – often brutal – neoliberal extractivist policies in countries like Colombia, Perú or México, or the neoextractivism of the center-left regimes, these models are legitimized as efficient growth strategies.

This implies a transition from One-World concepts such as “globalization” to concepts centered on the pluriverse as made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct worlds (Blaser, de la Cadena and Escobar 2013; Blaser 2010). There are many signs that suggest that the One-World doctrine is unraveling. The growing visibility of struggles to defend mountains, landscapes, forests and so forth by appealing to a relational (non-dualist) and pluriversal understanding of life is a manifestation of the OWW’s crisis. Santos has powerfully described this conjuncture with the following paradox: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions (Santos 2002:13).

This conjuncture defines a rich context for commons studies from the perspective of pluriversal studies: on the one hand, the need to understand the conditions by which the one world of neoliberal globalization continues to maintain its dominance; and on the other hand, the (re)emergence of projects based on different ways of “worlding” (that is, the socioecological processes implied in building collectively a distinctive reality or world), including commoning, and how they might weaken the One-World project while widening their spaces of (re)existence.

The notion of the pluriverse, it should be made clear, has two main sources: theoretical critiques of dualism, and the perseverance of pluriversal and non-dualist worlds (more often known as “cosmovisions”) that reflect a deeply relational understanding of life. Notable examples include Muntu and Ubuntu in parts of Africa, the Pachamamaor Mama Kiwe among South American indigenous peoples, Native US and Canadian cosmologies, and even the entire Buddhist philosophy of mind. Examples also exist within the West as “alternative Wests” or nondominant forms of modernity. Some of the current struggles going on in Europe over the commons, energy transitions, and the relocalization of food, for instance, could be seen as struggles to reconnect with the stream of life. They also constitute forms of resistance against the dominant ontology of capitalist modernity. Worldwide, the multiple struggles for the reconstruction of communal spaces and for reconnecting with nature are giving rise to political mobilizations for the defense of the relational fabric of life – for instance, for the recognition of territorial rights, local knowledges, and local biodiversity. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation.

V. The Commons and Transitions Towards the Pluriverse

Economically, culturally, and militarily, we are witnessing a renewed attack on anything collective; land grabbing and the privatization of the commons (including sea, land, even the atmosphere through carbon markets) are signs of this attack. This is the merciless world of the global 10 percent, foisted upon the 90 percent and the natural world with a seemingly ever-increasing degree of virulence and cynicism. In this sense, the world created by the OWW has brought about untold devastation and suffering. The remoteness and separation it effects from the worlds that we inevitably weave with other earth-beings are themselves a cause of the ecological and social crisis (Rose 2008). These are aspects of what Nonini (2007) has insightfully described as “the wearing-down of the commons.”

The emergence, over the past decade, of an array of discourses on the cultural and ecological transitions necessary to deal with the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy and poverty, is powerful evidence that the dominant model of social life is exhausted. In the global North and the global South, multiple transition narratives and forms of activism are going beyond One-World strategic solutions (e.g., “sustainable development” and the “green economy”) to articulate sweeping cultural and ecological transitions to different societal models. These Transition discourses (TDs) are emerging today with particular richness, diversity and intensity. Those writing on the subject are not limited to the academy; in fact, the most visionary TD thinkers are located outside of it, even if most engage with critical currents in the academy. TDs are emerging from a multiplicity of sites, principally social movements and some NGOs, from emerging scientific paradigms and academic theories, and from intellectuals with significant connections to environmental and cultural struggles. TDs are prominent in several fields, including those of culture, ecology, religion and spirituality, alternative science (e.g., complexity), futures studies, feminist studies, political economy, and digital technologies and the commons.

The range of TDs can only be hinted at here. In the North, the most prominent include degrowth; a variety of transition initiatives (TIs); the Anthropocene; forecasting trends (e.g., Club of Rome, Randers 2012); and the movement towards commons and the care economy as a different way of seeing and being (e.g., Bollier 2014). Some approaches involving interreligious dialogues and UN processes are also crafting TDs. Among the explicit TIs are the Transition Town Initiative (TTI, UK), the Great Transition Initiative (GTI, Tellus Institute, US), the Great Turning, (Macy and Johnstone 2012) the Great Work or transition to an Ecozoic era, (Berry 1999) and the transition from The Enlightenment to an age of Sustainment. (Fry 2012) In the global South, TDs include the crisis of civilizational model, postdevelopment and alternatives to development, Buen Vivir, communal logics and autonomía, subsistence and food sovereignty, and transitions to post-extractivism. While the features of the new era in the North include post-growth, post-materialist, post-economic, post-capitalist and post-dualist, those for the south are expressed in terms of post-development, post/non-liberal, post/non-capitalist, and post-extractivist. (Escobar 2011)

VI. Conclusion: Commoning and the Commons as Umbrella and Bridge Discourses

What follows is a provisional exploration, as a way to conclude, on the relation between commoning and the commons and political ontology and pluriversal studies. To begin with TDs, it is clear that there needs to be a concerted effort at bringing together TDs in the global North and the global South. There are tensions and complementarities across these transition visions and strategies – for instance, between degrowth and postdevelopment. The commons could be among the most effective umbrellas for bringing together Northern and Southern discourses, contributing to dissolve this very dichotomy. As Bollier (2014) points out, the commons entails a different way of seeing and being, a different model of socionatural life. Seen in this way, the commons is a powerful shared interest across worlds. Struggles over the commons are found across the global North and the global South, and the interconnections among them are increasingly visible and practicable (see, e.g., Bollier and Helfrich 2012). Commons debates show that diverse peoples and worlds have “an interest in common,” which is nevertheless not “the same interest” for all involved, as visions and practices of the commons are world-specific (de la Cadena, 2015).

Second, reflection on commons and commoning makes visible commons-destroying dualistic conceptions, particular those between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, the individual and the communal, mind and body, and so forth (see Introduction to the volume). Commons reflection reminds those of all existing in the densest urban and liberal worlds that we dwell in a world that is alive. Reflection on the commons resituates the human within the ceaseless flow of life in which everything is inevitably immersed; it enables us to see ourselves again as part of the stream of life. Commons have this tremendous life-enhancing potential today.

Third, debates on the commons share with political ontology the goal of deconstructing the worldview and practice of the individual and the economy. No single cultural invention in the West has been more damaging to relational worlds than the disembedded “economy” and its closely associated cognate, “the autonomous individual.” These two cornerstones of the dominant forms of Western liberalism and modernity need to be questioned time and again, particularly by making evident their role in destroying the commons-constructing practices of peoples throughout the planet. Working towards a “commons-creating economy” (Helfrich 2013) also means working towards the (re)constitution of relational world, ones in which the economy is re-embedded in society and nature (ecological economics); it means the individual integrated within a community, the human within the nonhuman, and knowledge within the inevitable contiguity of knowing, being and doing.

Fourth, there are a whole series of issues that could be fruitfully explored from the double perspective of commons and political ontology as paired domains. These would include, among others: alternatives to development such as Buen Vivir; transitions to post-extractive models of economic and social life; movements for the relocalization of food, energy, transport, building construction, and other social, cultural, and economic activities; and the revisioning and reconstruction of the economy, including proposals such as the diverse economy as suggested by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013), subsistence and community economies, and social and solidarity economies (e.g., Coraggio and Laville 2014). There are many ontological and political questions relating to these issues that cross-cut both commons and political ontology, from how to question hegemonic forms of thinking more effectively to how to imagine truly innovative ways of knowing, being and doing with respect to “the economy,” “development,” “resources,” “sustainability,” and so forth. Along the way, new lexicons will emerge – indeed, are emerging – for transitions to a pluriverse within which commoning and relational ways of being might find auspicious conditions for their flourishing.

Today, the multiple ontological struggles in defense of commons and territories, and for reconnection with nature and the stream of life, are catalyzing a veritable political awakening focused on relationality. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation. Moving beyond “development” and “the economy” are primary aspects of such struggles. But in the last instance .

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

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Arturo Escobar (Colombia/USA) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Research Associate, Grupo Nación/Cultura/Memoria, Universidad del Valle, Cali.

Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

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“If something goes wrong, its not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s.”

[Tweedie Waititi, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Sunday Star Times]

Anne Salmond: In April 2011, a small flotilla of protest vessels headed out to sea from the Eastern Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. Among them was a fishing boat, the San Pietro, owned by the local iwi (kin group), Te Whanau-a-Apanui, and skippered by Elvis Teddy, an iwi member. Rikirangi Gage, a senior tribal leader, was also on board.

At that time, a large ship, the Orient Explorer, contracted by the Brazilian oil company Petrobas, was conducting a seismic survey of the Raukumara Basin, about 300 kilometers north of East Cape. In 2010, Petrobas had been granted a permit by the New Zealand government to prospect for oil in these waters, which crossed Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s ancestral fishing grounds.

When they learned of this permit from press reports, the iwi leaders were incensed. Under the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, Queen Victoria had guaranteed their ancestors the “full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties… so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.” (Waitangi Tribunal)

Since 1975 the Waitangi Tribunal, established to inquire into breaches of the Treaty, had held hearings around the country and investigated many complaints by Maori kin groups, including those relating to fishing and the ocean. The Tribunal issued reports and made recommendations, and over this period, successive governments had offered apologies and settlements in cash and kind to many iwi around the country.

When Te Whanau-a-Apanui leaders met with the Prime Minister to state their opposition to drilling for oil in their ancestral waters, he expressed sympathy, but refused to revoke the permit. Determined that their point of view should be heard, the tribe put out a call for assistance, and the environmental group Greenpeace responded by sending a flotilla of protest vessels to the Bay of Plenty.

As anger about the oil prospecting increased, placards and signs sprang up on windows and fences along the road between Opotiki and Gisborne. Bonfires were lit in protest, and large-scale haka (war-dances) performed on the beaches.

In April 2011 Greenpeace protestors swam into the path of the Orient Explorer, watched by members of the Air Force, Navy and police. The police issued notices under the Maritime Act, ordering the protest boats and their crews to stay 200 meters from the ship, or to face a fine of NZ$10,000 or up to a year in jail (Hill 2011).

In a press interview, Tweedie Waititi from Te Whanau-a-Apanui expressed surprise at the depth of feeling among her people: “We are the most placid iwion earth. And I tell you what, the government has awakened some sort of taniwha [guardian creature]. It’s quite a surprise to see my people react the way they are reacting. We’re all virgins at doing this. We never fight.” (Waititi 2011).

Like other New Zealanders, tribal members had heard a great deal about the Deep Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, and the damage done to the ocean, sea life, coasts and estuaries, and the livelihoods of local people. They were fearful that a similar catastrophe might happen in their ancestral waters.

Tweedie also expressed concern for the moki, a sacred fish that migrates every year from Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland, to Te Whanau-a-Apanui waters. “That’s the moki’s home”, she said, “Right where they want to drill. Every June, there is a star that shines in the sky and her name is Autahi, and that’s our indication that the moki has come home.”

The story of the moki is told in paintings in the dining hall and carved meeting-house at Kauaetangohia marae, at Whangaparaoa. I had also heard about this sacred fish many years earlier when I worked with Eruera Stirling, a leading elder of the iwi, on a book about his ancestors and his life. He told me about a time in his youth when a senior elder, Manihera Waititi, invited him and his elder brother to catch the “first fish” to open the moki season.

On that occasion, the two boys went to the Whangaparaoa River before dawn and boarded Manihera’s boat. With a land breeze behind them, the elder took them to the moki fishing ground about one hundred yards offshore from Ratanui, a beach where ancestral voyaging canoes had come ashore.

After catching several moki, they headed out to a deep water fishing ground, where they caught several more of the sacred fish. Back on shore, the old man gave them the moki to take home to their mother, Mihi Kotukutuku. As the tribe’s senior leader, it was customary for her to be presented with the first fish of the season.

According to Eruera, the waters offshore from Raukokore, his home village, are known as Te Kopua a Hine Mahuru, the deep waters of Hine Mahuru, named after the ancestress of his people. Its fishing grounds and shellfish beds are linked with the carved meeting-house on shore, also named after this high born woman, whose mana(ancestral power) extended over the land and sea.

A rock named Whangaipaka stands in these waters, guarded by a kai-tiaki or guardian, a large sting-ray. If a stranger went there without permission, a great wave carrying the stingray would sweep over the rock, drowning the intruder. Eruera told me that in his time, shellfish beds and fishing grounds were jealously guarded:

Each district had its own mussel beds, and they were reserved for the people of that place. If the people saw a stranger picking their mussels, look out! He’d be a dead man if he came ashore. Fishing was very tapu [imbued with ancestral presence], and each family had its own fishing grounds, no one else could fish there or there would be a big fight.

The old people were very particular about the sea, and nobody was allowed to eat or smoke out on the boats. If a man took food with him when he went fishing, he’d sit there all day with his hook and line empty and the fish would stay away.

Sometimes if the fishing was very bad the people would start asking questions, and if they found out the guilty man, he’d get into big trouble for breaking the sacred law of tapu. The people would just about knock him to pieces, and he wouldn’t be allowed to go out to sea again for quite a while. If a thing like that happened at home, you were well marked by the people (Stirling 1980:106).

Given the intensity of this bond between people, their land and ancestral waters, it is not surprising that Te Whanau-a-Apanui were outraged when, without prior warning, the government issued a permit for an oil company to explore their ancestral waters. As Tweedie Waititi remarked, it was as though a taniwha, a powerful ancestral being, had woken up and was thrashing around in the ocean.

When Rikirangi Gage, an acknowledged senior leader of the iwi, joined the protest flotilla, the government ignored this gesture. Several days later, Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s fishing boat San Pietro motored across the bow of the Orient Explorer, trailing tuna fishing lines and a string of buoys tied together with rope. When the captain of the survey ship told them to stay away, Gage replied, “We won’t be moving. We’ll be doing some fishing.”

Soon afterwards police officers boarded the fishing boat and arrested the skipper, Elvis Teddy, charging him with an offense under the Marine Transport Act. Back on shore, Teddy defended his actions, saying that he was simply exercising his right under the Treaty of Waitangi to fish his ancestral waters. If his boat had come close to theOrient Explorer, it was the fault of the drilling ship’s commander for not avoiding a fishing vessel.

Teddy was prosecuted, and during his trial in the Auckland District Court, his lawyers argued that since the confrontation had happened outside New Zealand’s twelve mile territorial zone, the Maritime Transport Act did not apply. The judge agreed, and the charges were dismissed.

When the police appealed the judgment to the High Court, however, the Court ruled that as a New Zealand vessel, the San Pietro came under New Zealand jurisdiction, even on the high seas (Woolford 2013). Although there was no specific provision in the Maritime Transport Act to this effect, the Act must apply beyond the twelve mile limit, or the New Zealand government would be unable to uphold its international obligations under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. (Webster and Monteiro 2013).

After this verdict, Teddy’s lawyer issued a statement saying that by granting a drilling permit in their ancestral waters without consulting Te Whanau-a-Apanui, and by sending the Navy, Air Force and police to stop Teddy and Gage from fishing in ancestral waters, the New Zealand Government had breached not only the Treaty of Waitangi but the International Convention of Indigenous Rights, which New Zealand has also signed (Te Whanau-a-Apanui 2012).

Soon afterwards, the New Zealand government took further steps to tighten its control over New Zealand vessels on the high seas, passing a hotly debated act that prohibits protest at sea in the vicinity of oil exploration vessels (Devathasan 2013).

This clash between Te Whanau-a-Apanui on the one hand, and Petrobas and the Crown on the other, was not just a physical confrontation. It was an ontological collision – a clash between different “worlds” or ways of being. Different claims to the sea, different ideas about collective rights, and different kinds of freedoms and constraints were being negotiated.

At the same time, this is not a simple confrontation between different “cultures” or “ethnicities.” It is a complex story, with different resonances for different people.

The Sea as a Theater of Protest

For many in New Zealand, the standoff between the San Pietro and a large oil drilling ship recalled an episode in 1973 when the New Zealand government tried to stop French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Two naval frigates, one with a cabinet minister on board, were sent to Moruroa atoll, a testing site in the Society Islands. When a Greenpeace yacht was boarded off Moruroa, its skipper was assaulted by French marines.

In 1984 when the New Zealand government declared the nation nuclear-free and refused to allow visits by US nuclear vessels, the country was ejected from the ANZUS alliance. A year later, French agents sank the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, which was about to lead another protest flotilla to Moruroa, in Auckland harbor (Thakur 1986).

In New Zealand, as one can see, freedom to protest at sea is deeply entangled with national identity, and a concern for environmental issues. For many New Zealanders, by pitting its small boat against the oil drilling ship, Te Whanau-a-Apanui was following in that tradition, fighting to protect the ocean.

For many members of Te Whanau-a-Apanui, on the other hand, this was more a question of protecting the mana of their kin group. The San Pietro and its crew were asserting the right of their iwi to protect their ancestral fisheries against unwanted intrusion, based on the guarantee of “full, exclusive and undisturbed possession” of their fishing grounds under Article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi.

At the same time, for the Government and many other New Zealanders, it was a matter of upholding the sovereignty of the Crown, and the government’s right to manage the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone; to issue exploration permits to oil companies; and to protect prospectors from interference by protest vessels, including those owned by iwi.

Nevertheless, this was not an ethnic confrontation. Many of the protestors were not Maori, and as Tweedie Waititi remarked, “If something goes wrong, it’s not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s. I’m pretty sure that not only Maori have a connection to the sea.” Also, some iwi were flirting with the idea of supporting oil exploration: “Like our lawyer said,” she added, “our mana’s not for sale and no amount of money could pay us off. Maybe some iwi you could dangle a carrot. But this one’s not biting.”

In order to explore these ontological collisions, and what they tell us about different relationships between people and the ocean in New Zealand, and different ideas about the commons, I’d like to explore some of the deep, taken-for-granted presuppositions that underpin the positions adopted by different protagonists, along with previous alliances and confrontations.

The Fountain of Fish: The Ocean in Te Ao Maori

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once remarked, “The [Mori] universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy… a veritable ontology” (Sahlins 1985:195). Te Ao Maori [the Maori world] is ordered by whakapapa – vast, intricate networks of relationships in which all forms of life are mutually defined and linked, and animated by hau [breath, wind, life force].

In 1907, Elsdon Best, a New Zealand ethnologist who had spent a lifetime studying Maori customs, wrote to an elder called Tamati Ranapiri, asking him to explain the idea of the hau. Ranapiri replied:

As for the hau, it isn’t the wind that blows, not at all. Let me explain it to you carefully. Now, you have a treasured item (taonga) that you give to me, without the two of us putting a price on it, and I give it to someone else. Perhaps after a long while, this person remembers that he has this taonga, and that he should give me a return gift, and he does so.

This is the hau of the taonga that was previously given to me. I must pass on that treasure to you. It would not be right for me to keep it for myself. Whether it is a very good taonga or a bad one, I must give to you, because that treasure is the hau of your taonga, and if I hold on to it for myself, I will die. This is the hau. That’s enough (Ranapiri 1907).

