incommunicado

Via William Hutton:

“Cheryll Barron has written a new OII Internet Issue Brief (No. 4), entitled ‘The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for post-Gutenberg Publishing’, which is available online at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1532173 It is an imaginative proposal for a new business model to support publishing in the digital age.”

I asked for some reactions on the p2p research list. Below is a reaction from Alex Rollin, and in the comments field, from Sam Rose.

Alex Rollin:

“In this paper the author goes over a number of facts about the decline of what might be called ‘centralized’ publishing. Newspapers, book publishers, and magazine publishers are looking for new ways of building an maintaining audiences while turning their attention to the possibilities the internet has to offer. On the other side, in this paper, are the ‘bloggers’ and ‘twitterers’ who are publishing.

The author spends a great deal of words explaining the environment and the challenges to publishers, and uses a lot of bold type to enumerate the potential gains to authors. While those gains are probably enough to invite folks into a publishing cooperative, I believe that the issues she doesn’t deal with, like content ownership, are at the very least a deciding factor for participants in some way.”

• Michel Bauwens over P2P in economie en democratie - Ambtenaar 2.0 netwerk
  Michel Bauwens is oprichter van de Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives. Hij schrijft en spreekt regelmatig over nieuwe vormen van organisatie (P2P, open source) en de gevolgen daarvan voor economie en bestuur. Op dinsdag 23 maart is hij in Nederland en komt hij spreken bij het ministerie van LNV. De bijeenkomst is open voor alle geïnteresseerden.
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Dwolla low cost transfer system to take on bank, credit card fees
  a peer to peer payment platform which allows any user to exchange money with another user quickly, safely, at a lower cost. For now, the system is operational in the US only, and so far it covers, I believe, Iowa and California.
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Lecture by Michel Bauwens in Athens
  The European Research project MIG@NET and the p2p foundation invite you to a lecture by Michel Bauwens on “P2p Networks and the Production of the Commons» on Saturday 13 March at 18.00.
  
  The event will be held at Bios, Peiraios 84 (map)

The European Research project MIG@NET and the p2p foundation invite you to a lecture by Michel Bauwens on “P2p Networks and the Production of the Commons» on Saturday 13 March at 18.00.

The event will be held at Bios, Peiraios 84 (map)

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He is the author of a number of on-line essays, including the seminal thesis Peer to Peer and Human Evolution, and The Political Economy of Peer Production. Bauwens currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand.

The lecture will be held in English.

[From Lecture by Michel Bauwens in Athens | Re-public: re-imagining democracy – english version]

DWOLLA (https://www.dwolla.com/) bills itself as a peer to peer payment platform which allows any user to exchange money with another user quickly, safely, at a lower cost. For now, the system is operational in the US only, and so far it covers, I believe, Iowa and California.

On the system’s blog, users are encouraged to vote to extend the service to their state.

The start-up payment company is rigorously linked to US dollars, no complementary currencies and no foreign currencies. It aims at tackling what they call the $48 billion elephant in the room: the swipe fee attached to all credit cards.

The interesting feature is that transfer fees on the Dwolla system are kept to an absolute minimum: a flat 25 cents per transfer, no matter how small or large it is.

Dwolla links to your bank account in a similar way as PayPal. It is primarily a money transfer tool. There is no need to keep a positive balance in a Dwolla account and it is possible to set the account to automatically transfer all incoming money into your standard bank account.

A video explaining the basic idea of the Dwolla system is on this page.

A series of videos on the Dwolla site explains the features of the system.

Dwolla’s relatively very simple user interface is explained in this video.

It will be interesting to see how fast they manage to grow and whether web based transfers will be able to make a dent in the billion-dollar credit card business.

Banks should have made such a system long ago, but it seems complexity is their preferred method of maintaining user dependence, in addition to making money on slow transfers.

• Tο ελληνικό ιστολόγιο της P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Ομιλίες του Michel Bauwens στην Αθήνα
  ????? ?? ????????, ?????????? ??? ????????? ????????? ??????????????? ?? ???????????? ??????, ??? ??? ????????? ???????? ????????? ??? ????????? ???? ??????? ???????? (peer to peer (P2P)). ????????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ?????????, ??? ??? ????? ????????????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ?????? ???????????, ??????????? ??? ??? ??????? ? ??? ???????. ?? ??????? ?????? ???????? ???? ?????? ???? ??? ????????? ??????????? ??? ???????????? ??? ??? ???? ??? ????????? ??? ????????????? - ????????? ??? ??? ??? ?????? ???????? ????????. ??? ????? ???? ??? ????? ? ?????????????? ?????? ????????? ????? ?? ??????? ?? ?????????, ? ???????? ???? ??????? ???????????? ?????????? ????? ????????? ????????? ??? ?????????????? ???? ???????????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ??? ?????????. ? ???????? ??? P2P ??????????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ???????? (????? ??? “?????”),

Here’s an idea for a smart-mob phone app.

It occurs to me that - with the help of a simple p2p application that may run on networked hand-held devices - it would be possible to produce, in the manner of a smart mob, any desired frequency in almost limitless strength. Here’s how:

The frequency could be produced by any desired means. It could be a song, achant, a clapping of hands, a beating of sticks on some object or something more technical like claxons or machines that produce a loud clap, the possibilities here are limitless, but they do not necessarily require any other technical means than linked-up smart devices in each participant’s hands. Even thoughts or directed intentions could be smartmobbed.

