PLANET P2P » P2P Foundation » September 2008

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• 

  Links for 2008-09-30 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 30th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • Creative Class: Arts, Culture, and Economic Growth - Creative Class
    arts and culture add a lot to regional income,so that abolishing its subsides does not make sense
  • Know It All - - All Politicking is Local: How the Obama Campaign is Using Technology to Change Elections on the Ground
    It's the difference between open and closed source." That's how Cyrus Krohn, director of the eCampain division of the Republican National Committee, describes the approaches of the Obama and McCain campaigns. The Democratic campaign is using technology to create a very large, relatively unstructured army of local volunteers to register voters and get out the vote; the Republicans are relying on a more conventional, top-down approach
  • The past, present, and future of location-based mobile social networking - Trends in the Living Networks
    a very quick review of the past, present, and future of the space.
  • Wohlers Talk » The U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Additive Fabrication
    Most of the AF systems that build metal parts are from Europe. They include Direct Metal Laser Sintering from EOS (Germany), Electron Beam Melting from Arcam (Sweden), LaserCUSING from Concept Laser (Germany), laser melting from Phenix Systems (France), and Selective Laser Melting from MTT (UK/Germany).
  • Wohlers Associates - Where is Wohlers Speaking?
    meetings and industry events over the coming months
  • Stanford University School of Education
    An Open Access Motion was passed unanimously by the faculty of Stanford University School of Education (SUSE) on June 10, 2008
  • Jeff Vail - Law, Energy, Geopolitics, and Organizational Theory
    “Energy Geopolitics” is extremely broad and complex. As a result, it’s necessary to take a systems-thinking approach, addressing the issues of complexity and feedback loops head-on
  • The credit crunch is feeding LinkedIn | Media | guardian.co.uk
    The credit crunch. It might be bad news for investors, the housing industry, the government, tax payers and home owners - but LinkedIn would like us to know that they are doing rather well as a result of international economic meltdown.
  • Review: Three Skype Phone - CyberShack
    the Three Skype Phone, a new idea to merge the already widely used 3G network held by Hutchison's 3 with the ability to make calls on the Skype network.
  • mapa Software Libre
    floss initiatives in spain
  • Mozilla in Asia » Blog Archive » 98.7% Internet Explorer in South Korea
    why S. Korea is an all-Microsoft, all-Internet Explorer nation
  • @ Brest - Premier salon Creative Commons à Paris, le 15 octobre
    Creative Commons France et La Cantine par Silicon Sentier organisent le premier salon Creative Commons à Paris Paris, 26 septembre 2008
  • Transitional labour market policy in denmark
  • microclesia � Blog Archive » Dreamtime
    These are and were a people with no notion of linear time. Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-29 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 29th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • …My heart’s in Accra » The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech
    examples of online video based activism in many countries
  • Lunch over IP: Modu: the modular future of the cell phone?
    can slid into a variety of "jackets" that give it the desired form and shape, and additional functionalities: large screen, full keyboard, music player, GPS navigator, stylish design, office software applications, kids' phone, etc. I
  • LRB · John Lanchester: the thinning of the press
    Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was
  • Lunch over IP: OpenSpimes: Turn your cell phone into a monitoring tool of your own local climate
    The first spime they've designed is a smart application of distributed computing in the service of sustainability. It can measure the CO2 level in parts-per-million in the surrounding air, and through a bluetooth link to a cell phone
  • Grand Challenges - Engineering Challenges
    the Grand Challenges for engineering as determined by a committe of the National Academy of Engineering
  • cityofsound: The Personal Well-Tempered Environment
    A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
  • The Long Tail - Wired Blogs -media revenue models based on free
    Here's my start at a list all the revenue models you can find in the media industry, all based around a core of free or almost-free content
  • John Gray: A shattering moment in America's fall from power | Comment is free | The Observer
    The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over
  • SMBlog -- 4 February 2008
    As a security guy, I'm paranoid, but I don't understand the threat model here. On the other hand, four accidental failures in a week is a bit hard to swallow, too. Let's hope there will be close, open examination of the failed parts of the cables.
  • A Glimpse Into Personalized Medicine of the Future - washingtonpost.com
    Today drug companies profit by selling large volumes of low-priced products. In the future, high-priced personalized medicine will be sold in low volumes.
  • Looking for a loan? Try P2P
    The rates between the banks that I've looked at are anywhere from five to seven percent more than it is with Lending Club
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
    These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines are intended for all Web content developers (page authors and site designers) and for developers of authoring tools. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility
  • It Takes Tech to Elect a President
    Many candidates simply ask supporters for money and a vote. Obama uses social media tools to ask for even more
  • The Social Media Gender Gap
    According to a Rapleaf study, while both sexes still use social networking sites in huge numbers, women are the ones holding down the fort

  
• 

  Does genetic food become palatable when it is a public good

  Posted: September 29th, 2008, 1:13am PDT by Michel Bauwens

  Seed Magazine reports on efforts to make genetic engineering research a public good and says that it is vital for the next green revolution.

  Excerpt:

  “Free distribution and local ownership of bioproperty will be one crucial aspect of the new Green Revolution. Another will be the cultivation of locally adapted varieties. “The second Green Revolution is going to be much more complicated than the first,” says Nina Fedoroff, a plant geneticist at Penn State, and science and technology adviser to the US Secretary of State. This time around, Fedoroff explains, scientists will have to address local needs and local crop varieties. Consider ringspot-virus-resistant GM papaya: “It’s been a wonderful, wonderful accomplishment,” says Fedoroff, “but the transgenic plants that are protected from the virus in Hawaii aren’t going to work in the Philippines.” Building locally focused biotech and training biotech-capable scientists is “a big deal,” says Fedoroff. “It’s a huge investment, and it needs to be done everywhere.”

  

  
• 

  The other singularity: from the Great Meltdown to the Great Escape

  Posted: September 28th, 2008, 11:33pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  A brilliant excerpt from the fifteenth chapter of Kevin Carson’s draft on Organisational Theory, which I will discuss in detail in daily submissions from October 2 to 5. If you can’t wait, go read it now, it’s has all the makings of a masterpiece.

  In this excerpt, Kevin Carson discusses a possible counter-strategy to the collapse of the financial economy:

  We’re experiencing a singularity, of sorts, in which it is becoming impossible for capital to prevent a shift in the supply of an increasing proportion of the necessities of life from mass produced goods purchased with wages, to small-scale production in the informal and household sector. The upshot is likely to be something like Vinay Gupta’s “Unplugged” movement (see below), in which the possibilities for low-cost, comfortable subsistence off the grid result in exactly the same situation, the fear of which motivated the propertied classes in carrying out the Enclosures: a situation in which the majority of the public can take wage labor or leave it, if it takes it at all, the average person works only on his own terms when he needs supplemental income for luxury goods and the like, and (even if he considers supplemental income necessary in the long run for an optimal standard of living) can afford in the short run to quit work and live off his own resources for prolonged periods of time, while negotiating for employment on the most favorable terms. It will be a society in which workers, not employers, have the greater ability to walk away from the table. It will, in short, be the kind of society Wakefield lamented in the colonial world of cheap and abundant land: a society in which labor is hard to get on any terms, and almost impossible to hire at a low enough wage to produce significant profit.

