There are three types of networks important in business: operational, personal and strategic. While a lot of managers excel at building and using their operational network, they often overlook their personal and strategic networks.
Brett Frischmann on Infrastructure as a Commons | David Bollier - 1 views
-
"Brett Frischmann's recently published Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford University Press). This book is a landmark in the study of the social value of infrastructure, a theme that is generally overlooked or marginalized."
A 150-Year Experiment: Colleges That Serve Everyone | On the Commons - 2 views
-
"The most significant connection between land-grant institutions and commons-based organizations and movements exists in their shared interest for the public community. How their interests have been applied or expressed may differ, yet their common theme could be a catalyst for future partnership and collaboration. "
Quilligan's "Failed Metaphysics Behind Private Property" | David Bollier - 1 views
-
"Many people don't recognise that the commons is not just a thing - a physical element of nature or a resource like the Internet - but a distinct metaphysics and epistemology that challenges some deeply rooted premises of contemporary politics and policy. James Quilligan probes this territory with a thoughtful piece in the latest issue of Kosmos magazine. In particular, he explores the "social nature of property"and how its individual, atomistic nature in liberal political philosophy is responsible for "its catastrophic impact on the commons.""
Share or Die, the Book | David Bollier - 1 views
-
Shareable Magazine has just released a lively book that provides a few answers. It doesn't offer any grand manifestos so much as a series of highly personal, evocative testimonies filled with rays of hope. Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis, is an eclectic collection of essays about the ways that young people are trying to build happier, wholesome, workable lives for themselves as the edifice of late-stage capitalism begins to implode.
LiquidFeedback: What A Genuine Democratic Process Looks Like | David Bollier - 1 views
-
"The LiquidFeedback mission statement concludes, "All the experience we have gained over the past months shows people participate if they think it makes sense and representatives at least acknowledge the will of the participants rather than arguing with silent majorities." It concludes with a ringing line from Thomas Jefferson: … every man is a sharer… and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day." "
Upsetting the oil drum | The Agonist - 0 views
-
it means not only a radically different structure of the economy, but a change in who runs American industry. And this is what the current political order is fighting to the death.
-
More political than commons related, but connected to the question of energy and resource usage and power.
Herminia Ibarra Networking is vital for successful managers - 0 views
-
Managers today juggle more responsibilities than ever and for many of them networking becomes an afterthought. Herminia Ibarra, INSEAD Professor of Organisational Behaviour says that's a potentially fatal career mistake.
On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides | e-flux - 0 views
-
The identification of “new enclosures” in contemporary capitalist dynamics urged us to reconsider traditional Marxist discourse on this point. What the Marxist literature failed to understand is that primitive accumulation is a continuous process of capitalist development that is also necessary for the preservation of advanced forms of capitalism for two reasons. Firstly, because capital seeks boundless expansion, and therefore always needs new spheres and dimensions of life to turn into commodities. Secondly, because social conflict is at the heart of capitalist processes—this means that people do reconstitute commons anew, and they do it all the time. These commons help to re-weave the social fabric threatened by previous phases of deep commodification and at the same time provide potential new ground for the next phase of enclosures.
-
Commons are not simply resources we share—conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the same time. First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons.
-
Stavros Stavrides: First, I would like to bring to the discussion a comparison between the concept of the commons based on the idea of a community and the concept of the public. The community refers to an entity, mainly to a homogeneous group of people, whereas the idea of the public puts an emphasis on the relation between different communities. The public realm can be considered as the actual or virtual space where strangers and different people or groups with diverging forms of life can meet. The notion of the public urges our thinking about the commons to become more complex. The possibility of encounter in the realm of the public has an effect on how we conceptualize commoning and sharing. We have to acknowledge the difficulties of sharing as well as the contests and negotiations that are necessarily connected with the prospect of sharing.
ICEO | IEEE Committee on Earth Observation - 0 views
-
The IEEE Committee on Earth Observation (ICEO) facilitates broad-based IEEE participation in the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and its international effort to create a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) for applying Earth observation data and information for societal benefits. The focus of GEO and ICEO is helping to improve living conditions, particularly in developing countries, through the development of GEOSS, a realizable global resource for decision makers at all levels. To support this development, GEOSS requires the broad range of skills embodied in the IEEE membership from System of Systems (SoS) engineering and communication to standards and information applications.
Open Humanities Press - 0 views
-
An example of open publishing for the humanities.