The hau is at the heart of life itself. As Ranapiri explains, if a person fails to uphold their obligations in such exchanges, their own life force is threatened. As gifts or insults pass back and forth, impelled by the power of the hau, patterns of relations are forged and transmuted, for better or for worse.

When Elsdon Best wrote about Ranapiri’s account of the hau, it captured the imagination of a French sociologist, Marcel Mauss. In 1925, Mauss published The Gift, a classic work exploring gift exchange in a range of societies, including his own. Quoting Ranapiri, he contrasted the Maori concept of the hau and chiefly generosity with the utilitarian assumption in contemporary capitalism that all transactions are driven by self-interest, arguing that this gives an impoverished, inaccurate view of how relations among people shape social life.

For Mauss, the hau, or the “spirit of the thing given” impels a gift in return, creating solidarity. His discussion of the concept is perceptive, but in fact, it only scratches the surface. In Maori philosophy, hau drives the whole world, not just human communities. It goes far beyond the exchange of gifts among people.

According to the tohunga [experts] in the ancestral whare wananga [schools of learning], hau emerged at the beginnings of the cosmos. In a chant recorded by Te Kohuora, for example, the world begins with a burst of energy that generates thought, memory and desire (Te Kohuora 1854).

Next comes the Po, long aeons of darkness. Out of the Po comes the Kore, unbound, unpossessed Nothing, the seedbed of the cosmos, described by one of Best’s contemporaries as “the Void or negation, yet containing the potentiality of all things afterwards to come” (Tregear 1891:168).

In the Void, hau ora and hau tupu, the winds of life and growth begin to stir, generating new phenomena. The sky emerges, and then the moon and stars, light, the earth and sky and the ocean.

When the forest ancestor Tane creates the world of light and life by forcing earth and sky apart, his brother Tawhiri, the wind ancestor, attacks him and his children, the trees, smashing their branches, and the ancestors of root crops, forcing their offspring to hide in the ground. In this cosmic battle, only Tu, the ancestor of people, stands tall against the Space Twister. For his bravery, he earns for his descendants the right to harvest the offspring of his brothers – birds, root crops, forest foods and trees, fish, crayfish and shellfish.

Utu, the principle of reciprocity, drives the interactions between individuals and groups and all other life forms in the Maori world, working towards (an always fragile) equilibrium. In the process, hau is exchanged among and between people and other life forms, binding their fates together.

Here, individuals are defined by their relationships, and subject and object are not radically divided. From this we can see that any idea of the commons that presupposes this Cartesian division is rooted in a particular modernist cosmo-logic, one that cannot claim universal validity or application.

In Maori life, the mingling of self and other is reflected in many ways. When greeting one another, for instance, Maori people press noses and breathe, mingling their hau [wind of life] together. People speak of themselves as ahau[myself], and when rangatira or chiefs speak of an ancestor in the first person, it is because they are the kanohiora [living face] of that ancestor.

A refusal to enter into reciprocal exchanges, on the other hand, is known as hauwhitia, or hau turned aside. Hauhauaitu [or “harm to the hau”] is manifested as illness or ill fortune, a breakdown in the balance of reciprocal exchanges. The life force has been affected, showing signs of collapse and failure.

This also applies to people’s relations with other life forms. Unless the exchanges between people and the sea are balanced, for instance, the hau of both the ocean and the people alike will suffer.

Stories about the sea illustrate this point. According to Timi Waata Rimini, an elder from Te Whanau-a-Apanui, many generations ago the son of the ancestor Pou drowned in the Motu River. Setting off in search of his son, Pou arrived at the home of the sea ancestor Tangaroa, a “fountain of fish” teeming with different species, where he asked the sea ancestor whether he had taken his son. When Tangaroa denied it, knowing that he was lying, Pou asked him to attend his son’s tangi [funeral].

Returning to the Bay of Plenty, Pou told his people to make a great net. That summer, a huge shoal of kahawai (Arripis trutta) approached the coast, escorting the sea ancestor to the funeral. On a signal, Pou ordered his people to cast the great net. Thousands of Tangaroa’s children were caught and fed to the crowds that had gathered to mourn Pou’s son (Rimini 1901).

As Rimini explained, when the kahawai arrive at the mouth the Motu River every year, a chiefly youngster was sent out to catch three kahawai, which were offered to Pou and the high chief of the region. By acknowledging the mana of the sea ancestor, these “first fish” rituals opened the fishing season, protecting the fertility and abundance of the ocean.

Other local customs related to the kehe or granite trout, a sacred fish that frequented rocky channels in the reefs, grazing on kohuwai, a particular type of seaweed. There were a number of methods used to catch this fish, including shaping channels in the reef with stones, waiting until the kohuwai grew back again, and then using a hoop net to scoop up the kehe as they grazed on the seaweed, or using a pole to drive them into the net.

When the chief’s wife at Omaio became pregnant, he said, the rahui or sacred prohibition on a famous kehe fishing ground called Te Wharau was lifted, and as people gathered on the beach, men with hoop nets were sent to stand on particular named rocks. When the tohunga or expert called out Rukuhia, people dived into the channels, swimming underwater and driving the keheinto the hoop nets, in a joyous pandemonium. Afterwards, the fish were cooked and presented to the chieftainness as a delicacy (Te Rangihiroa 1926).

In this onto-logic, the sea itself was alive and breathing. When Te Parata, a powerful being in the heart of the ocean, breathed out, the tide began to flow, and children were born. When he breathed in, a great vortex formed, swallowing canoes at sea. At death, a great rangatira might be farewelled with the chant, “The eddy squall is gone, the storm is passed away, the Parata is gone, the big fish has left its dwelling place.” (Colenso 1887:422).

Here, ideas about collective rights acknowledge the vitality of other life forms – fish, rivers, mountains and land, for example. Rights in particular localities are distributed between people and other phenomena, nested and linked in exchange relationships at various scales. In relation to the sea, these ideas allow the control of use rights, along lines of kinship and descent or gift exchange.

In contemporary times, these ways of thinking are receiving legal recognition in New Zealand. In 2014, for instance, in a Waitangi settlement with the Whanganui iwi, the Crown has recognised their iconic river as a legal being; while in a Waitangi settlement with Tuhoe, an inland people, their ancestral land Te Urewera has been recognized in the same way, with co-management regimes with the Crown and regional authorities being established.

In many ways, these legal innovations echo contemporary biological understandings in which people and other phenomena (such as the ocean) are engaged in complex interactive systems, mutually implicated at every scale, while the idea that people might be linked by kinship with marine life forms is shared with evolutionary biology, for instance.

The virtue of these arrangements is that the well-being of a lake, a river or the ocean can be given legal priority in the allocation of resource rights and management regimes, alongside the interests of human beings.

The Ocean in the Enlightenment

There are both divergences and resonances between Western and Maori ideas about the sea. When Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour arrived off the east coast of the North Island in October 1769 and brought the first Europeans ashore, for instance, the ship was a travelling sideshow of the Enlightenment in Europe, laden with a cargo of colliding cosmologies.

This was a scientific naval expedition, sponsored by the Royal Society of London to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti, and by the Admiralty to find Terra Australis, the Unknown Southern Continent. It is a mistake to think of the meetings that followed as binary clashes between two “cultures,” however. As at present, Maori and European ways of thinking alike were diverse.

One strand of Enlightenment thought, for instance, can be traced back at least as far back as the seventeenth century, when the philosopher Descartes had a new vision of reality, at once powerful and intoxicating. In his dream, the Cogito – the “thinking self” or Subject – became the eye of the world, which in turn became an Object for inspection.

The Cartesian division between mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), Subject and Object is historically and culturally specific. During the Enlightenment in Europe, as culture was separated from nature, the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences began to diverge (Descola 2013).

As entities were detached from each other, they were objectified and classified, and the different disciplines emerged. This “Order of Things,” as Michel Foucault called it, was at the heart of Enlightenment science (Foucault, 1970). It also shaped the law of the sea, and how forms of control were distributed over the ocean.

In this style of thinking, the ancient motif of the grid was used to divide and sort different dimensions and entities into bounded units, bringing them under control for practical purposes. Often, the grid was hierarchical – the old idea of the Great Chain of Being, for example, with God at the apex followed by angels, divine Kings, the aristocracy and successive ranks of people, from “civilized” to “savage,” followed by animals, plants and minerals in descending order (Lovejoy 1936, Hodgen 1971).

As the cogito or thinking self became the guarantor of being, the all-seeing “Eye of God” was replaced by the “Mind’s Eye,” and human beings were put in charge of the cosmos. Often, this was understood as a machine, made up of distinct, divisible working parts that performed particular functions.

In the mid-eighteenth century in Europe, the Order of Things went viral. Many aspects of life were transformed – administration (with censuses, surveys, and bureaucratic systems), industry (with manufacturing based on mechanization and standardization, the replication of parts and processes), and science (with the use of instruments and quantification, and the increased specialization of knowledge), for instance (Frängsmyr, Heilbron and Rider 1990). In the case of surveying, this was closely associated with military activities, and the scientific use of force (Edney 1994).

As it happened, Captain James Cook, the first European explorer to land in New Zealand, as a leading hydrographer, was in the vanguard of this way of reimagining the sea. Like his cartographic peers, he adopted an imaginary vantage point high above the earth – an “Eye of God” perspective.

In Cook’s charts, the ocean – grey or blue-green, the home of birds, fish and whales, surging with tides and currents, ruffling or roaring in the wind – was transformed into a static, white, two-dimensional expanse, gridded by lines of latitude and longitude and mathematically partitioned and measured.

Near harbors or lagoons, the depth of the coastal seabed was measured with the lead, and these soundings were recorded on his charts. Using a process of instrumental observation, the blurred, shifting liminal zone between land and sea was reduced to a simple line (Salmond 2005).

As Jordan Branch has recently argued, this process of cartographic simplification was intimately entangled with imperial power and the creation of the modernist nation-state. Except for scatters of islands, new stretches of the Pacific were depicted as vacant expanses, waiting to be explored, charted, claimed and ruled by European powers (Branch 2011).

At this time in Europe, the sovereignty of the Crown (or imperium) in Europe was held to extend about a league (three nautical miles) from the coastline, or within cannon shot, although property rights [dominium] could be granted within that limit (Bess 2011:87). Captain Cook had instructions from the Admiralty to claim any new lands he might “discover” for the British Crown.

At the same time, as Peter Hans Reill has remarked, one should not underestimate the diversity of Enlightenment thinking. In the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, men including Erasmus Darwin and Priestley, many of those involved in the Scottish Enlightenment, Buffon in France, Benjamin Franklin in America, and later the Humboldt brothers, understood reality as living networks of relations among different phenomena, animated by complementary exchanges – an account that has strong resonances with Maori and Polynesian thinking (Reill 2005; see also Israel 2006).

In this Enlightenment tradition – the Order of Relations, one might call it – people are just one life form among many, and the world is constantly changing. Ideas such as justice, truth, equality and honor, and balance and equilibrium suggested how exchanges – particularly among people – should be handled. Here one can find the origins of participatory democracy, and much of contemporary anthropology, earth sciences, cosmology, ecology and evolutionary theory. The World Wide Web and scientific ideas about complex systems and networks also trace back to this strand of modernist thought.

Not surprising, this diversity of views was reflected on board the Endeavour. In addition to his orders from the Admiralty, Cook had a set of “Hints” from the Earl of Morton, the President of the Royal Society, which acknowledged the legal rights of Pacific people to control their own lands and coastlines, and suggested how to describe in detail the people, places, plants, animals and minerals that they might encounter during their voyage around the world.

While Cook’s charts abstracted the land and sea, the journals, sketches and collections produced by the scientists and the ship’s officers restored them to life again, at least in part, with meticulous depictions of local people and landscapes, canoes and fishing gear, different species of fish, as well as currents, tides and the temperature of the ocean (Salmond 2004).

During the Endeavour’s circumnavigation of New Zealand in 1769-1770, these divergent strands in Enlightenment thought – as reflected in the Admiralty orders and the Earl of Morton’s “Hints” in particular – helped to shape what happened. The presence of Tupaia, a brilliant man later described as a “genius” by Georg Forster, also powerfully shifted the dynamics of these encounters. A high priest from one of the homelands of Maori, he was quickly able to master the sound shifts between Maori and Tahitian, and speak with the local people.

The warriors who came out in their canoes to challenge the ship were unsure what this bizarre apparition might be. In Turanga, for instance, the first harbor visited by the Endeavour in New Zealand, the people thought this might be Waikawa, a sacred island off the end of the Mahia peninsula, floating into their harbor. Nevertheless, they used their own time-honored rituals for challenging the strangers, performing wero [ritual challenges], karakia [incantations] and haka [war dances].

While Cook followed his Admiralty orders and took possession of New Zealand, marching the marines ashore to set up a British flag, he also followed the “Hints” by negotiating with Maori, using Tupaia, the Ra’iatean star navigator, as his interpreter. When the first encounters on land and sea ended in shootings, Cook was bitterly chagrined.

There were many such clashes around the coastline of New Zealand. When the Endeavour arrived at Waikawa, for instance, off the end of the Mahia peninsula, a sacred island and the site of a school of ancestral learning, priests chanted and warriors in canoes threw spears at the hull of the Endeavour. As they sailed across Hawke’s Bay, flotillas of canoes came out, led by elderly chiefs wearing fine cloaks, chanting, making speeches and brandishing their weapons, preventing the Europeans from making a landing.

When the Endeavour headed north and arrived in the Bay of Plenty, a large canoe carrying sixty warriors came out from Whangaparaoa in Te Whanau-a-Apanui waters, and circled the ship, a priest reciting incantations as the crew performed a war dance. They cried out, “Come to land and we will kill you,” paddling at high speed to attack the Endeavour and stopping only when a volley of grapeshot was fired beside their canoe. When a cannon loaded with round shot was fired overhead, they fled back to the land.

As one can see, there is a strong continuity between Rikirangi Gage’s presence on board the San Pietro and their confrontation with the oil drilling ship, and these earlier clashes in which Te Whanau-a-Apanui defended their mana(ancestral power) over their tribal waters.

On the whole, Captain Cook respected these challenges, retorting with warning shots rather than shooting the warriors. The Earl of Morton had insisted that people in these new lands had the right to defend their own territories, including their coastal waters. Later, this same understanding underpinned the promise in the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi that Maori would enjoy “full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of their Fisheries and other properties… so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.”

It was not until quite recently in New Zealand (in 1965) that the Crown’s sovereignty was formally extended out to three miles from the coast, to twelve miles in 1977, and in 1982 under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (or UNCLOS) out to 200 miles, defining an oceanic “Exclusive Economic Zone” that the Government sought to defend against Whanau-a-Apanui and Greenpeace protestors.

Thus in very recent times, the high seas or mare liberum¹ – that part of the ocean which falls outside the Exclusive Economic Zones, an expanse free to all nations but belonging to none – has been shrinking, as nation-states expand their terrestrial sovereignty out from their coastlines – a kind of oceanic enclosure. As we have seen, such cartographic visions of the ocean embody particular assumptions about the world. This atomistic, quantifying, abstracting, commodifying logic is still unfolding.

This cosmo-logic fragments the sciences, detaches people from “the environment” and makes the well-being of other life-forms contingent. It therefore is not particularly successful at understanding or safeguarding the vitality of those intricate socio-biophysical systems in which human beings participate, and on which their own well-being and futures rely.

In New Zealand, as in other situations where the government has sought to commodify and privatize resources formerly held in common, Maori have reacted by challenging the Crown’s right to make these decisions. As Alex Frame, a law professor in New Zealand, has observed, under the Treaty of Waitangi:

The commodification of the “common heritage” has provoked novel claims and awakened dormant ones…Claims to water flows, electricity dams, airwaves, forests, flora and fauna, fish quota, geothermal resources, seabed, foreshore, minerals, have followed the tendency to treat these resources, previously viewed as common property, as commodities for sale to private purchases. Not surprisingly, the Maori reaction has been, if it is property, then it is our property (Frame 1999:234).

The Foreshore and Seabed

It would be possible to examine the unfolding of this logic with the quantification of fish stocks in the fisheries quota system in New Zealand, for instance, which provoked one of the first claims to the Waitangi Tribunal. Here, however, I will focus on the confrontations between many Maori and the Crown over the foreshore and seabed, since this forerunner to the clash between Te Whanau-a-Apanui and the Crown also illuminates complexities in contemporary debates about the commons.

The foreshore and seabed saga began in the Marlborough Sounds, at the northern end of the South Island. Although the local tribes had repeatedly applied to the local District Council for licenses to farm mussels in their ancestral rohe (territory), none were granted. Finally in frustration, they finally applied to the Maori Land Court to recognize their customary rights over the foreshore and seabed in the Sounds (Bess 2011:90-93; Boast 2005).

In Maori ancestral practice, the foreshore is a fertile place. At the time of the Treaty, clans and families moved from gardens and forests to wetlands, sandy beaches, rocky reefs and out to sea in seasonal migrations, maintaining relations with a complex mosaic of fish, plants and animals, and harvesting at peak times of plenty. Particular groups held nested use rights to particular resources at particular times of the year, creating overlapping, shifting networks of rights that crossed the shoreline, binding people, land and sea together.²

According to English common law in 1840, on the other hand, land and sea were divided at the high tide mark, and subject to different regimes of control. On land, the Crown held the right of imperium or sovereignty, whereas dominium or ownership was generally held as private property; whereas at sea, it was assumed that the Crown held both imperium and dominium, at least as far as three miles offshore, unless it had granted the right of ownership to other parties.

When land began to be surveyed, partitioned into bounded blocks and sold in New Zealand, the government and European purchasers alike generally assumed that if they bought coastal land, they owned it to the high tide mark, but that the foreshore or tidal zone and the seabed belonged to the Crown.

From the beginning, Maori contested this assumption, which clashed with the Article 2 Treaty promise about their control of ancestral fisheries. But in 1963, when the Court of Appeal ruled in a case over the Ninety Mile beach that customary rights to the foreshore had been extinguished when the Native Land Court had issued title to coastal land, the matter was assumed to be legally settled.

The application of the Marlborough iwi to the Maori Land Court overturned that legal precedent, however. The judge held that the legislation cited by the Attorney General, including the Ninety Mile Beach case, had not in fact extinguished the customary rights of the Marlborough iwi.

The case was appealed, and then referred to the High Court, where the judge reversed the ruling, and then to the Court of Appeal, where the judges ruled unanimously that upon the signing of the Treaty, the Crown had acquired only a radical right or imperium over the sea with the acquisition of sovereignty.

Citing the doctrine of aboriginal title, they ruled that unless the rights of dominium had been legally extinguished, they remained with Maori kin groups, and that this was also the case with the foreshore and seabed. Furthermore, they argued, the distinction in English common law between land above the high water mark, and land below it, did not apply.³

As Judge Elias said, “The common law as received in New Zealand was modified by recognized Maori customary property interests. There is no room for a contrary presumption derived from English common law. The common law of New Zealand is different.” The judges referred the case back for the Maori Land Court to determine whether or not the Marlborough iwi had customary ownership of the foreshore and seabed in their ancestral territories (Elias, S, in the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, CA 173/01).

