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Items by Michel Bauwens

Global governance through shared operating platforms

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 6:04am PDT by Michel Bauwens

As Joanne Richardson once wrote, the rhizome is not characteristic of civil society-based peer production communities but a general characteristic of all power structures:

“It is naïve to invoke a rhizomatic mode of organization as a means of contestation and as an alternative to global capitalism since it has become what they have in common rather than what holds them apart.”

Alec Evans and David Steven have published a series of articles proposing a new approach for public diplomacy that can deal with contemporary global crisis such as climate change. It is a good example of how global and national institutions are called to move even further towards their own kind of participatory and ‘rhizomatic’ structures.

A recent overview article summarized their views, which they have presented in expanded form elsewhere.

Their calling for what they call ’shared operating systems’:

“First, public diplomacy is about building shared awareness – a common understanding of an issue around which a coalition can coalesce. The task here is not simply to accumulate information, which often exists in abundance, but rather to invest in analysis, synthesis and dissemination. Are state and non-state actors using the same data? Has a common language emerged? Is there a hub for discussion and debate?

Shared awareness should be the precursor to the construction of a shared platform. The new public diplomacy will usually – perhaps invariably – be a multilateral pursuit. The objective is to build a network of state and nonstate actors around a shared vision or set of solutions: something a bilateral programme will seldom be able to do. This vision or solution need not be provided by a particular government and then ‘sold’ to its partners. The approach is less top-down that that: a really compelling vision will in itself have sufficient power to draw together a network and motivate it to campaign for change.

The end point is institutionalising this network’s beliefs, thinking and structures into a framework for managing a particular problem. Given the amorphous and dynamic nature of the challenges we face, this framework will seldom be a permanent one. Rather, it will involve the creation of a shared operating system that distributes our response to a risk, and is flexible enough to evolve as that risk evolves. The result should be a change in the structure of globalisation, a rewiring of our ability to act together in the face of a collective challenge.”

From a civil society point of view, this is of course fine as far as it goes, but crucial is of course, how much participation goes into the process, as, if only the elite is heard, this shared response can only be inadequate.

A more recent expanded treatment of their ideas can be found in the as yet unpublished draft document: Multilateralism and Scarcity.

Community protection in product-service platforms

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 11:21pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

Service Innovation is a big buzzwords in business and management circles right now, because in this participatory and connected age, simple physical produces are making way more and more for product-service platforms that bring together the supply of the product, and the user community, which is allowed various degrees of participation.

Alex Steffen writes:

“PSS offer enormous potential sustainability benefits. Indeed, I’d argue that it will be impossible to deliver sustainable prosperity without the widespread adoption of shared/sharing systems. But they can also have a real downside, for PSS rely on a more intimate connection with their users, and where that intimacy is not backed by protected relationships, real disaster can result.”

And he gives an example (regarding car-sharing) of what can go wrong, when the proprietary owners disregards the wishes and needs of the user community:

“Consider ZipCar’s takeover of FlexCar, for example. Many FlexCar users made serious life decisions — about whether to own a car and where to live, for instance — based in some large part on the availability of FlexCars in their lives. When ZipCar began making arbitrary changes to the means and extent of that availability (removing cars, raising rates, changing policies) without any warning or discussion whatsoever, former FlexCar customers (who had treated FlexCar as much as a community as a business) realized that they in fact were not community members in any meaningful way, and that their involvement with car-sharing was unprotected by any meaningful ownership or rights.”

He is reacting to a very impressive presentation by Matt Jones and Tom Coates about such services, in which they outline, 3 conditions for their successfull design, the 3 P’s.

They are:

“Politeness, in this context, means not only aware of the social niceties, but a radical bias towards openness, or as Adam Greenfield says, “Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, capabilities, etc.”

Pertinence essentially contains the expectation that the user gets the truth, the useful truth and the truth in time to matter: that the choices we make are informed by the best possible understanding of the situation, and that the evolution of that understanding ought to be up to us to shape. [I’m wildly extrapolating on their argument here.]

Prettiness is not only about the aesthetics of the user experience (though I’d argue those are not in any way trivial, and that Bucky was right about beauty), but even more so, about the crafting of user experiences that allow people to meaningfully engage with masses of data and complex systems in ways that are simple and compelling.”

Given the example above, it is clear that one more P is missing: Protection. It’s a part of peer governance that can never be forgotten!!

Alex Steffen concludes:

“If we are going to interact with companies in intimate ways — in ways that impact our deepest life choices — those interactions ought not only to be held to a higher standard of transparency and public accountability; they ought to be safe-guarded in formal ways as well by having corporate decision-making structures that protect the user rights of the people involved.

Some of these protections might involve legislation and regulation; legally protecting users’ privacy and data ownership, for instance. Some might involve business ethics, codes of practice and certification systems enforced by NGOs. Some might involve new forms of corporate chartering and governance. Some might involve actual ownership by and participation of the users themselves.

Because all commerce involves power and money, creating a marketplace expectation of protection will not be painless. It’ll take a consumer rights movement to make this happen. PSS companies which refuse to do business in an appropriate manner ought to be not just avoided, but identified and penalized. As much energy ought to go into weeding out bad PSS as rewarding good ones, especially now, when the concept is just taking root, and the market could easily adjust to an expectation of privacy abuse and exploitation.”

In the discussion area of the article, one reader wonders whether such protection is possible in a business environment, and suggests that cooperatives may be an answer:

“If what you want is a respectful relationship between the citizen/customer and the companies that they do business with, I think you’d be better off advocating for cooperatives. Victoria and Vancouver, BC both have co-op car shares (see [victoriacarshare.ca] and [www.cooperativeauto.net] respectively).”

The Long Tail and the Crisis of Value

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 10:49pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

Readers know that I’m very keen on the crisis of value concept, first identified by Adam Arvidsson and elaborated since.

In short, my take on it is that we now have a peer production method that increases use value exponentially, but where monetisation only increases linearly, leading to an increasing gap between social production and ’social reproduction’ (the ability to live from it through the monetary economy).

This not only creates and will create a crisis of precarity, but also a crisis of accumulation for capital.

Recently, Kevin Kelly has been re-exploring the intricacies of the Long Tail (which has NOT been debunked, recent hype to the contrary), and he is coming to a similar conclusion.

Kevin Kelly:

“One hundred readers/watchers/listeners is not economical. There is no business equation that can sustain profits for continual creation from so few buyers. (It can of course support the business of aggregation above the level of creation.) But the long tail niche creation operates perfectly well in the realm of passion, enthusiasm, obsession, curiosity, peerage, love, and the gift economy. In the exchange of psychic energy, encouragement, meaning of life, and reasons to live, the long now is a boon.

That is not true about profits. Economically, the more the long tail expands, the more stuff there is to compete with our limited attention as an audience, the more difficult it is for a creator to sell profitably. Or, the longer the tail, the worse for sales. But if we view the long tail as a market of a different type, as a market of enthusiasm and connection, then as the long tail expands, this increases the chance of two enthusiasts meeting, and so the longer the tail, the better.

the Long Tail as being a tail to a different animal. We’ve misidentified the intangible being it belongs to. It is not the long tail of the Beast of Commercial Profits. Rather it is the long tail of the Dragon of Love. The love of creating, of making, of connecting, of unreasonable passion, or making a difference, or doing something that matters to ourselves, the love of connecting, giving, learning, producing, and sharing.

It is important to know which tail we are wagging.”

We need an Outquisition

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 10:35pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

As Gerrit Visser reminds us of this most wonderful website, service, and movement:

“Worldchanging was founded on the idea that real solutions already exist for building the future we want. it’s just a matter of grabbing hold and getting moving.”

This is very much inline with the spirit of the age and our own philosophy at the P2P Foundation.

Similarly inspired initiatives are: 1) Attainable Utopias; 2) Open Sustainability; 3) Appropedia

But in a recent conversation, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging and Cory Doctorow hit on the key paradox of the age:

abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

What is needed, they propose, is an Outquisition movement, of ’sustainability heroes’ leaving their bright green cities to go to where there work is really needed:

“What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.”