  The potential for defection is heightened by the greater efficiency with which the counter-economy extracts use-value from a given amount of land or capital.

  …[T]he owning classes use less efficient forms of production precisely because the state gives them preferential access to large tracts of land and subsidizes the inefficiency costs of large-scale production. Those engaged in the alternative economy, on the other hand, will be making the most intensive and efficient use of the land and capital available to them. So the balance of forces between the alternative and capitalist economy will not be anywhere near as uneven as the distribution of property might indicate.

  If everyone capable of benefiting from the alternative economy participates in it, and it makes full and efficient use of the resources already available to them, eventually we’ll have a society where most of what the average person consumes is produced in a network of self-employed or worker-owned production, and the owning classes are left with large tracts of land and understaffed factories that are almost useless to them because it’s so hard to hire labor except at an unprofitable price. At that point, the correlation of forces will have shifted until the capitalists and landlords are islands in a mutualist sea–and their land and factories will be the last thing to fall, just like the U.S Embassy in Saigon.

  Johan Soderberg refers to the possibility that increasing numbers of workers will “defect from the labour market” and “establish means of non-waged subsistence,” through efficient use of the waste products of capitalism. [Soderberg, p. 172.] The “freegan” lifestyle (less charitably called “dumpster diving”) is one end of a spectrum of such possibilities. At the other end is low-cost recycling and upgrading of used and discarded electronic equipment: the rapid depreciation of computers makes it possible to add RAM to a model a few years old at a small fraction of the cost of a new computer, with almost identical performance.

  The central barrier to garage production of computers is the microprocessor, which can only be produced on capital equipment costing nearly a billion dollars. But reprogrammable microprocessors will eliminate that barrier, with millions of discarded chips enabling garage industry to operate entirely on recycled inputs in the same way that minimills reprocess scrap steel on a small scale wherever a market exists. In Cory Doctorow’s Themepunks, for example, a small workshop uses the chips harvested from thousands of discarded Elmo dolls.

  Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich both remarked, in their unique ways, on the effect of radical monopolies in making comfortable poverty impossible. As the alternative economy undermines the ability of artificial property rights to levy tribute on access to the means of subsistence, comfortable poverty becomes increasingly feasible.

  Dave Pollard, of How to Save the World blog, describes his own version of the singularity in “The Virtuous Cycles of the Gift Economy.” As people do the things they love and become better at them, it takes less and less money to live. People need to work less, and can devote the saved time not only to further developing production technique. People develop more skills, become more self-sufficient, and less dependent on store-bought commodities purchased with wages. They also invest a greater share of their productive energy in the gift economy and mutual aid, and a greater share of their time in building social capital. As a result, people on average are happier, healthier, and more responsible and competent; social problems and social costs decline, which further adds to the virtuous cycle of reduced cost and frees up more time from work. “These cycles are, of course, subversive. They threaten to undermine and starve the ‘market’ economy by freeing us, the end-customers of that economy, from the need to pay money into it.”

  This undermining and starving is exactly what we discussed in Chapter Thirteen: building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. Pollard describes, as one way of bring about major global change, “incapacitation–rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive.”

  But suppose if, instead of waiting for the collapse of the market economy and the crumbling of the power elite, we brought about that collapse, guerrilla-style, by making information free, by making local communities energy self-sufficient, and by taking the lead in biotech away from government and corporatists (the power elite) by working collaboratively, using the Power of Many, Open Source, unconstrained by corporate allegiance, patents and ’shareholder expectations‘?

  Gupta’s short story “The Unplugged” related his vision of how such a singularity would affect life in the West.

  Wealth stored as dollars was essentially a share in America’s national economy - a credit note backed by the US Government. But Buckminster Fuller showed us that wealth-as-money was a specialized subset of Wealth - the ability to sustain life.

  To “get off at the top” requires millions and millions of dollars of stored wealth. Exactly how much depends on your lifestyle and rate of return, but it’s a lot of money, and it’s volatile depending on economic conditions. A crash can wipe out your capital base and leave you helpless, because all you had was shares in a machine.

  So we Unpluggers found a new way to unplug: an independent life-support infrastructure and financial architecture - a society within society - which allowed anybody who wanted to “buy out” to “buy out at the bottom” rather than “buying out at the top.”

  If you are willing to live as an Unplugger does, your cost to buy out is only around three months of wages for a factory worker, the price of a used car. You never need to “work” again–that is, for money which you spend to meet your basic needs.

  The idea was to combine “Gandhi’s Goals” (”self-sufficiency,” or “the freedom that comes from owning your own life support system”) with “Fuller’s Methods” (the dymaxion principle of getting more with less).

  In conclusion:

  If this singularity will enable the producing classes in the industrialized West to defect from the wage system, in the Third World it may enable them to skip that stage of development altogether. Gupta concluded “The Unplugged” with a hint about how the principle might be applied in the Third World: “We encourage the developing world to Unplug as the ultimate form of Leapfrogging: skip hypercapitalism and anarchocapitalism and democratic socialism entirely and jump directly to Unplugging.”

  Gupta envisions a corresponding singularity in the Third World, when the cost of an Internet connection, through cell phones and other mobile devices, falls low enough to be affordable by impoverished villagers. At that point, the transaction costs which hampered previous attempts at disseminating affordable intermediate technologies in the Third World, like Village Earth’s Appropriate Technology Library or Schumacher’s Intermediate Technology Development Group, will finally be overcome by digital network technology.

  The question of the transition period is a real one. There is a very real possibility that the material foundations of the new decentralized economy will not be sufficiently laid down before the old economy’s system of circulation breaks down, so that many who are dependent on employment lose their means of support with nothing to take its place. How to manage the transition is far beyond the scope of this analysis. My main purpose has been, first, to show that such a transition is likely, whether we like it or not, as state capitalism reaches its limits and the technical and organizational means of withdrawing from it become available; and second, to show the likely outlines of a successor society based on the new technical and organizational means. My personal opinion, as I have already discussed in Chapter Twelve in regard to the crisis of centralization resulting from Peak Oil, is that the transition will be relatively long and stable, compared to (say) the catastrophic collapse scenarios of James Kunstler.

  At any rate, the more widespread the means of subsistence in the informal and household economies, and the more local infrastructure exists for exchange and barter, the more closely the transition crisis will resemble the paper crisis envisioned by Schumacher. For someone who has avoided or paid off credit card debt, who has obtained a modest mortgage and made paying it off as quickly as possible his top priority, and who has a large and productive vegetable garden, the possibility of unemployment is scary. But it’s nowhere near as terrifying as for someone who’s currently barely making the monthly interest payments on his mortgage, and who’s cashed out all his home equity and maxed out all his credit cards buying a Wii and a big-screen TV and getting a new model car every couple years. Even for the creditors and the unemployed described by Schumacher’s questioner, having a roof over your head free and clear and a reliable source of food will reduce, to a large extent, the concrete harm from the paper collapse.

