Public Intelligence Blog

Jean Lievens

From the P2P Foundation.

Money, Markets, Value and the Commons – detailed stream description (DRAFT)

Working page for the money, markets and value stream of the Economics and the Commons Conference.

Please read, view, and feel free to edit, comment, add to the list of stream recommended readings and viewings (at the end of this page), or contact the stream coordinator (Ludwig Schuster) as appropriate.

A stream forum for real time discussions is available on the conference communications site.

Introduction

Money, markets, and value are some of the core-categories of today’s capitalist societies. They come with specific meanings, forms and interpretations which are reflected in and at the same time give shape to socio-economic and cultural contexts.

This stream shall deal with the question what happens if these specific forms are (deliberately) changed. Do we need money in an economy of the Commons? If yes, how would that money need to be designed and who should control it? If no, how could a demonitised society look like? And perhaps most importantly, how can the phase of transition be envisioned? In this stream light shall be shed on the different standpoints and the reasonings behind them in order to reach a more clear-cut view and to find some common route in this extremely wide and controversial, yet highly important field.

Linked Table of Contents Below the Line.

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Michel Bauwens

People are raving about this as a possible alternative command and control system for the public to use.

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Jeff Atwood

Coding Horror, February 5, 2013

EXTRACT:

After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I’d spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?

I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter?

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

The goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

• 100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
• Feels great to use. It’s fun.
• Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
• Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

Our amazingly talented team has been working on Discourse for almost a year now, and although like any open source software it’s never entirely done, we believe it is already a generation ahead of any other forum software we’ve used.

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Neal Rauhauser

Professionalism & Propaganda

One of the things I have done over the last six months has involved identifying and observing hive mind constructs in the real world. This happened in the context of examining the publicly visible process of foreign policy making. I wrote thirty three posts that are at least tangentially related to this pursuit. Hive mind constructs will eventually win out over point source propaganda, but it won’t be pretty to watch.

. . . . . . . . .

Links and short descriptions of various sequential endeavors and their findings

. . . . . . . . .

CONCLUSION:

Monolithic corporate forces heavily invested in the status quo are wrestling with networked humans and finding they face a sort of memetic Devil’s Snare. Their struggles may seem to be momentarily successful, but they are only educating their opponent as to their strengths and weaknesses.

The concept of the corporation didn’t really take off until the Catholic church relaxed usury laws three centuries ago. Compound interest depends on exponential growth and humans have pretty much hit the wall in terms of what our environment will support. Any one of climate change or peak oil could undo the perception that we are all consumers living in a conglomeration of free markets. Those two have arrived pretty much simultaneous with a financial sector meltdown and we are entering a period where our society will wind down to the Earth’s solar maximum. A value system based on exponential growth will not survive a disproof by counter example, and Mother Nature responds to neither paper injunctions nor heartfelt supplications.

Some of those networked humans are starting to realize that they need not tear down the corporatocracy by hand and they are already thinking about how and what to preserve. What role does a hive mind play in this? What role can it play when electrical power is intermittent and the supply chains needed for electronic devices are interrupted?

Read full post, see all linked posts with graphics.

Click on Image to Enlarge

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Jean Lievens

The Sharing Economy is Exploding: Knok’s 7 Key Factors Why Home Swap is the Perfect Example of a Sharing Service

Knok, the fastest growing home exchange community, shows that house swapping is the perfect example of collaborative consumption.

(PRWEB) May 08, 2013

This year has seen the consolidation of the sharing economy and several conferences around this theme confirm it. In April, 150 sharing economy leaders joined author and organizer Lisa Gansky in San Francisco for Let’s Mesh. In May, the OuiShareFest in Paris brought together over 500 people from all over Europe, and in June, the sharing economy is Le Web’s theme for its London event.