The size of the mob so linked would be limited only by the technical feasibility of co-ordinating an increasingly widely dispersed group of people. There would be no difficulty making a whole city, a nation or a  continent part of such an action.

At the level of each individual participant, the application would only have to show two signals for each beat: a preparatory signal and - after a small interval that remains constant - the signal for the agreed action. This would make sure that the actual action forms an exactly co-ordinated beat and produces the desired frequency effectively.

If the frequency were chosen to produce a certain effect and it were desirable that the effect should only be produced at a target group, but not at the individuals participating in the frequency-producing smart mob, the networked application could smartly choose to let individuals participate in “the beat” at a safe, lower frequency by for instance only requiring each individual to produce every second or third beat, or it could randomize the frequency for the participants without affecting the output frequency.

It would even be possible, in this way, to produce a higher frequency - say a frequency in the brain wave range that produces healing - which any single individual could not efficiently produce by themselves, but which could be produced by the co-ordinated smart mob. The application would do the co-ordinating to achieve the higher desired frequency.

The applications for something like this seem almost endless and I would think that a whole range of effects - from damaging to highly beneficial - is possible. Since the smartmobbing of frequencies requires the participation of a large number of individuals, it is hoped that the technology would be used predominantly for positive ends. In any case, better for this to be public knowledge than restricted to military and covert intelligence applications.

I am putting this in the public domain.

Developers and smart mobs may do with it as they wish.

The latest issue of the International Journal of the Commons contains a special collection of articles on the microbial commons, edited by Tom Dedeurwaerdere of the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

From the introduction: “vast amounts of plant and animal genetic material are collected and microorganisms isolated throughout the world from various habitats and sources, and exchanged in collaborative research networks for the improvement of global food security, public health and climate change mitigation” but “the relatively frictionless exchange of biological materials within a global commons, which prevailed during the early days of modern life sciences, now seems to be reversed. More and more biological materials are enclosed behind national and privatized fences, or only accessible under very restrictive license conditions”.

On the other hand, “due to the dual nature of genetic resources (as a biophysical resource used in current applications and as a living and evolving informational resource which provides basic input for the development of future applications and uses) the line between the market and non-market value of genetic resources is very difficult to draw.”

The special issue is devoted to investigating a new or stronger role of governance to design principles for building the microbial commons. The main argument of this collection of articles mainly coming from international law scholars is that commons governance is based on a variety of governance modes. Namely, “self-governance in global science communities, participatory modes of governance in international non-profit organizations, and conventional intergovernmental negotiation forums.”

In fact, specific governance problems are the biophysical characteristics of the resources: “goods that are more efficiently provided through non-market means (such as open-source collaborations and public provision). Genetic resources are complex goods with both a biophysical and an informational component.” But apart from the long tradition of international cooperation amongst culture collections, the impact of free riding is threat for the long-term sustainability of the commons. That is why the global community of scientits working on microbes needs formal intergovernmental arrangements.

But another important point is the role of self-governance and “the need to go beyond the dissociation between users and producers of knowledge within the commons.” The need to involve the user communities has led to a set of interesting institutional innovations, such as “public genome databases, open source bioinformatics software, and viral licensing by culture collections through so-called legitimate exchange.” And these institutional innovations were not established through governmental or intergovernmental legal or policy arrangements. They were the result of self-governance by the science and microbial culture-collection communities.” We need a legal infrastructure for the commons, as well as a culture rooted in sharing and openess practices.

Dedeurwaerdere concludes that “a mutually supportive relationship between various governance activities is an important feature of a successful genetic resource commons. This can be thought of as an organization with multiple layers of nested enterprises, which has been recognized as an important characteristic of large-scale and robust common pool resource systems”.

• Tim Berners-Lee on mashups with open data — keimform.de
  The inventor of WWW and HTML, Tim Berners-Lee, shows mashups using open data, e.g. OpenStreetMap after the earth quake in Haiti.
• Coordinated Cooperation vs Subordinated Cooperation - P2P Foundation
  P.R. Sarkar was a twentieth-century philosopher and spiritual teacher who was as concerned with social justice as he was with spiritual liberation. Sarkar, like others who espouse the perennial philosophy, believed that the B-cognition, or intuitional mode of knowing, is inherently synthetic. In contrast to reductionism and the rationalist approach to knowledge, which is analytical in nature, intuitional faculty of mind tends toward wholeness--its ultimate reach being a state of unitary consciousness in which individuals directly identify with the cosmic whole, rather than with a limited ego state.

“‘Clip Kino’ events are self-organised screening events of short video clips & documentaries found online. It aims to drag aspects of normalised ‘private’ activity - of viewing downloaded content on one’s own computer - into public space for screening, appreciation and debate. ‘Media-environmental awareness’ applies to include the social ecology of one’s interests, desires, and attentions in one’s peer-group and community”

Our friend Andrew Paterson has written an extensive report on a important cultural experiment involving video-sharing practices, see the full article published on SQUIDproject here and downloadable as PDF.

“The roll-down screen, the fold-up chairs, the sound-system, laptop, projector and popcorn were all prepared in the public underground passageway to coax people out of their pathway, to sit down and watch video clips they might have or never seen before. The billboard proclaiming ‘Jii Hutikka’s Clip Karavaani!’ was the beginning of ‘Clip Kino’ in Helsinki and beyond: a self-organised social event platform consisting of screening events in public spaces, featuring not full, or even short, film screenings but video clips and documentaries found online.