By this time, however, most New Zealanders took it for granted that, apart from riparian rights, the foreshore and seabed were owned by the Crown, and the decision caused a furor. Over the generations, many non-Maori New Zealanders had also formed close ties with particular beaches and stretches of coastline, echoing an ancestral Maori habit of setting up summer fishing camps by heading to beaches and coastal camping grounds, and spending a great deal of time fishing, diving, surfing and sailing.

Although some Maori leaders insisted that they only wished to exercise kai-tiakitanga or guardianship over the foreshore and seabed, and not treat them as private property, others were clearly interested in commercial possibilities, and claimed property rights in the ocean. Fearing that their relationship with particular beaches and harbors would be severed, and their recreational as well as commercial interests in these places would be lost to Maori, many non-Maori New Zealanders were incensed by the Court of Appeal’s decision.

Again, this was not strictly an ethnic confrontation. None of the Court of Appeal judges, for example, were Maori. Nevertheless, public anger was such that in 2004, the Government hastily passed legislation to ensure that the foreshore and seabed would be owned by the Crown, with open access for all, subject to various regulatory restrictions and acknowledging Maori customary interests (but not allowing this to be translated into freehold title).

When a hikoi (march) of thousands of Maori protesters marched on Parliament, they were dismissed by the Prime Minister as “wreckers and haters,” a comment that hurt and horrified many of the elders who participated.

In the aftermath, however, as different iwi signed Treaty deeds of settlement with the Crown, anger on all sides gradually cooled (Palmer 2006:197-214). When a new Government formed a coalition with the Maori Party, which had been created in protest against the Foreshore and Seabed Act, in 2010 new legislation gave Maori further customary (but not freehold) rights to these areas, while protecting public access and enjoyment by defining the foreshore and seabed as “public domain” (Bess 2011:92-93).

Out at sea, on the other hand, the Crown reserved its right to allocate oil and mineral licences, without public participation. By the time that Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s fishing boat confronted the Orient Explorer, they had many non-Maori supporters who shared their fears for the future of the ocean. In October 2011 when a container ship the Rena ran aground on a reef in the western Bay of Plenty, it seemed that they had been prescient. A cargo including hazardous materials, fuel oil and diesel spilled into the sea, causing widespread environmental and economic damage.

“Tie the Knot of Humankind”: Experiments Across Worlds

As one can see, in New Zealand, fundamentally different onto-logics about human relations with the ocean have proved very resilient. At the same time, there have been significant transformations, both to Maori ideas and to modernist thinking.

In the law, for example, at different times, the doctrine of continuity in relation to Maori rights has transformed English common law by the incorporation of Maori customary law. As Sian Elias, now the Chief Justice of New Zealand, put it succinctly, “The common law of New Zealand is different.” One can see this in many New Zealand laws that cite tikanga (ancestral conventions), whether in general or in particular,⁴ including those recent laws giving effect to those Waitangi settlements in which ancestral rivers and stretches of land are recognized as beings with their own legal rights.

At the same time, while particular tikanga may be cited in legislation, their content has often fundamentally shifted. One can see this in the case of kai-tiakitanga, for example, once exercised by non-human beings such as sharks and stingrays over particular ancestral stretches of the ocean. Today, a more anthropocentric version is common, with people regarding themselves as kai tiaki (guardians) of these places.

On the other hand, the assumption that with the signing of the Treaty, sovereignty was transferred to the British Crown, has not been seriously disturbed, despite many challenges, since this provides a fundamental scaffolding for legal processes in New Zealand.

In relation to the sea, this means that mechanisms such as mataitai and taiapure, where Maori kin groups either exercise or share limited rights over coastal subsistence fishing with other community members, operate within strict limits. For example, Ministers appoint tribal “representatives” to management groups and require that their arrangements not clash with commercial fishing rights.

Simultaneously, however, the idea of the “Crown” itself has also altered, so that any pure opposition between Maori and the Crown is now difficult to sustain. For many years in New Zealand, Maori have been lawyers and judges, officials, members of Parliament and Ministers. In fact, it was a Maori Minister of the Crown, Matiu Rata, who helped to set up the Waitangi Tribunal.

Again, the relation between iwi and the Crown is structural rather than strictly ethnic, and this is played out in fisheries management as well, with non-Maori as well as Maori managing fishing quota for iwi according to strictly commercial principles; while in mataitai and taiapure, the management of customary fishing is usually shared with non-Maori community members (Jacobson and Moller 2009).

At the same time, some non-Maori New Zealanders now speak of themselves as kai-tiaki or guardians for rivers, beaches and endangered species. As Maori terms increasingly shift into Kiwi English, both European and Maori ways of thinking are being transformed.

This holds promise for the future, because in relation to the sea, experiments of this kind are urgently needed. In New Zealand as elsewhere, a radical division between Nature and Culture, born of one strand of modernist thought, and the belief that Nature is there for human beings to exploit without limit and that any damage can be fixed, is fundamentally disruptive to relations between people and the ocean.

While surfers, swimmers, divers and fishers still frequent our beaches and coasts, and sailors still cross the Pacific, their activities are increasingly at risk from water-borne pollution, sedimentation, over-harvesting of reefs, shellfish beds and fisheries, and the intense storms, acidification and current shifts driven by climate change, for example.

Contemporary scientific models, with their fragmented partitions, and the split between Nature and Culture with its deep separation between people and other phenomena (also born of the Order of Things), are flawed. They fail to adequately grasp the cascading dynamics of complex systems in which people are implicated at every scale, putting the future of many marine species andcoastal human communities at risk.

Ideas of the commons do not always escape these limitations. In New Zealand, these play out in complex ways, sometimes to oppose Maori claims to fisheries or waterways (“No one owns the water!”), whose control may then be privatized – but also to forge alliances with Maori kin groups (in the case of the San Pietro, for example) to try and prevent extractive activities that seem too damaging or dangerous.

Until people grasp that their being and that of the sea are bound together, they will not demand that human activities that put our futures at risk are conducted within survivable limits. We need new ways of thinking about the shifting relations between people and the ocean – and indeed, all the intricate biophysical systems of which human beings are a part.

In New Zealand, deep resonances may be found between relational thinking from the Enlightenment (including the commons); Maori ideas of complex networks that bypass Cartesian divisions between subject and object, mind and matter, society and nature; and the contemporary science of complex systems. These convergences may help to incubate some new ideas about the ocean.⁶

Just as the physicist Niels Bohr drew upon Asian conceptions to grasp quantum theory, or Marcel Mauss reflected on the Maori idea of the hau to imagine alternatives to a commodified world, such cross-philosophical experiments (and not just in New Zealand) might help to engender new kinds of environmental science.

They might also foster ideas of the commons based on complex systems – those intricately entangled, cascading, dynamic, interactive networks among people, and between people and other life forms at different scales – and legal arrangements in which rivers and the ocean have their own being and their own rights.

As my mentor, Te Whanau-a-Apanui elder Eruera Stirling, used to chant:

Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Whakarongo!

Ki te tangi a te manu e karanga nei

Tui, tui, tuituiaa!

Tuia i runga, tuia i raro,

Tuia i roto, tuia i waho,

Tuia i te here tangata

Ka rongo te po, ka rongo te po

Tuia i te kawai tangata i heke mai

I Hawaiki nui, i Hawaiki roa,

I Hawaiki pamamao

I hono ki te wairua, ki te whai ao

Ki te Ao Marama!

English Translation:

Listen! Listen! Listen!

To the cry of the bird calling

Bind, join, be one!

Bind above, bind below

Bind within, bind without

Tie the knot of humankind

The night hears, the night hears

Bind the lines of people coming down

From great Hawaiki, from long Hawaiki

From Hawaiki far away

Bind to the spirit, to the day light

To the World of Light!

References

• Bess. 2011. “New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi and the Doctrine of Discovery: Implications for the Foreshore and Seabed.” Marine Policy 35:85-94.
• Blomley, Nicholas. 2003. “Law, Property and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey and the Grid.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(1):121-141.
• Boast, Richard. 2005. Foreshore and Seabed. Wellington: LexisNexis.
• Branch, Jordan. 2011. “Mapping the Sovereign State: Cartographic Technology, Political Authority, and Systemic Change.” PhD thesis in Political Science, Berkeley.
• Brookfield, F.M. 2004. “Maori Customary Title in Foreshore and Seabed.” New Zealand Law Journal 34(1).
• Colenso, William. 1887. “Ancient Tide Lore, and Tales of the Sea.” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 20:418-22.
• Cox, Michael, Arnold, Gwen, and Tomás. 2010. “A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Ecology and Society 15(4):38.
• Descola, Phillipe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Devathasan, Anna. 2013. “The Crown Minerals Act 2013 and Marine Protest.” Auckland University Law Review 19:258-263.
• Diaw, Mariteuw. 2008. “From Sea to Forest: An Epistemology of Otherness and Institutional Resilience in Non-Conventional Economic Systems.” http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/312/diaw.pdf?sequence=1
• Edney, M.H., 1994. “British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment.” The Cartographic Journal 31:14-20.
• Frame, Alex. 1999. “Property and the Treaty of Waitangi: A Tragedy of the Commodities?” In Janet McLean, editor. Property and the Constitution. Oxford: Hart Publishing: 224-234.
• Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
• Frängsmyr T., J.L. Heilbron and R. Rider, editors. 1990. The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Grotius, Hugo, translator. Ralph Magoffin. The Freedom Of The Seas: Or, The Right Which Belongs To The Dutch To Take Part In The East Indian Trade. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Henare [Salmond] AJM. 2007. “Taonga Maori: Encompassing Rights and Property in New Zealand.” In A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell, editors. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. 47-67.
• Hill, Marika. 2011. “Police Make Arrest on Protest Ship.” Stuff NZ, April 23.
• Hodgen, Margaret. 1971. Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Israel, Jonathan. 2006. “Enlightenment. Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(3):523-545.
• Jacobson C., and H. Moller. 2009. “Two from the same cloth? Comparing the outcomes of Mtaitai and Taipure for delivering sustainable customary fisheries.” He Khinga Rangahau No. X. Dunedin: University of Otago.
• Lovejoy, Arthur. 1936. The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea. Boston: Harvard University Press.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West Ltd.
• Palmer, M. 2006. “Resolving the Foreshore and Seabed Dispute.” In Raymond Miller and Michael Mintrom, editors. Political Leadership in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 197-214.
• Ranapiri, T, 1907. Letter to Peehi (Elsdon Best), 23 November 1907, p. 2, MS Papers 1187-127, in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Anne Salmond, translator.
• Reill, P.H. 2005. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley, California. University of California Press.
• Rimini, Tiimi Waata. 1901. “Te puna kahawai i Motu.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 10(4):183-190.
• Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. “Hierarchy and Humanity in Polynesia.” In A. Hooper and J. Huntsman, editors. Transformations of Polynesian Culture. Auckland. The Polynesian Society.
• Salmond, Anne. 1992. Maori Understandings of the Treaty of Waitangi, F19, for the Waitangi Tribunal, Muriwhenua Land Claim.
• —– . 2004. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. London: Penguin.
• —– . 2005. “Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different: European and Tahitian Navigators in the 18th Century.” In History and Anthropology,16 (2):167 – 186.
• —– . 2010. Brief of Evidence of Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond, WAI 1040, #A22, for the Waitangi Tribunal.
• Stirling, Eruera, as told to Anne Salmond. 1980. Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder. Christchurch: Oxford University Press.
• Te Kohuora of Rongoroa, dictated to Richard Taylor. 1854. [The Maori text is in Taylor, Richard (1855), Te Ika a Maui. London:15-16.]
• Te Rangihiroa, Peter Buck. 1926. “The Maori Craft of Netting.” Transactions of the New Zealand Institute 56: 597-646.
• Thakur, Ramesh. 1986. “A Dispute of Many Colours: France, New Zealand, and the Rainbow Warrior Affair.” The World Today 42(12):209-214
• Schmidt, Jeremy and Mitchell, Kyle. “2014 Property and the Right to Water: Towards a Non-Liberal Commons.” Review of Radical Political Economics46(1):54-69.
• Te Whanau-a-Apanui. 2012. Statement of Te Whanau-a-Apanui, iwimaori.weebly.com/…/te_whanau_a_apanui_statement_16_may_2012
• Tregear, Edward. 1891. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Wellington: Lyon and Blair.
• Waitangi Tribunal. http://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/waitangi-tribunal/treaty-of-waitangi
• Waititi, Tweedie. 2011. Quoted in Sunday Star Times. April 24.
• Woolford, J. 2003. Judgment in NZ Police vs. Elvis Heremia Teddy, CRI-2011-470-00031 [2013, NZHC 432].
• Webster, Kerryn and Felicity Monteiro. 2013. “High Court clarifies jurisdiction over New Zealand ships on high seas, International Law Office.” http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.aspx?g=96970d24-7159-4b4c-b41f-71d8c0f58 

Anne Salmond (New Zealand) is a Distinguished Professor of Mori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. For many years she has worked with indigenous leaders and groups in New Zealand and the Pacific. As a writer, she has won many literary and academic awards. A passionate environmentalist, she has also led major ecological projects in New Zealand. In 2013 she was awarded the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s top scientific award, and was made the New Zealander of the Year.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by amg1994

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Fountain Of Fish: Ontological Collisions At Sea appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Lifezones By Peter Halasz [CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

I. First, the list of commons economic terms in the original article has a very notable omission:

cooperative

I suggest that we avoid coining new words, phrases and “commons jargon” for ideas and  terms that already exist and have reasonably well-established meanings in public and academic discourse. Language is one of our most important commons and its conservation and good stewardship is important.

Suggested terms with utility for commons economics:

• subsidiarity  In my opinion this may be the single most important concept in modern society. “Subsidiarity is an organising principle of decentralisation, stating that a matter ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralised authority capable of addressing that matter effectively. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, cybernetics, management, military, and, … In political theory, subsidiarity is sometimes viewed as a principle entailed by the idea of federalism.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
• conditional ownership
• equity
• commonwealth
• absentee ownership
• doctrine of laches
• rule against perpetuities
  
• community land trust
• community property
• concurrent estate
• conservation easement
• public easement
• public interest
• beneficial interest
• deed restriction
• covenant
• co-housing
• condominium
• benefit association
• mutual association
• benefit corporation

II. Secondly, we might consider referring to some existing top-level vocabularies (data dictionaries, ontologies, etc.) and perhaps building the commons-based economics vocabulary as an extension (specialized domain) of one or more of these.

Below is a graphic of the GoodRelations e-comerce vocabulary (click to enlarge in another window). I include this graphic not for its specific terminology but because it conveys several concepts at a glance. The use of a Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram would allow us to  show terms grouped into logical classes and the relationships between those classes. But this is not only a step towards a standardized and machine-readable dictionary of terms; it is also a model of economic processes. I think this would be a very useful kind of model to create for an Economics of the Commons. Rather than invent the Commons Economy Model from scratch we could borrow from existing models like GoodRelations and adapt them as necessary.

At the most basic level, such a diagram would allow us to hyperlink each term to a standard definition such as those given in the UNITED NATIONS METADATA COMMON VOCABULARY. Note that in the UN Metadata dictionary each term is not only defined but there are references to relevant organizations, standards, specifications, urls, etc.

Such a model could be created and updated collaboratively using tools like Prezi, Mindmap, Debategraph, etc.

Once we create our model, software engineers can render it into various machine-readable protocols such as XML, RDF, OWL, etc.

(click on the image for an enlarged view)

Other examples of standardized vocabularies  designed for  both human-readable and machine-readable information exchange:

UNITED NATIONS METADATA COMMON VOCABULARY (2009) http://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/docs-nqaf/04_sdmx_cog_annex_4_mcv_2009.pdf

Other UN data and metadata dictionaries, vocabularies, data sets, etc. http://data.un.org/Default.aspx

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), which is XML-based, has a variety of schemas (vocabularies) used to facilitate information exchange among partners in various disciplines, government-wide. It’s about achieving interoperability. Think of the NIEM data model as a mature and stable data dictionary of agreed-upon terms, definitions, and formats, independent of how information is stored in individual agency systems. www.niem.gov/technical/Pages/niem.aspx

GoodRelations  is a standardized vocabulary (also known as “schema”, “data dictionary”, or “ontology”) for product, price, store, company data, etc. GoodRelations is now fully compatible with the HTML5 microdata specification and can be used as an extension for the schema.org vocabulary. www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1

Schema.org The schemas are a set of ‘types’, each associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy. http://schema.org/docs/full.html

The geopolitical ontology, developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), provides names in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Spanish, Russian and Italian) and identifiers in various international coding systems (ISO2, ISO3, AGROVOC, FAOSTAT, FAOTERM, GAUL, UN, UNDP and DBPediaID codes) for territories and groups and tracks historical changes from 1985 up until today;[2] provides geolocation (geographical coordinates); implements relationships among countries and countries, or countries and groups, including properties such as has border with, is predecessor of, is successor of, is administered by, has members, and is in group; and disseminates country statistics including country area, land area, agricultural area, GDP or population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitical_ontology

Lists of other ontologies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28information_science%29

http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology#Ontologies_on_semanticweb.org

Related articles

• Solidarity, subsidiarity, and principled sanity (insightscoop.typepad.com)
• Schema.org, Learning Resource Metadata Initiative Join Hands In Boost To Educational Content Searches (semanticweb.com)
• Schema.org Gets New eCommerce Features (nexcess.net)
• Science of the Commons? (Poor Richard’s Almanack 2.0)

The post Building a dictionary for an economics of the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Poor Richard: I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here. I am imagining an information system of P2P practice and research. The P2P collaborative economy, free culture, and new commons movements are creating a lot of digital content. Most is in discursive and narrative form that is time consuming to read. Among this volume of content are case studies in a variety of formats (many very informal), business plans, proposals, and presumably many legal documents (charters, agreements, etc.).

I am imagining a semantic ontology according to which the key ideas and data of this content could be parsed and tagged to form a distributed database using semantic linked-data structures. This would help transition the collective knowledge base of the research, activist, and social entrepreneurial communities into a machine-readable, semantically linked, searchable form.

The P2P Foundation Wiki is an excellent searchable resource, and perhaps the semantic wiki extensions for the wiki engine could eventually be applied. “A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki

A fringe benefit of creating such data structures for existing content would be to provide common templates for future content creation and data collection.

• Gure Guretxa, Linda Larson Kemp, Lynne Desilva-johnson and 14 others like this.

• 

  Michel Bauwens I’m all for it,and have been proposed it quite a few times, but the issue for a volunteer-based commons is: who will do it. As you may realize, I have more than enough on my plate. So if a “just do it” injunction does not work, perhaps you could write it up in the form of a fundable research proposal?

