IonOptix is proud to announce the release of the MyoStretcher, our new cardiomyocyte force measurement system. Facilitated by the arrival of IonOptix MyoTak, our bio-compatible cell adhesive, we've developed the MyoStretcher with a focus on simplicity, ease-of-use and reliability. The MyoStretcher includes all of the necessary components to stretch as well as record force in isolated myocytes. In addition to the sensitive force transducer, motorized micro-manipulators and all component fittings, we also offer an optional piezo-electric translator for programmable stretching and a kit to facilitate attachment of glass rods to the MyoStretcher arms.
165More
If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views
-
I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and “Open” form of Capitalism.
- ...162 more annotations...
-
‘Enterprise’ is defined as ‘any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Value”.
-
Pirsig’s approach Capital may be viewed as “Static” Value and Money as “Dynamic” Value. “Transactions” are the “events” at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which “Value judgments” are made based upon a “Value Unit”.
-
The result of these Value Events /Transactions is to create subject/object pairings in the form of data ie Who “owns” or has rights of use in What,
-
It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of “intellectual property”.
-
“The purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
-
The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
-
Static Value – which only becomes “Money”/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
-
the practice of Lending involves an incomplete exchange in terms of risk and reward: a Lender, as opposed to an Investor, has no interest in the outcome of the Loan, and requires the repayment of Principal no matter the ability of the Borrower to repay.
-
-
"The Lender has no interest in the outcome of the loan", i.e doesn't care what happens in the end. The Lender ins not interested in the economical outcome of the Lender-Loner relation. So in fact there is no real risk sharing. the only risk for the Lender is when the Loner doesn't pay back, which is not really a risk... In fact it is a risk for the small bank, who has to buy money from the central bank, but not for the central bank.
-
-
an “Object” circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a “Value Unit”.
-
in relation to Productive Capital relates to the extent of “property rights” which may be held over it thereby allowing individuals to assert “absolute” permanent and exclusive ownership - in particular in relation to Land
-
need for institutions which outlived the lives of the Members led to the development of the Corporate body with a legal existence independent of its Members
-
The key development in the history of Capitalism was the creation of the ‘Joint Stock’ Corporate with liability limited by shares of a ‘Nominal’ or ‘Par’ value
-
over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
-
Such “Closed” Shares of “fixed” value constitute an absolute and permanent claim over the assets and revenues of the Enterprise to the exclusion of all other “stakeholders” such as Suppliers, Customers, Staff, and Debt Financiers.
-
It has the characteristics of what biologists call a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ in the way that it allows Economic Value to be extracted from other stakeholders but not to pass the other way.
-
-
Capital most certainly is and always has been - through the discontinuity (see diagram) between:‘Fixed’ Capital in the form of shares ie Equity; and ‘Working’ Capital in the form of debt finance, credit from suppliers, pre-payments by customers and obligations to staff and management.
-
xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
-
All that is needed is a simple ‘Member Agreement’ – a legal protocol which sets out the Aims, Objectives. Principles of Governance, Revenue Sharing, Dispute Resolution, Transparency and any other matters that Members agree should be included. Amazingly enough, this Agreement need not even be in writing, since in the absence of a written agreement Partnership Law is applied by way of default.
-
The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended – as an ‘Open’ Corporate partnership.
-
it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
-
may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
-
-
no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
-
in an Enterprise constitute an infinitely divisible, flexible and scaleable form of Capital capable of distributing or accumulating Value organically as the Enterprise itself grows in Value or chooses to distribute it.
-
Within the OCP Capital and Revenue are continuous: to the extent that an Investee pays Rental in advance of the due date he becomes an Investor.
-
A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
-
the crippling factors in practical terms have been, inter alia: the liability to which Member partners are exposed from the actions of their co-partners on their behalf; limited ability to raise capital.
