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Via: BoingBoing Great Firewall of China crumbling from within
Reading this boing boing post yesterday got me thinking about how watching whatVeroEl juego del casino es un juego de naipes que ha convertido en uno de los mas practicados en todo el mundo gracias a su sencilla mecanica y reglas que son tan fasil para entender. al suo nome
I’ve just returned from Nottingham, UK., where I participated in the first-ever academic workshop on p2p concepts, a conference/workshop on “the political economies of peer production”.
I plan on giving a review of each presentation in blog postings here. This first post is about Adam Arvidsson’s amazing, and thought provoking presentation on what he is calling the “Ethical Economy”.
(I am reviewing Adam’s presentation first, because my notes ended up being most complete on his. I plan on reviewing all other presentations here as well, once I have a chance to reconstruct and map them).
This review will be in my words, and mostly paraphrased, but I’ll do my best to stay faithful to the vision that Adam was communicating.
Adam’s idea about an “ethical economy” is basically a new human-centric economy, that is emerging out of materialistic economy that has dominated the world for over a century now.
Adam’s compelling arguments include:
Many people in the conference responded to ask, basically “how will we make a living in this new economy”, if value is no longer centered on materialistic gain. Indeed, this is the problem we all face, but it is also simultaneously the opportunity that is currently wide open, and wating, for people to build out new types of wealth.
I’ve created a dialogue map, that attempts to show Adam’s key points, and conceptual connections between them. I made this dialogue map while Adam gave his presentation. One interesting thing to note is that all arguments point toward the building, support, and sustaining of community as the answer to the questions that the ethical economy raises (”Value is contingent on the construction/sutainence/producing of community in the ethical economy. Communities depend on ethics for cohesion/sustainability”).
(click on image above to see map full size).
(Via Panarchy “Social Publishing” talks coming up | Panarchy.com)
Fellow P2P Foundation blogger Paul Hartzog will be in the UK in November to talk about the exciting topic of Social Publishing
Nov 14, de Montfort University, Leicester, U.K.; Institute of Creative Technologies IOCT
Co-presenter: Richard Adler, Michigan State University
“Social Publishing”
This talk will focus on how social publishing at oort-cloud.org came into being, and on some interesting phenomena that have emerged regarding the future of narrative.
[www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk] 15-16, Trent University, Nottingham, U.K.; The Political Economy of Peer Production
“Social Publishing”
This brief talk will focus on how social publishing might affect the peer-to-peer p2p economy, and on ways in which social publishing can help us to formulate a more general approach to understand the p2p economy.
[www.ntu.ac.uk]
Both myself and Michel Bauwens will also be present at the Poltical Economy of Peer Production workshop.
Paul’s Social Publishing background comes from his experience in helping to found the [www.oort-cloud.org] collaborative science fiction writing community. If you are a science fiction fan, be sure to check out Oort-Cloud.
GiveMeaning - online donation, online fundraising and creative fundraising ideas
An interesting idea, connecting news stories with Donation projects, and giving people ways to collectively rate and filter different dimensions, or propose their own way to solve the problem. “Problem spaces” are sorted through tags, and tag clouds show areas with higher activity.
Process Network building theory - P2P Foundation
Diagram
Stage 1: Discussion/Credibility establishment
Assuming the two groups decide they want to connect at all: The process starts out with discussion/conversation among the two groups. This is where the two groups both start to create shared understanding through dialogue, and mutually determine the level of credibility and knowledge of one another. This process is transparent, in order to encourage equitable interaction. Stage 1 could be:
* Conversation/reasoned discussion and debate
* Mutual peer review of each groups self-selected “highest insights” Peer review could be done through a semantic annotation process, that would semantically “tag” both an ontology, and a “rating/review” onto content (which would then make an RDF-exportable knowledge network map, that could be filtered and sorted via machine, based on peer-review, and/or ontology)
* Summary of conversation into Pattern language [c2.com] wiki pages, that help create mutual understanding
The groups can then stabilize into a conversation based relationship, which has value based mostly around feedback and loose connection. Or, the groups could decide to establish a “process network”, and collaborate together, to leverage the power of their numbers. if so, they move on to stage 2
Stage 2 Evaluate and Orchestrate
They mutually evaluate one another’s capability to accomplish the proposed work, and they decide which group will fill what role based on the capability assessment. Then they select individuals to act as “orchestrators” to help coordinate, and to make sure that reciprocation of value is reaching participants satisfactorily.