“My desire was also to explore the peer-to-peer theme in collaboration with young people, using metaphors from BitTorrent protocol. The slang terms for key roles in P2P file sharing—seeder and leecher—refer to the original uploader who provides the original file to ’seed’, and the downloader who ‘leeches’ the content from the network. The BitTorrent protocol is also a form of encoded cooperation: When you start downloading the file you wish for, you are also, by default in the protocol, helping others, by making the file more available for them. I hoped the workshop, exploring and sharing of video-clips between us as a group, would give us the roles of being ’seeders’ and ‘leechers’ of content—face-to-face—sharing content in presence of each other, gradually helping each other understand one another’s interests.”

Hillary Wainwright is one of the finest people I have met over the last few years, so I’m happy to share this profile, written by my friend David Bollier:

“If you want to learn the nitty-gritty about social transformation in our times — What works and what doesn’t? How exactly does market culture subvert change? What are the promising new models of democratic participation? — one of your first stops should be the London office of Hillary Wainwright, the British feminist, sometime-academic, magazine editor and activist.

Wainwright’s flinty realism is a tonic: “The institutions that are supposed to reproduce daily life and incapable of acting on behalf of the people any more,” she says, “so we need to produce our own institutional alternatives based on micro-experiments and universal values.” It is fortunate that, as new forms of commons emerge from so many quarters, there will be an astute chronicler and critic with pen in hand.”

Would it be possible for a community of small groups and/or a plethora of individuals within an open source economy to decisively outcompete the dominant global system? I’m pretty sure the answer to that question is an unqualified yes. An open source economy, a place where ideas are free from ownership, would gain a decisive competitive advantage over a traditional economy very quickly.

In my three laws of asymmetric competition, a standard slide in my presentation, I claim that the open source business model outflanks pure for-profit plays for a number of reasons.

John Robb applies the same idea to the whole economy, and explains why the new system of open source economies necessarily outcooperates its rivals:

Open source economies would have a rate of innovation far in excess of traditional economies due to the speed at which innovation percolates through the system. With each successive cycle, innovation upon innovation, the process accelerates until dominance is achieved.

Let’s use an extreme and idealized example of a near term future to demonstrate the point. There are one million people in the open source economy. Each person has a desktop manufacturing device and a high speed connection to everyone else in the community. A couple people develop an idea , or more specifically a design, for a simple set of devices (circuit boards + housing + wireless comms) that intelligently manages a home’s electricity usage for a savings of 25%. In the open source economy, that idea is freely shared. It is then copied, in a growing cascade, by nearly everyone that can use it. They all print the device and deploy it into their home. Within weeks/months of the idea’s release nearly all 1 million homes of the economy’s network are saving 25% off of their electricity bill for only the cost of the smattering of materials required to build it. Within a month or two of that initial release, another innovation on the innovation arrives, that shaves 35% off of the cost of the electricity. The wave continues, on and on. Each step results in full societal benefit, since the full savings for each member that installs it can be applied to other activities (all boats rise).”

• Trust is the Only Currency: The Growth of Citizen Co-Ops Is a Positive Development As Corporations Fail Us in Every Way
  As economic hardship threatens communities, there is one bright light in the fog -- cooperatives -- which already serve 4 in 10 Americans and are growing strong.
• Trust is the Only Currency: The Social Forum and the Solidarity Economy: A Dialogue
  Rejecting both the "stand pat" notion of the WSF as an open but unengaged space for dialogue, and Hugo Chavez's call for a "Fifth International" united by a "uniform [i.e., Marxist?] ideology", they offer a third option: that the WSF be used by its constituent social movements [to focus] "on building regional and global solidarity economies". The WSF would thereby avoid rigid ideologies and divisive party building, while moving beyond the stand pat's "comfortable" inaction.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Proutist Economics
  This chapter presents the basic economic principles required to move from a profit-based to a consumption-based economy. A consumption-based economy is premised on the belief that the opportunity to meet one’s basic needs should be guaranteed to all the members of a society.
• Trust is the Only Currency: The Suppressed Ideas of Kropotkin on Evolution
  Sarkar insisted that collective efforts should take the form of "coordinated cooperation," not subordinated cooperation. Subordinated cooperation occurs "where people do something individually or collectively, but keep themselves under other peoples' supervision." Coordinated cooperation occurs "between free human beings, each with equal rights and mutual respect for each other, and each working for the welfare of the other." In relation to this ideal form of social relationships, he observed that none of the present socio-economic systems are based on coordinated cooperation, but on subordinated cooperation, and that this "results in the degeneration of society's moral fabric."
• The Social Forum and The Solidarity Economy: A Dialogue | Grassroots Economic Organizing
  A second, and related, question is how to interpret the "building economic solidarity" strategy. Bob and Betsy explicitly reject acting "in the political sphere"; in their view, "party-building....would be divisive" and taking "state power" is not "a privileged means [of changing] the world". Despite this, they still endorse the Brazilian participatory budget process - whereby civil society groups become active stakeholders in, rather than passive spectators of, governance. And they claim that "Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution" - in which state power is most certainly central - "may be showing the way", i.e., may illustrate how to build a vibrant, oppositional, democratic replacement of capitalism.
• Last week's web-censorship proposal shows that supporters of every party need ORG - Boing Boing
  In the wake of last week's introduction of a LibDem pro-web-censorship amendment to the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock has a call to action for supporters of all the UK's political parties to join ORG and its nonpartisan effort to promote liberty and openness in the digital realm.
• Stuck in Idle: Odd Jobs in the Social Factory « Generation Bubble
  The advent of networked sociality offers a new way for capitalism to strike the balance. Enthusiasts for online culture often present it as though it offers a solution to the problems of atomization and the “crisis in leisure” Aronowitz describes: “the effort of people to regain their sense of craft, and liberate themselves from their complete dependence on the wage relation for personal and social meaning.” And in a sense the crisis in leisure has done just that. People no longer have the sense that they live in a world in which “friendship and community-making have become as rare talents as good cabinet-making,” as Aronowitz writes. Instead we are increasingly connected in social networks and may thereby seem to have more community in our lives than in the days of suburban angst and dyadic withdrawal into the claustrophobic nuclear family. It has opened a whole new space in which people can construct identity, replacing what was lost as the workplace became deadening.
• Connectivist Learning Theory - Siemens - P2P Foundation
  Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories…
• Specters of Marx: Immaterial Labor and the Primitive Accumulation of Cool « Generation Bubble
  Champions of communication and internet technology predict that a grand era of human emancipation is at hand. But what if all the feel-good rhetoric of creativity and play belies the fact that what awaits humankind is a drab future of unremitting work dressed up as self-indulgent pleasure?