  My hope, at least, is that conventional measures like GDP will suffer (if only gradually, over a generation) what appears to be a catastrophic implosion, as people simply stop buying shit, cut back on the hours of wage labor they previously worked to earn the money to pay for shit, and supply more and more of their own needs producing for themselves and exchanging with their neighbors. My hope, at the same time, is that people will be so busy producing for themselves and their neighbors, and enjoying their control over their own lives and work and consumption, that the collapse of the state capitalist economy won’t matter very much to them.

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-28 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 28th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • Higher Education Jobs
  • Interview with Juan Enrique Hinostroza
    What worries me more is that due to the development of the information society and the emergence of a “digital generation” or “new millennium learners”, the educational gap is increasing. This is, what youngsters are expected to know at age 18 today is significantly different from what it was 5 years ago, and educational systems in developed countries are starting to provide the opportunities to learn these new skills and abilities, while developing countries are far behind.
  • Over sharing, Blogging and Transparency—Notes—and Quotes-- from a Talk | BlogHer
    talks about identity and reputation management in a world where many people stream big chunks of their lives
  • Safaricom: M-PESA
    M-PESA is a Safaricom service allowing you to transfer money using a mobile phone. Kenya is the first country in the world to use this service,
  • apophenia: Teens, Video Games, and Civics
    participation in gaming does not cause a decrease in civic participation and, if anything, certain forms of gaming activity are correlated with civic engagement
  • » Visualizing OpenCourseware Carol Gering
    Earlier this year I performed a review of OpenCourseware courses from three different institutions: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and The Open University. I evaluated three courses from each of the three institutions.
  • Collaborative Thinking: Employee Networks (E2E)
    In industries from retail to high tech, banking and manufacturing, companies are increasingly building networks behind the firewall where employees can create profiles and connect with one another in ways first demonstrated by LinkedIn
  • YouTube - Religion & Morality (Oops!)
    "higher level of religious belief leads to more crime" - study
  • The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World - ReadWriteWeb
    we'll look at other uses of the technology including scanning products in store, scanning broadcast media, and even exchanging contact information with others through the use of barcodes.
  • open money and comunity currencies talk radio show | p2p and open money
    Michael Linton VS Michel Bauwens
  • Richard Baraniuk | Profile on TED.com
    Richard Baraniuk is founder of Connexions, a free, open-source, global clearinghouse of course materials
  • Open-Source Learning | EDC Blog
    reviews presentation by richard baraniuk of Connexions
  • Zoopy | Your Social Media Playground | Share videos, photos, podcasts and blogs online
    zoopy.com is a social media platform in South Africa
  • The Political Economy of Peer Production | The Communication Initiative Network
    According to the author, this is a major post-industrialisation shift in distribution networks that is affecting production, governance, and property through processes that aim to increase the most widespread participation by equipotential participants
  • Peak Energy: Hedge Funds and Economic Terrorists
    The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil market price has become almost entirely irrelevant in the real world of physical and forward oil trading, which largely takes place, believe it or not, in Yahoo chat rooms.

  
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  Thoughts on P2P production and deployment of physical objects

  Posted: September 28th, 2008, 9:14pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  Our Italian friend Marco Fioretti, of the social-catholic free software advocacy group Eleutheros, a man with a longstanding experience in the manufacturing of integrated circuits, has summarized a discussion we have on the specific difficulties of using peer to peer methods in the sphere of real physical production.

  Marco summarizes the other contributions, and strongly challenges them.

  Here only the abstract and the conclusion, so go to the full article for the concrete case studies and objections.

  Marco Fioretti:

  1. Abstract

  “These days there is a great interest in finding ways to build a more open and balanced society through social structures, legal frameworks, proper education and innovative technical practices. The goal is to enable as many people as possible to produce, independently or directly collaborating with other individuals without any intermediary or delegation of power, everything one needs to live happily, creatively and sustainably. P2P networks for digital distribution and the P2P Free/Open Source software development model are often taken as examples to apply to other fields, due to their evident success.

  This article is an edited summary of two email conversations which took place among a few subscribers of the p2p-research mailing list during spring of 2008 about the applicability of P2P development models to physical objects and infrastructures. It first sums two independent P2P visions or proposals: microelectronics manufacturing and deployment of telecom networks. Next follow my (Marco F.) comments and objections to each case study. The last chapter presents some general conclusions and questions about intrinsical limits of P2P production of physical objects or about its very necessity in some areas: if, to which extent, how and (maybe the more important part) where and when the P2P production models for immaterial products and services can be applied to the production and deployment of physical objects and infrastructures. ”

  2. Conclusion

  “Before concluding, let’s remind where we started from: are there limit to “P2P production and deployment of physical objects”? Is it possible and desirable in any field? What is the best scale for production, deployment and management of (networks of) complex physical objects? Can centralization be thoroughly substituted by appropriate scale as in the P2P movement? (the two last questions were asked to me by other participants in the threads).

  Let’s first sum up a few key points:

  * With immaterial objects, design (and compilation when applicable) is also all it takes to manufacture and maintain. In those cases, design is production.

  * If you cannot manufacture something you need by yourself in a sustainable way (whatever “sustainable” means for you), it doesn’t matter much if you can design it.

  Generally speaking, I agree that decreasing the scale of some human enterprises would increase the quality of life for everyone and that more P2P than there is today would be a good thing. This said, I think that the comments and objections to the two case studies highlight a few general issues which deserve attention.

  The first is that, in any given age, P2P production of physical objects is only possible and economically meaningful where the complexity of those objects and of all the tools needed to build them from raw materials is so high as is the case of microelectronics today. Using in a P2P way sophisticated integrated circuits, instead, to build something new, is already possible today and maybe should receive more attention. Of course, “complexity” is a function of the state of technology: what is impossible today may very well become absolutely ordinary bricolage some time in the future. What matters is not to underestimate the limits of current technology, that is to not confuse Research with Development.

  The second, very general advice that comes from this analysis is that accepting as good, or proposing, P2P-only societies or lifestyles on assumptions like “today, cost of software is zero and cost of computer hardware is nearing zero” may generate frustration, to say the least. Computer hardware, FPGAs and things like the BUG or any other microelectronics device, are “nearing zero cost” only because produced in diametrically opposed ways to P2P philosophy and techniques, and this is not going to change in the near/medium term. With respect to “the cost of software being zero”… Linux, mass access to the Internet and all the empowerment this implies, digital creative works and P2P networks were and remain cheap to produce, use, distribute and co-develop in innovative ways just because they rely on (should we say “live completely inside”?) a huge quantity of physical objects (computers and networks) which are affordable only because of mass, centralized production.