The “middle ground” that I proposed to create on Semantic wiki was to help facilitate stage 1.
Tools and Techniques
Examples of people summarizing discussion into wiki pages
This concept actually emerged from the first wiki. If you read the page of the inventor of wiki [c2.com] you’ll see his description of how he goes about doing this. You can also see this in [www.usemod.com] and [communitywiki.org]
All of those wikis are “CommunityOverContent” wikis, which means there is some very cutting edge thinking and discussion going on, but the purpose of the wiki is for a group of close collaborators to create a PatternLanguage, as opposed to creating pages for a publication. Readability is less important than evolution of mutual understanding, in those wikis.
When Wikipedia was founded, and when Media Wiki software was created, the purpose of the wiki in that case was ContentOverCommunity, the community was dedicated to content. So, the discussion was moved off of the content page, and to a talk page, and the content pages in Wikipedia were organized for maximum readability.
Most communities that use wiki are usually some degree of a hybrid of these two purposes. So, MediaWiki becomes a great tool for them to both try to develop a PatternLanguage (as you see happening at [c2.com] and [www.usemod.com] and trying to develop good quality readable content, like a Wikipedia-type encyclopedia site. P2P foundation falls under this category.
Sometimes, though, two groups that are trying to collaborate, when they are in “stage 1″ of the process described above, can use more of an open CommunityOverConent space, because it is more important to try and create a PatternLanguage at that stage (Shared understanding), and to build trust (through Shared Understanding, and through mutual equitable evaluation/review of existing knowledge bases). Stage 2 is when they will be able to join forces on the creation of refined content.
References
The Only Sustainable Edge John Hagel, JS Brown - Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2005
Retrieved from “ [p2pfoundation.net]
In How do we take care of each other?, Chris Messina writes about Kevin Burton, a dedicated Open Source software project leader, who was attacked, and how a growing social network is donating money to help demonstrate that there are some good people in this world, to someone who does so much good.
Chris writes:
Kevin Burton IM’d me yesterday and asked if he could give me a call. “Y’know Greg Stein?” “Yeah,” I said, “I just finally met him at BarCampBlock. What’s up?” “I just heard that he was mugged on his way home yesterday.” “Is he okay?” I asked. “No.”
Apparently two guys jumped Greg (who happened to be on crutches), gave him a black eye and serious laceration that was bleeding profusely when the ambulance arrived.
All for a hundred bucks and a credit card.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, Greg is a great guy, and one who has done a tremendous amount of good for the open source world. He’s now at Google doing loads of good work open sourcing their innards while chairing and acting as director of the Apache Software Foundation, lead developer of Subversion, and all things WebDAV.
And it’s really too bad that terrible things happen to good people like Greg.
So Kevin decided he wanted to do something. And that’s why he IM’d and then called me. He’s collecting donations in order to buy flowers, buy dinner and generally prove that, even when shit like this happens, that there is still good people and humanity in the world. And that when you give so much of yourself away to others and expect nothing in return, you’re the best candidate to receive the support of the community you’ve helped for so long.
So as I talked to Kevin about what we could do for Greg, it become abundantly clear that in all the social networking and digital ephemera that we’ve wrapped ourselves in we’ve done a pretty shoddy job of creating simple or obvious ways to help each other out in meaningful and effective ways when we’re most in need. Our networks are self-healing; people are not. So what have we done to make it possible to immediately mobilize ourselves when things do go wrong in order to provide the most effective and helpful response? When it comes to taking care of one individual out of our hundreds of friends across these online networks, does the network confound or enhance our ability to pitch in and materially help out?
