Group items tagged

Tools for Conviviality. Ivan Illich, 1973. A very Important philosopher and a book about the idea of making tools which allow people to be autonomous and build links between users.

Quote page 109 of this PDF It is now clear that users often innovate, and that they often freely reveal their innovations. But what about informal cooperation among users? What about organized cooperation in development of innovations and other matters? The answer is that both flourish among user-innovators. Informal user-to-user cooperation, such as assisting others to innovate, is common. Organized cooperation in which users interact within communi- ties, is also common. Innovation communities are often stocked with use- ful tools and infrastructure that increase the speed and effectiveness with which users can develop and test and diffuse their innovations.

Vinck Dominique. Les objets intermédiaires dans les réseaux de coopération scientifique. Contribution à la prise en compte des objets dans les dynamiques sociales. In: Revue française de sociologie. 1999, 40-2. pp. 385-414. This paper explains the importance of "intermediate tools" as mediator of social relations, how it embeder the links among parties. Really useful to justify our consortium and a DIWO Lab environment.

"E-democracy is a combination of the words electronic and democracy. In an evolving political and technological landscape here on Earth, many are fighting over the definition of this term. But a logical definition adheres to the word itself: a democracy that has "electronic" characteristics. E-democracy does not equal e-government, but is a form of it. It does not equal "wikigovernment" but is a form of it. Of course, defining "e-democracy" can be just as difficult as defining democracy when you get down to brass tacks. But because the Internet connects millions of people and can be a tool for governance, e-democracy has the potential to become one of the first forms of large-scale direct democracy on Earth. Canada and Sweden are now both trying to enact forms of this system of government, by working within the traditional political process to elect e-democracy friendly politicians, with the ultimate goal of overhauling the entire system of their nations' governments. Sweden's party Aktiv Demokrati aims to build a genuine direct democracy; Canada's Online Party has taken a milder approach with citizens in a more advisory capacity."

"Sociocracy is a system of governance, using consent-based decision making among equivalent individuals and an organizational structure based on cybernetic principles.[1] The most recent implementation of sociocracy by Gerard Endenburg,[2] also known as Circular Organizing, was developed as a new tool for governance of private enterprise, but has been adopted in many different kinds of organizations including public, private, non-profit and community organizations as well as professional associations."

"Consensus Democracy focuses on the need to reengineer the approach to local decision making in the 21st Century. It assumes the present system which emphasizes political parties and simple ideology is unable to be effective in a fast-paced age in which constant change creates a new level of interdependency and complexity. It assumes that the old idea of checks and balances will create tremendous gridlock in a society increasingly diverse. "

"Even without considering radical projects like all the Open Money and Metacurrency initiatives that proposes new forms of currencies, we can think more about further joining existing currencies with microcredit certificates like the Open Source Hardware Reserve Bank ones. There is the need of accurate, portable and shareable tools of reputation ranking, able to interconnect different local contexts and attached to existing currencies. The Open Hardware still needs proper open-content licenses, since with current licenses we can protect the design but not the manufactured product or forks. And Open Hardware projects will have the need of warranties and conformance marks about the proper function of the manufactured product. Why don't we use the microcredit certificates for these tasks as well? We could design microcredit certificates to act as a conformance mark, warranty and license certificates as well: only the community can issue them and use them for its own self-organization." (http://www.openp2pdesign.org/2011/open-design/business-models-for-open-hardware/) "

Here is 10 Free and useful computer-aided design software. Computer-aided design (CAD) is a combination of computer programs and systems that allow engineers and architects to design detailed two- or three-dimensional models of physical objects, such as mechanical parts, buildings, and molecules. It specially used to design curves and figures in two-dimensional ("2D") space; or curves, surfaces, and solids in three-dimensional ("3D") objects. There are so many "free" CAD programs out there but only a handful are either really free or useful. 

AMEPLM
Advanced Platform for Manufacturing Engineering and Product Lifecycle Management -Develop an open engineering platform based on existing tools and libraries, by special consideration of open-source software

"Computer-aided design (CAD), also known as computer-aided design and drafting (CADD) , is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation. Computer Aided Drafting describes the process of drafting with a computer. CADD software, or environments, provides the user with input-tools for the purpose of streamlining design processes; drafting, documentation, and manufacturing processes. CADD output is often in the form of electronic files for print or machining operations. The development of CADD-based software is in direct correlation with the processes it seeks to economize; industry-based software (construction, manufacturing, etc.) typically uses vector-based (linear) environments whereas graphic-based software utilizes raster-based (pixelated) environments. "

Concerning the abstraction of industrialized objects and devices, here the quote of German Sociologist Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, 1919. Quote: "Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may 'count' on the behavior of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools".

Here we can see that Opensource Hardware" is a n expression mostly used for computer-related hardware. It is intersting to evaluate if OSE and wikispeed should relate to other branches of opensources, non-computerized ones ?

A selection of stats in English : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogaz ... and in French and German too look at the page, the guy made a kind of micro SoA and posted it in his blog. You also have a link to a tool in German to calculate the production of a biogas digester