  This may be a temporary inconvenient, of course, but let’s move to the third and most interesting general point, which is: maybe there are some areas of human activity where, regardless of the technology level of any given period, the ideal scale may not be the P2P one, but something much closer to the much larger one used to produce the same good and services today.

  While this shold not be meant in any way as a full endorsement of the current system, the fact that many “centralizations” of today do more harm than good is not a rigorous proof that any conceivable centralization is always bad period. Couldn’t it be that P2P, which remains a good thing, isn’t really doable nor desirable in some areas, telecom networks being one of them, because it wouldn’t really improve quality of life? Are we really sure that “anything large in scale should be broken down, decentralized”?

  Look at the Internet or at mobile phone networks. They make P2P and Free Software development possible and can greatly lower the costs of many self-entrepreneurs, from African fishermen to web 2.0 gurus, or make public officials more accountable and easier to control. But in order for all this to physically work at the smallest possible cost, the physical infrastructure must be as homogeneous and obeying to centralized technical specifications as possible. Ditto for the specs of the single parts constituting it. What you need to decentralize on the Internet, in order to build a fairer world and to make the P2P culture prosper, is things like DNS management, Net neutrality, production of application software. Let’s decentralize the right things at the right level.

  I wonder if this last point may be some sort of general “law”, if you’ll forgive me this term, which puts some intrinsical, upper limit on what P2P can do or on what it should be used for. As Einstein put it, “everything should be made as simple as possible - but not simpler”.

  Living cells, ants or bees can organize themselves spontaneously in a P2P-like manner without any supervisor or mass-produced machinery. Human beings, on the other hand, have both physical and intangible needs which are a tiny bit more complex than those of bees. Think to affordable and open access to quality education, culture in all its forms, communication or advanced health care. Think to services like weather forecasts reliable enough to minimize human casualties or food waste. Unlike food, clothes and shelter all these things demand (at least) lots of physical objects which cannot be made from scratch at home, together with very large and sophisticated (=expensive) physical networks like the Internet, professionally built and managed.

  Even if the cost problem didn’t exist, technologically sophisticated activities imply specialization, which sooner or later brings the need for coordination and some form of centralization. Is there any way to completely escape this fact without giving up all the real benefits on quality of life which are possible with today’s technologies?

  What about aiming directly for a mixed model, instead, one where decentralized (P2P) and centralized activities mutually enforce each other? It may be not only much easier to build (by forcing the current system to evolve, instead of starting over): it may actually be the best possible solution, even better than a 100% P2P one.”

  

  
• 

  Christian Siefkes on the difference between capitalism and the peer economy

  Posted: September 28th, 2008, 8:22pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  This is a response to some of the challenges expressed by Stefan Merten, who believes Siefkes book re-introduces capitalist concepts in another form.

  Christian Siefkes:

  “In so far as current peer production tends to go, my solution is the same as of current peer production processes: you can take anything, without having to give anything back, as long as you don’t take it _away_ from others. That means that you can freely take information and anything else that can be copied freely. Current peer production tends to end here.

  The problem that arises next is how to organizing taking when taking does mean taking away: say if I want to take a bicycle, but somebody else wants to take it too — if there’s only one bicycle, and if one of us would take it, she would take it away from the other (she would deny her the possibility of taking it). My problem to this solution is basically: “arrange production, through social agreements, so as to avoid that taking becomes taking away — i.e. arrange production so as to ensure that there is one bicycle (etc.) for everyone who needs one.” People thus enter a joint agreement to help each other produce what each of them needs.

  Realizing this common goal requires effort, and the agreement must therefore find a mode for distributing this effort–my proposal here is either to distribute effort evenly among participants (flatrate model), or to distribute it roughly proportionally to the effort it takes to satisfy everyone’s wishes (”the more you want, the more you have to give”), plus some further details and possible modifications. The decision to regard effort as “abstract human labor”, disregarding the specific useful goods it produces (except that they must of course be useful, i.e. somebody must want them), is therefore the result of an social agreement, it does not happen “behind the back of the producers.”

  The important thing, I believe, is that people enter a joint agreement to help each other produce what they need–the details of the agreement (how to distribute effort etc.) will be a matter of experimentation. Feel free to propose better solutions for these details, if you know any.

  But please stop ignoring the difference between freely copyable and other things: if you take a copy of Linux, nobody else loses a thing, but if you take the last bicycle, other people lose the possibility to take it. That’s a difference that must be dealt with, merely wishing it away won’t help you.

  I don’t think the problem in capitalism is that you don’t get everything for free. On a deep level, the problem that you have to work in order to consume even exists in any society, since only goods that have been produced can be consumed. Thus work (production) is always a necessary precondition for consumption–maybe not for you personally, but definitely for society as a whole. (Of course, the people doing it may perceive this work not as necessity, but as Selbstentfaltung, as something they’re doing voluntarily and with pleasure–that’s the best outcome a mode of production can hope to achieve. But it can only be an outcome, not a precondition for a mode of production. Otherwise needs which, for whatever reasons, cannot be satisfied by pure Selbstentfaltung would simply be neglected, and that wouldn’t be a good thing.)

  The problem in capitalism is that production only takes place if there is _profit._ The goal of all capitalist production is to make profit, i.e. to turn money into more money. So, in order to get the things you need, you cannot just “work a little”–no, you have to convince some capitalist that they need you, i.e. that employing you allows them to make more profit than they would make otherwise. Your mere willingness to work is entirely unimportant–you must be useful for some capitalist, too. But capitalists only need a limited number of personnel, much less than there are people on Earth, so that’s the big hurdle which most people fail to overcome (when speaking on a global scale).

  The second aspect of this problem is that, as a worker, you don’t sell the results of your labor, you sell your _labor power_ (workers, or would-be workers, are people who don’t have anything to sell than their labor power–most people haven’t). The deal by selling your labor power is: you get paid the value of your labor power (what else?), and the value of your labor power is what you need in order to survive (according to your local community standard of living); in return, you have to give your full labor power (according to the local standard for the length of they work day/week, say, 8 hours a day/40 hours a week). If the production of the goods you need for your standard of living takes 20 hours a week, you still have to work 40 hours–the other 20 hours are the “surplus”–they go to the capitalist, become their profit and are, in fact, the only reason why they employed you in the first place.

  In the peer economy, you don’t need to be useful for a capitalist, since you can join, without any preconditions, the general agreement to help each other produce what they need. And since work is simply divided up, there is no surplus–if producing your standard of living takes 20 hours a week, you work 20 hours (assuming a proportional model), if you want a higher standard, you have to work a bit more, say 25 hours, etc. (In fact, your workload would probably be even lower, since in capitalism there is much duplication of work and overload work which would be unnecessary in a peer economy.) The general agreement to help each other produce what they want and to divide the necessary work among those that can contribute means that everybody who can has to work a little, but nobody has to work very much. (And if you can’t contribute at all, then you don’t have to. That’s how I describe it, at least, and I believe that rule to be very important, since the goal of dividing up the labor is to allow everyone to get what they want with the least possible effort, not to exclude anybody.)