Noting the christian analogies the authors are using, it reminds me of my current interest in the transition from the slave-based Roman empire to the new feudal order. (See video below)

In a recent email conversation, I made a note of the analogy between the role of the christian monks in the early middle ages, and what open design communities are emerging to do in this new temporal landscape:

“you have to remember that in slave based society, manual work was frowned upon, and there was no impetus for productivity, but christianity turned it around, as a sociological religion, it carries the idea of incarnation and of making the world a better place (the edenic impulse)

the monasteries were communities that choose the most difficult outlaying lands, and worked incessantly to improve it, they had therefore a key role in increasing the surplus in medieval society, and they were also the learned class, as the others were (until the first medieval renaissance and the reappearance of thriving cities) either illiterate farmers or the warriors class. The church in general represented cultural and intellectual ‘globalization’ in the context of a material re-regionalisation after the fall of the Empire.

This is why I often compare the role of open design communities, with the historical role of christian monks

Furthermore, they also represent a model for social organization around non-productive work (I’m contradicting myself a little bit, but their role was to work on salvation, and therefore ‘outside’ of both the warrior function of the nobles and tribute function of ordinary farmers), and this shows society supporting one quarter of the population to work outside its core productive logic of producing feudal surplus for the ruling class”

There is a vision emerging that aims to empower/enable villages worldwide with access to knowledge networks to achieve the same effect. (this is what the Global Villages and Global Swadeshi movements are trying to achieve)

Alex Steffen’s similar vision:

“it’d be a network of places where people were engaged in ingenious development of elegant solutions to the problems of life where living is hard and money is short might well be a vital necessity for a certain portion of the population. It’s really not hard for me to imagine a certain kind of person eagerly embracing the role of being facilitators of that network, sort of like barefoot solar engineers for the forgotten parts of the developed world.”

I only have one recurring problem with Alec’s vision. He is convinced that local agrarian people voluntarily escape the land and their communities, instead of being forced away by the lack of survivability and opportunities of landed life. I think this is both historically incorrect (it required the destruction of local life through enclosures to motivate mass migration to the cities), and I think, from my experience here in Thailand, that most people in the world actually prefer to live in their native communities, given a true choice.

Alec has a very nice citation summarizing the necessities of the age:

“Our ideas of what’s normal, or even what’s possible, will not outlast the next decade, and it’ll be the people who think in (what are by today’s standards) abnormal, impossible ways who may just do the most good.”

Carbon farming: eating a hamburger against global warming?

Posted: July 16th, 2008, 4:53am PDT by Michel Bauwens

A counter-intuitive idea being proposed in the reportage by David Bollier at On The Commons.

Moving herds actually sequeter carbon, so chaning the eating habits towards food from such herds, would reverse the damaging effects of contemporary agriculture. The whole essay is worth reading.

Carbon farming is an attempt to recreate the natural conditions of a commons even under the structure of private property in order to reverse the effects of global climate disruption.

David Bollier explains:

“The central idea of carbon farming is to move the animals frequently—as once happened with wild herds chased by predators—so grasses are not gnawed beyond the point of natural recovery and plant cover remains to fertilize the land and sequester carbon. The sequestration process works like this: The grass takes in carbon from the atmosphere; the animals trample the grass into the soil, where the carbon is absorbed; new grass sprouts and the process is repeated over and over again, absorbing more and more carbon.

This was the natural cycle before the enclosure of the commons. Bison roamed the great American plains, as did other large herds in wild lands throughout the rest of the world. Even in places where livestock farming prevailed, the grazing lands were still held in common and animals wandered freely under the watch of shepherds or small farmers. With the privatization of grazing land, this ecological system was disrupted to the point where today raising livestock is rightly seen as one of the most environmentally destructive industries.”

Here is the specific part where the provocative idea of eating hamburgers is explained:

“The hamburger makes a good symbol of what can be done with carbon farming,” Collins says. So he reasons that eating grass-fed beef from sustainably-managed herds will contribute in a small way to reversing global warming. Any large hoofed animals like sheep, goats, bison, elk, antelope or horses can be used in carbon farming, and raising meat isn’t essential to the process. Collins after all is a dairy farmer.

But what about the argument that meat-eating is a major cause of global warming due to massive emissions of nitrous oxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from livestock operations? John Wicks answers immediately and forcefully, “That’s absolutely correct about feedlots and absolutely wrong about grass-fed livestock. Sustainably-raised grass-fed beef is a natural system and the methane and other greenhouse gases are mitigated by the carbon sequestration in the soil. We see this as a way to phase out feedlots.” Collins adds that nitrous oxides are in huge part the product of chemical fertilizers, which don’t make any sense in a farming system based on restoring the soil and halting global warming.

On The Commons’ Peter Barnes is looking into the idea of carbon farming. “We saw the Arctic melt last summer and Greenland glaciers slide into the ocean,” he says, “and scientists realize that climate change is happening faster than in their models. We seem to be a tipping point right now, and that’s the context for ideas like carbon farming and planting trees. Sequestration is not a marginal idea but central to any effort keep the planet from tipping into disaster.”

One reason why carbon farming and other sequestration methods have gotten far less attention in the fight against global warming than efforts to reduce emissions is because they represents something new in environmental policy—the idea that solving our ecological crisis means not just stopping human interference with nature, but also on humans taking positive steps to undo the damage already here.

“The days of hands-off environmentalism are over,” declares John Wick. “Humans are part of nature, we are part of ecosystems. We can be part of the solution.”

Recursive Publics as a challenge to the State

Posted: July 16th, 2008, 1:53am PDT by Michel Bauwens

Felix Stadler has an interesting essay in First Monday, unfortunately titled Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies.

It describes two countervailing tendencies: self-aggregating publics that are challenging traditional politics centered around a public sphere, and the tendency by authoritarian state forces to use data capture as an enforcement and control mechanism. Midway, he also has a nice overview of theorizers of networked individualism.

We are quoting the part, where, using the example of bilaterals.org, he explains how these new forms are a real challenge to the state.

Felix Stadler:

“The old mode of political (mass) communication is not just becoming weaker, but is actively challenged by a new one.

Perhaps the most unexpected challenge is in the area of international treaty making, the exclusive domain of nation states since the creation of the Westphalian system in the seventeenth century. Since most international treaties are highly specific and technical, mass media, driven by the need to address the broadest possible audience, rarely reported on them in a prominent fashion. Thus, even the negotiations which were legally public were de facto closed and the representatives of states were amongst themselves. Not anymore.

One of the new actors challenging the state in this once exclusive territory is the collaborative project bilaterals.org [bilaterals.org] which bills itself as “a collective effort to share information and stimulate cooperation against bilateral trade and investment agreements that are opening countries to the deepest forms of penetration by transnational corporations”. Through collecting, aggregating and publishing critical information in real time, they create a public in order to challenge the state in an arena — international treaty making — that is has never been challenged before. But who is bilaterals.org? One the one hand, some of the people who run the site can be identified with hyper–precision and they are easily accessible via e–mail. On the other hand, they are merely temporarily aggregating information generated by much larger networks, which are very hard to identify with any precision because they are built on open, weak cooperation. As they write “no one owns or controls bilaterals.org, [but] a small group of people collaborate informally to keep the site going on a day to day basis.” Yet, this loose organization has the capacity to analyze and digest very large amounts of information and thus create a critical public in areas where there has never been one, even if the underlying information has, formally, always been public. By networking local and global actors, the organization is not just capable of creating a translocal public, but mobilizing people to take to the streets when state representatives meet and try to discuss the issues behind closed doors. Bilaterals.org is not an exception. There are thousands of groups like it, advocating the full range of imaginable demands.

What makes it hard for the state to interact with such organizations is not just that it can be hard to identify whose really responsible. That problem can be solved. What makes it really difficult is that these organizations are not built on the principle of representation, but on the principle of weakly coordinated action. They stake their legitimacy not on formal membership, but on expertise, moral imperatives or informal public support. Here, people, by and large, speak for themselves or for their often very small organizations. They do so on behalf of very large constituencies (the “people”, the “global south”, “developing nations”), but they do not represent them, nor do they have any authority over them .