  October 15 at 10:20pm · Unlike · 4
• 

  Michael Maranda PR: How much time have you put to this vision and its parameters? What you envision above has numerous layers. I imagine others hearing it would read their own take into it, as I do. My own past efforts overlap some of what you are addressing. of course, anyone who has experience in dealing with various aspects of this would probably do things differently if approaching it anew. It would be interesting to tease out some of the perspectives and chunk different tracks of effort that could move forward.

  October 15 at 11:13pm · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda As for capacity to move something like this – there is an order of complexity whereby it is hard to imagine it resulting from a volunteer just-do-it approach, unless perhaps a roadmap is plotted, and others can see their own interest in tackling various chunks. Still – I would also like to address the question of “community supported technology” as Sam Rose raised elsewhere. Some people are ready to put in some time pro bono in hackathons, but I’d like to see a way where we can blend such efforts fairly with others who are supported by the work. This is of course separate from the technological product you are visioning, but it’s hard for me to hear any big vision without returning to these questions.

  October 15 at 11:18pm · Unlike · 2
• Helene Finidori Probably this could be part of what I am currently trying to develop with Markus A. O. Loponen. It’s more or less the idea that was behind the pearltree that I connected on another thread

  October 16 at 9:36am · Edited · Unlike · 4
• Sergio Storch Great, friends! That´s also what I´ve been developing under the name “ecosystemic architecture” for a knowledge-centric NGO in Brazil. We are using a set of tools, with a little bit of data modeling, where we haven´t still reached the stage of using onthologies. It´ll be very welcome, as well as I think we can offer value-adding visions for this endeavor. Does anyone want to know more about it?

  October 16 at 12:25pm · Unlike · 6
• Sergio Storch Michel Bauwens, I think we together can tap resources to fund such an effort in Brazil. This can be a place appropriate for putting this together, because we are in a good moment in the convergence of information science and civil society P2P collaboration. And it can be glocal, of course, since the work that has to be done can be done remotely.

  October 16 at 12:27pm · Unlike · 8
• 

  Michael Maranda Sergio Storch do share. Perhaps a new thread, or whatever forum you like?

  October 16 at 9:41pm · Unlike · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda All – wish we would spend time mapping out alignments on these ideas..

  October 16 at 9:41pm · Unlike · 2
• 

  Poor Richard Michel, I’m surprised no one has pushed a few million dollars at you yet for such projects. Seriously, shame on those out there with deep pockets.

  October 16 at 9:42pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Helene, your pearltree background comments are probably what got me to thinking about this again — a topic I return to perennially. I have been interested in “expert systems” and knowledge bases for several decades, but as an intellectual tourist. I have no significant hands-on experience in the field. It is a fairly big theme in the chapter on “Identity Management” (still incomplete) I wrote for my PeerPoint paper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkAUpUxdfKGr_5Qio2SlZcnBu_sgnZWdoVTZuD_Regs/edit

  October 16 at 9:49pm · Like · 1
• 

  Poor Richard Helene’s pearltree: http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-fa=5509379&N-s=1_5509379&N-u=1_558656&N-p=50149783&N-play=0&N-f=1_5509379&N-reveal=2

  

  Pearltrees

  www.pearltrees.com

  Pearltrees lets you have all your interests at hand all the time

  October 16 at 9:56pm · Like · 3 · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard P2P Foundation’s “Everything Open and Free” mindmap: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-everything-mindmap-and-visualization/2009/09/08

  

  Open Everything Mindmap and visualization

  blog.p2pfoundation.net

  Thismindmapcould certainly be more beautifully designed and presented, but I can…See More

  October 16 at 9:58pm · Like · 5 · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard P2P Foundation “Everything Open and Free” Prezi: http://prezi.com/tlsiltvngctq/everything-open-and-free/

  

  Everything open and free by Lily Fisher on Prezi

  prezi.com

  presentation by Michel Bauwens

  October 16 at 10:00pm · Edited · Like · 5 · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard The P2PF Wiki has lots of ontology references: http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives?title=Special%3ASearch&search=ontology&go=Goand a page on linked data: http://p2pfoundation.net/Linked_DataThe PeerPoint paper has many links to sources on ontologies, linked-data, etc. but unfortunately its still a bit disorganized. It is searchable, though (press F3). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkAUpUxdfKGr_5Qio2SlZcnBu_sgnZWdoVTZuD_Regs/editWikipedia of course also has many pages on these and related topics.

  

  Search results for “ontology” – P2P Foundation

  p2pfoundation.net

  October 16 at 10:10pm · Edited · Like · 2 · Remove Preview
• 

  David EggletonEverything cultural, you (all) mean?Gravity and air are open and free, but solar gain, water and soils vary a lot from place to place. We are eaters.Yes, let’s stop shooting ourselves in the feet.

  October 16 at 10:14pm · Unlike · 2
• 

  Poor Richard Sergio, that sounds very exiting about the “convergence of information science and civil society P2P collaboration” in Brazil! I have been feeling for some time that Latin America is the hope of the world in pioneering new-old socioeconomic forms and technologies as if people and the planet mattered. As you, Michel, and your friends pursue things along these lines I’d love to keep in touch.

  October 16 at 10:18pm · Like · 2
• 

  Poor Richard Michael Miranda, the most time and effort I’ve put into this vision and its parameters is the PeerPoint paper and some long discussions on the Next Net Google group going back a few years. Next Net: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet

  Google Groups

  groups.google.com

  October 16 at 10:22pm · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard David, point taken! I was just writing about the unqualified abundance meme in another post in this group.

  October 16 at 10:28pm · Like · 2
• 

  David Eggleton http://www.barbaramuirpaints.com/2009/08/unqualified-abundance.html

  

  Barbara Muir Paints: Unqualified abundance

  www.barbaramuirpaints.com

  It’s so nice to hear that you are having a wonderful time way up there in Nova S…See More

  October 16 at 10:31pm · Unlike · 2 · Remove Preview
• 

  David Eggleton got carried away

  October 16 at 10:33pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Lol, David!

  October 16 at 10:33pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Michael Maranda, many good points and questions in your several comments, to which I have few answers or solutions. Lets brainstorm.

  October 16 at 10:40pm · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda sounds good — will check that link

  October 16 at 10:41pm · Unlike · 1
• 

  Michel Bauwens http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Intelligence; also in diigo, the P2P-Epistemology tag ..

  

  Category:Intelligence – P2P Foundation

  p2pfoundation.net

  This section is dedicated to monitoring P2P-influenced concepts and practices re…See More

  October 17 at 8:52pm · Unlike · 1 · Remove Preview
• 

  Michel Bauwens Sergio Storch, we can talk about this when I arrive in Rio after nov 15 ..

  October 17 at 8:59pm · Like · 1

• Helene FinidoriSergio Storch, yes I would like to know more about your endeavor. Also as far as ontology is concerned, you can have a look at the pearl tree linked by Richard higher up and it’s background explanation. Michel remember I suggested to do something like this (linked data accessible through graph pearltree is an intermediary step) with the p2p foundation internal links. Keep me in the loop .

  October 18 at 12:50am · Unlike · 3
• 

  Michel Bauwens will do Helene, but having time for such things is clearly an issue for now ..

  October 18 at 7:16pm · Like
• Helene Finidori Well Michel, I would suggest that we let this emerge from some interactions we are having here… working on it ! And so is Richard it seems?

  Friday at 3:00am · Edited · Unlike · 3
• Helene FinidoriJohn Love, Richard welcome to the Exploring Alternatives pearl tree team!

  Friday at 3:02am · Unlike · 2
• 

  Poor RichardHelene, I am still far from any good answers to the questions you pose in the “background” pearl of the Exploring Alternatives pearl tree. I particularly like what you did with debategraph, and after my initial experience with that user interface, I consider it an impressive achievement on your part!

  While I’m finding debategraph difficult to master, I like its capability to define crossliinks between nodes, a capability absent from many idea graphing/mapping tools using the “tree” metaphor. I created a simple debategraph for the “hex model” here: http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nid=231296&iv=09&mac=231299-231300-231298-231296-231303-231304-231302–

  (note: if the graph window is empty at first, try refreshing your browser)

  You have to go around and click on all the nodes before the cross links are shown in the graph. That’s one example of the problems with the interface. You should be able to easily select a view where all that information is included. Also, I don’t know how you got such a clean looking “outline” view (debategraph calls it “box” view) in yours.

  Debategraph might be suitable for designing ontologies at the conceptual level if it were easier to use. Things like Delicious or Diigo are good tools for creating folksonomies via tagging, but a folksonomy is just a vocabulary or word list without any organizational substructure. What is needed is more like a nested tree/outline format to turn a folksonomy into an ontology. Debategraph has this, plus the valuable crosslink feature, but it lacks the convenient browser “bookmark bar” button to capture content into the graph the way pearltrees, delicious, and diigo can do.

  None of this goes any farther towards creating open linked-data structures, either. I am focused on the ontology design first, but perhaps there are tools that cover both bases that I’m not aware of yet.

  

  Commons

  debategraph.org

  Debate map visualization of: Commons

  Friday at 3:53am · Edited · Like · 2 · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard Another part of the “research information system” I am visioneering is pattern detection and recognition. An ontology gives us set of semantically charged patterns. Then what we need is a pattern language with which to parse existing content and match it with our ontology. I am thinking of something like the “regular expressions” used in the old unix text editors or in the Pearl and Awk programming languages I once used. http://encyclopedia.tfd.com/Regular+expressions

  

  Regular expressions

  encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com

  Wikipedia article about Regular expressions

   

  Friday at 4:04am · Edited · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell Monson Hi Poor Richard , this is a vision we share. Programming work has been on its way. I invite you to have a look at http://automenta.com/netention, and to join this list https://groups.google.com/group/global-survival

  Netention – Automenta

  www.automenta.com

  Software that works with us, instead of for us. A future that promises accelerat…See More

  Friday at 4:29am · Like · 2 · Remove Preview
• 

  Michael Maranda Ontologies of/for what?

  Friday at 4:33am · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda Pattern languages best emerge by direct human effort.

  Friday at 4:35am · Edited · Like
• Dante-Gabryell Monson some more precise descriptions of ungoing coding :
  http://blog.automenta.com/2012/10/netention-semantic-editor-design-options.html

  

  Automenta News: Netention – Semantic Editor (Design Options)

  blog.automenta.com

  Friday at 6:07am · Unlike · 1 · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell Monson some more :
  http://blog.automenta.com/2012/10/combining-netention-and-gss-into.html

  

  Automenta News: Combining Netention and GSS into Netention

  blog.automenta.com

  Friday at 6:08am · Unlike · 1 · Remove Preview
• Lorraine Lee And of course I will again plug http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Pubwan

  

  Pubwan

  scratchpad.wikia.com

  Pubwan is a proposed project in open source, non-profit data mining. Applications to consumer…

  Friday at 6:11am · Unlike · 2 · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell Monson and some recent post :
  https://groups.google.com/d/msg/global-survival/3F_iSgz4Ei4/5VVcR9XyRV4J

  Re: Visual Programming with Interaction Nets – Google Groups

  groups.google.com

  Friday at 6:12am · Unlike · 1 · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell MonsonMichael Maranda , perhaps you mean Folksonomies ?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

  

  Folksonomy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  Afolksonomyis a system of classification derived from the practice and method of…See More

  Friday at 6:29am · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell Monson further note : although it may not yet have the visualization potentials I hope Netention will have, it is also of great interest to look into OntoWiki ( cc: Pavlik Elf ) :
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OntoWiki
  http://ontowiki.net/Projects/OntoWiki
  Its mailinglist :
  http://groups.google.com/group/ontowiki-user

  

  OntoWiki – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  OntoWikiis a free,open-sourcesemantic wikiapplication, meant to serve as anontol…See More

  Friday at 6:34am · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell Monson I also feel like citing a phrase used by Seth , in relation to the development of http://automenta.com/netention ( see links to prototypes and mailing list above – code is open sourced )

  “I’ve explained to people that Netention is not just a product – but that it refers to the evolution of human language into new semantic and syntactical domains of higher expressiveness and effectiveness in programming reality itself, not just software. so anything that can help this goal ought to be part of the project, as long as it doesn’t complexify it.”

  Netention – Automenta

  www.automenta.com

  Software that works with us, instead of for us. A future that promises accelerat…See More

  Friday at 6:43am · Like · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard Thanks for posting the links y’all. I hope these projects will all continue to develop and gain momentum. How and where does it all come together?

  Friday at 7:01am · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Dante that netention semantic editor would be truly awesome! Not that I’m any expert on the topic, but that is the first tool of its kind I have even seen a coherent description of. I would suggest that such an editor should have easy switching between several views including an outline view and a semantic graph view as well as the wysiwyg document content. Is there any way in hell that a great editor like LibreOffice (a free and open source office suite, developed by The Document Foundation. It is descended from OpenOffice.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice) could be forked and retrofitted with semantic functions? Then we’d have semantic spreadsheets, outlines, etc., too. (LibreOffice Online will allow for the use of LibreOffice through a web browser by using the canvas element. Development is ongoing and it has not yet been released)

  

  LibreOffice – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  LibreOfficeis afree and open sourceoffice suite, developed byThe Document Founda…See More

  Friday at 7:20am · Edited · Like · Remove Preview
• Dante-Gabryell Monson I suggest these projects come together by supporting the synthesis of these technologies, and then use these technologies to continue our interactions. What could help, is to support developers / programmers. I believe a “collective” could be a good format to converge programmers and non-programmers sharing such intentions ( much in the way other platforms emerged, such as couchsurfing ).
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective

  I imagine it being like some kind of temporary artist / developer residency.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist-in-residence

  It would be good to cover the food, heating, water and electricity costs, and find some agreement in relation to rent. I believe this approach is, at first, one of the most cost effective approaches to converge and mutually empower each other. It would need to be decided where to hold such collective ( I have in mind some places in Germany – perhaps there are other suggestions ? Or perhaps we could change location every 3 months ? Europe, US, … ).

  If need be, I imagine partnering with existing not for profits, or eventually a limited liability partnership, or setting one up.

  We are discussing legal frameworks here ( edgeryders are also interested in graphed approaches , midst other projects )

  http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/where-edgeryders-dare/mission_case/can-we-and-should-we-pull-official-edgeryders-organisation

  Edgeryders also discuss potentials for collectives / residencies , called “unmonastery” :

  https://twitter.com/unmonastery

  I personally suggest a permanent collective residence :

  http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/who-ryder-what-edge/mission_case/permanent-collective-leipzig

  

  Collective – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  Acollectiveis a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one co…See More

  Friday at 7:25am · Unlike · 2 · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor RichardDante-Gabryell Monson, per Seth “as long as it doesn’t complexify it.” — LOL, yeah, right…

  Friday at 7:30am · Edited · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Dante, I agree that a collective-in-residence approach would be ideal. If one exists or forms with the scope discussed here I would try to be involved as much as possible via net.

  Friday at 7:33am · Like
• 

  Poor Richard OntoWiki looks very promising but I don’t have a server. Does anyone know if there is a hosted wikifarm running OntoWiki? Also this:

  “Possible drawback: since OntoWiki is based on RAP (an RDF API for PHP and SQL databases), it cannot be used to host large RDF/OWL models (hosting more than 5 MB of RDF/OWL is not possible, I would estimate). However, we could still try to represent some selected parts of the demo datasets in OntoWiki.” http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-lifesci/2007Jan/0229.html

  Suggestion for the HCLSIG Demo: Ontowiki from [email protected] on 2007-01-30 (public-semweb-lifesci@w3

  lists.w3.org

  Friday at 8:02am · Like · Remove Preview
• 

  Michael MarandaDante-Gabryell Monson I meant what I said .. someone else mentioned ontologies being facilitated by a tool, I think debategraph. I want to know Ont. applied to what specifically?

  Friday at 8:08am · Like
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  Michael Maranda Unless what was meant in that case WAS folksonomy, but the term ontology was used?

  Friday at 8:11am · Like
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  Poor Richard “Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki Farm Abstract. (pdf) This paper details the main concepts and the architecture of UfoWiki, a semantic wiki farm { i.e. a server of wikis { that uses form-based templates to produce ontology-based knowledge. Moreover, the system allows diferent wikis to share and interlink ontology instance between each other, so that knowledge can be produced by dierent and distinct communities in a distributed but collaborative way. Key words: semantic wikis, wiki farm, linked data, ontology population, named graphs, SIOC” http://smw.referata.com/w/images/Towards_an_Interlinked_Semantic_Wiki_Farm.pdf

  Friday at 8:13am · Like
• 

  Poor Richard note: Distinctions between folksonomy and ontology (information science) were briefly discussed in a prev comment.

  Friday at 8:35am · Like
• 

  Mark Dilley An interesting thread – it got a little TL;DR – what it makes me think about is how we work together – on Facebook & other threaded media we have an http://bit,ly/WriteOnlyMemory – if we were working in a wiki – we would be building our knowledge and conversations into reference able points that could help us work together better.

  Friday at 8:43am via mobile · Unlike · 1
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  Poor RichardMark Dilley I’m looking for a hosted semantic wiki platform for my work and for collaboration like this. OntoWiki sounds like the best semantic wiki platform so far, but no hosted sites available yet. Any suggestions? (anyone)

  Friday at 8:46am · Like · 1
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  Michael Maranda Indeed – Mark Dilley thats one aspect that makes FB particularly unsuited for this work. It’s fine for stream of the moment, but meaningful work requires some room for curation/stewardship. Potential for subgroups, space to summarize and cull…

  Friday at 8:48am · Unlike · 1
• 

  Michael MarandaPoor Richard are you at all familiar with wagn? see http://wagn.org— it’s more relevant if you can get to the level of wagneer. It’s billed as a variety of wiki, and as a application platform. I’ve known the folks involved for many years, and have been serving on their board. they are an NPO. (GrassCommons.org)

  

  Go together. – Wagn

  wagn.org

  team-driven websitesWagn helps creators work together. Most web teams are badly …See More

  Friday at 8:50am · Unlike · 2 · Remove Preview
• 

  Mark Dilley Wagn is a great wiki, very powerful – a semantic MediaWiki farm http://referata.com is also available.

  Friday at 9:03am via mobile · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard I was considering referata, but I’ve hesitated because I am a little underwhelmed with the mediawiki semantic extensions. I wouldn’t get into wagn if not ontology-aware.

  Friday at 9:08am · Like · 1
• 

  Mark Dilley I believe Wagn is ontology aware

  Friday at 9:10am via mobile · Like · 1
• Helene Finidori That’s the problem maybe? Many wikis and apps are just ‘ontology aware’, or ‘folksonomy aware’ through tags or keywords. Not many are ontology generating through hyperlinks (linked data) that are representative of activity and actual emergence. Not the perception thereof… At the beginning of emerging memes, tags are not very usefull because lost in the noise, or struggling to find an expression. Just look at the commons tag. What turns out is creative commons…

  Friday at 2:35pm · Edited · Unlike · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda We can ask Ethan McCutchen the manner or extent to which Wagn is “ontology aware”

  Friday at 2:28pm · Like
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  Poor Richard MM, Helene’s qualification of “ontology generating” should be the operative one. Thanks, Helene.

