Kategorie: English

[Repost from GeorgieBC under CC-by-nc-sa, translated german version]

Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. – Wikipedia

A personality based system can never allow for mass collaboration on a global scale without representation such as that seen in organizations like the United Nations. If the world is to move away from representation and allow all voices to be heard, we need to find methods of collaboration which work with idea and action based systems. Concentric user groups with epistemic communities and knowledge bridges may work for idea based systems; for action, stigmergy may be the best option.

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The following presentation of Nathan Seidle is fully embedded in capitalist logics, but it impressivly shows, that in the long run openness will out-compete old-fashioned proprietary approaches. And all results can be used by everyone, including by peer-commons projects.

[Update]: Youtube has removed the video 🙁

[Update]: The video is online again 🙂

[This is part of an debate regarding parecon and peercommony between Michael Albert and me. It is a repy to Michael Albert’s Summarizing Participatory Economics. All articles can be found on the debate overview page – more will follow.]

While I like the goals of the Parecon, one thing that confuses me is that Parecon, while intended to overcome capitalism, still resembles it in an essential aspect. Society still revolves about paid labor: everybody is forced to work for money in order to be able to buy the things they need to live. Why is that so? Do we really must forever force people to work because otherwise they wouldn’t?

A typical proponent of capitalism would probably respond: “Yes, humans are just lazy bastards. Without coercion, nobody would work and humanity would perish.” Michael Albert argues a bit smarter, but essentially in the same way:

If we disconnect work and income, … people will typically choose to work too little for the social good to be optimally met, and people will choose to take too much for the system to even work because the available output will fall well short of available demands for income.

So, everybody it still a bit too lazy and a bit too greedy for society to work without coercion, it seems. But is that claim as self-evident as Albert puts it? Moreover, if the mismatch between “available output” and “available demands” was real, could Parecon avoid it? I doubt both points.

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Federico Pistono at TEDxVienna: »Robots Will Steal Your Job, but That’s OK«

Ok, no critique of capitalism in its very notion, but on the right track. Quote:

Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your live.

— Confucius

Photo stream of the Maker Faire in Lagos, Nigeria:

Sam Muirhead from Year of Open Source visited Berlin based hardware hacker Fabienne Serrière and made a video about The Wonderful, Wooly World of Hacked Knitting Machines. Great!

See also: Open hardware knitting machine

[First part]

Building Blocks for Physical Peer Production

[Originally published in Journal of Peer Production, Issue #1: Productive Negation, July 2012.]

[Diesen Artikel gibt es auch auf Deutsch.]

[Originally published in The Wealth of the Commons (eds. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich; Levellers Press, Amherst, MA, pp. 289–294). Also available on the website of the book. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.]

In 1991, an undergraduate Finnish computer science student, Linus Torvalds, had a surprising idea: he began to write a new operating system on his PC. His initial goal was to be able to try some things that weren’t possible with the operating systems then available to him. After several months of tinkering, Torvalds noted that he had developed a system that could be useful for others too. He announced his work on the Internet and asked for feedback about features that people would like to see. Some weeks later, he put the software online. Now anybody could download and use his code. It was also possible to adapt it to better fit your needs, if you knew how to program. (mehr …)

The story of the Liberator — the worlds first open source compressed earth brick press. Download the designs from opensourceecology.org and build yourself.

[Update] (mehr …)