  That’s the difference between capitalism and the peer economy. For many people in our society, it would mean the difference between life and death, or at least between having to live in misery or being able to live a good life. And for almost everybody else it, it’s the difference between having to work very much (and often with the fear of losing that precious, if unloved job and the advantages it entails) and having to work much less (and without fear of dropping out). And that’s not even speaking of the fact that in the peer economy you’re part of a equal community of co-producers with a common goal (produce for everyone what that like to have), while in capitalism you must subjugate to the command of some boss whose goal (making profit) has nothing to do with you...”

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-27 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 27th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • The B-Files
    these excerpts from The Story of B are exceptional and strongly recommended reading, on the rise and demise of totalitarian agriculture
  • How to Save the World - Intentional Communities, Cohousing, etc..
    because of the ponderous nature of the term "Intentional Community", many such communities are called cohousing neighbourhoods. Other terms like ecovillages, communes and housing cooperatives are also used. Since even wikipedia mis-defines some of them, it may be worthwhile defining what we mean by all these terms.
  • How to Save the World - 12 tools that will disappear
    a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts of my generation that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular
  • How to Save the World - on avatars and authenticity
    there are people who are there to play being someone they're not, and other people who are trying to be authentic. At one extreme there are people who come in and act as a member of the opposite sex, or as a machine or animal. There are those who come specifically to play faerie and S&M roles, living out fantasies behind the mask of their avatar. There are those who act "realistically" but assume airs or false bravado, who essentially lie about who they are
  • From courses to community: 6 trends that change learning
    From Expert led to peer driven social learning
  • B Corporation - About B Corp
    B Corporations are a new type of corporation that are purpose-driven and create benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
  • Portals and KM: Forty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers (Part 2)
    Yesterday, I listed Twenty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers. Below I provide the next twenty on the list.
  • How to Save the World - dominance and submission behaviours
    how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interaction
  • How to Save the World - The book of tells
    Before humans invented language, these signals were used more overtly to establish the pecking order in prehistoric tribes. This ranking was not merely done as an act of bravado -- your placement in the pecking order from alpha to omega male or female was a critical determinant of your role in the tribe
  • Presencing: The Meaning of Life Lost in Manipulated Language
    Dead Speech networks are identified with the imposed deadening consumerist language of back and forth manipulations among people, Live Speech is identified with meaning oriented conversations with a movement toward shared understandings being its prime value
  • The Idea of a Local Economy | Wendell Berry | Orion magazine
    So far as I can see, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence.
  • How to Save the World - Food is the cause of our problems
    the root cause of the population explosion is excessive and ever-increasing food production, and the paradoxical and counter-intuitive solution to human misery caused by overpopulation and starvation is to cut food production
  • The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race
    .. was: the invention of agriculture
  • Palmer's JAMES BURKE Fan Companion
    Once in an era, a book comes along that changes the way we think about ourselves, our culture, and our future. Brilliant, radical, and extraordinary in its range, The Axemakers Gift poses the right questions at a critical moment, and begins to find the right answers.
  • How to Save the World - Collapse and the history of progress
    While Diamond suggests the errors of excess and foolishness that led to previous collapses were unwitting, and well-intentioned, Wright describes human society-building as steeped in violence, genocide and savagery, and demonstrates that evolutionary success of human cultures has been proportional to their readiness and willingness to exterminate or subjugate 'competitors' (plants, animals, other human cultures and members of their own culture) with deliberate, zealous and ruthless barbarity

  
• 

  What exactly is Open Video?

  Posted: September 27th, 2008, 1:50am PDT by Michel Bauwens

  An announcement and appeal by the crew of Miro TV:

  “For many, it’s not clear what Open Video actually is — here’s what it means to us: openness is a state where video has more potential for innovation and competition. It’s a place with fewer restrictions and digital locks, fewer hurdles to block viewers who would become authors. The nuts and bolts of this place are: open video formats, open standards, and open tools for watching and authoring video. This openness inherently brings with it a higher resistance to gatekeepers, greater decentralization, and better interoperability. The ability of the average person to watch, create, and manipulate video becomes much higher — a more participatory culture emerges. Video in this idealized future is actually pretty similar to the text and images that populate our current internet.

  Television on the internet, in its current state, is not much more than video on demand. It’s largely made up of centralized and proprietary services that offer streaming-only video. It’s a sort of one-way street, disappointingly similar to our traditional broadcast media. Getting to watch what you want, when you want, is great; however, without a big shift towards more openness, we aren’t guaranteed to see an earth shattering paradigm shift in television-based mass media, like we have with text and image.

  Open Video is complex and deserves more attention than we alone can give it. The topic is ripe for a broader analysis, clearer guidelines around what constitutes “open,” more discussion of what’s at stake, and ultimately, more public awareness. In light of these needs, we’ll soon announce some work we’ve been doing to create a broad-based project aimed at accomplishing many of these goals.”

  
• 

  A sensible alternative plan to the bail-out

  Posted: September 26th, 2008, 11:14pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  Via Ian Welsch:

  “I have received multiple e-mails today suggesting that instead of the bailing out banks at the expense of taxpayers, the government should give mortgage holders money to pay off their mortgages.

  Both ideas are bad. But there is a better solution.

  The government is talking about setting up a Trust to buy distressed debt then sell it again. The problem is that the Trust company will simply bail out banks at taxpayer expense without helping mortgage holders much. The mortgages it sells will still be underwater, or too expensive for many people to service, especially as their houses lose value.

  The other proposal, just giving money to people to pay for their mortgages, is bad also. Housing prices are actually dropping, most mortgages issues were bad mortgages with horrible penalty clauses, based on assumptions about housing values which are just wrong. House prices are going to keep dropping.

  What the government should do instead is set up a Trust to buy mortgages at a discount, then reset them to 20, 30 or 50 year fixed mortgages with a reduced face amount. If the house is later sold, half of the increase goes to the government, so that taxpayers make a profit. The mortgage cannot be paid off before the end of its term so that financial scavengers cannot come around and, as they did over the last ten years, say “get rid of that mortgage, and take ours. It’s better. Honest!”, because we know that when they say better, they don’t mean better for the mortgage holder. The mortgage is attached to the property and is transfered to any new buyer. And the mortgage cannot be removed from the property, and any new mortgages attached to the property are junior to the government mortgage.