The state and its organizations have a highly developed capacity to deal with homologous organizations — structurally similar to itself — with a small number of representatives with a formal mandate to speak on behalf of many people — such as unions or professional associations. Yet, they it poses significant challenges to interface with organizations that are structurally very different as described above. For one, there are simply too many of these networked organizations and taken together, their demands are often contradictory. They filter their demands not in a way that bureaucracies can easily recognize and address them. The lack of representation — which is so characteristic for these networked organizations based on weak cooperation — makes it dangerous for the state to interact with them because the state draws its very legitimization from representation. Thus, in a formal way, incorporating non–representative organizations further undermines the legitimacy of the liberal state.

One of the ways in which the state can react to this development is by trying to withhold certain types of information, thus preventing the analysis and publication by networked actors most likely very critical of their actions . The notion of “executive privilege” — that is the right of the government to act outside the realm of public scrutiny — is playing a key role in the governance of the current U.S. administration. But similar tendencies can be observed in Europe as well, which lead, as Saskia Sassen observes, to a general strengthening of the executive organs at the expense of the legislature tasked with overseeing them and interfacing with the public at large .”

The Benefits of Distributed Power

Posted: July 14th, 2008, 10:14pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

I have asked Benjamin K. Sovacool, a Research Fellow in the Energy Governance Program at the National University of Singapore, for a recap of why we need to move towards distributed energy.

This is an area which we follow on our wiki here, where you’ll find a number of introductions.

Here is Benjamin’s editorial:

“Today, the technological basis for the electric utility system remains in flux. Large-scale generation and transmission technologies no longer offer prized economic benefits, and some policymakers and system operators have identified security and reliability threats to a society that increasingly depends on electricity. In such a complicated environment and quickly changing environment, advocates of distributed generation (DG) technologies have seen opportunities to reconfigure the existing electricity environment to their advantage.

The notion of DG, also called “distributed power” and “micro-power,” refers to an approach to generating power as well as a wide variety of physical electricity generators. As an approach, DG entails producing power on-site and close to the end user, emphasizing the deployment of small-scale generating facilities.

As a technology, the term “DG” often encompasses three classes of generators: combined heat and power (CHP) systems that produce thermal energy and electricity from a single fuel source, distributed renewable energy generators such as wind turbines and solar panels, and distributed non-renewable energy generators such as reciprocating engines, stirling engines, natural gas turbines, micro-turbines, and fuel cells.

A significant amount of new evidence suggests that DG systems strengthen the reliability of the power grid and decrease transmission congestion. They reduce the capital needed for energy production and displace power plant and T&D construction. They help conserve the amount of land needed for power generation and transmission facilities, and improve overall system efficiency.

Consider just two of these advantages: reliability and modularity.

First, and focusing on reliability, deploying DG systems in congested areas can provide an effective alternative to constructing new transmission and distribution lines, transformers, local taps, feeders, and switchgears, especially in congested areas or regions where the permitting of new transmission networks is difficult. One study found that up to 10 percent of total distribution capacity in ten years in high growth scenarios could be cost-effectively deferred using DG technologies. The International Energy Agency has even noted that “by moving portable power generators to distribution substations, utilities have been able to cope with rapid load growth more quickly than by upgrading distribution facilities.”

‘Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), the largest investor-owned utility in California, built an entire power plant in 1993 to test the grid benefits of a 500 kilo-watt (kW) DG plant. PG&E found that the generator improved voltage support, minimized power losses, lowered operating temperatures for transformers on the grid, and improved transmission capacity. The benefits were so large that the small-scale generator was twice as valuable as estimated, with projected benefits of 14 to 20 ¢/kWh.

Since modern DG technology enables utilities to remotely dispatch hundreds of scattered units, they also improve the ability of system operators to handle peak load and grid congestion problems. Another PG&E analysis, comparing fifty 1-MW distributed plants to one 50-MW central plant in Carissa Plains, California, found that the grid advantages (in forms of load savings and congestion) more than offset the disadvantages (in terms of high capital cost and interconnection) of installing the new generation.

DG systems can provide utilities and system operators with a variety of important ancillary services as well, including system control (how operators control generators on the grid), reactive supply (the injection of power needed to maintain required voltages), and spinning reserves (alternating existing generation capacity to offset load imbalances). Because of their smaller size, DG technologies can be started up more quickly and deployed more easily than centralized systems. Smaller units have lower outage rates, decreasing the need for reserve margins and spinning reserves. Since DG technologies can be constructed more quickly, they enable utility managers to respond better to supply and demand fluctuations, especially when used with advanced functions like real time pricing and net metering.

Second, and focusing on modularity, classic grid systems are “lumpy systems” in the sense that additions to capacity are made in primarily large lumps (gargantuan power plants, new transmission plants). These plants have long lead times and uncertainties, making planning and construction difficult, especially when the balance of supply and demand can change rapidly within a short period of time. They can also be extremely capital-intense: a typical 1,100 MW light water reactor can cost as much as $8 to $16 billion when licensing and construction expenses are included.

In contrast, DG technologies tend to have quicker lead times—taking between a few months to five years to implement. The quicker lead times for DG enable a more accurate response to load growth, and minimize the financial risk associated with borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to finance plants for 10 or more years before they start producing a single kW of electricity. John Ravis, a project finance manager for TD BankNorth, recently told industry analysts that utility-level PV systems can come online in as little as two months if the panels are available.

Utilities and investors can cancel modular plants easier, so abandoning a project is not a complete loss (and the portability of most DG systems means recoverable value exists should the technologies need to be resold as commodities in a secondary market). Smaller units with shorter lead times reduce the risk of purchasing a technology that becomes obsolete before it is installed, and quick installations can better exploit rapid learning, as many generations of product development can be compressed into the time it would take to build one giant power plant. In addition, outage durations tend to be shorter than those from larger plants and repairs for reciprocating gas and diesel engines take less money, time, and skill.

In both cases—power reliability and generator modularity—smaller, distributed units hold many advantages over large, centralized ones. As the prized economist E.F. Schumacher has written, when it comes to generating power, “small can sometimes be the most beautiful.”

For more information:

Readers that would like to learn more are invited to sample Benjamin’s other writings:

Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Distributed Generation (DG) and the American Electric Utility System: What is Stopping It?” Journal of Energy Resources Technology 130(1) (March, 2008), pp. 16-25.

Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Distributed Generation in the US—Three Lessons,” Cogeneration and Onsite Power Production 10(1) (January/February 2008), pp. 69-72.

Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Coal and Nuclear Technologies: Creating a False Dichotomy for American Energy Policy,” Policy Sciences 40(2) (June, 2007), pp. 101-122.

Benjamin Sovacool and Richard F. Hirsh, “Energy Myth Six – The Barriers to New and Innovative Energy Technologies are Primarily Technical: The Case of Distributed Generation (DG),” chapter in B.K. Sovacool and M. Brown, eds., Energy in American Society–Thirteen Myths ( Springer, 2007), pp. 145-69.

Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Using Distributed Generation and Renewable Energy Systems to Empower Developing Countries,” The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability 2(3) (2006), pp. 77-86.

Benjamin K. Sovacool and Richard Hirsh, “Technological Systems and Momentum Change: American Electric Utilities, Restructuring, and Distributed Generation,” Journal of Technology Studies 32(2) (Spring, 2006), pp. 72-85. )

5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G

Posted: July 14th, 2008, 8:50pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

Via the Free Software Foundation.

“The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G:

* iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can’t be on everyone’s phones.

* iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology.

* iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.

* iPhone won’t play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.

* iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don’t spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software — like the FreeRunner.”

The article elaborates:

“The iPhone is an attack on very old and fundamental values — the value of people having control over their stuff rather than their stuff having control over them, the right to freely communicate and share with others, and the importance of privacy.

The iPhone does make phone calls, but it is not just a phone. It is a general-purpose computer, more powerful in terms of hardware than the ones we might have had sitting on our desks just a few years ago. It’s also a tracking device, and like other proprietary GPS-enabled phones, can transmit your location without your knowledge.