The conference “Future Internet and Society: A Complex Systems Perspective” will take place on 02-07 October in Acquafredda di Maratea, Italy.

The digital revolution and the advent of the Internet are transforming the way we work, how we spend our free time. These phenomena are also changing how we communicate with each other and the way in which we establish and maintain our social relations.

The relationship between Internet and society is complex and bidirectional, leading to a co-evolution of the two systems. In fact, the Internet exists because humans need networking and the Internet evolution is ultimately driven by our ever-increasing use of it.

The complexity of the current Internet structure and its future developments cannot be understood without taking a full multi-disciplinary approach. Such an approach must necessarily be based on the science of complex systems, and in particular complex network theory. It must also depend on social sciences and humanities to elucidate the underpinnings of the Internet at a societal and economic level.

This conference will bring together experts in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), social scientists, as well as experts in the area of complex systems They will assess the state-of-the-art, identify new trends and envision future developments in the intertwined domains of future Internet and society.

Topics that will be covered in the conference include:

• Internet topology and modelling
• Complex techno-social networks
• Modelling of collective social behaviour
• Social and human dynamics
• Spreading and epidemics in techno-social systems
• Virtual social systems
• Co-evolution of Internet and society
• Internet as a socio-economical system
• Mobile social networks
• Internet enabled applications and business
• Future Internet as a techno-social system

We welcome top-level presentations on the most recent results in analysis and modelling, from the point of view of complex systems and other techno-social issues.

Invited Speakers

• Petra Ahrweiler, University College Dublin, IE
• Enrico Gregori, National Research Council CNR Pisa, IT
• Fredrick Liljeros, Stockholm University, SE
• Angel Sanchez, Universidad Carlos III, ES
• Andrea Scharnhorst, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, NL
• Bosiljka Tadic, Jozef Stefan Institute, SI
• Alessandro Vespignani, Indiana University, US / ISI Foundation, IT

The preliminary programme will be published in February.

For more information please visit the ESF Research Conferences website: http://www.esf.org/conferences/10341

David Ronfeldt has a post recalling his recent interventions on tribal governance, and part of it is a recall of a recent debate we had.

David Ronfeldt:

“A set of interesting posts appeared at the P2P Foundation blog — one of my favorite blogs — in August 2009 comparing the histories of Maghrebi and Genovese traders in the Middle Ages. The posts concerned a view, raised at another blog, that the Maghrebis exhibited an early kind of P2P/network approach to organization, the Genoveses a more market-like approach — and that this might explain why the latter proved more durable and successful as traders.

My point was that the Maghrebis were less an expression of the p2p/network form than of the tribal form — and that’s what explained the differing outcomes:

The Maghrebis do exhibit some P2P relationships. But it’s one thing to exhibit some relationships, quite another for those relationships to add up to a full, distinct system of thought and action. The key systems of organization that have developed across the ages so far — tribes, hierarchical institutions (like states), and markets — all contain some P2P relationships in varying respects and degrees. But we have yet to see a full-fledged, distinct P2P /network system emerge to take its place alongside those systems. That still lies ahead.

The Maghrebis appear to correspond far more to an innovative tribal system than to a P2P system. This is particularly so given the exclusionary behavior that accompanied their ethnic orientations. And it’s this tribal nature that ultimately limits them. The Genovese appear to have been less tribal. Thus, perhaps it remains an open question as to whether and how much it’s the tribal, the market, or the P2P orientations that explain the differing outcomes.