  Friday at 2:31pm · Like
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  Michael Maranda Not yet convinced of that, I am afraid.

  Friday at 2:34pm · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda Or it is unclear what the purposes and uses are of these ontologies.

  Friday at 2:34pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Michael, ontology (info sci) and linked-data can be hard to get your head around if you don’t have fairly recent software engineering familiarity. Here is the best explanation I’ve seen in a while:

  Open Ontology, by Paola Di Maio

  While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies are conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to understand what makes up an ontology, different authors have different views. Mike Uschold et al. say that an ontology may take a variety of forms, but it will necessarily include a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning, such as definitions and an indication of how concepts are interrelated, which collectively impose a structure on the domain and constrain the possible interpretations of terms [9]. Particularly in Web based environments, an ontology delimits the boundary of the system’s knowledge and functional domain, and serves as conceptual and semantic reference for software development. In practical terms, entities and attributes, classes, objects and properties, as well as data models, data schemas, metadata and vocabularies and their extensions, when ‘normalized’ all contain information that models a view of the world, for the purpose of a given system, and constitute the representation of such domain, in short, an ontology.

  The expression ‘open ontology’ is not new, and it is used generically to reference ontologies which are in the public domain, and sometimes to ontologies that have been developed using collaborative processes.

  In our work, we have come across the need to define and qualify, at least to some extent the degree of ontology ‘openness’:

  To be ‘useful’ (fit for purpose) in complex loosely coupled scenarios, where the cooperation of diverse and geographically dispersed agents is required, it is necessary for the ontology to display at least the following properties ….

  http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Ontology

  

  Open Ontology – P2P Foundation

  p2pfoundation.net

  While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies a…See More

  Friday at 2:41pm · Like · 3 · Remove Preview
• Helene Finidori Sorry I didn’t get to read the whole thread… On ontologies, Shirky’s ‘Ontology is overrated maybe’? Netention? Hat off to Seth! Dante-Gabryell, if you manage to get the ball rolling on transforming the pearl tree of alternative memes into linked data of evolving memes from wikipedia or P2P foundation as we have discussed several times, through a collective, so that an ontology of P2P linked memes actually emerges from our discussion, great!

  Friday at 2:42pm · Unlike · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda I have been paying attention, dont get me wrong. I think there is some wishful thinking here in this application of ontologies. Are we trying to make the brainwork automated? What is lost? Is what emerges from these automata folksonomy or ontology? Do we have human intervention in the curation of these ontologies? On what basis? (again, with what purposes? for the latter let me mull your last post a little more)

  Friday at 2:45pm ·Like
• 

  Poor Richard MM, the only place in PeerPoint I had a chance to get into detail about how ontology and linked data are applied is the section on Identity Management. That is ontology/linked-data through and through, and the engineers in the W3C RWW community working group, among many other active software engineers, totally agree.

  Friday at 2:53pm · Edited · Like · 1
• 

  Poor RichardThere may be ways for folksonomy to feed ontology. I’m agnostic about it right now. I recently posted at Y Worlds Working Group Alpha:Greets, tawhuac

  I’m glad you picked up on that P2P fb thread. There’s more on this topic in the Next Net and Global Survival Google Groups, and I’ve also been tossing it around with folks at the W3C Read Write Web Community Group and various mail lists.

  The trouble with folksonomies like you get from diigo or the like is no category/subcategory organization. You might impose this later, perhaps, but after the fact the semantic relationships between tags are not as clear as when you first assign them to a tweet, web page, link or whatever. I may be wrong about this, but it seems important at this point.

  Using Diigo as an example, it has some great features, not the least of which is poping its tagging dialog up in whatever your active window may be and automatically capturing the url, etc for you.

  What Diigo and other similar apps don’t do:

  1. let you access your entire existing folksonomy, alphabetized, in the dialog box or auto-complete if you manually type a tag. So you wind up with many variants of the essentially the same tag.

  2. let you hierarchically group tags into categories or sub categories, and define those on the fly

  3. let you define crosslinks between tags, categories, and subcategories (tags and subcategories may relate to more than one main category)

  4. they don’t publish the data to RDF or some linked-data format.

  What do you folks think?

  Friday at 3:01pm · Like
• Helene Finidori Actually, I think Shirky is one that knows what he is talking about… He speaks from one vantage point and you Richard probably from another… Anyway Michael… actually I think the ‘application of ontology’ is to enable us to see what emerges and to ‘orient’ emerging data and patterns so we humans can parse it and make sense of it… I see this as a help to navigation, exploration and discovery… Of course we have human curation in the process… it’s the whole point… bring things to visibility of humans… The negation of the black box! Our problem with data and knowledge is access and entry point. You have to know from where to enter and start to navigate…

  Friday at 3:01pm · Unlike · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda Thats’ my point in several different posts. yes. But I think we already have much of the tech at hand, and I think we are inflating the value of concepts like the semantic web. I see myriad projects starting with very similar aims, and overlap, and a bit too much attachment.

  Friday at 3:11pm · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda (last response was to Helene Finidori primarily)

  Friday at 3:12pm · Like
• 

  Poor RichardHelene, I agree with your points about ontology, but have to strongly disagree with you about Shirky’s.  In 10 or 20 years with strong AI in the reach of the open software community (as opposed to the military), our computers would be able to crawl the web and learn language and infer meaning the same way a child does, perhaps. At present, projects like IBM’s Watson rely on ontologies and expert systems.

  “The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies. Specifically, DBPedia, WordNet, and Yago were used.[20]” (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_%28computer%29 )

  Also see a paper by one of Watson’s architects: Foundations of Ontological Analysis by Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Center

  http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CD0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.vassar.edu%2Ffaculty%2Fwelty%2Fpresentations%2FIBM-02.pps&ei=lbOBUMCjB4Ho8QTC_IHQBA&usg=AFQjCNE-dfzVAXX2II3wtV4M00UyFyjOGg

  

  Watson (computer) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  Watsonis anartificial intelligencecomputer system capable of answering questions…See More

  Friday at 3:22pm · Like · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richard Sophisticated search engines like Google can find patterns but they can infer very little meaning aside from dumb correlations without consulting ontologies. Ontologies are models of our knowledge of the world created by humans for computers to use in order to do tasks we want them to do.

  Friday at 3:26pm · Like · 1
• 

  Michael MarandaPoor Richard what sort of claims is Shirkey making that you find problematic? if best addressed in another thread, please do

  Friday at 3:32pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Part of the reason for common misconceptions and lack of wide understanding about ontologies is the primitive state of development of the tools available at our level to create and apply them. Most people who are not software engineers in the ontology …See More

  Friday at 3:37pm · Edited · Like · 1
• Helene Finidori Ah Richard, I just see you comment on debategraph. Lots of potential in debategraph… some serious work to be done on the interface though…

  Friday at 3:35pm · Edited · Unlike · 1
• Helene Finidori Richard? Misconception of a potential because lack of tools? Really? It reminds me of 3G bound to fail in 2000 because of lack of adequate device and software -seen from Sweden first hand at the time…

  Friday at 3:39pm · Edited · Like
• 

  Poor RichardHelene, I’m not understanding your point. Have you read all my remarks in this thread?

  Friday at 3:42pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Michael, I’ll confine my critique to Shirky’s remarks about ontology. He basically says all we need is folksonomy (chaotic tagging) and our surprisingly brilliant computers can figure everything out from that. He says for example “The strategy of tagging — free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints — seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.” For one thing, you can’t create meaningful linked data sets from thousands of slightly different tags that mean the same thing, or identical tags that mean thousands of different things. Our surprising computers would choke. Remember, a single system of categorization (in Shirky’s universe a giant global tag cloud) must be shared by hundreds of millions of people. The only way to make sense of that many tags is, unsurprisingly, an ontology. Tags are just words. We already have words. Words don’t solve the problem by themselves. We need dictionaries to go with the words– that’s one of the things an ontology is, a dictionary/encyclopedia for computers.

  Friday at 4:04pm · Edited · Like · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda I imagine some of this is more in the inspirational realm of possibilities. I have the same well grounded reservations per folksonomies. I see more value in the communities of practice establishing these as common assets. I’ll have to follow up sometime on a model that aims to bridge over some of the difficulties.

  Friday at 4:04pm · Like
• 

  Poor Richard We have the collective knowledge of the crowd, of humanity, in Wikipedia. In ten years the volume of data in such resources will be several orders of magnitude greater. But the present limits of a computers ability to help us digest, cross-reference, c…See More

  Friday at 4:20pm · Edited · Like · 1
• 

  Ethan McCutchen Hi all. As to the question of whether Wagn is “ontology generating”, we’d like to think so. At least, that’s what we’re aiming for. Naming, renaming, denoting, referring, contexualizing… it’s all at the heart of our approach to creating community databases organically.

  Friday at 5:21pm · Like · 2
• 

  Poor RichardEthan, thanks for dropping in. Does Wagn output any RDF or linked-data or such?

  Friday at 5:26pm · Like · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda While waiitng for Ethan or Gerry Gleason to weigh in — I believe these outputs are something that can be established via wagneering, or constructing some WQL… but aside from that there is a lot of interesting items in the pipeline that are close to what we are seeking, if not already present.

  Friday at 6:23pm · Like · 1
• 

  Mark Dilley Wagn is powerful – it has been 6 years since the inception of the idea and I still struggle with it. Wiki+Tagging

  Friday at 6:46pm · Like · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda And a new release was pushed out today ,, they are moving forward to an exciting model w upcoming 2.0

  Friday at 6:52pm · Like
• 

  Mark Dilley looks like not right now: https://Google.com/search?&q=site:wagn.org+RDF&oq=site:wagn.org+RDF

  Friday at 7:00pm · Edited · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda The Q is more what it takes or what strategies are best, because I think it is not presently built in but can be readily achieved on the new framework. but thats all prob best for a separate thread.

  Friday at 7:04pm · Like · 1
• 

  Ethan McCutchen We don’t currently have an RDF exporter, though Gerry Gleason is currently working on a general XML export solution.

  Friday at 7:57pm · Like · 1
• 

  Ethan McCutchen shoot, typing with a sleeping infant on my lap, and his foot just submitted that last response prematurely I would say that wagn is more RDF-like in the way it structures data than any other solution I know, so the export is really no significant c…See More

  Friday at 8:01pm · Like · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda RDF is in XML, so it is really a matter of setting up cards/nesting etc..?

  Friday at 8:04pm · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda I’m falling more on the side of ontology than folksonomy in this sort of endeavor.

  Friday at 8:04pm · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda So, it is fair to say we can populate datasets based on our ontologies and we can cobble together export ability fairly easily

  Friday at 8:06pm · Like
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  Ethan McCutchenyes, that’s fair to say.I would say that once we have an XML renderer, it would be very straightforward to build an RDF/XML renderer that inherits from it.

  Friday at 8:17pm · Like · 1
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  Gerry Gleason My theory for Wagn Xml has been that if you put the information into Xml, there is much support for translating to any variation of xml with the same info (I’m talking about XSLT stylesheet, supported by most browsers now). Json is similar, once it is in Json, you can rearrange stuff to any target formatting.

  Friday at 8:22pm · Like · 1
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  Gerry Gleason I picked Wagn to work on because it mixes relational and free format data better than anything I’ve even seen. I’ve been working to add the format rendering, and more recently towards taking data into Wagn in the same formats.

  Friday at 8:26pm · Unlike · 2
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  Gerry Gleason As I read through more of the background in this thread, I think there is a lot of confusion about what ontologies and semantic web constructions will do for you. I have yet to read anything compelling about ontology in the information systems sense. …See More

  Saturday at 5:58am · Edited · Like
• 

  Gerry Gleason To put it another way, when you talk about ontology this way, you are talking about a solution in search of a problem, and it isn’t really a solution to anything. Dante is pointing to a way forward, creating spaces for the work to connect and interlin…See More

  Saturday at 5:50am · Like
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  Gerry Gleason Another interesting project is Ward Cunningham’s “Smallest Federated Wiki project …See More

  Saturday at 5:57am · Like · 1
• Helene Finidori cc Markus A. O. Loponen

  Saturday at 6:21am · Unlike · 1
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  Poor RichardGerry, Ethan, and interested others, I agree that providing XML rendering is a good thing, but I doubt that RDF can be automatically parsed out of generic XML. ( RDF is a data model often expressed in XML syntax, but also in other types of syntax such as N3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

  

  Resource Description Framework – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  TheResource Description Framework(RDF) is a family ofWorld Wide Web Consortium(W…See More

  18 hours ago · Like · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor RichardEthan McCutchen: “I think of it [RDF?] less as an export than as one format of a query result. Wagn has a query language (WQL) which is, to my mind, very much like navigating RDF.” Sounds like a useful feature, but I am also wondering in this topic thread how to parse entire collections of existing content into RDF and linked-data with some kind of overarching ontological framework.

  17 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1
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  Poor RichardGerry Gleason “As I read through more of the background in this thread, I think there is a lot of confusion about what ontologies and semantic web constructions will do for you….Can anyone tell me what successes or results have come from this work?”…See More

  17 hours ago · Edited · Like
• 

  Poor Richard@Gerry, “when you talk about ontology this way, you are talking about a solution in search of a problem, and it isn’t really a solution to anything.”I beg to differ with you and numerous others who feel this way. I have given a variety of arguments …See More

  17 hours ago · Like · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda As long as we’re in FB threads, I feel doomed to repeating.

  17 hours ago · Unlike · 1
• Helene Finidori Doomed to repeating only if you/we, everybody keeps opening conversations all over the place… But that’s how we create a diversity of contact points and a diversity of response… so repetition is probably not a feature ‘imposed’ by FB… but r…See More

  16 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 1
• Helene Finidori And that’s what we need to deal with and manage… conversations that are scattered and asynchronized vbecause this is how we want them to be… open and evolutionary…

  16 hours ago · Like
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  Michael Maranda Well, part of the repetition is because we are using this threaded space which we cannot curate to our purposes. It should be expected that there will be people new to the conversation in general and in the specific formations here. This space is not set up to receive and orient well. I would argue this is in fact imposed by a carelessness or more pointedly, lack of concern for these issues of groupness.

  16 hours ago · Unlike · 1
• Helene Finidori Yes so we need to redispatch/segment our conversations contents into chunks that can be reprocessed… What I’ve been talking about and trying to get some development done for a while… with to date Markus A. O. Loponen up to the task!

  16 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Michael Maranda Indeed. And the rationale for such agreements has to be part of the orientation for anyone arriving.

  16 hours ago · Like
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  Poor RichardHelene Finidorii: “we need to redispatch/segment our conversations contents into chunks that can be reprocessed.”Not a bad problem definition. I am imagining a semantic wiki space that includes additional collaborative functions. Each wiki page migh…See More

  15 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1
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  Gerry Gleason The Open Ontology article is great too. I think we can go further with that and do something necessary. In the space of the metacurrency project, something like what is described here is necessary as a foundation of what we where calling Open Rules, …See More

  13 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason BTW, comments are a standard feature in Wagn. It using a special code in the permissions system. If you can “comment” on the card by the permission setting, then a comment box shows up on the botten in the “open” view. Most Wagn’s also will have ru…See More

  13 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason If I were automating the migration of a mediawiki to wagn, I would probably turn the talk namespace into +discussion cards attached to the base name as migrated.

  13 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard I discussed commenting above because of our shared experience here on fb with so many parallel and discontinuous threads on related topics within and between groups and also venues outside of fb. The most generic metaphor for this may be micro blogging…See More

  13 hours ago · Like
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  Gerry Gleason I realize that, and so I would want to have features to ‘pull’ comments from any source and record how and when that is done. I also think we should look to Ward’s SFW for initial protocols for doing that. FB may not like ‘comment pulling’, but if th…See More

  12 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard Midiawiki’s talk space is good but doesn’t feed into a trans-wiki-page stream, does it? I think the only way of aggregating talk from multiple pages is via email notification.

  12 hours ago · Like
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  Gerry Gleason And don’t get me wrong, I love imagineering and find it to be productive preparatory work, but I really want to be building things. I want to be building things in the gift economy and I do possess important currencies in the design and coding of thes…See More

  11 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard I appreciate your inputs here, Gerry. This is a big, long, conversation.

  11 hours ago · Like · 3
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  Gerry Gleason Indeed.

  10 hours ago · Unlike · 3
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  Chris Watkins I think we might have discussed Semantic MediaWiki with Michel, and from memory, he liked the idea. Installing it will require effort, though and they don’t have the resources for it.
  We’ve installed SMW on Appropedia (when we started a compendium of m…See More

  9 hours ago · Unlike · 4
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  Mark Dilley I think we if we could raise a couple hunded dollars, that would get us upgraded… will ask around

  8 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard Just tacking a link here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Prospective_EcoSocial_Ontology“The Prospective Eco-Social Ontology (PESO) is an approach toward interoperable taxonomic systems for navigation and concatenation of diverse content libraries and topical threads in the realm of “common good” environmental and cultural regeneration work. The idea sprouted from designs for the BrowsEarth content aggregation platform.”

  

  Prospective EcoSocial Ontology – P2P Foundation

  p2pfoundation.net

  Basic concept: create adaptable shared reference structures and symbology for cr…See More

 

Michael Maranda

Ontology/Ontologies … we use the term in a variety of senses. Some inspired by or in context of programming, some in programmatic approaches to semantics for content. We have the adjacent term folksonomy. We have some philosophical minds among us I am sure, and I’ll let them speak for themselves, and we have social theory and observation as further sources. We also have patterns and pattern languages with roots in architectural theory (Alexander) and with some modification to coding practice. We’d do well to acknowledge the different purposes, strategies and language for each of these, which are somewhat overlapping.

Like · · Unfollow Post · Friday at 8:18am near Ann Arbor, MI

• Kyle Sykes, John Kellden and 2 others like this.
• 

  Michael Maranda Going to the root of ontology, and very central to my own work which is a blend of most fo the above (making me rather sensitive to the ambiguities of this discourse) leaning heavily upon social theory/observation in response to what I see as gaps that often stem from ideology or slant. Without burdening everyone with the complexities of the full modelof Shared, Layered and Open Stewardship I will highlight one aspect of the ontology of that work, and here I mean Ontology as mode of being – philosophical and social. Looking at social interactions, and the social formations that undergird them I distinguish in pragmatic terms four layers (you may quickly also relate this to Internet architecture by analogy). Also I am employing a coding mentality of “Acts As” rather than “is a” …

  Friday at 8:23am · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda What I wish to make clear for design work and for providing a vision and possible framework for coordination and collaboration are appropriate layers of stewardship and the being of different social formations. (I know I open myself to argument, and have had many of them already.)