As of November 2007, 3.3 billion people in the world had mobile telephones, and the number continues to rise rapidly. For many of these people, phones are becoming the most important computers they own. They are vital to their communications and they are with them all the time. Of all the technology people use that could be turned against them, this is one of the most frightening possibilities.

But there is an important difference between the iPhone and prior general-purpose computers: The iPhone is broken, on purpose. It is in theory capable of running many different kinds of programs, but software applications and media will be limited via Apple’s ironically named Digital Restrictions Management technology — “FairPlay”.”

But is there an alternative?

“Fortunately, we will soon be able to have all the convenience of a mobile computer that also makes phone calls without selling our freedom to Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or anyone else. The Neo FreeRunner is a promising free-software phone, being developed in cooperation with the same worldwide community responsible for the GNU/Linux operating system. These are creators who want to share their work and who want you and others to be able to do what they did — build on the work of people who came before them to make new, empowering devices.

We have a choice. The FreeRunner doesn’t yet do as much as the iPhone and it’s certainly not as pretty. But in terms of potential, the fact that it’s supported by a worldwide community of people rather than a single greedy, dishonest and secretive entity puts it light-years ahead. We can trade our freedom and our money to get something flashy on the surface, or we can spend a little more money, keep our freedom, and support a better kind of business. If we want businesses to be ethical, we have to reward the ones that are. By not enriching companies that want to take away our freedom and by rewarding those that respect us, we will be helping to bring about a better future.”

Check out OpenMoko’s FreeRunner at [www.openmoko.com]

Further overviews on Open Mobile Telephony, Open Source Telephony, and Open Source VoIP can be found here.

What kind of movement is the open movement?

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 6:05am PDT by Michel Bauwens

Interesting contribution by David Eaves:

He starts his argument by stressing that the Open Web is not just a desirable physical infrastructure but a social value:

“The open web is a social value. It’s not a fact, it’s not necessity, and it’s not a requirement. It’s a value - one that a growing community of people believe in and are willing to fight for. Indeed an emergent community in support of this value, initially composed of coders and technophiles, has steadily grown in size and scope. Today, there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who believe in the open web. They want the internet to be an open platform, indeed, they know the internet must be an open platform.”

He then asks, what kind of social movement is it, and his answer is akin to Christopher Kelty’s notion of Recursive Publics:

“Embracing the notion that the open web is a social movement does not mean that we must start lobbying politicians or chaining ourselves to Microsoft servers (although some people may already be doing these things). I will be the first to admit that this social movement is very unlike those of the past. We do not need to employ the industrial and hierarchical model of influence and power that underlies the Bill Moyes document that, in part, inspired this post. It is for another era, or at least, for other movements.

This social movement is different in that, so far, it has been able to derive its power from a narrow set of people – mostly coders – who by volunteering their labour, have given the movement neither political power, nor economic power, but hard consumer power. This power has enabled projects like Mozilla to out-create, out-innovate, and out-perform the largest, best financed, and most successful software and IT companies in the world. As such, it does not need to rely on persuading government to create structural changes the way past social movements have. It has simply been able to force change through its market position.”

However, the provisional success of the movement, David acknowledges, does not mean it has nothing to learn from the past:

“Possibly the most important of these past lessons is that social movements may emerge organically but often do not succeed until at least some primitive form of organization or basic structure takes form around which resources, supporters, and eventually the general public, can coalesce.

This structure does not need to be hierarchical, but it does need to at least anchor or provide a platform around which the movement can build identity and direction. I sense a number of people look to Mozilla to be that rallying point. ”

There is a lot that could be said about the still techno-centric vision underlying this vision of a social movement, but I see this as a very clear sign of the maturation of the movement, that such discussions are taking place.

Perhaps then, this is as good a time as any to recall what inspires the P2P Foundation, which is precisely the vision of such a broad social movement, which we do not of course claim to represent, but aim to be one of the informational building blocks that it could use. The following was written in November 2005, when we launched the wiki:

“* that peer-to-peer based technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it

* that the “distributed network” format, expressed in the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political organizing and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current political/economic order, which though it does not offer solutions per se, points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organizing formats, i.e. it represents different processes for arriving at such solutions; it ushers in a era of ‘nonrepresentational democracy’, where an increasing number of people are able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of autonomous and interdependent networks and peer circles; that global governance, and the global market will be, and will have to be, more influenced by modes of governance involving multistakeholdership

* that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement; that universal common property regimes, i.e. modes of peer property, such as the General Public Licese and the Creative Commons licenses should be promoted and extended

* that the principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the General Public License, and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements, provides for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life

* that it reconnects with the older traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization; it has the potential of showing that the new more egalitarian digital culture, is connected to the older traditions of cooperation of the workers and peasants, and to the search for an engaged and meaningful life as expressed in one’s work, which becomes an expression of individual and collective creativity, rather than as a salaried means of survival

* that it offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of ‘cognitive capitalism’; P2P is a language which every ‘digital youngster’ can understand. However, ‘peer to peer theory’ addresses itself not just to the network-enabled and to knowledge workers, but to the whole of civil society (the ‘multitudes’), and to whoever agrees that the core of decision-making should be located in civil society, and not in the market or in the state, and that the latters should be the servants of civil society

* that it combines subjectivity (new values), intersubjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and interobjectivity (new forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives would address the following issues:

* P2P currently exists in discrete separate movements and projects but these different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds them

* thus, there is a need for a common initiative, which

1. brings information together;

2. connects people and mutually informs them

3. strives for integrative insights coming from the many subfields;

4. can organize events for reflection and action;

5. can educate people about critical and creative tools for world-making

* the Foundation would be a matrix or womb which would inspire the creation and linking of other nodes active in the P2P field, organized around topics and common interests, locality, and any form of identity and organization which makes sense for the people involved

* the zero node website, i.e. the site of the P2P Foundation, would have a website with directories, an electronic newsletter and blog, and a magazine. It aims to be one of the places where people can interconnect and strengthen each other, and discuss topics of common interest.

In conclusion, we have made some progress in our aims, but still need a long way to go, but at the same time, it seems clear that humanity is indeed organizing itself in the sense we are indicating above.

(If you want to support our own role in this, please consider participating in our fundraising drive, via the Tip It button at the right of this blog!!)

When crowdsourcing is exploitation

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 3:26am PDT by Michel Bauwens

Amongst the three forms of the new peer-informed economy (next to sharing and commons-oriented peer production proper), crowdsourcing is the most ‘capitalist’, and therefore could arguably be the most exploitative. I have indicated elsewhere the differences between peer production and crowdsourcing, but perhaps it bears repeating:

Peer production is defined by:

- voluntary engagement for the creation of use value, not exchange value

- a production process under the control of the participants

- universal access property regimes, i.e. universal availability of the results.

It is important that there is no direct link between input and output (non-reciprocal character of peer production), i.e. there can be no payment directly linked to the production. When there is such a link, as in paying a programmer to write a specific piece of free software, it will create a commons, but it is not peer production.

Most corporate-driven crowdsourcing will only apply the very first principle, i.e. voluntary engagement but in this case the hope is that it is sold, i.e. it is produced for exchange value, not use value; the companies will aim to drive and control the production process; and the results will be proprietary. Finally, they will introduce payment or Revenue Sharing schemes. In terms of the hierarchy of engagement, crowdsourcing is more akin to swarming than to the collective intelligence of an intentional community, which is the characteristic of peer production only.

So if there is profit sharing, it changes the dynamics and is not peer production. But even worse can be when corporations start making you work, just for their benefit, and without any guarantee that you will get paid for your work. So there is a difference between producing for an open marketplace, where many might by, or not, your product, and when a company asks you to design something specific, but without any guarantee of payment.

This is what is meant with the concept of speculative work. In this model, corporations invite you to design, but will only pay for some of the inputs,it might be yours, or it might not.

Here’s the official explanation from the NoSpec campaign:

“Spec has become the short form for any work done on a speculative basis. In other words, any requested work for which a fair and reasonable fee has not been agreed upon, preferably in writing.

In a nutshell, spec requires the designer to invest time and resources with no guarantee of payment.”

In a commentary on this trend, Andrew Hyde is very clear: Speculative work (asking someone to complete a job as an application is a loose promise to pay them if you want to) is evil.