  End results:

  a) a floor is set for mortgage prices. (Whatever discount the government is buying at. Probably 60% to 70%, but it should be based on what the long run price was in the area before the housing bubble.) This ends the confidence crisis in these securities, because there is now a market price—what the Trust will pay.

  b) It helps homeowners stay in their homes.

  c) It gets rid of overly complex mortgages and puts in their place a dead simple mortgage that anyone can understand.

  d) It punishes lenders, which they deserve, for making loans they should never have made.

  e) While it does keep homeowners in their homes, it doesn’t let them off scot-free either. In exchange for a good mortgage they can service, they give up some of the future profits on sales in their houses.

  f) The government will almost certainly make a long term profit on this. This is important, because it’s not fair for people who aren’t underwater on mortgages to spend hundreds of billions or trillions bailing out those who are without some expectation that in the end it won’t be more than just a transfer of wealth to them and to investors and banks.

  This bailout can be done right. It’s up to Democrats, who appear to be in danger of stampeding into a hasty decision, to stand firm and make sure it’s done right. The last two times they didn’t stand firm and do things right, we got the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. This is too important for Democratic fecklessness. Too important for them to just give the Bush administration whatever it wants.

  If they do give the administration what it wants, then Wall Street and the Banks just got bailed out, no help goes to ordinary people and you get stuck with a trillion dollar bill. Taxpayers get all the toxic assets, but Wall Street, who paid themselves more in bonuses in 2007 then 80 million Americans got in raises, keeps the profits.

  Democrats need to stand up for ordinary Americans and do the right thing.”

  

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-26 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 26th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • Metamorphosis - Launching Creative Commons Romania
  • India's Hari Puttar caught in Harry Potter spell | U.S. | Reuters
    the story of a young boy fighting two criminals who are trying to steal a secret formula devised by the boy's scientist father.
  • Open Resource Group
    Open Resource Group is building systems that host a community on your site as vibrant and as engaged as MySpace, but focused on your goods & services.
  • CMap: Learning Models, or... | Lisa's CCK08 Edublog
    good concept map of learning theories from behaviorism to cognitivism to constructivism to connectivism
  • Carr favours open access | Australian IT
    In his address Senator Carr strongly endorses Cutler's open access recommendations, saying: "If we are serious about boosting innovation, we have to get knowledge and information flowing freely."
  • Singles Union: Singles of the world, unite !
    To be fair, singles should not be treated as they are now as a sort of private property exploited by any businesses that sell the connection to other singles. Singles should be free and the collective solutions should work for free, self-managed by singles.
  • Ubiquitous Learning: An International Conference
    investigates the uses of technologies in learning, including devices with sophisticated computing and networking capacities
  • Homophyli - P2P Foundation
    the phenomenon where we associate with like individuals because we share like experience.
  • Foundation for Conscious Evolution | Foundation for Conscious Evolution
    The initiatives of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution offer a context and container for connecting and empowering the vast global movement arising for positive change, making the efforts of this movement visible to engender greater coherence and synergy.
  • Edge 258 - Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
    when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.
  • Hugo Chávez and Venezuela: questions of leadership | open Democracy News Analysis
    Hugo Chávez's policies have been responsible for real social achievements. The Venezuelan president's record has been unfairly traduced. But his current diplomatic confrontation with the United States - which risks undermining Venezuela's own interests and fraying regional solidarity - is symptomatic of a pattern of political misjudgment
  • 'New thinking' needs new direction | open Democracy News Analysis
    The incoming President needs to articulate a new narrative for US security policy based on the notion that population security (or I would say human security) is a world-wide goal rather than the War on Terror and that the US will strengthen multilateral institutions in order to develop the capacity to prevent conflicts as well as reducing violence
  • Rediscovering Traditionalism | open Democracy News Analysis
    One year after re-introducing the Tridentine Mass and two years after the Regensburg address, Benedict XVI's popular new traditionalism has re-ignited the Catholic culture wars.

  
• 

  From the World Wide Web to the Web Wide World

  Posted: September 26th, 2008, 9:54pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  If you read only one article about the future of the web, what exactly Web 3.0 might become, go no further than this brilliant overview by Nova Spivack here, entitled: The Future of the Desktop.

  In his own blog, he gives a brilliant summarizing of what it is all about.

  Nova Spivack:

  “Things are not going to turn out the way we thought. Instead of everything going digital — a future in which we all live as avatars in cyberspace — The digital world is going to invade the physical world. We already are the avatars and the physical world is becoming cyberspace. The idea that cyberspace is some other place is going to dissolve because everything will be part of the Web. The digital world is going physical.

  When this happens — and it will happen soon, perhaps within 20 years or less — the notion of “the Web” will become just a quaint, antique concept from the early days when the Web still lived in a box. Nobody will think about “going on the Web” or “going online” because they will never NOT be on the Web, they will always be online.

  Think about that. A world in which every physical object, everything we do, and eventually perhaps our every thought and action is recorded, augmented, and possibly shared. What will the world be like when it’s all connected? When all our bodies and brains are connected together — when even our physical spaces, furniture, products, tools, and even our natural environments, are all online? Beyond just a Global Brain, we are really building a Global Body.

  The World is becoming the Web. The “Web Wide World” is coming and is going to be a big theme of the next 20 years.”

  
• 

  The revolution in accounting and the emergence of ethical markets

  Posted: September 26th, 2008, 9:21pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  You may want to read Hazel Henderson’s reaction to the financial meltdown.

  Her stress on ethical markets is in tune with our own analysis of capitalist formats being subsumed through peer to peer-based ‘partner’ logics.

  Of interest is the paragraph in which she refers to deep changes that have taken place in statistical and accounting methnods, and that pave the way for post-neoliberal approaches to the economy.

  Hazel Henderson:

  “Three decades of socially responsible investing which screens out the worst of these excesses has proved successful in providing reliable returns (www.socialfunds.org, www.socialinvest.org). Research analysts, including Innovest, KLD, Calvert, Trucost and many others, report on companies’ social, environmental and ethical governance performance (all at www.ethicalmarkets.com). Sustainability metrics beyond money-based GNP/GDP and conventional economics use multi-disciplinary, systems approaches to overall quality of life, happiness and ecological footprints (e.g., www.calvert-henderson.com). Triple bottom line accounting, pioneered by the Amsterdam-based Global Reporting Initiative is used by over 600 global companies to report their social, environmental and governance performance as well as profitability. All these new statistical reforms constitute the greatest revolution in accounting since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the Renaissance. All these reforms of markets, economics and accounting accelerated after Enron and are now growing even more rapidly in response to Wall Street’s downfall, leaving the Chicago Boys in the dust. Meanwhile, local “green” economies are flourishing, creating local currencies, alternative liquidity networks, online community credit facilities and barter systems, reported by the Schumacher Society (www.smallisbeautiful.com).”