This idea is new, natural, and yet confounding at the same time. Because, it is so easy and affordable for many of us to chip in some money towards helping others. And yet, it is so counter-intuitive to so many people’s world-view. A giving attitude is one of the biggest changes that I believe has emerged from online cooperation networks. People are slowly more and more able to build trust among their networks, and to put that trust into action.
Chris goes on to write:
If the government’s response to Katrina proved anything, it’s that our safety and well-being is in each others’ hands. And that we have to figure out how to put these new networks into our employ, and to figure out how design them to serve our human needs in the most vital times. It’s ideas like Brian Caldwell’s Emergency Social-Repeater System or the recent thread on the coworking mailing list for P2P health care that suggest that we’re beginning the work to figure this stuff out for ourselves.
In the meantime, Kevin is just about half way through raising $2000 to send Greg out to Big Sur where he can relax and recuperate. Even though no one deserves to experience the kind of thing that Greg did on Friday, I think he’s more than earned the support of the community here. The systems of supporting ourselves and keeping each other safe certainly have a long way to go and deserve our attention; however, in the meantime, there is a more pressing need. For the moment we’ll make due, and do the best that we can, for each other.
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The following is wiki post that I made recent to the coworking wiki, in it’s entirety. Feedback is most welcome
ContextAs detailed at HealthCareArchive, previously, we tentatively figured out (http://tinyurl.com/328dk8) that creating a formalized health care entity might:
ChrisMessina, TaraHunt, and maybe others were thinking about the idea of
group-buying, to help coworkers leverage their numbers. This is a good idea,
yet, if I recall correctly, we also seemed to find geography is still an
issue, because one provider cannot cover many different states, in many
cases.
Inspiration from “Church Plan”Thinking back on a phenomenon that I research for the
http://cooperationcommons.com project, and the
http://p2pfoundation.net project. SamRose came across the “Faith Based Health
Insurance” phenomenon:
The way this works is that “members send a monthly check, or “share,” that
ranges from $200 to $400 to the plan or to members the plan designates with
“needs,” or medical bills. The plans subtract overhead and administrative
expenses from the total collected and use the remainder to pay claims”
Members are “vetted” or qualified to join the “plan” based on a letter from
their clergy person verifying they are an active church member, and
trustworthy person.
So, what does this have to do with Coworking?This “church plan” shows a plausible legal international route to
sharing health care costs among a network of people, religious or otherwise.
These “church plan” participants are really just donating money to one
another, facilitated by their churches, and by “plan” coordinators. Might a
non-religious network of people also think about a way to pool money, and
route it to people who need it in this way? Some of us think so.
The idea here is that it is legal for us to give money to each other for
pretty much anything we want to, so it becomes a matter of figuring out how
we can give each other money in an equitable, not-for-profit way, that can
systematize some aspects, and can buil on inherent trust.
The System Evisioned:1. Participation is based upon the trust metrics of others who are already in the network (others “vouch” for you on the local CoWorking level). Each participant joins a local group made up of people they actually know. Each group votes on whether it will participate with other groups, based on an AggregatedRating for each group.
2. Each donor is given a mechnism for splitting their donation up and paying out to all others in the network who have donation requests
3. The system calculates the minimum that each donor would need to pay to ensure that all donation requests in the network or the month are fulfilled. (When possible, larger lump sum requests are split up across as many months as possible per donation request)
Goal: 100% coverage for all users.
Factors that impact use of system - Items To Docurrently give $12,000.00 US per year, $1,000,000 ove lifetime before paying these taxes (don’t
know what state laws are) [www.irs.gov]
1. You would not be able to write off your contributions into the
system
2. You would not have to pay taxes on your contributions into the
system, because even if you contributed as much as $500 per month,
you would only have contributed 6000.00 per year (this would of course
eat into you ability to give other gifts, except to qualifying
charities, which would then allow you to claim a deduction)
3. It would appear that you would still be allowed to write off your
health care costs off of the top of your income, even though they
would all presumably be payed by the donation system. This is because
the recipient does not have to declare the gift as income. This needs
further research, but I believe I am right about this.