• Shareable: Is Income Equality the Killer App?
  The below video and the study it promotes make the bold claim that there's one thing that increases almost all social problems in developed countries - income inequality. Apparently, they have 30 years worth of research to back it up, here's a summary.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Barter and Cashless Trading Summit
  The International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA) announces Reaching The Stars: Uniting People & Standards In A Cashless Trading World,” a comprehensive barter and cashless trading conference to be held September 22nd — 25th 2005 at the Wyndham Palace Resort and Spa in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, USA. Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World, will deliver the keynote presentation.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Local Currency Council to hold it's First Online Conference
  The Local Currency Council, will host their online conference on March 6th, 2010 from 12-3pm (Pacific Standard Time). Participants from around the world are facilitating discussions intended to establish and strengthen the bonds between various community-based currency systems.
• Trust is the Only Currency: The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free
  perhaps nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. In November, it further opened up its code, giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay. The move could unleash a wave of innovation unlike any we’ve seen since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company’s pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose ShopSavvy program lets people find an item’s cheapest price by scanning its barcode, used PayPal to add a “quick pay” button to its app. LiveOps, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Report: 1st Solidarity Economy Social Forum
  The 1st Solidarity Economy Social Forum took place at Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil from 22nd to 24th January 2010, showing achievements in different aspects of this new economy and defining challenges to get over, with hundreds of participants mostly from all over Brazil and neighbouring countries
• Sustainable Money | matslats.net
  Following a presentation I made on the subject of money and sustainability, I thought it would be useful to note a list of the characteristics of the present dominant monetary system, and why it is unsustainable.
• Trust is the Only Currency: 21 hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century
  This report sets out arguments for a much shorter working week. It proposes a radical change in what is considered ‘normal’ – down from 40 hours or more, to 21 hours. While people can choose to work longer or shorter hours, we propose that 21 hours – or its equivalent spread across the calendar year – should become the standard that is generally expected by government, employers, trade unions, employees, and everyone else.
• Trust is the Only Currency: The Great Transition
  what we measure ends up driving what we do. The Great Transition proposes a move beyond GDP, to start measuring the things which really produce value, for our communities, our societies and our environment. The report sets out seven main interventions.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Co-opted: The Fall Of The Natural Foods Cooperative And What We Can Do About It
  Sadly, the once vibrant organic and natural foods movement has been taken over by the very businesses and business models that the founders of food co-ops a generation ago set out to replace. Not helping matters is the food co-op's own desire to survive at any cost and the widespread belief that continual growth is necessary and even beneficial for small businesses. Add to the mix a conservativeness that comes from doing something a certain way for a long time and we end up with...well, go see for yourself.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Montpelier, VT is Piloting a Food Currency
  On the subject of food - we are in the process of piloting a food currency here in Central Vermont that is designed to help our local farmers cope with low prices and escalating costs. It will be a hybrid, where dollars, food storage units, and food credits will be used for transactions...
• Trust is the Only Currency: Other Economies are Possible: Organizing toward an economy of cooperation and solidarity
  The idea and practice of "solidarity economics" emerged in Latin America in the mid-1980s and blossomed in the mid to late 1990s as a convergence of at least three social trends.
• Rights-based Organizing
  The biggest threat posed by corporations is not the illegal stuff of headlines. The real danger is what they are empowered to do legally, every day, in every community across the country. From water withdrawal to polluting refineries, toxic sludge spreading, GMOs and more, the corporate few wield the law against our communities, endangering our health, safety and the environment.
• Trust is the Only Currency: Damanhur Economics
  The Damanhurian economic system blends free enterprise with solidarity and communal sharing, with the objective of creating the most advantages and wealth possible at an individual and collective level. This “richness” is expressed in houses and land, schools and services, art and gardens, forests and meeting spaces, health and wellness, as well as a sense of belonging and security, and attention for the individual, from an economic and human point of view. This quality of life rivitalizes the Damanhurian territories, and in addition to the citizens of the Federation, everyone can enjoy the services and activities that exist here.
• Trust is the Only Currency: We're In This Together: Taxes and the Commons
  John Gurda, a history columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, paints a frightening picture of where continuing cuts in public services will lead us: “The day may come when librarians have to leave a key under the doormat at each neighborhood branch, when homicides are reported to a call center in Bangalore, when every household is expected to bury its own garbage and to keep its own fire bucket at the front door.”
• Trust is the Only Currency: BRAZIL: Solidarity Economy Thriving
  The Brazilian Solidarity Economy Forum (FBES) emerged at the
  2003 WSF which coincided with the start of the government of
  leftwing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who established a
  National Secretary of the Solidarity Economy (SENAES) under the
  Labour Ministry.

Clear insight on the necessary preconditions for open and distributed manufacturing to become the next ecosystem for making things.

Dominic Muren:

“We need to identify new methods and research directions which will lower the systemic barriers of entry to making. I believe that three primary directions exist for this exploration.

Humblefacture’s mission is to work bring together as much information as possible on the progress toward making these three pillars a reality.”

Al Jazeera reports on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a proposed reinforcement of free speech rights based on the best available legislation in the whole world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbGiPjIE1pE