And now, he writes, speculative work is taking on the role and identity of crowdsourcing, as in the activities of the Crowdspring project:

“CrowdSpring is a site that attracts people with small budgets for projects ($250 for a company logo) and designers to come up with the designs, including revisions, for clients, with the chance of getting paid. It is speculative work, almost at its worst.

Why is this such a big deal?

Design, unlike other industries is unique in that the intellectual property is put into your deliverable, and when the client asks for you everything you have to put into the project to think about purchasing. I am a designer and this is by far the easiest way to end a friendship with me (asking me or someone else).”

Andrew insists that specwork is different from the selling platforms such as istockphotos:

“Not understanding the difference between custom speculative work and selling art backs up my first thought that there is a major ethical vacuum and lack of understanding around design at CrowdSpring.

Going head to head and undermining/ underbidding an entire profession is not something to be done unless you can carry the torch for the industry in the name of good (INGdirect comes to mind).

Is There a Grey Area?

Yes, but very few. Volunteering. I do a lot of volunteer jobs that can be viewed as spec work. As a general rule I only volunteer for non profits that don’t have the energy/ time to look for a designer for a project. I also see some grey when it comes to community contests where a professional designer is hired to take the winner and develop it to the final.”

For example, bearing this distinction in mind, Andrew appreciates Threadless:

“Bandwagon fallacies don’t work for a lot of things, including this. If you are talking about ThreadLess, they have done a very good job a) paying their designers fair market value b) involving a community in the beauty of design that traditionally would have been left out and c) making clear that the designs are done for the love of design, not for a 3rd party to profit off of.”

The cooptation of peer production (2): digital sharecropping

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 11:01pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

The following is an interesting complement to yesterday’s article about the cooptation of open source. I will be quoting the same Tim Slee, whose key argument is that networked production, when done on private platforms, is a form of exploitation of free labour.

I do not disagree, but in the contribution below, I think he insufficiently makes the distinction between the logic of amateur production, and its exploitation by platform owners. That the latter use and exploit the former does not change the use value logic of voluntary sharing. Recognizing the exploitative features is important, but should not blind us for the new type of social contradicitions, which are quite different from industrial capitalism and the use of wage labour of knowledge workers.

I have dealt with this in my article on the Social Contradictions of Web 2.0, and the broader problem of use value vs. exchange value has been discussed by Adam Arvidsson and myself in our work on the Crisis of Value.

So I think that between naive enthusiasm for amateur production, and what Tim Slee calls copying the arguments of the turbocapitalists, there is room for intelligent analysis which takes into account both the transcendent (liberatory) and immanent (exploitative).

Without further ado, here is Tim Slee, reacting to an earlier blog commentary:

“The distinguishing technological feature of the collaborative web (”web 2.0″) is the shift from peer-to-peer networks to a “platform” architecture that is built on top of the lower-level protocols of the Internet.

Wikipedia is a platform: it defines the ways in which you can interact with it, stores the changes you make, and provides security and authentication mechanisms among other things. Facebook is a platform. Amazon is a platform. YouTube is a platform. Blogging takes place on platforms. So the authors are wrong when they say that “As a result of various forces—notably the ascension of the general purpose computer, peer-to-peer technologies, and the internet—all manner of established verities in the content industry are falling.” [p215] None of the platforms mentioned above operate in a peer-to-peer manner.

The distinction matters because when content is built on a platform, it is in some important senses owned by the platform-owner or aggregator. Private ownership is present, even if the content (videos, book reviews etc) is explicitly shared by its amateur producer. The suggestion that “Users can modify open source software as they see fit, and can choose whether to make their modifications publicly available, but cannot charge for the use of software derived from an open source program.” is incorrect for open source software itself (it applies only to GPL’d software and not software produced under other open source licenses such as the BSD license, and even then copyright owners - such as MySQL AB, now a part of Sun Microsystems - can and do charge for some versions of the software). More importantly for this paper, it is also misleading when it comes to collaborative content. Chad and Steve cannot sell an individual video produced by an amateur, but they can sell the entire collection of videos lock stock and barrel to Google for about a third of a billion dollars each; Michael Birch can sell Bebo and all its content (including Billy Bragg’s songs) to AOL and pocket $600 million. Now that’s commercial. Or you can get a seat at Davos, of course, which now seems to be the Cannes red carpet equivalent for our youthful webby leaders.

Amateur production on a non-commercial platform such as Wikipedia is non-commercial. And it’s important. No argument there. But amateur production on a commercial platform is commercial activity. With one party in each transaction motivated my money, it’s the sound of one hand shaking. Back in 2003 Tim Bray’s dinner companion Robb Beal introduced the phrase “digital sharecropping” to distinguished building software “for any platform that is owned and operated by a company” from building sofware for the web. But now that dichotomy has faded: the web includes many platforms owned and operated by companies and sharecropping has moved online along with it. Nicholas Carr has been particularly pointed about the movement of digital sharecropping onto the web, and Seth Finkelstein has pointed to several examples including citizen journalism. It’s a phrase that should be front and centre of everyone’s mind when they see the phrase “networked production”.

The distinction can often be seen in who is sharing what. On a non-commercial platform, the amateurs share and the platform owners share as well. At least, my understanding is that on Wikipedia not only the content but also the software and large amounts of data mining derived from it about users and so on is shared publicly. In contrast, on a commercial platform only the amateur material is shared. The contributions of the commercial part of the transaction (Amazon’s sales data for example; data on user habits; the software that runs the platform itself) are not shared — in fact this half of the story is hidden with as much zealousness as the source code of any closed-source company.”

Tim Slee continues with another important argument:

“One argument made by the authors is that the incorporation of money into production would drive out amateur efforts in a blood-donation kind of way. I’m happy to help push someone’s car out from a snow drift for free, but I wouldn’t do it for a dollar. But there are two groups of people with an incentive to keep money out of the equation: one is the promoters of real community-driven, shared production (the authors’ camp, and one I’m quite happy with) and the other is the turbocapitalist platform owners such as Amazon (would you review a book for a nickel? would you trust the review of someone who did?) It is this shared interest in supressing the role of money for very different reasons that makes me most queasy in contemplating the future of the Internet. We need to be clear in distinguishing public goods from privately owned plantations.” [whimsley.typepad.com]

Structural conditions for creating the Open Mesh

Posted: July 9th, 2008, 9:35pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

Mark Canter has an extensive investigation of what we need to build the open mesh.

It gives the names of individuals and organizations, and of standards and existing tools and products, that can serve, or need to be developed still, to achieve it.

Some citations excerpted to highlight the main points, but first the overview in his own words.

” I’ve been trying to piece together an overview of all the ways that the Mesh will form - and outline what standards and best practices are needed, along with advocacy groups, major players and any outstanding issues to discuss.

I started with the #1 ID - one’s personal profile, set of Personas and the Groups that they’re a member of and their Social Graph. We now have OpenID and oAuth and lots of interest in uer centric ID issues nowadays - and I place this area in the center of every other area in the series.

I then covered #2 Persistent Ubiquitous Content - which includes eveything from the free BBC archives and Archive.org’s massive on-line digital media libraries to Wikipedia, iTunes and every other kind of on-line digital content - that’s there all the time. Knowledge bases, YouTube and Flickr also fit into this area. Imagine if all that stuff was available to you - all the time via two-way APIs. These repositories don’t have to be READ only, we can store all our UGC stuff there as well!

And recently I did #3 in the series - which covered one my favorite pet peeves - structured content - and the idea of shared servers of this stuff - with APIs and feeds coming in and out of it. Content as infrastructure. Tags and bookmarks as anchors and nodes for the mesh. Ricochet end-points of the starfish.

Now in this post - #4 - I will try to make sense how the Live Web and all this real-time communication, updating, presence management, feeds and APIs - can create a multiplier effect with one’s ID by putting it into context with all this persistent online content and all sorts of anchor points and structured content culminating in new ways for different platforms to interact in what we call ‘the mesh’.”