-
they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
-
The ‘new’ LLP was expressly created to solve the former problem by limiting the liability of Member partners to those assets which they choose to place within its protective ‘semi-permeable membrane’
-
However, the ability to configure the LLP as an “Open” Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
-
it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
-
would be divided among Members in accordance with the LLP Agreement. This means that all Members share a common interest in collaborating/co-operating to maximise the Value generated by the LLP collectively as opposed to competing with other stakeholders to maximise their individual share at the other stakeholders’ expense.
-
he ‘Commercial’ Enterprise LLP – where the object is for a closed group of individuals to maximise the value generated in their partnership. There are already over 7,000 of these.
-
-
the Profit generated in a competitive economy based upon shareholder value and unsustainable growth results from a transfer of risks outwards, and the transfer of reward inwards, leading to a one way transfer of Economic Value.
-
Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively – for mutual profit.
-
continuity between Capital as Static Value and Money as Dynamic Value which has never before been possible due to the dichotomy between the absolute/infinite and the absolute/finite durations of the competing claims over assets – “Equity” and “Debt”
-
Open Capital Partnership gives rise to a new form of Financial Capital of indeterminate duration. It enables the Capitalisation of assets and the monetisation of revenue streams in an entirely new way.
-
It is possible to envisage a Society within which individuals are members of a portfolio of Enterprises constituted as partnerships, whether limited in liability or otherwise.
-
‘Commercial’ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
-
It can only be replaced by another ‘emergent’ phenomenon, which is adopted ‘virally’ because any Enterprise which does not utilise it will be at a disadvantage to an Enterprise which does.
-
The ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is: capable of linking any individuals anywhere in respect of collective ownership of assets anywhere; extremely cheap and simple to operate; and because one LLP may be a Member of another it is organically flexible and ‘scaleable’. The phenomenon of “Open Capital” – which is already visible in the form of significant commercial transactions - enables an extremely simple and continuous relationship between those who wish to participate indefinitely in an Enterprise and those who wish to participate for a defined period of time.
-
Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate “shares” which constitute ‘Open’ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and ‘pre-distributive’: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the “Co-operative Advantage” based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to “rentier” Capitalists.
4More
Cell Tester Opens the Window of Discovery | Product Information | Articles - 0 views
-
Written by Lisa J Fulghum Physiologic Mechanisms in Cardiac Myocytes and Skeletal Muscle Cells The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool for cellular investiga
-
The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool for cellular investigation that can (without any changes) be used for one single living cell, for a small multi-cellular preparation and for single or larger skinned muscle strip preparations. Translational experiments from the single living cells to the intact multi-cellular level can be accomplished.
-
The Cell Tester offers: Integral microtweezer apparatus that facilitates cellular attachment Two integrated piezo manipulators are included Bio-compatible adhesive (MyoTak™) included Unique rotational stage that allows for easy cellular alignment, improved experimental throughput (shown in the image above) Ultra-quiet force transducer included Linear displacement motor stretches or compresses cells with 25nm precision Fits ANY inverted microscope Use native cuvette or ANY 35mm glass bottom dish
17More
Private 'Distributed Ledgers' Miss the Point of a Blockchain | Bank Think - 0 views
-
Some say it's a tool to enable transparency by ensuring that all members of a group receive cryptographically secured messages about participants’ activities
-
Some are even bold enough to predict that distributed ledgers will end the madness of managing multiple database and reconciliation structures.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
Distributed ledgers have primarily claimed to supplant the need for Bitcoin's mining process by introducing trust requirements among participants. These ledgers also promise users the immutability of Bitcoin without the need for expensive mining operations.
-
Blockchain technology is useful not because it offers efficiency in a world of message-passing but because it uses a complex process to settle value between untrusted parties.
-
But distributed ledgers do not offer users the ability to easily convert their tokens and messages into fungible units of value. Nor do distributed ledgers escrow value between parties that don't trust each other.
-
If a ledger is not a public resource, it will have the pressures incumbent to existing settlement systems plus the overhead of maintaining a shared database among competitors. What efficiency will remain thereafter remains dubious.
-
their institutional users will probably find it expedient to hash their private-chain transactions and use those hashes to create bitcoin addresses and then send tiny fractions of a bitcoin to them to register their data at a location that cannot be hacked or changed.