  Friday at 8:27am · Unlike · 3
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  Michael Maranda In short we must make room for a view of layered stewardship from the vantage of different social functions and social formations. Persons – Everybody. Groups, an are with the widest range of social formation from rather informal to incorporated, with attention to a range of nesting operations. Orgs with many subgroups, Organizations of Organizations and groups, etc. And finally Networks/Fields. The question that led me to this begins with the appropriate siting of stewardship and the necessity of openness… that any functional domain requires freedom to find alternate provider for that function and the ability to DIY or form an alternate body when desired.

  Friday at 8:31am · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda I offer this in contrast to models that ignore the variety of social formations, reducing us to individuals. Indeed, we are individuals, but we don’t have to lose anything or feel reduced by our participation in other social formations, and indeed we generally retain the freedom to participate in multiple such formations, more so in healthier societies.

  Friday at 8:32am · Like · 1
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  Poor Richard Disambiguation: My use of the term ontology here is specific to information systems which was my topic. If there is an ongoing problem with ambiguity I can adopt Wikipedia’s format: ontology (information systems). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28information_science%29

  

  Ontology (information science) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  Incomputer scienceandinformation science, anontologyformally represents knowledg

  e as a set of concepts within adomain, and the relationships among those concepts. It can be used toreasonabout the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.

  Friday at 8:33am · Like · Remove Preview
• 

  Michael Maranda As I noted sometimes this is a simple and reactive bias. Perhaps influenced by strands of Libertarianism, or at least reinforced by it. Often it is a reaction against injustices and enclosures perpetrated by others or at other layers. We have adopted the general philosophy of “route around” in many such cases where the institutions and groups are not serving well nor serving in a meaningfully inclusive manner. However, we should not deny to ourselves the ability to establish structures as and when we see fit, with the express freedom to likewise take them down when they no longer serve our purpose.

  Friday at 8:35am · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda Many is the time I have seen P2P architectures which are solely concerned with how we interact as persons, and with scant attention, and frequently a rejection of the need for instruments for the groups. This is not me calling out anyone here in this group, I a not saying I see it here. But I am hoping that you here also see these issues, and that if we can present a unified theory, it will take my points into account.

  Friday at 8:36am · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard I dealt with these issues a bit in http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/organizations/Subsidiarity is relevant, too.

  

  Organizing P2P organizations

  almanac2010.wordpress.com

  Last updated 10/4/2012 [I probably should have titled this “Hacking the Organiza

  tion”. What follows is not a primer of organizational design but simply a back-of-the-envelope sketch of how a number…

  Friday at 8:42am · Like · 3 · Remove Preview
• 

  David Braden This is an important topic Michael. The whole system (and I mean whole to mean everything) is built up from individual interactions. Humans operate primarily as groups. These are superorganisms operating within the system in the same way that ant and bee colonies are superorganisms. Groups then intereact at these different levels you describe.There are pros and cons to the internal structure of groups from the point of view of the individual. From the point of view of the whole, what is important is what flows from the interactions. Nutrient flows through an ecosystem, the flow of goods and services through a market, the flow of information through a network.The point of groups is how they allow individuals to participate in the flows . . . how they increase or decrease the quantity and quality of interactions . . . how they increase or decrease the volume of the flows.

  Friday at 9:28am · Unlike · 5
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  Michael Maranda Yes, thank you David I appreciate your input here. Indeed, the recognition of groups is a recognition of dimensions of our sociality and of our existing institutions and practices. Anything that excludes them will give only a partial picture.

  Friday at 9:33am · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda Picking up again from the other thread … what i am arriving at are purposive ontologies. They need to be tied to fields of practice or concern. They become a common asset for those acting in that arena. Certain Ont/ sets help navigate borders of fields or between them.

  Friday at 4:20pm · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard Ontologies encapsulate knowledge and expertise in various domains. It is important for people with the relevant knowledge and expertise in each domain to populate the ontology for that domain, but it is equally important for all the domains to use ontologies that are constructed according to certain common standards so that they are interoperable and form a whole. For example, Wikipedia enforces various standards and requires that data be entered into Wikipedia in proper wiki syntax via the the wiki editor. You can’t just paste any old Word doc into Wikipedia.

  Friday at 4:35pm · Like
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  Michael Maranda Yes. That is clear. The Ontology is a different matter than the syntax for a particular platform/tool. Each Ontology is a standard for content in a domain. Ontologies should conform to interchange standards, and platforms should habe adequate facilities for import/export according to interchange formats.

  Friday at 6:33pm · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda Certain classes of object will still have their own ontologies some elements being applicable cross-field, and others specific to fields/sub-fields. It is useful to have a place or places (& method) where reference ontologies are declared, stored and shared. Even for given Object type in an Ontology, we may therefore find many versions of that Ontology as a field evolves.

  Friday at 6:38pm · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda One model for organizing across ontologies groups 5 buckets – each bucket a type of data, where we may find reference to various object/ontology standards of that grouping, convenient acronym: S.C.O.P.E. Stories/Solutions, Conversations, Organizations, People (persons), Events.

  Friday at 6:41pm · Unlike · 1
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  Michael Maranda You may imagine that for example .. “Solutions” in one domain may require a different data model than in another, and would specify particular aspects for it’s Ontology.

  Friday at 6:42pm · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard Word.

  Friday at 7:08pm · Like · 1
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  Poor Richard Take “person” for example. Tha’ts an ontology (or I probably should say sub-ontology or mini-ontology) that Y Worlds is working on. Obviously person is an object common to most ontological domains of knowledge. The open ontology approach is to have a core ontology that is extensible and to customize it for if each knowledge domain. Or perhaps multiple domains can share a person model that has enough attributes to serve them all with some attributes being unused in some domains. One possible candidate for a core person model is the one needed for basic identification and access control across interacting web applications. One commenter on the hex model wondered what implicit assumptions I was making about a person. Would a robot qualify? Of course it all depends on the context you need the model for.

  Friday at 7:19pm · Edited · Like · 1
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  Michael Maranda Indeed, and in so many cases a group, organization or field will have need for particulars about a person-data-object… which are clearly extensions of a core, but even so deserve to be declared as a standard/extension.

  Friday at 7:23pm · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason Poor Richard, I don’t think we should explore this further here, but I would dispute this, “Ontologies encapsulate knowledge and expertise in various domains.” as being a claim made by advocates of these formal ontological systems. I’ve yet to say any that credibly deliver on that claim. If you want to debate that further, we should create a different thread for it.
  As a developer and systems expert, I don’t find these systems compelling enough to want to use them in any system I would work on developing.
  From the standpoint of ontology in the sense that Michael is exploring here, this is a question of group personality and choice. If you and your network are developing it, then you will attempt to use formal ontologies and explore a lot of existing projects and code that go that way. I and other have made other choices and you see some of that explored in the links. Formal ontologies are of no help in resolving the high level design questions like this, there is no ontology of ontology to explore it with.
  From the standpoint of actually building something collaboratively in this space, we have to first have a space for those who have made enough investment and commitment to matter in the outcome. If you’re not designing and building code, I don’t care what you think of formal ontologies. I’m not that invested in this specific community but I have a long time association with peer to peer as an open field. If I’m doing development work on this project, I can guarantee it will involve Wagn. If Poor Richard is involved it will involve formal ontologies (at least until he sees the light ), and he and I will have to figure out how to come to an understanding.

  Saturday at 8:46am · Like · 1
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  Gerry Gleason BTW, I would say the claim that “Wagn is ontologically aware” represents the fact that Wagn is very effective at creating ontological spaces, at naming things in a natural way. That means you just encode your ontology in the wagn namespace and rely on its own namespace semantics. These semantics also make the content available as RESTful resources. The Wagn namespace is a hierachy of potentially nested resources.
  I think it would be relatively easy to implement ontologies on Wagn as it is, we just don’t have a clear use case or any demand for it.
  With Wagn, you don’t need a lot of semantic translation, you can just name things how you want. Names and semantics are only formalized for Wagn development, for Wagneer and developers who are extending Wagn and naming things in a global space of reference.

  Saturday at 8:53am · Unlike · 3
• Helene FinidoriI’m wondering if the very constitution of a ‘pull-platform’ around social objects with graphs of relationships and visualization of what emerges does not de facto create an ontology… Because what we are after is having visibility on what is ‘out there’ in an evolutionary way -i.e as it emerges, on many dimensions.What is important I think is not to get lost into making too abstract/finished/closed images of reality. We need to concentrate our efforts in getting a clearer image of evolving reality that WE can interpret to take action.I think to try and get back to various streams of conversations here and there, that folksonomies have the downside of loosing the gems in the noise. And that things emerging are not necessarily visible in plain sight. Pre-established or as-we-go ‘declarative’ ontologies (like you describe Michael somewhere… require a shared discipline and might not be able to capture emergence in real time (otherwise we would have clearer pictures by now). Capturing relationships is probably the way to go, through linked data. But hybrid solutions are interesting because they provide the markers from which the holes can be filled by the reality of what is unfolding…

  Saturday at 10:01am · Edited · Unlike · 2
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  Gerry Gleason Poor Richard, thanks for the link to your P2P article. Haven’t read all of it yet, but wanted to comment on this: “A PGICI would have to be funded by the end users, and it SHOULD BE. But there is thus far no working business model for a crowd-funded public project of such size and scope. Projects of that size and scope are the province of governments and global industries alone, with perhaps a few philanthropic examples in the public health and humanitarian sectors.”
  That may be true, but I have a different response to it. So? P2P is pretty new, the Internet and Wiki and … all very new. Social media, etc.
  All it says is that we will have to first search for new forms of organization, new organizational processes. Much of our work will be explorative, experimental, tentative, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have much to build on. Articles like yours are part of that, thanks, as is the practice and history of cooperative organizations. It is telling is that we need to evolve new organizational forms, new modes of productions. It is a challenge to be sure, but all it good.
  I’m going to finish your article before saying much more, but one thing I do want to respond to. Having leadership and structure does not mean that the organization is not peer to peer. That’s one of the reasons I like the language about “vessels”. I have a sailboat, and when we take it out, I am responsible for everyone on board. In the context of “being on mission”, there will be operational leadership if only for coordination and a single source of clear signals for actions and transitions. The leader is a peer, and each person on a team is following a collective leadership, each has to lead within a particular scope of action. This is based on skills and experience, but most directly on “right placement”, being in position to act and with the knowledge to act rightly. The latter being derived from the former in large part.

  15 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason Well said, Helene. That what attracts me to Ward’s “Federated Wiki” (linked in another thread), I would call it a ‘pull-platform’. Like github and similar. Then if you want to build on something from a stream, you just pull it and rely on the backlinks to track the source. If the source takes updates (is not write once, read many), then the source can pull them (and/or be requested to pull them). When you go to formalize part of an ontology, you can pull from folksomic sources. The OED is built this way.

  Saturday at 12:10pm · Edited · Like
• 

  David Braden I like your approach Helene. Not being a platform designer, I get lost in the technical language. Being a user of social media I am continually frustrated by the impulse to divide ourselves up into interest groups. New sites attract people, they share that on which they agree, then there is nothing left to talk about and the site becomes inactive.The ontology I would propose is that the world we experience is a single pattern of flows built up from the relationships among the many elements. Any loss of a relationship or any gain of a relationship changes the pattern . . . literally changes the world we experience . . . so we cannot know the overall effect of a proposed change unless we consider the entire set of relationships.

  Saturday at 11:24am · Like · 2
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  David BradenIf you guys can design a place where we can have a discussion across interest and expertise about the way the world works, I am there.Relationships are built from the exchange of value and the multitude of individual exchanges create the flows. Nothing exists unless it fits within the flows. Nothing can exist unless it receives what it needs to live from the flows. What value will your platform deliver to attract participation across interest and expertise?

  Saturday at 11:30am · Like · 2
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  Michael Maranda (Caveat, with visitors since yesterday and through the next few days my bandwidth has been/will be limitied) Gerry Gleason I think I have come to better understanding of what Poor Richard has been communicating. The thread starts out with the Singular/Plural here for a reason… which is precisely what is implied in “ontology of ontologies” … Ontologies are by definition formal. The point that is important is a group needs to achieve formalization on aspects of it’s language and processes (with room for revisiting, of course). Going in the direction of Field – it is important for any number of groups to achieve similar formalizations between them.

  23 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda Gerry Gleason you say: “Having leadership and structure does not mean that the organization is peer to peer.” I presume you also mean it does not nec. mean that it isnt?

  23 hours ago · Like
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  Gerry Gleason Yes, exactly. Opens the question about what makes it one or the other, and I think it relates to consent. It is a collective choice to situationally recognize a leader. How does that choice happen? In a hierarchy, the leader is typically appointed these days, but these systems are rooted in power over scarce resources, often resources made scarce by those in power.

  22 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason Michael, by “singular/plural”, you mean the individual/group discussion at the top of this?
  If I understand, I totally agree, and apologize in advance if I misinterpreted anything above. I may have missed it.
  Not sure I agree about ontologies, unless we are meaning different things by formalism as well. I know you and I and many here agree that no formalism fully captures any complete reality, but that they are also all so necessary and a fundamental process of human beings as linguistic beings.

  20 hours ago · Like
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  Michael Maranda Nor any word captured the world, they are but devices.

  19 hours ago via mobile · Like
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  Poor Richard Apropos of this topic I’ll repeat a link on Open Ontology, emphasis on the open, for reference: http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_OntologyI acknowledge that ontology as an abstraction or general concept overlaps much more than information science (my per…See More

  

  Open Ontology – P2P Foundation

  p2pfoundation.net

  While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies a

  re conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to…

  19 hours ago · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
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  Poor Richard Gerry Gleason, I agree that consent is one of the key criteria of peerism. I give others in the intro (About) to this group and in the article you mention, and the literature on this is extensive, esp in the P2PF wiki and blog.

  18 hours ago · Edited ·

 

Michael Maranda

PeerPoint Revisited

• 

  Michael Maranda Quickscanned it having read it in past. But thought I would take a more disciplined approach since we are of late in more direct dialogue here, if you will indulge me.

  Friday at 9:27am · Unlike · 1
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  Michael Maranda First off the bat – Poor Richard– wondering in light of my discursus under the Ontology thread which you have just read, as to whether you think PeerPoint needs space articulated for a variety of Peer types? namely, that not only are individuals nodes/peers, but organizations/groups would also need tools and conceptwork in the peerage. or point me to where it is addressed in the document. Even if it is addressed, I think it needs more prominence.

  Friday at 9:29am · Unlike · 1
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  Michael Maranda PeerPoint — what do you want to do with it, how can we host a PeerPoint discourse, effort and process that allows easier entry? Or do you think it is premature? By this I mean a number of ancillary documents and chunks and a meaningful web-presence centered upon evolving this, attracting others to it, and advancing the field generally.

  Friday at 9:32am · Like
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  Poor Richard “PeerPoint needs space articulated for a variety of Peer types” I mention this briefly in terms of needing a variety of “on-ramps” and numerous other references to the varieties of different communities of interest or stakeholders, etc, but I didn’t develop it in a focused way yet. Good poiint.

  Friday at 9:35am · Like · 1
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  Michael Maranda I am not here to pester you on these, but if there is something I can do to help, i will do what i can.

  Friday at 9:35am · Unlike · 1
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  Michael Maranda (Direct editing the document is not so enticing to me… helping put an expression of it into a new and more inviting space is more so..)

  Friday at 9:36am · Like
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  Poor Richard My sense was that a wiki platform was really needed to take PeerPoint forward. I almost decided on referata but then I balked. Not sure why. Maybe I just needed a rest — or a push.

  Friday at 9:37am · Like
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  Michael Maranda Push.

  Friday at 9:38am · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda Well, rest also. Health and clear mind.

  Friday at 9:38am · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard “if there is something I can do to help, i will do what i can.” Please add paragraphs or pages to PeerPoint about this. You seem to have a good picture/map of this.

  Friday at 9:48am · Like · 1
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  Poor Richard Ooops didn’t see your other comment. Well, if you write some paragraphs or pages I can append them to PeerPoint as well as what ever other venue you want to use. Lately I’ve just been tossing stuff into PeerPoint to rearrange later, once there is a wiki.

  Friday at 9:50am · Like
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  Michael Maranda Let’s help you settle on and into a wiki then. Is the obstacle energy and time, selection of wiki, domain, hosting?

  Friday at 9:52am · Like
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  Poor Richard All of the above. Based on what I know at this moment I would go with referata because of the semantic features. There is a hosted site. If you can get a referata wiki up and running it need not be PeePoint specific. It could be P2P or “open collaborative football practice”. There’s a good chance there is an existing referata wiki that has similar topics and would welcome us. That might be ideal, especially if they already have a good use of the semantic extensions, a good site look and organization, and a knowledgeable user community. If you agree with those assumptions, job one would be to search/browse existing referata wikis to see if any would be a suitable “hoem” for our various activities. (BTW I would be using the P2P Foundation wiki if I were not dead set on semantic capabilities. I also strongly favor wysiwyg wikis but referata/mediawiki is not such.)

  Friday at 10:39am · Edited · Like · 1
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  Michael Maranda Not yet familiar with referata.

  Friday at 10:35am · Like
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  Poor Richardhttp://www.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page

  

  Referata

  www.referata.com

  Referata offers hosting of semantic wikis, allowing you to add, structure and st

  ore data so it can be managed, shared, browsed and analyzed in as many ways as you choose.

  Friday at 10:43am · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
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  Michael Maranda yes, looking into it

  Friday at 10:45am · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard I emailed the Referata admins to ask if they knew of existing wikis with similar topic coverage. Their FAQ says there are about 750 existing Referata wikis, but I didn’t fiind a directory of them (which seem pretty slack).

  Friday at 2:02pm · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda I am ambivalent re referata. I invite you to get to know wagn a bit. I am urging one of the main contributors to the code to log on to fb and engage us here.

  Friday at 7:50pm · Unlike · 1
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  Michael Maranda Doing my slowread of PP – I am struck by a thought that has recurred many times in these contexts – do we need X to build X? do we need peerpoint to build peerpoint? at minimum we have to model the processes through cobbled and found tech…

  Friday at 7:51pm · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda We covered very similar ground in Coalition of the Willing working group — folk such as Fabio Barone, Mark RoestCharley Quinton, Chris Watkins, Timothy RaynerGerry Gleason, were heavily involved. Not sure who else in this FB group, offhand.

  Friday at 7:57pm · Edited · Like · 3
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  Gerry Gleason First focus on the social processes you are intending to produce. Technology is secondary. General purpose technology will need a lot more work on the part of the participants, but the users will be called on to interpret the ins and outs of a particular technology. Therein is the rub you are up against. You want to be inclusive, but the group has to buy in to the platform. None of the platforms are compelling enough in their raw form to offer a clear path to a solution, so you try to find a good fit.