In more detail, Marc Canter on creating The Mesh:

1) Layer One, Identity, Data Portability, Social Graph

“The key foundation set of constructs, web services and APIs to support when building the mesh - is the area of profiles, personas, friendships, relationships, social graphs and groups. It all starts with humans and every construct, element and component of the open social web we’re building has to do with people. So that’s I’m starting here.

Luckily for us- we have OpenID2, oAuth, FOAF and XFN/hCard as great starting points. And the new Social Graph APIs are now available to get us started building up portable social graphs.

Luckily for us - end-users are starting to become aware of their own ID rights, privacy and security. And the kinds of controls that THEY should be able to assert over their own data. Standards for access controls and privileges need to be established so as I move between systems or I opt in and allow others to move my profile, content and social graph data around - I have the ability to control who sees my data - and when.”

2) Layer 2: Persistent Ubiquitous Content.

“If you step back and think about content as infrastructure you can take a different attitude towards stock photos, soundtracks and beats, 3D models, 3D city models and all sorts of reusable digital content assets. You can bake historical references, sports statistics, background on diseases and weather trends into your blog posts and software. You can make collaborative hypermedia a dream come true.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - as a key construct - is a mesh that can provide health information, small business knowledge and courseware for all ages - free and built into word processors, email, spreadsheets or browsers.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - can enable entirely new kinds of record labels, movie studios and book publishers - which have a fighting chance of surviving. By lowering distribution, development and www costs - we can enable the Long Tail to at least cover their costs and pay the rent and feed themselves.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it can seamlessly tie into other domains like the ‘Live Web‘ or ‘Tools‘- and seamlessly ‘mesh’ with other constructs like micro-content, aggregators or collections.”

3) Layer 3: Shared Structured Content Servers

“Call it micro-content, micro-formats, tagging, meta-data, semantic web, shared knowledge bases or what have you - the idea is that content comes along with extra ’stuff’ associated with it and that all that content and data is available on public, shared servers - where a community can contribute to it - and it’s overall value goes up.

Wikipedia in one way - is a shared structured content server. So is DMOZ. And there are all sorts of knowledge bases, open courseware and shared resources available on the web which could be considered ‘shared structured content servers‘.

But what I’m talking about here is one step beyond that. Something a bit more specific. It’s about shared Events, Reviews, local ads and info, maps, digital assets, even people databases or aggregated groups. Having APIs that can specify “Walnut Creek, April 20th, 2008 at 4:20 PM” kind of accuracy and granularity.

That means that the service needs Open APIs so developers (like us) can access it and rely upon it as infrastructure. Structured Content as infrastructure.”

4) Layer 4: The Live Web

“The Live Web is a commodity. Everybody is gonna have it - so there won’t be any huge tollgates or lock-ins into one particular technology or vendor. Even Skype is finding that out today. By utilizing tcp/ip and http the Live Web benefits from having an infrastructure in place to build on. But the Live Web can only be practical if it’s ALSO connected to the world of POTS and mobile devices.

GSM (the standard for cell phones) is pretty ubiquitous, but there are other forms of cell phone technology out there (CDMA) but nobody seems to worry about that. The different speeds for uploading and moving data (none of which are interoperable) have fragmented the so-called 3G world. But its the handset manufacturers and carrier platform vendors who have hopelessly fragmented the world of cell phones - to the point where there are over 10-15 different development platforms to worry about to ship ‘mobile’ compatible software.

This just makes it that more challenging in connecting the Live Web into the mesh - and enabling any kind of vendor to mesh into that same opportunity - as the Big Boys enjoy today. But it can be done!

The incredible real-time communication vehicle which we call IM, chat or Twittering provides a base platform from which 100’s if not 1,000s of unique solutions and innovative use case scenarios are being born - as we speak.

But the Live Web is more than just communicating.

It is about presence and just knowing if someone if there or not. And the world of 3D immersive virtual reality. Its about a swarm grid of tiny sensors monitoring the status of some factory or city streets and reporting back 20 times a second. Harnessing technology to improve our lives and make a buck - is what its all about.”

The cooptation of open source (1)

Posted: July 9th, 2008, 6:42pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

How could I have missed this? There are still huge holes in the alerting services that I use!!

I have long had a question: to what degree does the fact that free software programmers now get paid, change the internal dynamics of peer production?

The following debate, taken from Linux Journal, effectively answers that question,while at the same time confirming the huge commercialization that has been going on.

On April 30, the Linux Journal asked an important question: Is Linux now a slave to corporate masters? Does it matter who pays the salaries of Linux kernel developers? If so, how much, and in what ways?. This question was prompted by a report from the Linux Foundation, on the characteristics of those working on the Linux kernel.

Tom Slee has summarized the findings:

“One of the highlights: “over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work”. 14% is contributed by developers who are known to be unpaid and independent, and 13% by people who may or may not be paid (unknown), so the amount done by paid workers may be as high as 85%. The Linux kernel, then, is largely the product of professionals, not volunteers.

So Linux has become an economic joint venture of a set of companies, in the same way that Visa is an economic joint venture of a set of financial institutions. As the Linux Foundation report makes clear, the companies are participating for a diverse set of commercial reasons. Some want to make sure that Linux runs on their hardward. Others want to make sure that the basis of their distribution business is solid. And so on, and none of these companies could achieve their goals independently. In the same way, Visa provides services in many different locations around the world in different sizes and types of stores. Some banks need their service mainly in one country, some in another, but when they work together they all get to provide their services all around the world.

…the Linux Foundation report has made clear that open source has crossed its commercial Rubicon, and there is probably no going back.”

Nick Carr predictably concludes from this:

“The shift in Linux kernel development from unpaid to paid labor, from volunteers to employees, suggests that the Net doesn’t necessarily weaken the hand of central management or repeal all the old truths about business organization.”

This specific argument is addressed by Timothy Lee, who is essentially saying that the corporatization of Linux has not changed its underlying organisational model:

“For starters, most of the people contributing to the kernel are professional programmers, and most professional programmers have jobs in the software industry. So it’s totally unsurprising that most kernel contributors work for software companies.

But Carr’s observation also misses the point in a deeper way. What makes the open source model unique isn’t who (if anyone) signs the contributors’ paychecks. Rather, what matters is the way open source projects are organized internally. In a traditional software project, there’s a project manager who decides what features the product will have and allocates employees to work on various features. In contrast, there’s nobody directing the overall development of the Linux kernel. Yes, Linus Torvalds and his lieutenants decide which patches will ultimately make it into the kernel, but the Red Hat, IBM, and Novell employees who work on the Linux kernel don’t take their orders from them. They work on whatever they (and their respective clients) think is most important, and Torvalds’s only authority is deciding whether the patches they submit are good enough to make it into the kernel. Carr suggests that the non-volunteer status of Linux contributors proves that the Internet “doesn’t necessarily weaken the hand of central management,” but that’s precisely what the open source development model has done. There is no “central management” for the Linux kernel, and it would probably be a less successful project if there were.”

Ed Cone confirms:

“What that kind of analysis is missing is that IBM is paying engineers to work on projects that IBM doesn’t own, or solely direct. You pay these engineers — but of all the relationships between senior management and line employees, the fact you are paying them is about the least important, institutionally. The idea that the minute you pay people to do something, you have the right to manage them and the right to completely take over that work for the benefit of the company — that’s not true.

IBM is not producing that code, IBM engineers are. IBM is paying those people because it’s getting value out of them — Linux creates value for the enterprise, it lowers our cost of managing software, it increases peoples’ budgets for hardware and services — but there’s this crazy middle step where Linux is not now and cannot be owned or controlled by IBM. Linux is a brutal technical meritocracy, and there is no senior manager at IBM who can say, “I don’t care what the kernel engineers think, I want this.” They can’t put it into the product without appealing to people who don’t work for them. If they announced a strategic change in the kernel they would be laughed out of the room. They have given up the right to manage the projects they are paying for, and their competitors have immediate access to everything they do. It’s not IBM’s product.

There is a kind of perverse misreading of the change here to suggest that as long there are paid programmers working on the project, it’s not developing in any way different from what’s going on inside traditional organizations. It badly misunderstands how radical it is to have IBM and Novell effectively collaborating with no contractual agreement between them, and no right to expect that their programmers’ work is going to be contributed to the kernel if people external to those organizations don’t like it. And that’s a huge change.