This also does not factor in what you state government may do with
regards to taxing gifts, if anything.
4. Total actual healthcare costs for US citizen (not monthly insurance premiums, but actual billed costs from care providers) per capita (average) in 2005 is $6401.00 (from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/36/38979632.xls) about 533.00 per month. So, given that this is average, monthly minimum donation to create 100% coverage for all involved could range from roughly $50-$500 per month. Donation requests might need to be “throttled” to a maximum per month to keep system stable. These are only quick rough numbers. Full research needed to create accurate picture of system dynamics.
5. 50 state legality needs to be researched, and vetted by lawyer before any actual exchange of money takes place
Example tools that can facilitate exchange
Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation discusses the core P2P concepts at Swinburne in Australia recently:
This video is probably the best, most concise explanation of these concepts so far. Definitely worth watching. Also, visit [p2pfoundation.net] for more information on what is discussed in this video.
(via P2P-Kredite)
The P2P Lending enabler-site [prosper.com] is experiencing a rebellion by it’s lenders, mostly found on it’s forums:
See: ”FLASH:Prosper bans $100.000 lender“, “Prosper Mng. Living Under a Rock“, “Shooting the Messenger“, “What happens if Prosper goes under?“, “I am done lending on Prosper“, “Hello Prosper Moderator“, “Lender’s WHO are DONE with Prosper“, “My letter to Prosper” and ”Open letter to John Witchel“.
Apparently, the problem lies in Prosper’s reported un-responsiveness to their lender community. The lenders have raised issues about Prosper’s lack of effective collections on deliquent loans, and Prosper’s reported past inaction on preventing “blenders” (people who are both borrowers and lenders, or group leaders who are also borrowers) from lending money when they are deliquent on their own Prosper loan payments. Apparently Prosper.com has since announced that it will take action on deliquent “blenders”.
My own analysis is that some of these problems appear to be inevitable given the conditions on Prosper.com’s loan marketplace:
It is my theory that many people are likely defaulting on their Prosper loans because they are over-extended in credit. Because of the huge problem in the US with people being over-extended on their credit, Prosper is affected by the same factor as any unsecured credit lending entity. When people find out that they have a chance to obtain unsecured credit, whether they are over-extended or not, they are flocking to Prosper, and they are getting money, and they are not paying it back.
This actually reflects a deeper problem with the economy in America (and possibly elsewhere): for a huge amount of individuals, borrowing money is the only way to raise capital in the immediate future. roughly 6 in 10 US citizens are in Debt. Especially given economy slowdowns in many areas across the US over the past 8+ years, this also means things like getting a raise from your employer, or changing employers to increase wages is less likely of an option for a huge amount of people. So, people are turning to borrowing money.For the last 8+ years, there has also been an explosion in US subprime lending. This led to a mortgage bubble that is now collapsing in the US. In my opinion, our total societal system is broken when companies respond to economic downturns by stepping in to tempt people with quick money that the companies know many of them will not be able to pay back. In the case of mortgages, this means that finance companies acquire property when borrowers default.
For a system like Prosper to work in the long term, lenders and borrowers need literacies and knowledge to know when to borrow, and when to lend. Otherwise, Prosper will end up becoming part of the problem.
And, in general, there is a greater need now more than ever, for people to have other ways to invest in one another, and for individuals to raise capital, and to have the knowledge and personal infrstructure to use the capital in sustainable ways, that increase the chances that investors see ROI.
We’ve been discussing these ideas at [barcampbank.com,] and at [www.aboutus.org] and Open Business Models Wiki Hive. These ideas have also been discussed at [solari.com]
The idea is to create a P2P investing marketplace, that is tied to a fast-growing knowledge commons, and that is coupled with ongoing efforts to help people seek and use investment on a personal level wisely. People need open access to data about their local and regional conditions, and ways to pool their money without going into debt. Borrowing money is a great option, but only if you can pay it back. Otherwise, people need a way to leverage their abilities and resources to attract investment, and use it to grow wealth for themselves and investors in ways that can be sustained. Right now, the law makes little or no provision for this type of investment.