  Friday at 8:45pm · Unlike · 3
• 

  Gerry Gleason In building Wagn we have borrowed the best from Wiki technology, and it is a very good Wiki even if you don’t need Wagn’s unique features. The unique features are what enable us to build Wagn into something more that a content platform, a Wiki with data. By extending it, you can build full on custom apps, and have the Wiki functionality as a content management base for your application. In my view, this is what gives a path from a dedicated community building a wiki database, and an application built to attract a larger community into the collaborative spaces built by the core team.

  Friday at 8:51pm · Unlike · 3
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  Poor Richard “First focus on the social processes you are intending to produce.” Gerry, I completely agree with you, Michael and others on that. That is already going on in triplicate, though, and its not my area of expertise or personal focus. So I depend on the civilizing influence and social intelligence that you good folks bring to the table. Likewise there is piecewise work on open technology all over the place, but few places for the end-to-end, soup-to-nuts, solitaire-to-enterprise-management scope, ongoing conversation about requirements and specifications. W3C, IEEE, etc handle universal standards in the middle, but end-user needs (from the teenager to the global NGO) and application designs are not handled in such a universal fashion which IMO retards development of the future-class tools and infrastructure we need to battle the kleptocrats and corpoRats.

  Friday at 9:57pm · Like · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda indeed!

  Friday at 9:58pm · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard PeerPoint aims (how successfully is another matter) to offer low participation barriers and near-term value while simultaneously looking forward to a not-too-distant future when the net is the computer, the web is the OS, and yet every peer node (and its user) has complete control and ownership of how and how much to participate. In that paradigm we also need applications that have deep and mature feature sets and which are all highly intelligent and interoperable. It is fashionable nowadays to deprecate “high design” and hope for emergence. Contrary to popular belief emergence isn’t how we got to this point and that isn’t sufficient to take us forward as rapidly as we need to go to head off global neofeudalism and environmental catastrophe.

  Friday at 10:17pm · Like · 1
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  Mark Dilley Yaron Koren is a main developer of Semantic MediaWiki and runs referata – I like it because I am always a fan of the simplest thing that works. Shall I invite him to this thread or no?

  Friday at 10:22pm · Unlike · 3
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  Michael Maranda is it simplest because it works?

  Friday at 10:24pm · Like
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  Michael Maranda My criteria: does it do what is desired? and will we be able to extend and interoperate? and with what degree of complexity to do so?

  Friday at 10:27pm · Unlike · 1
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  Mark Dilley That doesn’t resonate – what do you mean by “it works?”

  Friday at 10:28pm · Like
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  Michael Maranda i mean, it is already operational. Rather a contrast between the ideas we have which are yet vaporware

  Friday at 10:29pm · Like · 1
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  Mark Dilley I guess in that sense. I am a bludgeoner, move to referata for as long as needed, move again, if needed. Does Wagn offer a WikiFarm? if so, that is a different question.

  Friday at 10:33pm · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda meaning an easy path for install/hosting? (if so, yes)

  Friday at 10:34pm · Like
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  Michael Maranda you can set up a wagn right away on cloudstore http://wagn.org/try_wagnand I think it is free presently (create cloudstore acct)

  

  try wagn – Wagn

  wagn.org

  Friday at 10:36pm · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
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  Michael Maranda was about to do an instal to test

  Friday at 10:37pm · Unlike · 1
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  Mark DilleyYaron Koren – wanted to see what your thoughts were on this thread – might be TL;DR

  Friday at 10:43pm · Like
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  Michael Maranda Problem is it is this thread and a few adjacent …

  Friday at 10:49pm · Like
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  Chris Watkins Yep, I’m a bit lost…
  I think that Referata makes sense, as it’s using Semantic Mediawiki which has a good sized user base (and is built on MediaWiki which has a very big user base).

  Yesterday at 5:34am · Unlike · 2
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  Gerry Gleason Mediawiki is popular and that is a point in its favor, but it is also more purpose built for Wikipedia. I don’t think it is actually a good fit for many organizations that use it.

  Yesterday at 6:40am · Unlike · 2
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  Michel Bauwens personally love mediawiki, very easy for non-tech people

  Yesterday at 6:52am · Like · 1
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  Gerry Gleason I don’t want to underemphasize that. That people who are part of the core group already know it is key. Every platform has a learning curve, and it is often hard for non-specialists to evaluate how well they will like it once past the learning curve.
  Actually, what I mean by “social structure first” is that the information system is being implemented as part of the systems supports of an actual working group. You convene a working group first, then the personalities and commitments of those gathered are something of a starting point. It also means that social network is a consideration. Things like Mediawiki and Drupal or wordpress already have large communities that the development teams have to serve. If the folks building referata are interested enough to come over and join this conversation, that’s a much bigger plus going forward than a wide user base (working alpha or beta release of better is also important as Michael suggested).
  My investment in Wagn means that all I need is a small team of ruby and javascript/css people and I can make it do whatever we can design. Each of those who gather to build this will have similar commitments.
  Finally what I mean is that the social systems design and experimentation is what drives the design. Very few people are deep enough in both the information and social systems to do this work, but I suspect that there are more of those here than we know.
  In other words, there is no better place to convene such a working group than here, not meaning FB, but out of a conversation like this. If mediawiki is what the community is familiar with, then create one for the community now and we can all learn to bludgeon the data there while some of us gather to build the next platform.

  Yesterday at 7:11am · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason It’s really a side topic, but I want to point out another budding opportunity. With Wagn we are the first vendor to deploy our app with “cloud store” (cldstr in the urls), sort of like an app store for the cloud. It would be a fairly simple matter to set up mediawiki to deploy that way. He already has wordpress, and then we could build “accessories” to extend these app in our community.
  Bottom line for the non-technical is that you can put any app on a hosting farm very easily, then you will be able to choose those apps and accessaries with a web application. What this also means is a marketplace in apps and accessaries, and I claim that this is a perfect space to create a P2P ecosystem that sustains itself on mini-payments in this marketplace. But that is another thread …

  Yesterday at 7:20am · Like · 1
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  Gerry Gleason Mark, please explain your practice of bludgeoning data a little for those who’ve never done it.

  Yesterday at 7:24am · Like
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  Mark Dilley I do not let my technical inability stop me from building my ideas (at least I try not to) – so I work with what ever is at my disposal , even if it is not technically the exact fit. What I how is for a technical person to come along after me and build tools. This often means I do more work than is “needed” and horrifies technically skilled folks – and it also means I often can get started building my ideas. (is that what you were thinking Gerry?)

  Yesterday at 7:53am via mobile · Unlike · 1
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  Mark Dilley *hope

  Yesterday at 7:53am via mobile · Like
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  Mark Dilley In this case – staring with referata and moving when other tools are ready (wagn) – ready in both the social and technical sense. 100 pages or 1000 pages – it just takes elbow grease

  Yesterday at 7:56am via mobile · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason Yes, but I was also thinking that this practice is one of using knowledge of what you can do with basic functions of wiki (linking, naming) and building an information resource with that. Managers and designer may specify a purpose built tool, and that might save you a lot of time, but it is also more complicated and not ready. I think I was hoping for more about the kind of idea that you might pursue that way.

  Yesterday at 8:01am · Like
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  Yaron Koren Hi guys – I just saw this conversation. I’m not planning to do any “evangelism”, but if you have any specific questions about Referata, Semantic MediaWiki or MediaWiki in general, I can probably answer them.

  Yesterday at 8:15am · Unlike · 3
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  Gerry Gleason Hi Yaron, I took a quick peek at some of the online info about these tool. Designer to designer, what is the best thing about these tools. To save you time interpreting that from the conversation, I work on Wagn, http://wagn.org/ I’m the #3 committer and closing fast on the inactive co-founder of the project. The other co-founder is Ethan McCutchen.

  

  Go together. – Wagn

  wagn.org

  team-driven websitesWagn helps creators work together. Most web teams are badly

  disconnected.  Designers, developers, and content creators go their separate ways for days, weeks, or months at a time.   Separate tools, separate timelines, separate worlds.With Wagn, your whole team is editing a workin…

  23 hours ago · Like · Remove Preview
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  Mark Dilley I read that Poor Richard has his work in a closed system and doesn’t know which open system to use. I advocate for starting with one even if it doesn’t meet expectations yet.

  23 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 2
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  Yaron Koren Gerry – I wouldn’t call myself a designer per se, but I’d say the best thing about Semantic MediaWiki is that it lets people easily create structures for collaborative data. You can see the testimonials page also: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Testimonials

  23 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason We have plenty of testomonials for Wagn too, I’m looking for how you would pitch it to a designer/developer to interest them in digging deeper into the details and potentially contributing by applying your tools.

  22 hours ago · Like
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  Poor Richardre cloudstore:This Connection is Untrusted
  You have asked Firefox to connect securely to cldstr.com, but we can’t confirm that your connection is secure.
  Normally, when you try to connect securely,
  sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are
  going to the right place. However, this site’s identity can’t be verified.

  20 hours ago · Like
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  Poor Richard Michel comments that mediawiki is very easy to use but other wiki engines have more WYSIWYG editors. In favor of Referata however is potential migration to P2PF mediawiki if they eventually add the semantic extensions there.

  20 hours ago · Like
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  Mark Dilley What other wiki engines have WYSIWYG editors? Do they play nice with people who are used to the simplicity if inline editing – I.e. not having to use a mouse / Microsoft word style.

  20 hours ago via mobile · Like
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  Poor RichardYaron Koren, bedides the basic semantic extensions, what other semantic tools are included in or compatible with Referata? (e.g. from one of the testimonials: “Semantic Forms, Header Tabs, Data Transfer, and recently Semantic Result Formats, and SRF Ploticus”)

  20 hours ago · Like
• 

  Poor RichardMark Dilley re wysiwyg wikis, see here for example:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software#Features_2
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_hosting_services#Technical_comparison

  

  Features 2 – Comparison of wiki software – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  en.wikipedia.org

  20 hours ago · Edited · Like · Remove Preview
• 

  Poor Richardhttp://www.wikimatrix.org/

  

  WikiMatrix – Compare them all

  www.wikimatrix.org

  Daisy Daisy is a Java-based open source content management system, with a Wiki-l

  ike combined editing/publishing frontend. It is ideally suited for structured content management, knowledge management, and complex website management as it has the concept of structured document types. It consists of a …

  20 hours ago · Like · Remove Preview
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  Yaron Koren Poor Richard – you can see here for the full list of extensions: http://www.referata.com/wiki/Special:Version . All the ones you listed are there, though SRF Ploticus no longer exists.

  16 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard Awesome, Yaron. Thank you for that link. That just about clinches my decision to start a Referata wiki. Now I have to decide how to name/brand/position it. I don’t want to make it for PeerPoint or the “Ontological Imperative” only, but something to att…See More

  

  Version – Referata

  www.referata.com

  This wiki is powered byMediaWiki, copyright © 2001-2012 Magnus Manske, Brion Vib

  ber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church, Yuri Astrakhan, Aryeh Gregor, Aaron Schulz, Andrew Garrett, Raimond Spekking, Alexan…

  15 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
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  Mark Dilley Poor Richard – Quite familiar with these – what I am curios about is your experience with one. I have not had a good experience with any of these – especially in the realm of going back and forth between wysiwyg and inline editing.

  15 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 2
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  Gerry Gleason I will take a look at that cldstr issue when I get a chance. It may just be an artifact of the beta state of the platform, not sure yet.

  15 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason The wagn WYSIWYG isn’t bad, just a javascript plugin, the name escapes at the moment (tinyMCE). The lack we feel we need to fill is a link/inclusion editor.

  14 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason Sometime I still need to transition to the raw (html) editor to fix things, but it isn’t bad even when you need to do that.

  15 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor RichardMark Dilley, no experience with any of them. Just like the idea. The divil is in the datiels.

  15 hours ago · Like
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  Gerry Gleason Most of us would rather bludgeon the raw interface than face flacky UI that is supposed to be easy to use.

  14 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard Flakey is bad, but all the early wysiwyg editors were flakey. It sort of caught on nonetheless….

  14 hours ago · Like
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  Gerry Gleason How good is your javascript? There is a lot of good javascript out there, and a lot of mediocre stuff too. Like you say, unfortunately a lot of marginal stuff is in use and more acceptable than raw to most. My javascript is getting better, but UI isn’t my sweet spot either.
  I’ve observed the good JS/CSS talent is hard to come by, and even harder in open source projects with no lead funding.

  14 hours ago · Edited · Like
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  Poor Richard Gerry, I used to dabble in JS, Perl, Awk, and many, many other things but no longer want to write code (though like you I have to go to HTML to tweak my WordPress editor). I have a hard enough time with English, but I think that’s where I can do the most good.

  14 hours ago · Like
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  Mark Dilley That is why I like wiki – stick to the language I know

  13 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
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  Gerry Gleason That was partly a joke. I will write JS when I have too, and I’m not too bad at it now. Someone has to make it work well for everyone. I still like to code, but I like doing ruby more than JS. The idea is to make Wagn into a tool where we can write little bits of ruby from some common patterns and never have to really code. This will make Wagneering a little harder than the sorts of Wiki power use that Mark likes, but that is where you get all the semantic features and custom app capacity.

  13 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Timothy Rayner @Hi everyone! Good to see you out causing trouble Michael Maranda.

  11 hours ago · Unlike · 4
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  Michel Bauwens dear Poor Richard, because of my very intensive travel schedule I have not been able to follow the whole discussion and have lost the thread a bit .. would be nice to see a summary accessible via the wiki and blog … my question is: can we semanticize the p2p wiki without funds, i.e. relying on low-entry volunteering?

  9 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Michel Bauwens or: we crowdfund the effort …

  9 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Mark Dilley I like community funding the effort!

  9 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor RichardMichel Bauwens: “can we semanticize the p2p wiki?” Yes, the semantic mediawiki extensions can be applied to the p2p wiki, but Yaron Koren is the expert on the necessary procedures. If Yaron is willing to discuss this with us, or refer us to the appropriate documentation and/or someone with the know-how, I will email you for the contact info of the appropriate p2p wiki admin person(s).

  9 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1
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  Mark Dilley Yaron helped out on WikiIndex.org – I am also tracking down a friend of mine that upgraded OutHistory.org and wanted to install SMW there, but that was too much for them to grok.

  9 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Michel Bauwens ok, I’ll be waiting for any news on this …

  8 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Michel Bauwens for the record the 18k entries have been viewed 20m times, now reaching 26k per day in traffic

  8 hours ago · Unlike · 2
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  Poor Richard Awesome, Michel. Semanticizing the p2p wiki might also attract some additional IT development around it (e.g. interfacing with it).

  8 hours ago · Like
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  Gure Guretxa I honestly think you should have been properly crowdfunding from last year. Never understood the reticence to fund, design, build and present a decent resource! Accesibility and usability (in their broadest meanings) are key.

  5 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard I don’t know about Michel, but I hate making pitches for money. I started working on one to fund a series of small symposia of key intellectuals, including Michel, so they could have some face time together. The working title was “World Justice League”. But I gave it up because as you say — personal reticence. But that’s just me. I don’t know what is stopping others from stepping up to the plate.

  4 hours ago · Like · 1
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  Gure Guretxa Oh, hey Poor Richard, I was commenting on Michel’s question about crowdfunding and the p2pF site/s in particular. I’d be embarrassed to launch a campaign too, hehe, that’s probably normal. However, surely the foundation could have and can easily make a proposal to the world about needing to upgrade and present the wealth of info in the wiki and blog (bookmarks, other satellite groups, etc) in a much more efficient and effective fashion. Usability is key, otherwise it is messy shelving for geeks who are not particularly interested in making that info accesible and attractive to the world. I would imagine a foundation would need to have an interest in spreading its message and having layers of complexity which would provide value both for new arrivals and experts/academics.

  4 hours ago · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard I said somewhere before that I’m really surprised that people aren’t shoving money at Michel by now. He needs to unleash some of his charms on some crowdfunding wizards — he must meet them on his many travels.

  3 hours ago · Like · 1
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  Gerry GleasonIt needs to be funded somehow. We can create something to hold the project and start working on it with a volunteer effort. I know that all of us are already contributing quite a bit to the commons to seed the process, and we are often asking our families to sacrifice a lot to pursue this vision.The financial tools and institutions that are available to us are totally inadequate. Something like crowd-funding probably is the solution, but the tools available for that seem too rooted in the systems of scarcity to support and sustain this kind of work. I worked on the Metacurrency project and still have some hope that those efforts will produce something because we need it. We need an accounting systems for open stewardship of commons based productions systems.
  And just like the information systems tools we need to bootstrap from the tools we have, so that could mean a kickstarter fund or similar to go after a couple of key milestones planning on designing a path to sustainability as one of the milestones.Wall street’s proposition is to give you the opportunity to bet on ideas, if the idea you back can make it to an IPO, you can exit with millions and move on to something else. The people with the ideas are often distinct from the ones selling the idea; getting venture capital, buying the distressed start-up and leaving the idea people out, or any of a hundred methods.Our proposition is sustainability. The investment you make is not looking for rapid growth and an exit strategy, it is looking for long-term sustainability. The goal is that the ecosystems that include these sustainable commons based institutions will thrive. When I invest in the commons I will expect to let my assets sit there for a long time and be undiminished, say when I withdraw some of it to fund my kid’s education or my retirement, but I don’t need it to grow. I need it to provide the environment where everyone in my community thrives and they are lined up to buy my commons shares when I need to redeploy my assets.

  3 hours ago · Unlike · 1
• Helene Finidori The P2P foundation should be (is?) applying for the CAPS EU grant?

  2 hours ago · Unlike · 2
• 

  Poor Richard Writing proposals is intense, and I don’t know if any of the P2PF crew is up for that on top of their existing commitments. Same for crowdfunding efforts. That’s why I’m blowing the ships horn here for some fundraising wizards who are friends of the P2PFto come forward….

  2 hours ago · Like
• 

  Michel Bauwens we have done a number in the past, at least 2 of which we won (like the one next year in Germany); Franco Iacomella is our point man on this, but as a true free software person, he doesn’t want to be on Facebook; we are now preparing a project with Comunes via Kune; we have room for more. It is only me who is over-extented, other people in the network might be game … I have time to work on project mid-dec to mid-febr; then march-june is dedicated to the EU project on Mirror Democracy … (in Berlin) and 2 months at home as well … so no room for quite some time

  48 minutes ago · Like · 1

Poor Richard

This is a thread from Y Worlds on the subject of folksonomies derived from sets of bookmark tags. I list the major features lackiing in Diigo and other apps in its class:

tawhuac « WGA Playground

wga.yworlds.com

An excerpt by Poor Richard: “I am imagining a semantic ontology according to which the key ideas and data of this content could be parsed and tagged to form a distributed database using semantic linked-data structures. This would help transition the collective knowledge base of the research, activis…

Like · · Unfollow Post · Share · Friday at 5:00pm

• John Kellden, Michel Bauwens and 2 others like this.