  

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-25 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 25th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • Can Advertising on Social Networks Work?
    ad agencies remain cautious about recommending social network advertising to their clients.
  • chisblassternardone: Making Money from Social Sites
    Advertisers are turning to complex applications to reach users on social networks.
  • Ad agencies team up on social-media standards | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET
    a new ad industry group dedicated to developing standards for social-media advertising.
  • Group Theory and the Online Community « Leadership in Social Networks
    Every online community is a group of people. What can the group theory coming from social psychology teach us about managing online communities?
  • Top Mobile Trends: Multimedia Microblogging
    The age of the personal blog is coming to an end. People have finally accepted that no one was reading their Typepad page, so they got off the couch and joined the microblog party.
  • kiwork > home
    find online work projects and professionals
  • Subsidiarity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority shoul
  • Peer to Peer and Relationship Capital talk radio show | Michel Bauwens talks about Peer to Peer and Relationship Capital
  • Learning Friends - Quest
    Enable children ages 4-9 to master an expanded set of basic skills, including how to learn, adapt and choose in a global environment.
  • Bauwens | Blog Talk Radio
  • NextNow Membership Public List
    change agents
  • Jane McGonigal Biography
    Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being.
  • The Superstruct Game
    future forecasting game
  • Minqi Li, Dr the rise of china and the demise of the world-system
    China has so overloaded the capacities for accumulation of the world-system as a whole that this rise has become a major factor in the coming demise of the world capitalist system. This is a book which explains much that seems a puzzle and challenges the received opinion of many analysts

  
• 

  A five step strategy to a new kind of business

  Posted: September 25th, 2008, 4:38am PDT by Michel Bauwens

  Umair Haque wants to change business from the inside out, by changing its very DNA, through a kind of moral re-armement based on the recovery of meaning. He rarely said it better than here.

  Below a liberal selection of the best quotable material, the subtitles are mine.

  Umair Haque:

  1. The crisis is systemic

  “The first step in building next-generation businesses is to recognize the real problem boardrooms face - that we’ve moved beyond strategy decay. Building next-gen businesses depends on recognizing that they are not about new business models or even new strategies.

  The stunningly total meltdown we just witnessed in the investment banking sector - the end of Wall St as we know it - was something far darker and more remarkable. It wasn’t simple business model obsolescence - an old business model being superseded by a more efficient or productive one. The problem the investment banks had wasn’t at the level of business models - it had little to do with revenue streams, customer segmentation, or value propositions.

  And neither was it what Gary Hamel has termed “strategy decay” - imitation and commoditization eroding the returns to a once-defensible strategic position, scarce resource, or painstakingly built core competence.

  It was something bigger and more vital: institutional decay. Investment banks failed not just as businesses, but as financial institutions that were supposedly built to last. It was ultimately how they were organized and managed as economic institutions - poor incentives, near-total opacity, zero responsibility, absolute myopia - that was the problem. The rot was in their DNA, in their institutional makeup, not in their strategies or business models.

  The point is this: the central challenge 21st century boardrooms must face is not reinventing strategies, or business models, but reinventing businesses as institutions.

  2. The global system is failing

  The centuries-old institutions of orthodox capitalism cannot support the transition to a hyperconnected global economy. They are increasingly unable to allocate capital efficiently, much less grow it productively. And so what we are seeing nothing less than the wholesale deconstruction of the global financial and economic system.

  Who’s going to reconstruct it? We are. By bringing new DNA to a table packed with crony capitalists, CEOs more concerned about their cash-outs than the companies they captain, and agitpropagandists thinly disguised as so-called arbitrageurs.

  3. New Organizational DNA is required

  The third, simplest, and most fundamental step in building next-generation businesses: understanding that next-generation businesses are built on new DNA, or new ways to organize and manage economic activities.

  Think that sounds like science fiction? Think again. Here are just a few of the most radical new organizational and management techniques today’s revolutionaries are already utilizing: open-source production, peer production, viral distribution, radical experimentation, connected consumption, and co-creation.

  The need for new DNA is the most visceral lesson of the macro crisis - and it’s why we’ve been discussing many of the radical innovators above in painstaking detail over the last few months.

  So how do the rest of us begin reinventing yesterday’s tired, stale DNA?

  4. What does the new DNA consist of

  We need no less than better corporate governance, a working shareholder democracy, a recognition of what capital really is (and isn’t), radically more enduring incentives - aligned with outcomes that actually matter to people - the capacity to trust and be trusted, more accurate and timely reporting, strategy that creates authentic value instead of just shifts numbers around, and business models that can yield sustainable growth.”

  5. Re-introducing Meaning back into business

  “The fifth, final, and most difficult step in building next-generation businesses is this: we have to put the meaning back into business.

  For too long, business has been meaningless: a passionless, soul-crushing game of ripping the next guy’s head off, to attain a short-lived competitive advantage - often simply balanced out by someone else’s disadvantage - in order to score points on an illusory scoreboard of “shareholder value creation”.

  That toxic recipe cannot power global economic growth in the 21st century. When your market cap, for example, can be utterly vaporized in a matter of days, it’s a stark reminder that shareholder value is a videogame - and it is human outcomes that make work meaningful.

  This final step - rediscovering meaning in the work we do - isn’t just the most difficult to come to grips with. It’s also the most critical - because though the other steps are necessary, they’re not sufficient. Without a deeply felt - and a powerfully lived - sense of meaning, every business will devolve to what the investment banks became: machines engineered with relentless precision to destroy long-run value, often implosively so.”

  
• 

  Open sourcing design is crucial for future of the world

  Posted: September 25th, 2008, 4:09am PDT by Michel Bauwens

  When intellectual problems become distributed, the search for solutions becomes collaborative and the research agenda is driven not by multinational shareholders but by the passions of the participants, you get not just better results, you get different results.

  Though written in 2003, this extended and recently republished editorial is worth reading in full, and is a prescient echo to our own open design pages, which monitor in detail how open source is morphing to the material world, and why this is absolutely crucial to transform our world.

  Excerpt from Alex Steffens:

  “Ultimately, that is the point: the 20th Century’s model of development - the “Washington consensus,” proprietary technological diffusion, the whole ball of wax - has completely failed a billion people and left another four billion falling farther and farther behind, while trashing the planet at an astounding rate.

  But that’s changing. Tools exist, right now, to make intellectual property regimes beside the point. Tools exist to give the developing world the capacity to build its own technology, to its own needs, and grow richer and more sustainable in the process. Those tools are the tools of collaboration. Open the source code of innovation, and we’ll change the planet.”

  Here’s a nice compilation of other quotes:

  Linus Torvalds on Open Peer to Peer Design

  ““I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.” (

  “don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.”

  Agroblogger on a Appropriate Technology General Public License

  “Let us imagine an active online community participating in vibrant discussions and sharing of Appropriate Technology plans and experiences. Let us imagine the AT equivalent of a sourceforge.net, a place where designers and field workers can go to download plans of greenhouses, beehives, water pumps, animal traction implements, and biodiesel equipment. And, within the legal framework of an AT General Public License (GPL), those plans can be used freely, modified, and republished under the same AT GPL. IRC channels dedicated to specific programmatic areas could serve as a dynamic forum where “newbies” can gain wisdom and insight from experienced field practitioners.”