Wired reports on an overview of the Assignment Zero Pro-Am Journalism project. Assignment Zero described itself as:
“Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate.“
The Wired report describes a project that looks like it could have been successful, but that was possibly run to much by a “seat of the pants” system of planning:
“One of the key problems confronting the project managers was technological. How to build a site that would allow large numbers of contributors to sign up and participate in meaningful ways?
The site developers turned to was Drupal, an open-source publishing system that’s become one of the leading platforms for community-driven projects. The designers built in numerous topics for contributors to colonize when they arrived. But the AZ team chose to hold off recruiting editors until after the launch, with the result that when contributors signed up, they essentially arrived at a ghost town.
The flood of volunteers made Assignment Zero’s design flaws quickly apparent. Potential contributors — which numbered roughly 500 after the first week — were routed to a single Assignment Zero staffer, a former WashingtonPost.com editor, Steve Fox.
The net effect was to put the organizational onus on the volunteers themselves. Baffled by the overarching concept of crowdsourcing, confused by the design of the website and unable to connect directly to a manager or organizer, most of the initial volunteers simply drifted away. “What we learned,” says Rosen, “is that you have to be waaaay clearer in what you ask contributors to do. Just because they show up once doesn’t mean they’ll show up over and over. You have to engage them right away.”
Over the course of the next two weeks, around 30 volunteer professional editors were assigned to manage various topics. Theoretically this should have solved Assignment Zero’s organizational problems. But this presented a new set of hurdles. For one, each editor needed to be trained to use our implementation of Drupal. But even once they were up to speed there was a lack of understanding of how open-source projects tend to work.
“What we really needed were people who understood online organizing,” says David Cohn, an Assignment Zero editor. “But many of the editors just didn’t have much experience with the internet.”
After roughly six weeks — halfway through its run — Assignment Zero reached its nadir. Most of the initial volunteers were gone, the majority of topic pages were deserted and communications between staffers, volunteer editors and the few contributors that remained were uneven, resulting in frequent misunderstandings. A drastic change was required.”
This is an important lesson for all Pro-Am and community-driven, internet-networked publication projects. Thanks to Jay Rosen, Wired, and Assignment Zero for sharing this valuable insight so quickly and honestly.
I’m going to try and catalogue and summarize the lessons in this article as I review it in this blog posting, so:
The Wired article then describes the changes that were implemented based on review of project progress:
“Although much had already gone awry, Rosen and the Assignment Zero team had one advantage working in its favor: hard-earned knowledge from six weeks of trial and error.
The first order of business was a site redesign. After consultation with the rest of the team, Cohn, who doubled as AZ’s webmaster, rebuilt each topic page to include social networking features. The relevant editor’s picture and contact e-mail were placed at the top of each page, and each topic area now included a forum. The idea was to make each topic a sort of home page, a community gathering-place.
The effect of this reorganization was felt immediately, as contributors could now collaborate openly with each other and review one another’s reporting. This certainly reinforced one of the lessons that was learned from reporting on various crowdsourcing projects: Essentially, it’s all about the community.
However, the majority of topic pages had yet to attract a base of interested volunteers. This demonstrated another lesson: The community controls the scope and direction of the project. “We had to jettison most of the topics we’d started off with,” says Cohn. “Instead, we concentrated on the topics that people were most clearly interested in.” At about the same time the Assignment Zero team made the decision to shift the goal from producing scores of feature stories to producing scores of interviews. Asking contributors to “write the story on open-source car design” had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response.”
