Group items tagged

"Half a billion people around the world spend more than 20 hours a week "wearing" avatars, that is, using digital representations of themselves. Did you know that a virtual representation of a politician could be more convincing than the politician himself? That your heart beats just as fast when your girlfriend winks at you from your computer screen as when she walks into the room? That if you make your onscreen surrogate mimic your friend's head movements, he's more likely to do what you say? Within three years, many online interactions will not simply involve passages of text typed on a keyboard but will instead be rich exchanges involving sophisticated representations of ourselves. Those digital beings are called avatars, and today at least half a billion people around the world are routinely socializing through them over the Internet, for example in online games."

"Michel Bauwens 30th November 2010 In the article for the Argentinian national daily "Pagina 12″, journalist Mariano Blejman writes that I equate open hardware with socialism. and this is also the message that is being retweeted. This is not explicitely my position, so I'd like to take up the occasion to republish an earlier article on how our position is related to the historical movement of socialism. 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?"

"Michel Bauwens 30th November 2010 In the article for the Argentinian national daily "Pagina 12″, journalist Mariano Blejman writes that I equate open hardware with socialism. and this is also the message that is being retweeted. This is not explicitely my position, so I'd like to take up the occasion to republish an earlier article on how our position is related to the historical movement of socialism. 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?"

"By Joel Lee on 1st February, 2013 | Technology Explained, Web Culture | 25 Comments "Open source" is a term that's thrown around a lot these days. You may know that certain things are open source, like Linux and Android, but do you know what it entails?"

"By Joel Lee on 1st February, 2013 | Technology Explained, Web Culture | 25 Comments "Open source" is a term that's thrown around a lot these days. You may know that certain things are open source, like Linux and Android, but do you know what it entails?"

"by Cathleen O'Grady Nov 24 2014, 4:00am CET If you know how to do something and people around you start doing it differently, you have two options: stick to what you know, or change to use their strategy. If the new strategy is more efficient than yours, or gets better results, it's a no-brainer, so you switch. But if it's exactly as efficient and produces the same results, the decision to switch is based on another factor-conformity."

"by Cathleen O'Grady Nov 24 2014, 4:00am CET Share Tweet 24 If you know how to do something and people around you start doing it differently, you have two options: stick to what you know, or change to use their strategy. If the new strategy is more efficient than yours, or gets better results, it's a no-brainer, so you switch. But if it's exactly as efficient and produces the same results, the decision to switch is based on another factor-conformity."

"The room was packed with almost 30 community managers from around the world. We were attending the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, Oregon and I was leading a session called Building programs and other ways to engage your community. "

"The room was packed with almost 30 community managers from around the world. We were attending the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, Oregon and I was leading a session called Building programs and other ways to engage your community. "

[... At LibrePlanet 2015, we're taking software freedom around the world, to outer space, and through all kinds of industries, governments, organizations, fields of study, and communities. We hope to see you at LibrePlanet 2015, March 21-22 in Cambridge, MA. FSF members and students attend LibrePlanet at no cost! Become a member now. ...]

[... At LibrePlanet 2015, we're taking software freedom around the world, to outer space, and through all kinds of industries, governments, organizations, fields of study, and communities. We hope to see you at LibrePlanet 2015, March 21-22 in Cambridge, MA. FSF members and students attend LibrePlanet at no cost! Become a member now. ...]

"January 26, 2015 by Jim Lynch 14 Comments Image credit: Straight.com Well folks, it's that time again. Yes, there's another one of those silly "the linux desktop is dead" kind of articles floating around out there. As usual the article is quite wrong, and I'll tell you why in this post."

"January 26, 2015 by Jim Lynch 14 Comments Image credit: Straight.com Well folks, it's that time again. Yes, there's another one of those silly "the linux desktop is dead" kind of articles floating around out there. As usual the article is quite wrong, and I'll tell you why in this post."

"From killer robots, to runaway sentience, there's a lot of FUD that needs clearing up. by Rupert Goodwins - Dec 21, 2015 9:30am CET"

Open source gear might be one way to get around LED pollution on wireless access points, routers, etc.

"A common piece of advice thrown around in tech circles is to "get involved," but what does that mean, exactly?"

" 80 down vote favorite 43 To work around bug #1005495 (changing LCD brightness via hotkeys impossible), I'd like to have one command line query for increasing and one for reducing the brightness of my LCD. I could then map a hotkey to each one of this queries. The problem is: I don't know how to increase and reduce the LCD brightness on the command line. Do you?"

"Even the most dedicated Linux user includes some proprietary apps into their desktop mix. Is there a way around this?"

[Description How does the sense of basic fairness--or selflessness versus selfishness--arise? How is it exhibited behaviorally? How is it maintained? Few topics hold more contemporary significance or have proved more elusive to specification in precise scientific terms. Current research perspectives on altruism, narcissism, and comity by distinguished behavioral scientists from around the world were brought together in a special issue of Current Psychology (Summer 1998) and are offered here in a useful compendium. ]

"There are lots of ways to kill an open source project, and there's plenty of blame to go around. Both project maintainers and users are culpable, one GitHub official believes."

"Hi, my name is Albert Westra. Back when I was around 12 years old, my best friend introduced me to the operating system we all know and love (and grieve for) Mandrake."

"When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs? In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts. Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist - he popularized the term "virtual reality" - wonders if the Web's structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against "hive thinking" and "digital Maoism," by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity."

Still 30-below! lol

it's a balmy -11 now, breaking out the beach shorts tomorrow

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community. ... [M]y approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy.

""This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness" - Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society."

[The idea is to create a research group centering around understanding the 'object' of emerging peer to peer dynamics, and more particularly the emerging forms of peer production, governance and property, and the associated paradigms of openness, participation, and commons-orientation. ...]

"When you take a moment and look around at the world, things can appear pretty messed up. Take 5 or 10 minutes and watch the 6 o'clock news. Chances are, the entire time, all you are going to see is war, conflict, death, illness, etc. Sure, ..."