After the output of these events and the discussions on the future of the sharing economy with practitioners around the world, Knok has created a list of the 7 most relevant reasons why home exchange is a great example of a collaborative consumption business:

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Jean Lievens

Warren Karlenzig: Collective Intelligence–Cities as Global Intelligence Platform

Social media and collaborative technologies–layered with smart systems combining geo-location data with human experience–will make cities the driving sustainability force in a dawning planetary era. Cities will anticipate new risks with rapid urban systems innovation based upon crowdsourcing, virtual and physical communities, and transparent markets sensitive to full carbon and resource costs. Creatively leveraging collective intelligence for clean energy, low carbon mobility and sustainable food and water, the new urban grid will enable high local quality of life, lifelong learning and vibrant green economies.

Theophillis Goodyear

This is a response to Owl’s post Owl: Public Awake, Major Media Shredded — the Revolution IS Being Televised!

CNN is having ratings problems. If their subterfuge in Boston becomes common knowledge they will loose credibility and even more viewers. It would be a shot fired across the bow of every other news network. All the prominent muck-raking journals, like Mother Jones, the Nation, etc., should work together and make it happen, just like a blitz in football where everyone goes after the quarterback at once. They’re already doing it, but they need to hit CNN hard, gang up on them! It may be a long time before there’s another golden opportunity like this. CNN is down right now. With a behemoth like that, this is the best time to kick the crap out of them. And there’s no mistaking the fact that they deserve it and in fact are inviting it by their repeated breaches of journalistic ethics. If the shoe was on the other foot they would be kicking the crap out of the little guy. It goes with the territory. They knew the rules when they started playing the game. The bigger they are the harder they fall.

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Who? Who?

Blogger Jon Rappoport offers penetrating insight into the on-going implosion of image-based mass media, and it’s good news for truth (emphasis mine):

“Television news is shriveling. And it’s under attack from a new breed. You can call them counter-programmers, video freaks, whatever.  But they’re winning. Every dollar and inch of technology the networks employ move toward an irrefutable image on the screen. “Here it is. Look.”  And counter-programmers say, “Look again. See those guys in the yellow jackets standing right near the bomb when it goes off? They don’t move at all. They’re fine.” There is something very powerful in that response, because people are addicted to images. When the image you’re watching blows up, because somebody forces you to see something new, you start to wake up and effect a cure, even if you don’t want to. Image-addiction is sacred to people…

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Neal Rauhauser

DataScienceCentral Users – No Klout Via LinkedIn

The retrieval of 11,712 DataScienceCentral profiles completed earlier today. I found about 2,600 instances of ‘linkedin’ when I checked the extract dt/dd files. I rigged up a bunch of awk statements and distilled that down to about 900 DSC userids and the associated plain text LinkedIn userids. I skipped the ones with embedded slashes, figuring I could go back later, and then I hit the roadblock you see above.

Read more.

Choosing The Wrong Tool

When we left off last night we had about 55,000 keywords from about 11,500 Data Science Central profiles. I manually reviewed and filtered, tossing out stuff that I felt was noise. Here are those nodes after I left the ForceAtlas2 layout algorithm work while I was making breakfast.

Automated community detection in Gephi found eleven communities using the default values. If you’re a puzzled Maltego user trying to follow along, community detection is an algorithm that examines edges and assigns nodes to groups, which can then be colored. This is what you are doing manually with the five colored stars Maltego lets you use to group entities.

Read more with several large network graphics.

Patrick Meier

Jointly: Peer-to-Peer Disaster Recovery App

My colleague Samia Kallidis is launching a brilliant self-help app to facilitate community-based disaster recovery efforts. Samia is an MFA Candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. While her work on this peer-to-peer app began as part of her thesis, she has since been accepted to the NEA Studio Incubator Program to make her app a reality. NEA provides venture capital to help innovative entrepreneurs build transformational initiatives around the world. So huge congrats to Samia on this outstanding accomplishment. I was already hooked back in February when she presented her project at NYU and am even more excited now. Indeed, there are exciting synergies with the MatchApp project I’m working on with QCRI and MIT-CSAIL , which is why we’re happily exploring ways to collaborate & complement our respective initiatives.

Read full post with multiple graphics.