When people read those statistics, they think, If there’s a salary, then all the other trappings of management must go along with it. Not only is that not true, it’s actually blinds you to the fact that paying someone a salary without being able to direct their work is probably the biggest challenge to managerial culture within a business that one can imagine.”

Doc Searls then concludes the article with some personal observation and especially quoting a personal testimony by Andrew Morton, confirming the indepedence of kernel programmers:

“Andrew went out of his way to make clear, without irony, that the symbiosis between large vendors and the Linux kernel puts no commercial pressure on the kernel whatsoever. Each symbiote has its own responsibilities. To illustrate, he gave the case of one large company application.”

Read the whole quote here.

Of course, this does not settle the matter of corporate influence over Linux development, and this issue needs to be further studied. Any material on this topic would be very welcome.

New book: Abstract Activism

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 4:24am PDT by Michel Bauwens

A nice complement to Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits.

Together with Hacking Capitalism and Decoding Liberation, we now have four complementary books discussion the political implications of hacking strategies!

Here’s the description of the intriguing Abstract Activism:

“In recent years, designers, activists and businesspeople have started to navigate their social worlds on the basis of concepts derived from the world of computers and new media technologies. According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås, this represents a fundamental cultural shift. The conceptual models of modern social thought, as well as the ones emanating from the 1968 revolts, are being usurped by a new worldview.

Using thinkers such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda as a point of departure, the authors expand upon the idea that everyday technologies are profoundly interconnected with dominant modes of thought. In the nineteenth century, the motor replaced the clockwork as the universal model of knowledge. In a similar vain, new media technologies are currently replacing the motor as the dominant ‘conceptual technology’ of contemporary social thought. This development, von Busch and Palmås argue, has yielded new ways of construing politics, activism and innovation.

The authors embark on different routes to explore this shift. Otto von Busch relates the practice of hacking to phenomena such as shopdropping, craftivism, fan fiction, liberation theology, and Spanish social movement YOMANGO. Karl Palmås examines how publications like Adbusters Magazine, as well as business theorists, have adopted a computer-inspired worldview, linking this development to the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. Hence, the text is written for designers and activists, as well as for the general reader interested in cultural studies.“

On the relation between open design communities and their physical production partners

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 11:45pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

(the following may be a useful summary restatement of an issue that we have discussed here quite a few times)

A key issue is how a mode of production that is successful in the creation of ‘immaterial value’ is co-dependent and can co-exist with the sphere of material value creation.

The problem can be described as follows:

Immaterial production deals with non-rival or even anti-rival goods that can be produced through the self-assemblage of interconnected brains, the result of which can then be made ‘universally available’. This works without any problem for software and what is generally called ‘content’.

But, what about immaterial value that is intrinsically interconnected to physical products, which are often ‘rival’ and in any case need systematic cost-recovery mechanisms? Any physical production of course has design aspects which can be produced through peer production, i.e. through open design communities that make their innovations universally accessible, just as software or content is.

But where as non-rival production is compatible with the non-reciprocal mode of peer production (i.e. voluntary participation), this will usually not be the case for physical production, and therefore, at this stage, reciprocal or market-based mechanisms are needed. Of course, it is theoretically possible to assume that material goods be produced and used according to ‘communist’ principle, but I believe this is not the order of the day in the short term, and perhaps not even in the long term, because of our newfound sensitivity to the limitations of our natural world.

We therefore need to imagine mechanisms that combine:

1) non-reciprocal peer production of designs for immaterial production

2) a separate system for physical production that relies, cooperates and supports open design communities

Eric von Hippel has already described the emergence of such processes of built-only capitalism in his book, Democratizing Innovation and the P2P Foundation monitors this emergence closely as well .

The relation between such corporate entities, and the open design communities could be ideally modeled on the benefit-sharing practices that are characteristic of businesses operating around the Linux commons. Better yet, we can imagine different formal governance models for such entities, such as cooperatives.

We are now at the phase of emergence of peer production, and even more so at the level of open design communities, but nevertheless, this is the key issue of social transformation. Any transformation to the dominance of a dual format that combines open design communities with a more just and equitable format for physical production will be depending, not just on political and social struggles and the social balance of power, but also on a number of objective trends. We believe that the same trends which have led to the distribution of computer power, are starting to manifest themselves as a general characteristic of the means of production. We believe that economies of scale will be replaced by economies of scope through the hyper-productivity of the collective learning derivative of open design communities. Just as the cost of energy and raw materials may be expected to rise, so may the cost of capital goods be expected to diminish dramatically in the coming decades, giving rise to the development of cheaper and modular production machinery, that can co-exist with both globalized coordination and relocalized production.

This will mean that the self-assemblage of immaterial resources can be matched by self-assemblage of physical production resources, but nevertheless, at this stage, we see a dual regime as inevitable because of the issues of cost-recovery in the physical sphere.

It is important to consider the mutual interdependence of the immaterial and material spheres of production, not only in a hypothetical future of reorganization of the mode of production, but today, through the already existing interplay between peer production and capitalism.

Peer production is a mode of voluntary contribution that is dependent on the existing surplus of the current political economy. It is only viable because the current system has created sufficient interstices where people can operate outside of the commodity and wage logic, but only as an ‘aspect of their lives’.

But the opposite is just as true: innovation is becoming increasingly social, a function of the general intellect, an emergent property of the networks of cooperation in which most of us (and not just in western countries) are increasingly inserted. This means that capitalism is increasingly dependent on the value creation and innovation that are the positive externalities of social cooperation.

It is the complex interplay between peer producers, physical production actors, and metagovernance organized under the auspices of collective authorities that I have discussed in detail yesterday.

The Tacit Governance of the Internet as a sign of strength

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 10:44pm PDT by Michel Bauwens

Key theme of this contribution: Why Abundance is a necessary policy goal for internet governance.

Via the Berkman Centers Publius Project on ‘constitutional moments of the internet‘

So far, we have been very lucky at the P2P Foundation, in the sense that we always have had civil dialogue, and we have done this with a minimal amount of explicit rules, but rather relying on the general civility of our participants.

This is neither a general rule (cfr. flaming wars and trolls in many places), but neither is it very exceptional.

The absence of rules is therefore a function of the implicit presence of accepted norms.

What follows is a debate on norms vs. rules, with David Weinberger defending norms, and a number of follow-up contributions stressing that norms-based communities may be oppressive to outsiders, and therefore rules should not be seen an necessarily oppressive.

1. Norms vs. Rules and its dependence on Trust

That rules may be failed norms is a point made in an excellent starting piece by David Weinberger, which is followed up by a number of internet luminaries, and from which we quote, starting with David’s contribution:

“Governance, as an explicit social structure, codified and implemented, arises when tacit governance fails. At its best, explicit governance is a response to a breakdown. It rarely restores a society to its prior, unbroken state.

Governance is made explicit as a scar. Scars are useful. They can even be honorable. But they generally mark wounds. The lack of explicit constitutions and explicit rules often is a sign of health.

The vastest stretches of the Internet’s surface are as yet unblemished by explicit governance. Tacit governance, however, is the surface of the Net. The Net is most of all a new social space in which people gather in groupings familiar and odd. All human intercourse has some form of governance, for otherwise the participants have no way to talk. Conversing (in its broadest sense) requires not only a common language, but also some set of core expectations about the boundaries of the conversation. Those expectations steer the conversation; “governance” comes from the Greek for steering.

The expectations that steer human intercourse are rarely laid out, in the real world or on line. Since our interactions always occur within some context, we assume the norms of that context: In Boston, we’d be fine with our cab driver spontaneously expressing support for the Red Sox, but we would be surprised if the cab driver pulled over, unasked, to show us how well she plays the tuba, no matter how well she plays it. There is no explicit rule about this because there doesn’t need to be. If, however, cab drivers start regularly giving curbside tuba performances, a “You are entitled to a tuba-free cab” rule will be posted. Rules can also be useful guides to norms when we can anticipate cultural strangers may be coming along for the ride.