Michel Bauwens

Benjamin Brownell has been designing a simple, universal, open ontology system for “common good” success stories:http://p2pfoundation.net/Prospective_EcoSocial_OntologyUseful open-source tool to consider in this domain:http://www.ontopia.net/

Prospective EcoSocial Ontology – P2P Foundation

p2pfoundation.net

Basic concept: create adaptable shared reference structures and symbology for cross-platform semantic linking and pattern reinforcement in non-fiction story-form media

Like · · Unfollow Post · Share · Saturday at 10:51am

• Michael Maranda, Helene Finidori and 2 others like this.
• Helene Finidori Is there a visual representation of it? Or an example to picture it?

  Saturday at 10:59am · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michel Bauwens he’s in my g+ list .. perhaps you can gmail me and I forward?

  Saturday at 11:02am · Like · 1
• 

  Michael Maranda Is he on FB? He was an active member of the CotW discussions/ working group. I would have listed him, if I thought he was active on FB.

  23 hours ago · Like
• 

  Poor Richard Thanks for these links, Michel. Apropos of this topic I’ll repeat a link on Open Ontology, emphasis on the open, for reference: http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Ontology

  

  Open Ontology – P2P Foundation

  p2pfoundation.net

  While different definitions for ontology exist, it can be said that Ontologies are conceptual and semantic frameworks representing models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge representations of a model of reality, expressed using different formalisms and artifacts. When trying to…

…

 The Next Edge Group

Michael Maranda

Several parallel threads are running on questions that are closely aligned, and if not they end up twisting to invoke the other issues. An obvious point perhaps, but I will follow it with another. We here are not alone, others all around are working on so manny of the same things, or discovering they wish to. Whatever emerges must establish meaningful paths for any and all to get involved in advancing our cause(s).

Unlike · · Unfollow Post · Friday at 2:33pm near Ann Arbor, MI

• You, John Love, Irma Wilson, Helene Finidori and 6 others like this.
• Arié Moyal How do we map the overlap?

  Friday at 2:34pm · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda There are several aspects to map, and I think it worthwhile to map in a way that allows any of several starting frames, and not prioritizing one above the other – in part because each is valid, but also because we can gain something from the different angles, not to mention there are different learning/thinking styles. What might some of these mappings take as entry points: people/identities w/interests/passions/commitments; projects; groups/orgs; problems/itches(to scratch); interests/ideas/fields; offers/needs; locations. all obvious and some elements left out, perhaps and surely better ways to frame this.

  Friday at 2:42pm · Unlike · 4
• 

  David EggletonE. F. Schumacher: “”For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance.”I suggest that naming the “target” balance is a very good way to find allies and colleagues. With such an intention (I’m comfortable with the concept, obviously), people can begin to self-organize in a balanced and balancing way.In my case, the constructive work is moving the slider on the producers….mere consumers continuum to the left, because those populations are way/unsustainably out of balance.

  Friday at 2:56pm · Edited · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda I need to dwell on what you just posted David Eggleton – not grokking yet.

  Friday at 3:27pm · Unlike · 2
• 

  Michael Maranda But I do want to add that it is also beneficial to map the spaces/contexts/processes we are all participating in — just as there is overlap in the few threads I observed, we are all in several overlapping groups and listservs etc. We’ve taken up many of the underlying tech out of convenience and as early adopters and for exploration, or even to stake a claim for our ideas and aims… we need to bring these into view and start to build what suits our needs and processes rather than contort ourselves to what has been found. This is not to say that I reject bricolage, but we really need to align through mapping these purposes and social processes among the other things listed.

  Friday at 3:30pm · Unlike · 4
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  David EggletonMichael, I hoped to provide an alternative to the morass that is problem-solving. Maybe it was out of place, but look at the complexity of your first comment. I despaired of all that getting started, much less done.

  Friday at 3:42pm · Unlike · 2
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  Michael Maranda That is not to say parts cannot be moved forward. The ideal would be for such parts to be designed in a way that other aspects can be connected readily. And while what I list sounds complex, I think it can be brought to better focus. And fwiw, it may seem more complex than it is.

  Friday at 3:44pm · Like
• 

  Michael Maranda “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. ” (Helps me – and felt urge to put that interlude into this space)

  Friday at 3:47pm · Unlike · 5
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  David Eggleton Yes, there is simplicity on the far side of complexity. “Lighting” can put one’s attention on one or the other.

  Friday at 3:51pm · Like · 1
• 

  Poor Richard In app development and in information curation, access, and quality control we have a “confusion of tongues” like that which plagued the Babylonians when they tried to build the tower of Babble to the heavens.

  Friday at 4:27pm · Like · 3
• 

  Joris Claeys Started to follow this thread as I got exactly the same impressions as Michael Maranda built his first thought around.
  The intentions are great but this platform will never get you anywhere. You will need collaborative tools or platforms such as The Brain to bring connected thoughts and ideas together or linked or influenced by/from to see the correlations betzeen the different ideas, initiatives, people, markets, etceteras…
  I don’t have the golden resolution here as there are many groups wher eI have seen the same issue rising up, being explored and up not far at all. Living Bridges Planet / SOCAP Network has done some good work in this area with Bert-Ola Bergstrand, Willi Schroll together with many others have realized some results. I still have to study their state of outcome. Perhaps we can ask for their assistance or share their experience on tools and approach. I think both are also part of this group, so perhaps they can take the director seat and tell us

  Friday at 4:42pm · Unlike · 2
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  Adam Johnson I too am trying to get my head around what Michael Maranda is pointing out. I’m perhaps a little less perturbed by the lack of a map, but that could be because I come from a field that it is overmapped and suffers for that. I like the sense of a lack of maps, but a free flow of intelligence to enable interesting ideas to emerge and be grabbed by people. Is that the point being made by David Eggleton? I see the centre for action not being the group where the discussion takes place, but rather the person with whom an idea resonates. So, for me, the goal is less to map (conveys a sense of coordination to me, probably unfairly), and more to infect with ideas. The distillation of the Babel of tongues referred to by Poor Richard then happens when somebody grasps an idea and makes it real.

  Friday at 5:42pm · Like · 3
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  Adam Johnson Anyway, my thoughts. Not without their problems.

  Friday at 5:42pm · Unlike · 1
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  Poor Richard Hmm.. thinking out loud….It seems to me that most of Michael’s points are the reasons I stared PeerPoint, but Michael has looked at the PeerPoint proposal and isn’t attracted to it. I think we’re looking at the same problem, but can’t get into the same approach. Are M’s concerns getting lost in the clutter and noise of PeerPoint, or does PeerPoint seem pointed in a different direction and beside the point w/r to his map of problems and solutions? Where is the disconnect? This is complingcatered. For one thing, I am focusing on tools and infrastructure to address the needs of activists, collaborators, and social entrepreneurs. Is Michael focusing on the other side of the coin, the people, groups, and objectives? Perhaps I am concentrating on the generic collaborator’s toolkit while waiting for the users to step up and explain their needs in their own voices. I spent a few pages up front discussing the people and the needs, but it may not have been enough to “seed” the participation of the elusive and endangered users lurking out there in their own enclaves of idiom and discourse. I guess my bias may be that the human side of all this gets discussed almost ad nauseum while the engineering side doesn’t get the attention of enough eyeball and brains. But ultimately the two side need to interdigitate. I seem to have failed to set up the right atmosphere for that to happen in the context of PeerPoint. So what are the altourniquets?

  Friday at 6:45pm · Edited · Like · 5
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  Michael Maranda Dont put words in my mouth. I am still digging into PeerPoint, Poor Richard. Indeed – I have been pushing in a way to get us started o thinking of what next to advance PP. I want to see PeerPoint and other related efforts put into a space or adjacent spaces so we can determine do they meet our needs – and get clear what our needs are.. and also what degree of consensus we may establish for aligning in a meaningful endeavor. Of course, I think there is something to what you say about 2 sides of the coin. I was mulling that over while driving around town.. I respect the dimensions you have expressed. if you hadnt expressed them (Many) I would have criticised and said why arent they there. But as they are there – tho I am not sayingI have no criticsm of them.. I am free to empahsize elements that are the other side of that coin, groupness, process, space of interaction, space between. I offer these things because I think they are deep relevance to design and coordination in these endeavors.

  Friday at 6:49pm · Edited · Unlike · 3
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  Michael Maranda Funny thinking the two sides of the coin thing … I had a different slice on my two sides… some of which included things you see on your side .. it is like when Helene reacted to your Hex model, and we saw different configurations.. There is too much overlap for us not to be thinking of many of the same things. What is important I think is to be able to express is simple and 30,000 ft view language what we want, and see how different our angles are – and where complementary (and where supplementary).

  Friday at 6:52pm · Unlike · 3
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  Poor Richard Michael, I couldn’t agree more. Part of my problem is years of built-up frustration that I tend to project onto everyone. I think we’re in the same boat I need to stop standing up and tipping it so much.

  Friday at 6:56pm · Like · 5
• Helene FinidoriMichael, I’ve missed part of the discussions lately and I’m just discovering this thread. I am yet to talk with Richard about PeerPoint, which converges with the project I am working on with Markus A. O. Loponen, described in March here: http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/2012/02/engaging-for-the-commons.html when I was postulating for a knights foundation grant. It has evolved with a strong focus on making conversations ‘productive’ and using some forms of machine assisted, ontology as orientation that I think I gave you a hint on… There’s also loads of stuff I put on debategraph… some of it is accessible through here:http://www.debategraph.org/Poster.aspx?aID=40. but it’s been a while since I didn’t touch any of that. There’s also the trial I’ve been gathering on github that could serve to pull the various projects: https://github.com/HeleneFi/The_Project/wiki/_pages. We’ve tried to pull people there with Harlan T Wood, not sure where he is at. Basically I’m operating a convergence between commons P2P, systems-thinking/complex adaptive systems, collaboration/facilitation and semantic/ontology… It’s a bit of a mess (i.e. stuff everywhere trying things out I suppose and looking at what sticks and can get some discussion going beyond the actual FB thread exchange… . Here are the links to Markus’ stuff: http://intra.samabase.org/a work in progress. We are trying to develop the project around actual user cases and communities of practice, based on needs.I would be very interested to see what you are up to if there’s a place to look.

  Saturday at 9:31am · Edited · Unlike · 4
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  Daniel F. BassillMichael Maranda with over 6 billion people in the world there must be others who share the same vision and sense of purpose as each of us have. Finding and connecting to such people is the first challenge. I wrote this blog article in 2010. …See More

  

  Tutor Mentor Institute, LLC: What is purpose of conferences. Seminars?

  tutormentor.blogspot.com

  Though training and couching plays a vital role,mentoringhas its own effectivene

  ss because senior level guidance is given to all working class to enhance their working condition and to eliminate work related conflicts in an organization.

  Saturday at 10:33am · Unlike · 1
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  David Eggleton Assumptions of fuels and electricity sufficient to support nonlocal activities, which I, too, am enjoying, concern me. Have you all settled on something I missed or is there agreement to ignore what’s so uncertain?

  Saturday at 10:41am · Unlike · 3
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  Sepp Hasslberger I have settled on the likelihood of there being a good chance of a technological jump pretty soon that will make our energy worries a thing of the past. That view matured from a decade and more of observation of the alt energy movement and what’s happening in little ways here and there.

  Saturday at 11:17am · Like · 1
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  David Lawrence Hawthorne This morning I found a post from Tom Mallard on my FB page about a purported plan by FB to implement a fully-paid subscription model for its business. Of course, we could ‘opt-out,’ or find a number of ways to be cultivated into one or another paid tiers. I speculated in my own post, that FB would, as a result, become a nonentity in time, no more powerful than the old “comic book” or “match book” ads. It’s also possible that another entity, could offer a very similar service to FB, and be satisfied with an open-source model. A nation, group of nations, company or group of companies, institution or group of institutions, satisfied by the utility of mapping big data patterns might find good reason to offer similar services ‘free’ to an open market. Imagine a non-governmental enterprise that guaranteed your ‘privacy’ It is the behavior of people, (to paraphrase Drucker), that is the source of all value. Why should we have to pay to behave? To speak? To think? To converse? If “investors” see some value in being permitted to observe these behaviors, they should take the risk, after all, they are willing to harvest the value. If the Middle East needs a post-oil age resource to market, why not mine ‘Big Data’ and earn great public relations ‘soft-power’ credits by ‘protecting individual rights and privacy?’ (Another item for my Swiftian Memoirs

  Saturday at 11:45am · Unlike · 7
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  Ralf Lippold The true value of FB is its non-monetary cost.

  Saturday at 11:57am · Like · 1
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  Joris ClaeysRalf: for as long as it lasts…In the end FB and the non-availability of tools to do something with all the information makes FB a dead-end platform – sooner or later…David: I will be posting an extra-ordinary article on future energy in the coming days on @ eco-sTrEAMS . It will blow many out of our chairs and will make reference to it on the Next Edge once it is out. Suspense …So back to the subject, do we come to a conclusionhere on how to make use of teh data and thoughts being gathered and made useful, other then a paid service?

  Saturday at 2:02pm · Like · 1
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  Jim Rutt The true COST of FB is wasted time!

  Saturday at 2:03pm · Like
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  David Lawrence Hawthorne I wait with bated breath Joris Claeys It will be interesting to see how closely aligned we might be.

  Saturday at 3:55pm · Edited · Like · 2
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  Joris Claeys HopeDavid: I can get to it tomorrow… it should have been out a week ago!

  Saturday at 4:06pm · Like
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  Joris Claeys HopeDavid: I can get to it tomorrow… it should have been out a week ago!

  Saturday at 4:06pm · Like
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  David Lawrence Hawthorne Don’t worry, I’m only 6 month behind on my book.

  Saturday at 6:38pm · Like
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  Michael MarandaDavid Eggleton if you have missed anything it is perhaps in parallel discussions in the P2P group. However, there is no agreement except that there is high likely overlap and probablility that several of us are working on things that are roughly in the same boat. There has been no agreement to ignore any major uncertainties either. (Side note, I will likely be less active next several days as family is in town — but I hope to steal some moments for these discussions!)

  Saturday at 6:47pm · Unlike · 2
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  David Eggleton Thanks for that, Michael. I really wondered if something was agreed upon re energy availability/affordability prior to my debut here last spring. I’m under the influence of Chris Martenson and Richard Heinberg, to name just two of a cohort, and seem unique in that.

  Saturday at 9:02pm · Like · 2
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  Seb PaquetHere’s something I wrote a few years ago that feels relevant…In my view, conflict is actually good when
  it arises, because it provides visible points of “creative friction”
  and lets participants each refine what exactly it is that they are
  after. In a way, by hashing out a disagreement, you define yourself.
  Only by showing yourself, what you are into, and what you value, can
  networking work appropriately for you – that is, bring the right
  people and projects towards you. In other words, good self-
  representation leads to good connections.One key issue when working on self-representation is that of language.
  You may be using words with different meanings than others. This is
  why we need conversational spaces, to figure out e.g. if my idea of a
  “Pooled Fund” means exactly the same as *your* idea of “Pooled Fund”.Language is imperfect, but it’s pretty much all we have, right? It can
  still roughly guide our explorations of one another. When ideas and
  goals are verified to line up among a number of people, you’re on your
  way to collaboration. Actually you’ve collaborated already, on the
  task of clarifying that common goal.One idea that keeps coming back to my mind is that of “knowledge
  territories”. We each have a piece of turf we know about and a
  vocabulary to talk about it. It’s great to have a space to each define
  our territories. Once that is done, though, if we adopt a
  collaborative stance, we will want ways of identifying overlap between
  those territories, ways of matching up concepts between us, and ways
  to agree on a shared language. I think that when this is achieved in a
  disciplined way, it becomes easier for individuals to adhere strongly
  to a shared vision or goal and move forward together with confidence.

  (context: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/openkollab/Vfg8VELhC1g/CBPZ-VNIcfQJ)

  Re: Conflicts Arising From Generative Open Collaboration Spaces – possible mitigating mechanisms -.

  groups.google.com

  21 hours ago · Unlike · 6
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  Poor RichardHelene Finidori, thanks for all those links in one comment–I finally made a bookmark folder for all your awesome work and networking.

  11 hours ago · Like
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  Poor RichardSeb Paquet: “we will want ways of identifying overlap between
  those [knowlege/vocabulary] territories, ways of matching up concepts between us, and ways to agree on a shared language. I think that when this is achieved in a disciplined way, it becomes easier for individuals to adhere strongly to a shared vision or goal and move forward together with confidence.”Good definition of problem space. Any ideas about solutions?Related threads from the P2P group:I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here….
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/464870363557148/Ontology/Ontologies … we use the term in a variety of senses…
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466381613406023/

  PeerPoint Revisited
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466406333403551/

  This is a thread from Y Worlds on the subject of folksonomies …
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466574893386695/

  Benjamin Brownell has been designing a simple, universal, open ontology system… https://www.facebook.com/groups/145538675490320/permalink/466870136690504/

  Next Edge Thread: Several parallel threads are running on questions that are closely aligned…
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/120497731371323/permalink/362987357122358/

  

  P2P

  I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here. I am imagini…See More

  10 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
• 

  Adam Johnson I think Seb Paquet has it right on the importance of a shared language, and to me there are two examples straight up.
  The first is a discussion in this group but on a separate thread. I refer to “infrastructure”, and am thinking hard infrastructure like roads and so on (forgive me, I garduated as an engineer and sometimes lapse). Others (most?), at least in this group, refer to infrastructure as the framework within which we can align conversations.

  10 hours ago · Like · 1
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  Adam Johnson Oops. The second is more meta. Some of the discussions here are using language and ideas that I have the smallest of fingernail-hold understanding. And yes, I graduated as an engineer but I also graduated in cultural studies during the reign of Derrida…See More

  10 hours ago · Unlike · 3
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  Mark Frazier Stephanie LeMieux has some intriguing ideas on a hybrid approach to folksonomies and taxonomies (slide 18 onwards) at http://www.slideshare.net/Earley/hybrid-approaches-to-taxonomy-folksonmy

  

  Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonmy

  www.slideshare.net

  Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonomy Semantic T e chnology, 2009 Stephanie Lemieux Earley & Associates [email_address] www.earley.com

  9 hours ago · Like
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  Troy CamplinThis is why I am trying to set up a Society that brings together all of the different groups working in complexity — CAS researchers, complexity theorists, chaos theorists, information theorists, self-organization theorists, network theorists, spontaneous orders theorists, Austrian economists, complexity economists, etc. We have a blog to start things off, but there will be a proper society eventually:http://spontaneousorderstudies.blogspot.com/

  9 hours ago · Like · 1
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  Poor Richard Thanks, Mark Frazier. That slide set covered the folksonomy/ontology dichotomy-overlap more thoroughly than I did. It seems most of the little projects like ZigTag have disappeared or been absorbed into Microsoft’s stable like KWizcom. Overall, I think the hybrid approach is a winner–its the way I would go if I were an apps developer. The concepts in slide 18-45 are must-read for anyone interested in the technical side of this discussion.

Finis

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