• Confucius | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
  Ten years ago American journalist T.R. Reid wrote a book called Confucius Lives Next Door, in which he tried to make a compelling argument for the West’s adoption of Asian ways. I read it when it first appeared and thought what many critics wrote: Are you crazy? His itemized lists of Japanese virtues read like a laundry list of American phobias: respect your elders, don’t question authority, do your work obediently, learn to live with adversity, don’t challenge the status quo. But rereading the book now, ten years after its publication, I realize Reid was on to something, however poorly timed his analysis.
• Clash of Civilizations | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
  Richard Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society. Adbusters contributing editor Micah White talked to him about his book The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.
• Philosophy at Zero Point | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
  Have we reached systemic collapse and civilizational crisis?
• Just Coffee's Mission | Just Coffee Cooperative
  Just Coffee Cooperative is a worker-owned coffee roaster dedicated to creating and expanding a model of trade based on transparency, equality, and human dignity. We strive to build long-term relationships with small-scale coffee growers to bring you a truly incredible cup of coffee.
• Lifestreams Project Home Page
  Welcome to the Lifestreams project homepage. Lifestreams was invented by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor. That original work is detailed in the Lifestreams dissertation:
• Edge: TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY By David Gelernter
  The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses). The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.
• Back to Mono
  More likely is that we’ll see a healthy battle for the legacy of FriendFeed between Facebook, Twitter, and Google. First will be the conversational flow, still a pathetic hack in Twitter, possible in Facebook only with a fast (three month) Everyone newstream rollout with 2 way Twitter/Everyone stream sync. Never mind the Web site; this has to come from the API, complete with granular tools for filtering the flow by data type and guaranteed RSS-hubbed delivery. Facebook must invest quickly in stream splicing to make filtering useful, and Twitter Lists give them the room to build it while no such tools exist on the Twitter side.
• echovar » Blog Archive » A Little Bit Louder Now…
  Moving from Space to Time is another kind of transition. David Gelernter is one of the few who has spent time thinking about organization based on time and stream. Why should we have to give names to digital files or assign them to folders? Can’t things just take the initiative? Once we shift the axis of organization from Space to Time, we begin to think about how we could relate to dynamic flows of information.
• Truth to Power: "This or that Hierarchy"
  When discussing issues related to our actions within hierarchies, such as voting, working, being subject to laws and workplace rules, propertarian laws, and so on, our opponents inevitably bring up the concepts of “voluntary” and “consent.” In order to properly understand these issues, we must therefore consider the concepts of what is “voluntary” and what is “consent.”
• Truth to Power: "Any Hierarchy that Exists"
  “equality.” The word evokes two general extremes. One is the total dehumanizing equality that reduces man to a machine, famously parodied in the story Harrison Bergeron, where people are made scrupulously equal in capacities by burdening them with crippling handicapping devices or weights. The other is the absurd capitalist concept of “equality of opportunities,” meaning nothing more than “you can get what you can get” (which leads today’s “socialists,” who are in fact as capitalists as everyone else, to try to make opportunities available to everyone, instead of correcting the more fundamental problems).
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » “Intellect” as a Component of Price
  In The Tom Peters Seminar, the business guru who goes by that name celebrated the fact that only some 10% of the price of his new Minolta camera resulted from materials and labor. The rest was “ephemera” and “intellect.” That means, translated from Peters-speak into English, that only a tenth of the hours we work to pay for a piece of consumer electronics go to pay the production cost; the rest go to embedded rents on artificial property rights.
• Rad Geek People’s Daily 2009-01-08 – Can anybody ever consent to the State?
  In their remarks on Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State, both Christopher Morris and Jan Narveson object to Sartwell’s conclusion that "existing states are conceptually incompatible with the very possibility of consent" (40, emphasis added). Specifically, they object to the strength or the sweep of the incompatibility claim: Morris thinks that this "is an exaggeration and an unnecessary one," and Narveson insists that such a strong claim of incompatibility "cannot be taken literally." Each attempts to refute the incompatibility claim, at least as originally stated, by means of counterexamples. Presumably, if you can point to at least one case where individual consent to be ruled is actually secured by an existing state, then clearly (modal logic and all that) it must not be logically impossible for existing states to secure it.
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Langdon Winner: from cyber-libertarianism to cyber-communautarianism?
  One especially foggy area in cyberlibertarian rhetoric is its depiction of matters of power and distribution. Who stands to gain and who will lose in the transformations now underway? Will existing sources of injustice be reduced or amplified? Will the promised democratization benefit the populace as a whole or just those who own the latest equipment? And who gets to decide? About these questions, the cyberlibertarians show little concern.
• Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published "Speak out against ACTA", stating that the ACTA threatens free software by creating a culture "in which the freedom that is required to produce free software is seen as dangerous and threatening rather than creative, innovative, and exciting."[44] Specifically the FSF argues that ACTA will make it more difficult and expensive to distribute free software via file sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent, which are currently used to distribute large amounts of free software. The FSF also argues that ACTA will make it harder for users of free operating systems to play non-free media because DRM protected media would not be legally playable with free software
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Mobile vs. Internet for the Global South: continuing the debate
  The Community Informatics mailing list has a continuing debate on whether the diffusion of mobile broadband is sufficient to replace the internet in developing countries. One of the best contributions is from Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change:

Recently Bolivia have published it’s cmmunication to WTO’s TRIPS Council on the Review of Article 27.3(b). This article allows patenting of life forms and requires provision to be made for the protection of plant varieties

Article 27.3(b) says the following:

“Members may also exclude from patentability:
plants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and microbiological processes. However, Members shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof. The provisions of this subparagraph shall be reviewed four years after the date of entry into force of the WTO Agreement.”

Here you can read the full review. Really interesting reading.

———————————————————————
WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION
IP/C/W/545

26 February 2010
(10-1102)

Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

Original: English

REVIEW OF ARTICLE 27.3(B) OF TRIPS AGREEMENT

Communication from Bolivia

The following communication, dated 24 February 2010, is being circulated at
the request of the delegation of Bolivia.

_______________

I. INTRODUCTION

1. The purpose of this submission is to contribute to the work programme of
the TRIPS Council under the review of Article 27.3(b).

2. Article 27.3(b) allows Members to exclude from patentability plants and
animals, but not micro-organisms, and allows Members to exclude from
patentability essentially biological processes for the production of plants
and animals, but not non-biological or microbiological processes.
Furthermore, it also requires a legal form of protection for plant
varieties, by requiring members to provide plant variety protection either
by patents or by an effective sui generis system of protection or by any
combination thereof. It also requires that Article 27.3(b) be reviewed four
years after the entry into force of the WTO agreement.

