Pierre Terre's blog

On the occasion of MediaWiki’s move from volunteer to professional development, Aryeh Gregor comments on the distinction between the two models:

“Let me begin with definitions. I will draw a basic distinction between community development and centralized development. I’ll start with two motivating examples.

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, will be serialized separately.

1. The parallel with the transition of the Roman Empire

Consequences of Changes in Distribution of Knowledge – from Rome to the Present

We asked our friend Eric Hunting to comment on the following article about the limitations of free software in terms of designing user-friendly interfaces:

The article:

* The Case For Open-Source Design: Can Design By Committee Work?
(http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/01/the-case-for-open-source-design-can-design-by-committee-work/)

is authored by Mushon Zer-Aviv.

Eric Hunting:

* Article: Do Patents Encourage or Hinder Innovation? The Case of the Steam Engine. by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine, and Alessandro Nuvolari. The Freeman, December 2008 • Volume: 58 • Issue: 10

Excerpted from a longer case study cited above:

“The impact of patents on innovation does have an objective answer. In this case history instead of nature has been kind enough to provide us with a wonderful natural experiment. This experiment took place in the county of Cornwall, England, between 1772 and 1852. It was there, in the extreme southwest of England, in the wet depths of the Cornish copper and tin mines, far removed from the supply of coal in Wales, that the steam engine was pioneered.

Power as Integration

Meditation on the nature of power, excerpted from George Siemens:

“Information is not power. And, neither is money. Or any of the other terms that get equated with power. Quite simply, integration is power. How an individual or organization forms a coherent view (integrates elements) internally and how it is related to the entities (venture capital firms, government officials, vendors, clients) that either enable or constrain their actions, that ultimately determines success.

• David Korten on Creating a New (More Real) Economy
  In the latest issue of YES! David Korten discusses his newly revised book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. In response to a question regarding the housing bubble—“Four to six trillion dollars of value went away when the bubble popped. But what does that actually mean in terms of housing?—
• How Social Data Built a Better Health Care App
  

John Michael Greer, on what kind of agriculture to expect after “peak phosphorus”:

(excerpts)

“It’s true, of course, that the rapid depletion of the world’s reserves of rock phosphate, a key ingredient in chemical fertilizers, is a serious short term problem. Today’s agricultural systems depend on chemical fertilizers, and there aren’t any other abundant and highly concentrated sources of mineral phosphate available to be dumped into the intake hoppers of fertilizer factories. Still, this doesn’t mean that we’re all going to starve to death; it means that the way we produce food nowadays is not long for the world, and will be replaced by other ways of producing food that don’t depend on mass infusions of nonrenewable resources.

John Michael Greer responds to a critique of his new appropriate technology movement, by Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement (see below):

1. Part One: excerpts from Greer:

• paper.li – read Twitter as a daily newspaper
  paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag.
• Infographic: The NewsScape - 8 sources of value creation in a post-channel media world - Trends in the Living Networks
  I have just prepared a framework to crystallize some of my thoughts on the news landscape today, which I've called The NewsScape. Individual channels - such as print, TV, internet, and more - are becoming meaningless. In the post-channel media world we are entering, the entire landscape is laid open. The NewsScape shows how value is created in this world.
• Key trends in media and communications usage - Trends in the Living Networks
  

What is the connection between the historical tradition of socialism/communism and the contemporary emergence of ideas and practices centered around p2p dynamics and the commons?

1.

Let’s first tackle our understanding and interpretation of communism.

To me it is basically the idea, probably born at the same time as post-tribal class-based society, that an alternative human arrangement based on equal relationships and without the inheritance of wealth and privilege is possible. It is something that appears again and again in human history as an expression of those that are not privileged in the existing social arrangements.

A prominent example is of course the form of the Christian communities as described in the Act of the Apostles, but it is a recurring theme across history.

• Videos tagged 'dividendeuniversel' on Vimeo
• Dividende Universel - Wikipédia
  Le Dividende Universel est un système de création monétaire, qui défend le principe que chaque citoyen d'une zone monétaire est co-propriétaire de cette zone, comme d'une entreprise, et que de ce fait, il est en droit de participer à la création monétaire sous la forme d'un dividende régulier versé sur la base d'un pourcentage de la masse monétaire totale de la zone économique répartie entre tous les citoyens de façon parfaitement égale et symétrique.
• https://nouvellesociete.wordpress.com/
• Jean Zin #solidarite#solidarite#solidarite
  

Via Open Culture:

“Above, we have TED’s Chris Anderson interviewing Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website that made headlines last month when it released the Afghan War Diaries, all 92,000 pages worth. During the 19 minute interview, Assange talks a little more about the philosophy behind WikiLeaks, how the organization decides when to release information (or not), how the site has changed world events, and what some more ordinary leaks look like. No matter what stance you take on WikiLeaks, the interview is worth a watch. You’ll only hear more about them down the line.”

Two important updates from John Robb:

- an analysis of Wikileaks as an open source insurgency