So, here it looks like AZ implemented some simple team organization and structure into their site. One thing about Drupal is that it is an amazing tool, but it’s not an “out-of-the-box” solution. It needs some real adjusting/tweaking and sometimes even customization to create a useful and comfortable environment, for both content users and creators, and administrators. Drupal administration in it’s default setup can be bogglingly complex. Yet, Drupal is flexible enough to be molded into a powerful and intuitive community tool. The Assignment Zero interface has some remarkable differences now, as compared to when I first looked at it a few months ago. It’s been my experience in launching Content Management System websites, that it is often essential to do a “test-run” of the technology, tools and proposed processes before inviting the greater public into the system. So:
Another note from the quote above, is that subject matter for AssignmentZero was pre-selected in a mostly top-down way. Consequently, contributors ended up selecting the topics they were interested in, and ignoring those they weren’t. There are some different possible ways this might have been approached in hindsight. Contributors might have been given the opportunity to vote on content choices during the first week or so of the project. Or, group selection by vote on potential content could have been a “phase” of the project, prior to launching the actual writing phase.
These are some important lessons that we hope to apply to the decentre project, an effort to create a community-authored book about the diversity and issues of Artist-Run Culture in Canada:
decentre isa book about artist-run culture as we find it at this particular moment
a collection of short texts by many authors that strives to articulate the ideas behind artist-initiated activities, strengths, weaknesses, challenges, accomplishments and futures
a rhizome of people, projects and places, a work in progress and continually evolving
a set of network tools to initiate an organic, evolving discussion, including a wiki, online forums and groups, blogs, as well as email, list-servs, etc.
We are carrying out much of the discussion at [www.arcpost.ca] and in Facebook at Artist-run Centres Unite! and Decentre - concerning artist-run culture and on Flickr at Artist-run Culture on Flickr. Last but not least, a wiki at
YYZBOOKS Book Wiki hosted by SocialSynergyWeb.net. This is combining multiple different creatie/intellectual processes to attract people to share their ideas and experiences in Artist-Run Culture, and to distill those contributions into a book.
Decentre faces some of the same potential issues as Assignment Zero, including encouraging passionate participation, and creating conditions where editors and contributors can work together to create content worthy of the project goals. Decentre also faces potential technological issues, similar to some of those experienced by Assignment Zero. Hopefully, we can learn from the valuable lessons shared y Jay Rosen and the many great people who worked for AZ.
I asked Sam Rose’s permission to highlight his comment from my post…because I heart new information:
Tara, it’s interesting that you’ve intuited the pattern of “individual” and “collective” in the way that people go about solving problems. About 40 years ago, this is the pattern that Clare W. Graves found when he did psychological research on his students over about a 15 year period. You can read about it here: [clarewgraves.com] I’ve mentioned his work here before, because I think it is really relevant to a lot of what you are talking about, and observing (as conveyed by your blog posts). And, for all of it’s incompleteness, it’s one of the best theories that we hve about human nature. Graves changed his theory over time, to account for new data. One example from the Futurist Magazine can be found here” [clarewgraves.com]
and an even better explanation is here:
Basically, Graves found that human nature tends to center on either the “individual” or the “collective” focus. This can hold true even for one person. In one situation, you may solve problems by focusing on the “communal” in some way, in other situations in your life, you may solve problems by focusing on yourself. This is true for all of us, I believe.
The amazong thing about Graves’s work is that we came to his conclusions by asking people to write a conceptualization of what they thought a “mature healthy adult” is. Then, he tasked the same people with defending their conceptualizations against each other, and gave them a chance to defend them against the leading “authorities” of the time period. Then, he turned the data over to indpendent judges and ask ed them to “quantify this any way that you can”. He did this for 15 years or so. Amazingly, the first pattern that emerged every time was the “indpendent” and “communal”. The exact same patterns you came up with, by observing your dinner party social dilemma! Later, people started calling this the “Locus of Control”, and started calling the patterns “inner directed” and “outer directed”, and other names which basically all mean the same thing.
Graves’s “levels” were really just more specific versions of these two “locus of control” centers.
Thanks Sam! I’m reading these resources right now…