3. The review of Article 27.3(b) is an issue within the mandate of the Doha
Work Programme under paragraph 19 of the 2001 Doha Ministerial Declaration
(WT/MIN(01)/DEC/1).

4. The review is also an issue within the mandate of the Doha Work Programme
under Implementation-Related Issues and Concerns (paragraph 12 of the Doha
Ministerial Declaration). Paragraph 12 mentions the adoption of the Decision
on Implementation-Related Issues and Concerns (WT/MIN(01)/17) to address a
number of implementation problems faced by Members. It also clearly states
that the “negotiations on outstanding implementation issues shall be an
integral part of the Work Programme”.

5. The “Compilation of Outstanding Implementation Issues Raised by Members”
(JOB(01)152/Rev.1) has several items relating to the review of Article
27.3(b). The relevant tirets and paragraphs are as follows:

“Tiret 91: The period given for implementation of the provisions of Article
27.3(b) shall be five years from the date the review is completed.”

“Tiret 95: …[Article 27.3(b) to be amended (...) The amendments should
clarify and satisfactorily resolve the analytical distinctions between
biological and microbiological organisms and (...) processes that produce
living organisms should not be patentable. The amendments should ensure the
protection of innovations of indigenous and local farming communities; the
continuation of traditional farming processes including the right to use,
exchange and save seeds, and promote food security.]”

“Proposal by Least-Developed Countries 22 October 2001: The General Council
agrees that the review process should clarify that all living organisms,
including plants, animals and parts of plants and animals, including gene
sequences, and biological and other natural processes for the production of
plants, animals and their parts, shall not be granted patents.”

II. PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE OF REVIEW OF ARTICLE 27.3(B)

6. Over the years, various submissions and proposals have been made on the
review of Article 27.3(b). Some important concerns raised by the submissions
and proposals are the need to amend or clarify Article 27.3(b) to prohibit
the patenting of all life forms, the need to protect farmers’ rights,
genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional practices in
developing countries.

7. Meanwhile various developments have taken place at different national,
regional and international levels that highlight the need to conduct
concrete and expedited discussions on the Review of Article 27.3(b). In
brief some of these developments are explained.

8. First, and for us most importantly, in January 2009 the people of Bolivia
adopted a new Constitution, which states:

Article 255 paragraph II: Negotiation, signature and ratification of
treaties will be governed by the following principles:

* Respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and peasants.

* Harmony with nature, protection of biodiversity and prohibition of private
appropriation of plants, animals, micro-organisms and any living matter for
exclusive use and exploitation.

9. Another important development is the adoption of the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Article 11.1 of the
Declaration recognizes the right of indigenous peoples “to practise and
revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to
maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of
their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts,
designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and
literature”. Article 11.2 of the Declaration requires states to “provide
redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution,
developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to their
cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their
free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions
and customs”.

10. Further Article 31 of the Declaration recognises that “indigenous
peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their
cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural
expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies
and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines,
knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions,
literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing
arts” and the “right to maintain, control, protect and develop their
intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge,
and traditional cultural expressions.” Thus States have the duty to “take
effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights”.

11. Furthermore extensive patenting of life forms, misappropriation of
biological resources originating from developing countries, increasing
concentrated corporate control over the agriculture industry due to various
acquisitions, undermining of the rights of indigenous peoples, local
community and farmers including farmers being prosecuted for alleged patent
violations, proliferation of trade agreements and initiatives focused on
enforcement of intellectual property, pressures to adopt a particular model
for plant variety protection, in our view makes a strong case for an
in-depth and accelerated review of Article 27.3(b).

III. ISSUES FOR CONSIDERATION

12. This communication is a brief introduction to some of the issues that
need to be addressed under the review of Article 27.3(b).

A. PATENTING OF LIFE FORMS

13. The rationale behind Article 27.3(b) is not clear. This relates to the
artificial distinction made between plants and animals (which may be
excluded) and micro-organisms (which may not be excluded); and also between
“essentially biological” processes for making plants and animals (which may
be excluded) and non-biological and microbiological processes (which may not
be excluded).

14. There is no reason why “micro-organisms”, “micro-biological processes”
and “non-biological” processes for the production of plants and animals
should be singled out for patentability, whereas members are given the
discretion to prohibit patents on plants and animals, and on essentially
biological processes.

15. Moreover, by giving Members the option whether or not to exclude the
patentability of plants and animals, Article 27.3(b) allows life forms to be
patented.

16. Consequently, since the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement, there has been
a proliferation of patents and patent applications involving micro-organisms
and other biological resources. This phenomenon has serious social, economic
and ethical implications, which are adverse especially for developing
countries.

17. Firstly, most of the patent holders and applicants are from developed
countries. Secondly, the granting of patents prevents those not having the
patents from making use of the patented materials, and this is also made up
of persons and institutions in developing countries, including indigenous
peoples. Thirdly, many of the biological resources originate in developing
countries and are obtained without their knowledge and in violation of their
laws, thus resulting in “misappropriation” and biopiracy. Fourthly, genetic
material may be inserted via vectors such as bacteria into plants and
animals, and all these living things (the genetic material, the
genetically-modified bacteria, and the genetically-modified plants and
animals) may then be patented.

18. The resulting effect is concentration of ownership of patents in a few
entities (largely based in developed countries) with detrimental effects on
competition and on social and economic situation (including food sovereignty
and livelihood of farmers) that most affects the vulnerable and poor,
including indigenous peoples in developing countries.