-
-
In other words, all private ledger/blockchains will lead to Bitcoin's Rome, driven there by its low cost and high public accountability.
31More
Innovation Canada: A Call to Action - Review of Federal Support to Research and Develop... - 1 views
-
Canada has a solid foundation on which to build success as a leader in the knowledge economy of tomorrow
-
innovation is the ultimate source of the long-term competitiveness of businesses and the quality of life of Canadians
- ...28 more annotations...
-
We heard that the government should be more focussed on helping innovative firms to grow and, particularly, on serving the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
-
innovation support is too narrowly focussed on R&D – more support is needed for other activities along the continuum from ideas to commercially useful innovation
-
whole-of-government program delivery vehicle – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC)
-
includes non-labour costs, such as materials and capital equipment, the calculation of which can be highly complex
-
the base for the tax credit should be labour-related costs, and the tax credit rate should be adjusted upward
-
facilitating access by such firms to an increased supply of risk capital at both the start-up and later stages of their growth.
-
encouragement of innovation in the Canadian economy should become a stated objective of procurement policies and programs.
-
Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) – a body with a whole-of-government focus that would oversee the realization of our proposed action plan, as well as serve as a permanent mechanism to promote the refinement and improvement of the government's business innovation programs going forward.
-
focus resources where market forces are unlikely to operate effectively or efficiently and, in that context, address the full range of business innovation activities, including research, development, commercialization and collaboration with other key actors in the innovation ecosystem
-
the closer the activity being supported is to market, and therefore the more likely it is that the recipient firm will capture most of the benefit for itself.
-
-
-
-
Still stack with the old paradigm of the "knowledge economy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy My opinion is that we're moving into a know-how economy.
-
rheingold's brainstorms: rheingoldian writing - 1 views
3More
Poly(methyl methacrylate) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
-
Names PMMA has been sold under a variety of brand names and generic names. It is often generically called acrylic glass,[6] although it is chemically unrelated to glass. It is sometimes called simply acrylic, although acrylic can also refer to other polymers or copolymers containing polyacrylonitrile. Other notable trade names include: Plexiglas
-
Acrylic paint essentially consists of PMMA suspended in water; however since PMMA is hydrophobic, a substance with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic groups needs to be added to facilitate the suspension.
-
Plastic optical fiber used for short distance communication is made from PMMA, and perfluorinated PMMA, clad with fluorinated PMMA, in situations where its flexibility and cheaper installation costs outweigh its poor heat tolerance and higher attenuation over glass fiber.
17More
INSO-5-2015 - 0 views
-
Scope: The scope is that of creating a Community, involving social innovators, researchers, citizens, policy makers, which will bring together on the one hand research actions and results and on the other implementation actions, new initiatives, and policy developments.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
setting up of a network of 'Local Facilitators' for a better dissemination and uptake at all levels.
1More
Food Security Information Network (FSIN) - 1 views
-
FSIN is a technical platform for exchanging expertise and best practices on food security and nutrition analysis. It promotes independent and consensus-based information and highlights critical data gaps. The result of a consultative process between government institutions and development partners interested in a new vision for country-led food security information systems, FSIN continues providing support at country and regional level. Demand-driven and flexible, it remains adaptable to changing contexts and evolving needs. Today, FSIN's work spans the effort of 16 global and regional partners committed to improving availability and quality of food security and nutrition analysis for better decision-making. It also facilitates the Global Network Against Food Crises's first pillar which is centered on better understanding global food crises.
75More
The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views
-
Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
- ...72 more annotations...
-
systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
-
unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011
-
even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field
-
The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work
-
ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States
-
The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation
-
if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students
-
Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
-
These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.
-
At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt
-
the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
-
growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
-
studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security
-
Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates
-
universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs
-
The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.
-
The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
-
The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
-
Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
-
The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.
-
Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
-
faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
-
it is critical to have active research laboratories, not only in elite public and private research institutions, but in non-flagship public universities, a diverse set of private universities, and four-year colleges
-
How then do increasingly beleaguered institutions of higher education support the research efforts of the faculty, given the reality that federal grants are going to be few and far between for the majority of faculty members? What are the practical steps institutions can take?