The fuzziness of norms is their strength. We need the looseness of norms to enable us to be with one another in surprising ways. The narrower, more explicit, and less ambiguous the norms, often the deader the social interaction: “Come now, Marjorie, you know that we raise our hands before speaking.” Norms are not rules that have yet to mature. Rules are norms that have failed.”

In one of the follow-up discussions, Esther Dyson makes a caveat, that reminds us of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness‘:

” Tacit rules are inherently hostile to outsiders and to trouble-makers – and ineffective with them as well. Weinberger’s tacit rules are benign, but most tacit rules are not so benign. And if they were explicit, they could be more easily condemned and repudiated.

Even if the rules are good, their implicitness makes them harder for newcomers to understand. Yes, newcomers can observe and learn, but the burden that imposes should be acknowledged. And finally, tacit rules are harder to spread, since they can’t be easily transferred to other communities. That’s unfortunate, because ideally communities can learn from one another, either by copying one another’s rules, or by having members who bring effective rules with them.”

This is of course why explicit online constitutions, such as the famous Ubuntu Code of Conduct, are important.

Echoing that point, Kevin Werbach stresses how many explicit, but hidden from view because embedded in the technical infrastructure, are in fact not only there, but highly necessary to the overall good functioning of the internet:

“a great deal of cyberspace involves not software, but infrastructure. And that infrastructure is chock full of rules. The days when researchers built the Internet as a communal activity are long gone. Backbone networks and domain name registries link together through written contracts: explicit governance through and through. The same goes for technical standards. As norm-driven as the Internet Engineering Task Force may be, its function is to systematically surface and formalize those norms into rules. There are right and wrong ways to write the technical documents known as RFCs, to populate the header fields of an Internet protocol data packet, and to advertise routes across interconnected networks. And those infrastructure rules matter. Bad route advertisements recently took YouTube off the Internet worldwide, after Pakistan attempted to block it locally.

The Internet’s rules rule because the old norm-based approaches no longer serve the huge and diverse Internet community. Gone are the days when @Home, a cable broadband service with no subscribers but good relationships, was allocated as much address space as all of China. Moreover, the norms of those building networks and those using them are increasingly mis-aligned. Many of the staunchest defenders of tacit governance in cyberspace are the loudest advocates of explicit non-discrimination rules governing how network operators deliver their packets. Network neutrality is, at bottom, an effort to surface a norm and make it into a rule. It may well be a worthwhile endeavor. Either way, it shows the danger of an uncritical preference for tacit over explicit governance.”

He argues that there are two factors that determine whether we can rely on implicit norms rather than explicit rules: 1) trust and 2) abundance.

On trust:

“Trust is strongest when dealing with those we know or share values with. Small groups, like the engineers who built the original Internet or the inner circle of top-tier Wikipedia editors, are more likely to trust each other. The larger the sphere of governance, the more likely interests will diverge, and the less likely that norms will suffice.”

2. On Abundance as a Policy Goal:

Kevin Werback continues:

“The cyber-solution to this governance dilemma is to fight the constraint that produces all the tensions: scarcity. Abundance trumps governance. There is no need to worry about resource allocation when there are more than enough resources to go around. And those who find their norms ill-served can choose a more suitable environment, because the costs of forming new groups and institutions are so low.

The good news is that cyberspace – if we let it – can be the greatest engine of abundance the world has ever known. From the billions of search clicks that Google pairs with targeted text ads to the millions of WiFi devices using shared wireless spectrum to the hundreds of thousands of books along Amazon.com’s long tail, abundance is the driving force of the Internet economy. It should be an abiding goal of Internet governance as well. Furthering the historical analogy, it was territorial expansion, to the Western edge of the continent and beyond, that channeled and checked the tensions of the nascent American constitutional republic.

If cyberspace is to be well-governed, therefore, it must grow. We must resist the temptation to look back nostalgically to the frontier homesteading days, when norms dominated because so many of them were shared. Let us, as David urges, embrace the Internet’s wondrous chaos. At the same time, though, let us sing the praises of its well-designed rules. The shared enemy is not structure, but exclusivity and other barriers to choice and connectivity.“

Campaign for ’sound copyright’ in the European Union

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 3:47am PDT by Michel Bauwens

EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy has announced his intention to extend the European copyright term for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years.

This is of course a dangerous and absurd policy and we should therefore support the campaign for a Sound Copyright in the EU.

Go the following site for the petitionL [www.soundcopyright.eu] Here is the text advocating this position.

Text:

“A handful of major record labels are trying to break a fifty year-old promise. Musicians and their fans will not be the only victims.

Copyright in sound recordings currently lasts for 50 years. An independent review (the “Gowers review”) commissioned and endorsed by the UK government says it should remain at 50 years. Yet the recording industry continues to demand that this term be extended. But term extension would be an injustice to European musicians and musical culture, and may harm our economy.

If you agree that copyright term on sound recordings should not be extended past 50 years, please, sign this petition today.

Copyright is a bargain. In exchange for their investment in creating and distributing sound recordings to the public, copyright holders are granted a limited monopoly during which are allowed to control the use of those recordings. This includes the right to pursue anyone who uses their recordings without permission. But when this time is up, these works join Goethe, Hugo and Shakespeare in the proper place for all human culture – the public domain. In practice, because of repeated term extensions and the relatively short time in which sound recording techniques have been available, there are no public domain sound recordings.

This situation is about to change, as tracks from the first golden age of recorded sound reach the end of their copyright term. The public domain is about to benefit from its half of this bargain. Seminal soul, reggae, and rock and roll recordings will soon be freed from legal restrictions, allowing anyone (including the performers themselves and their heirs) to preserve, reissue, and remix them.

Major record labels want to keep control of sound recordings well beyond the current 50 year term so that they can continue to make marginal profits from the few recordings that are still commercially viable half a century after they were laid down. Yet if the balance of copyright tips in their favour, it will damage the music industry as a whole, and also individual artists, libraries, academics, businesses and the public.

The labels lobby for change, but have yet to publicly present any compelling economic evidence to support their case. What evidence does exist shows clearly that extending term will discourage innovation, stunt the reissues market, and irrevocably damage future artists’ and the general public’s access to their cultural heritage.

As Europe looks to the creative industries for its economic future, it is faced with a choice. It can agree to extend the copyright term in sound recordings for the sake of a few major record labels. Or it can allow sound recordings to enter the public domain at the end of fifty years for the benefit of future innovation, future prosperity and the public good.

If you agree that copyright term on sound recordings should not be extended past 50 years, please, sign this petition today. Together, we can defeat copyright term extension.”

More Information:

If you have questions or suggestions about our campaign for sound copyright legislation in Europe, please mail soundcopyright@openrightsgroup.org, or dial +44 (0)20 7096 1079.

Marcin Jakubowski on a policy to expand material peer production through land

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 5:50am PDT by Michel Bauwens

In one of the email discussions taking place around the edge of the P2P Foundation, there was a vigorous exchange after a remark by James Edwards:

“I feel that if the movement doesn’t free itself from its dependance on corporate support it can’t legitimately claim to be a viable and credible alternative to the current system.”

This was the occasion for Marcin to give the following strategic and tactical considerations for a transition to ‘material peer production’.

Marcin Jacubowski:

“If you are talking about peer physical production, then I invite you to raise the level of expectations, expand your index of possibilities.

First, that can be done by becoming engaged effectively in the process of physical production, to make tangible objects (tech, food, energy, etc) that carry with them essential economic power. This tangible power cannot be coopted IF IT TRULY MEETS NEEDS. It then becomes replicable and in demand. It has to be better. This does not have a magic solution - this is a life of work for many.

Such production can be better if political-finance-trading-distribution-advertising-retail functions are unified and interoperable in a peer economy. We are calling for nothing less than this in a peer economy:

1. Peer political power - comes from economic power comes from production comes from resources come from land. (Note that land tenure is and always will be the ultimate frontier of civilizations). Political power in a peer economy comes not from the welfare state, but from distributed producers. On a practical level: once we have real production at Factor e Farm, I cannot see any other scenario than thousands of people adopting peer product in our area. I think the connection is pretty clear.

2. Peer finance - natural resources are capital if you have the means to convert t