19. Patenting of life forms promotes an imbalance in the current
intellectual property system. The TRIPS Agreement while granting monopoly
rights to private parties does not explicitly recognise the collective
rights of indigenous peoples and local communities over their biological
resources and traditional knowledge, farmers’ rights or the sovereign rights
of States.

20. There is also an ethical dimension to the issue. The patenting of life
forms is unethical as it is against the moral and cultural norms of many
societies and indigenous peoples, of members in the WTO including that of
Bolivia.

B. PROTECTION OF PLANT VARIETIES

21. The issue of protection of plant varieties is also of concern to the
delegation of Bolivia. Prior to the TRIPS Agreement, countries had
flexibility to deal with the issue of plant varieties protection in the
manner they chose. However, TRIPS Article 27.3(b) requires protection of
plant varieties by either a patent, a sui generis system or a combination of
both. In this regard there are a number of concerns.

22. Firstly, in several developed countries, patenting of plants is already
taking place, and in the process, there is misappropriation of biological
resources, as plants and seeds originating in developing countries are being
patented, usually without the knowledge or consent of the countries of
origin. Secondly, the 21st century has seen significant corporate control
over the agriculture industry due to various mergers and acquisitions.
Thirdly, in some countries where there are patents on plants, farmers are
being prosecuted for alleged patent violations.

23. Fourthly, pressures are often placed on countries to accept a certain
definition or model for implementation of Plant Variety Protection although
there is no such requirement in Article 27.3(b). In this regard it is
important to ensure that innovations of indigenous and local farming
communities; the continuation of traditional farming practices including the
right to use, exchange, save seeds and sell their harvest is recognised and
protected. It is also equally important to recognise the right to take
measures to prevent anti-competitive and other practices, which threaten
food sovereignty in developing countries.

24. In this sense, the new Constitution of Bolivia is a step towards
providing protection to its farmers and peasants against actions and
practices, which threaten food sovereignty. Article 16.II establishes that
“the State must guarantee food security through a healthy, adequate and
sufficient alimentation for the entire population”. Consistent with this
provision, the new Constitution also states in its Article 255.I.8 that
“negotiation, signature and ratification of treaties will be governed by the
following principles: security and food sovereignty for all the people;
prohibition of importation, exportation production and marketing of
genetically modified organisms and toxic elements, which damages the health
and environment”.

C. TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

25. The process of review of Article 27.3(b) should take into account the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as noted in
Part II above and the protection of traditional knowledge and folklore.

26. One of the cornerstones of Bolivia’s new Constitution is full respect
for the culture and rights of indigenous peoples. For example Article 100 of
the Constitution recognizes “the cosmovision1, myths, oral history, dances
and cultural practices, traditional knowledge and technologies of indigenous
peoples and peasants as their heritage [and that] this heritage is part of
the expression and identity of the State”. Article 382 states that it “is
the competence and duty of the State to defend, recover and protect
biological material coming from natural resources, ancestral knowledge and
anything else that originate in the territory”

27. The indigenous peoples’ cosmovision has been a structural element in the
design of the National Plan of Development. This philosophy is reflected in
the indigenous concept of “Suma Qamana” (that can be translated as “living
well”) which supports the idea that humans should live in harmony and
equilibrium with nature. The strong connection that Bolivian indigenous
culture has with nature is the heritage of humanity and represents an
alternative to the capitalist model of development, that is in crisis and in
which development is linked to the depredation of natural resources for
short-term profit.

28. In addition, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples was incorporated into the national legislation of Bolivia in
November 2007 through Law 3760, which requires all Bolivians to comply with
the Declaration.

29. Therefore, the Plurinational State of Bolivia shall prevent the
patenting of any form of life and the granting of private monopolistic
intellectual property rights on any traditional-ancestral knowledge.

IV. CONCLUSION

30. Following the above, we conclude on the need to urgently review Article
27.3(b) to:

(a) prohibit the patenting of all life forms, including plants and animals
and parts thereof, gene sequences, micro-organisms as well as all processes
including biological, microbiological and non-biological processes for the
production of life forms and parts thereof;

(b) ensure the protection of the innovations of indigenous and local farming
communities and the continuation of the traditional farming practices
including the right to save, exchange and save seeds, and sell their
harvest;

(c) prevent anti-competitive practices which threaten food sovereignty of
people in developing countries; and

(d) to protect the rights of indigenous communities and prevent any private
monopolistic intellectual property claims over their traditional knowledge.

31. The above-mentioned issues are long outstanding and thus the delegation
of Bolivia hopes that the issues will receive immediate attention. The
delegation of Bolivia will also further elaborate on the issues highlighted
above.

__________

1 “Cosmovision” denotes a set of concepts and beliefs related to the
universe, nature and life. The concept of “Cosmovision” is similar to the
German concept of “Weltanschauung” which is a framework for generating
various dimensions of human perception and experience like knowledge,
politics, economics, religion, culture, science, ethics and the relationship
between nature and human beings. The closest translation of this word may be
the English concept of “worldview” or “comprehensive world view”.

Via Keimform (originally from Counterpunch):

Peter Linebaugh (excerpt):

“Human solidarity as expressed in the slogan “all for one and one for all” is the foundation of commoning. In capitalist society this principle is permitted in childhood games or in military combat. Otherwise, when it is not honored in hypocrisy, it appears in the struggle contra capitalism or, as Rebecca Solnit shows, in the disasters of fire, flood, or earthquake.

Human thought cannot flourish without the intercourse of the commons. Hence, the first amendment linking the rights of speech, assembly, and petition. “