  Karim Lakhani on Communities driving Manufacturers out of the design phase

  “for any given company - there are more people outside the company that have smarts about a particular technology or a particular use situation then all the R&D engineers combined. So a community around a product category may have more smart people working on the product then the firm it self. So in the end manufacturers may end up doing what they are supposed to - manufacture - and the design activity might move to the edge and into the community.”

  Kevin Kelly on nearly-free material production

  “Material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don’t want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill.”

  Vinay Gupta on Open Source manufacturing for Development

  “An open library of designs for refrigerators, lighting, heating, cooling, motors, and other systems will encourage manufacturers, particularly in the developing world, to leapfrog directly to the most sustainable technologies, which are much cheaper in the long run. Manufacturers will be encouraged to use the efficient designs because they are free, while inefficient designs still have to be paid for. The library could also include green chemistry and biological solutions to industry challenges, for example enzymatic reactions that could be used in place of energy, and chemical-intensive processes or nontoxic paint pigments for cars and buildings. This library should be free of all intellectual property restrictions and open for use by any manufacturer, in any nation, without charge.”

  Steve Bosserman outlines what is most appropriate for local distributed manufacturing

  “strong candidates for a locally distributed manufacturing approach include ANYTHING that is agriculturally- based like food, feed, fiber, and biofuel production, much of housing and building construction including the manufacturing of inputs used in that industry, localized electric power generation using non-bio sources like wind, solar, and geothermal, and production / manufacturing of materials, components, and assemblies that use locally sourced raw materials and draw upon open-source, relatively easy to learn, appropriate technologies that can be applied in a wide range of situations– not just a single product.”

  Marcin Jakubowski on Neosubsistence

  “Neosubsistence is the term we apply to a lifestyle where people produce tangible (physical) wealth, as opposed to dealing with information in the information economy. We are talking about basics: even though we live in the information economy, we cannot deny the reality that human prosperity is founded on the provision of physical needs upon which the meeting of all higher needs is predicated. Neosubsistence is related to the information economy in that the information economy is a foundation for neosubsistence”

  John Thackara on the importance of design for sustainability

  “Eighty per cent of the environmental impact of today’s products, services and infrastructures is determined at the design stage. Design decisions shape the processes behind the products we use, the materials and energy required to make them, the ways we operate them and what happens to them when we no longer need them.”

  Eric von Hippel on Manufacturing around User Innovation Communities

  “Threadless has tapped into a fundamental economic shift, a movement away from passive consumerism. One day in the not-too-distant future citizen inventors using computer design programs and three-dimensional printers will exchange physical prototypes in much the same way Nickell and cohorts played Photoshop tennis.

  Eventually, Threadless-like communities could form around industries as diverse as semiconductors, auto parts, and toys. Threadless is one of the first firms to systematically mine a community for designs, but everything is moving in this direction.

  He foresees research labs and product-design divisions at manufacturing companies being outstripped by an “innovation commons” made up of tinkerers, hackers, and other devout customers freely sharing their ideas. The companies that win will be the ones that listen.” (quotes and paraphrased by Inc. )

  Frank Piller on User Manufacturing

  “User manufacturing is enabled by three main technologies: (1) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design. (2) Design repositories where users upload, search, and share designs with other users. This allows a community of loosely connected users to develop a large range of applications. (3) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New rapid manufacturing technologies (”fabbing”) finally deliver the dream of translating any 3-D data files into physical products — even in you living room. Combining this technology with recent web technologies can open a radical new way to provide custom products along the entire “long tail” of demand.

  User manufacturing builds on the notion that users are not just able to configure a good within the given solution space (mass customization), but also to develop such a solution space by their own and utilize it by producing custom products. As a result, customers are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies.” [mass-customization.blogs.com]

  Jeff Bezos on User-Manufacturing Everything

  “Before long, “user-generated content” won’t refer only to media, but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated breakfast meals. This is because setting up a company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog - and the repercussions would be earthshaking. ”

  

  
• 

  A strategic drawing board for peer production

  Posted: September 24th, 2008, 11:20pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  A very interesting initiative by Stefan Merten, who has decided to put together a set of questions regarding the present and future of peer production.

  Here as an introduction is his introduction/motivation.

  The Drawing Board is here.

  Stefan Merten:

  “Since 1999 starting with Free Software the Oekonux project is analyzing the existing phenomenon of peer production. One important goal was to understand how peer production works and what the underlying principles of peer production are.

  Now it seems to be about time to go to the drawing board and create some sketches of how this future peer production society might look like. While the discussion probably takes place mostly on the main mailing list this page is meant as the home for the results of the respective discussions.”

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-24 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 24th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

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• 

  Peer production is hyperproductive in politics as well

  Posted: September 24th, 2008, 4:03am PDT by Michel Bauwens

  The usual: light-footed, distributed, collaborative openness beats leaden, monolithic and closed anyday. - Glyn Moody

  Spotted by Glyn Moody, in an interview by Cory Doctorow, this shows the hyperproductive nature of the peer production of politics:

  Cory Doctorow:

  “One of the truly subversive and amazing things the NGOs did is that we set up open WiFi networks that weren’t connected to the Internet — because there was no Internet access at the meetings when we started — and then we would take exhaustive collaborative notes on what was said. It’s very hard to take notes at these events. Diplomatic speech is very stylized, so you’ll have a typical intervention which begins something like, “Mr. Chairman, allow me to congratulate you as I take the floor for the first time, on your reappointment to the chairmanship. I have every confidence that with your steady hand at the tiller, you’ll guide us to a swift and full consensus on the issues at hand. The delegation from Lower Whatistan is pleased to take the floor.” Und zo weiter. Eventually you get to the point, and after 20 minutes it boils down to, “No.” Taking notes on that kind of speech is really grueling, because it’s very hard to stay attentive and catch the one little phrase that has meaning.

  So we’d have teams of three or four people using collaborative note-taking software, and one would be taking notes, one would be adding commentary and another would be following behind and correcting typos and formatting and the like. Meanwhile, we’re all of us checking each other as we go — filling in the blanks, noting discrepancies and so on — and then publishing it twice a day at lunch and dinner.

  Now, the delegations there were accustomed to the old WIPO regime, where the notes would be taken by the secretariat, sent out for approval by the delegates, sanitized — all the bodies would be buried — and then published six months later. And what happened once we started working together like this is that delegates would get calls on their lunch break about things they’d said that morning. Suddenly, they’re immediately accountable for their words, which completely changed the character of the negotiations.”

  

  
• 

  Links for 2008-09-23 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 23rd, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

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• 

  Links for 2008-09-22 [del.icio.us]

  Posted: September 22nd, 2008, 10:00pm PDT

  • Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
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  • AfriGadget » Blog Archive » An AfriGadget Slideshow and Interview

  
• 

  Stefan Merten’s critique of Siefkes’ Peer Economy concept (2)

  Posted: September 21st, 2008, 11:44pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

  We continue the presentation and critique by Stefan Merten of Christian Siefkes proposals and book on the