-
Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory. Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP's editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory. OHP's journals are independent, published under open access licences and free of charge to readers and authors alike.
Yahoo didn't mean to censor emails about Wall Street protests. The truth is much more i... - 0 views
-
Unfortunately, thoughtless automation is driving the day. If we don't get off this train, it might have the same results it has had in other sectors of the economy: an unsustainable economy with high unemployment-and a lot of cheap, plastic crap.
War and the Tragedy of the Commons | Truthout - 0 views
-
"In this seven-part series of articles on each environmental impact of US militarism, scientist and author Patricia Hynes provides an overview of modern, military pollution and the use of natural resources with a central focus on the US military superpower, a power without precedent or competitor. From Superfund and former nuclear weapons sites in the US to Vieques, Agent Orange, depleted uranium - particularly in Iraq - biowarfare research and the use of fossil fuels in routine military training and wars, Hynes examines the war machine as the true tragedy of the commons."
Ugo Mattei on the Commons, Market and State | David Bollier - 0 views
-
"The real problem is that the State and Market are locked in a symbiotic alliance to the detriment of the commons. This unholy alliance so tenacious because it is embedded in our very phenomenological understanding of life, writes Mattei. We perceive the world as a mechanistic system in which subject and object are separate and distinct, and we supposedly have individual autonomy to do what we wish to act upon the world. As subjects, we tend to pracel out and commodify the world into units that are isolated from the larger whole; thus we see humanity as separate from Nature and the various elements of it (wetlands, atmosphere, genes) as isolated objects. "
Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies - 0 views
-
New technologies undermine the rationale for localist policies. It’s easier to get far-away content now — indeed the whole notion that content is bound to a place is fading away. With access to more content sources, there are more possible venues for local programming, making it less likely that local programming will be unavailable because of the whims or blind spots of a few station owners. It’s getting easier and cheaper to gather and distribute information, so more people have the means to produce local programming. In short, we’re looking at a future with more non-local programming and more local programming.
OnTheCommons.org - The commons as a new sector of value-creation - 0 views
-
So my first point is the importance of recognizing the commons as a distinct sector for creating value. It can be difficult to recognize this reality because we don’t have an agreed-upon language or taxonomy for talking about the value-proposition of the commons. The phenomenon is still too novel. For many people, it is difficult to accept that value can exist without the sanction of money or private property rights—that value that is intangible and unquantifiable can actually matter. Cold, hard cash is nearly always seen as more valuable than something as amorphous and non-physical as an online community
-
I call these epochal changes in economic and cultural production The Great Value Shift. In the networked environment that is becoming pervasive, we are being forced to recognize that markets—or at least, traditional hierarchical institutions such as the corporation—do not have a monopoly on the ability to generate value.
-
If you can acknowledge this fact, then it follows that we should take affirmative steps to preserve the commons and the special types of value that it produces. Let me conclude by suggesting four general strategies.
-
1. protect integrity of commons 2. new models for understanding value 3. invent new hybrids 4. active government support of commns
-
-
Keynote by David Bollier at Economies of the Commons Conference, April 12, 2008, Amsterdam.
Commons Law Project - 0 views
-
"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of "green governance"―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"
Doc Searls Weblog · Edging toward the fully licensed world - 0 views
-
"By losing the free and open Internet, and free and open devices to interact with it - and even such ordinary things as physical books and music media - we reduce the full scope of both markets and civilization. But that's hard to see when the walled gardens are so rich with short-term benefits."
OnTheCommons.org - The economics of online commons - 0 views
-
The focus of many presentations was how to organize the production and distribution of new creative works in a world where free/cheap digital transmission is the norm. It turns out that many established institutions—if they are going to come to terms with the Internet—are going to have to seriously transform themselves in order to survive.
-
Key summary of the conference in Amsterdam.
-
-
If you want to see the future, one of the best places to look is the freeboot innovators of the underground. They are always the ones who tried out the new ideas that later ripen into market opportunities. Think how hip-hop emerged from record-scratchers in Brooklyn basements and how the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club pioneered many of the early innovations in computing.
-
The idea of “culture without property” seems just too radical and counter-intuitive for some folks to get (or they get it only too well, because it jeopardizes their established business model). But this is not actually such a radical vision. There are already all sorts of profit-making enterprises that are building business models around open, non-proprietary platforms. IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux, the open-source operating system, is one of many prominent examples. So is Flickr, the photo-sharing website.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - 0 views
-
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
-
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