-
change the current model of providing large startup packages when a faculty member is hired and then leaving it up to the faculty member to obtain funding for the remainder of his or her career
-
universities invest less in new faculty members and spread their internal research dollars across faculty members at all stages of their careers, from early to late.
-
-
national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
-
Many prospective hires may find smaller startup packages palatable, if they can be convinced that the smaller packages are coupled with an institutional commitment to ongoing research support and more reasonable expectations about winning grants.
-
Smaller startup packages mean that in many situations, new faculty members will not be able to establish a functioning stand-alone laboratory. Thus, space and equipment will need to be shared to a greater extent than has been true in the past.
-
construction of open laboratory spaces and the strategic development of well-equipped research centers capable of efficiently servicing the needs of an array of researchers
-
Collaborative proposals and the assembly of research teams that focus on more complex problems can arise relatively naturally as interactions among researchers are facilitated by proximity and the absence of walls between laboratories.
-
The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
-
nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
-
-
-
relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
-
-
Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
-
some faculty members worried about firms dictating the research priorities of the university, pulling graduate students into proprietary research (which could limit what they could publish), and generally tugging the relevant faculty in multiple directions.
-
University faculty and businesspeople often do not understand each other’s cultures, needs, and constraints, and such gaps can lead to more mundane problems in university/industry relations, not least of which are organizational demands and institutional cultures
-
-
n addition to funding for research, universities can receive indirect benefits from such relationships. High-profile partnerships with businesses will underline the important role that universities can play in the economic development of a region.
-
Universities have to see firms as more than just deep pockets, and firms need to see universities as more than sources of cheap skilled labor.
-
We do not believe that research proposed and supervised by individual principal investigators will disappear anytime soon. It is a research model that has proven to be remarkably successful and enduring
-
However, we believe that the most vibrant scientific communities on university and college campuses, and the ones most likely to thrive in the new reality of funding for the sciences, will be those that encourage the formation of research teams and are nimble with regard to funding sources, even as they leave room for traditional avenues of funding and research.
43More
Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views
-
-
So here we have it, the new triarchy: - The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario) - The private sector, with the corporation and private property - The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)
-
- ...39 more annotations...
-
At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations
-
The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.
-
More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.
-
Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.
-
In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.
-
fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics
-
the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society
-
retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects
-
trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"
-
the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.
-
communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.
-
It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.
-
In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.
-
Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.
-
The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.
-
civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations
-
the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
-
Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.
-
if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.
33More
Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views
www.yesmagazine.org/...ng-together-is-the-new-sharing
ouishare sensorica loomio enspiral cobudget ethereum sovolve swarm ownership sharing paper
shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Jan 15
- No Cached
-
VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing
-
The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
- ...30 more annotations...
-
Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
-
Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations
-
once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
-
“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
-
It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.
-
From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
-
The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
-
And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
-
Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
-
“People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
-
As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
-
The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like
-
His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
-
Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
-
Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
-
Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
-
It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
-
The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
-
all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
-
A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
-
For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
-
For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
-
Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
-
Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
-
Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
-
A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
-
In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
29More
The Link Economy and Creditright - Geeks Bearing Gifts - Medium - 3 views
medium.com/...y-and-creditright-95f938b503be
contributory value accounting dimVal *jeffjarvis creditright
shared by Kurt Laitner on 07 May 15
- No Cached
-
News Commons used Repost as the basis of a content- and audience-sharing network among dozens of sites big and small in the state’s new ecosystem
-
Huffington Post and Twitter can get thousands of writers — including me — to make content for free because it brings us audience and attention.
- ...25 more annotations...
-
Consider an alternative to syndication. I’ll call it reverse syndication. Instead of selling my content to you, what say I give it to you for free? Better yet, I pay you to publish it on your site. The condition: I get to put my ad on the content. I will pay you a share of what I earn from that ad based on how much audience you bring me.
-
If content could travel with its business model attached, we could set it free to travel across the web, gathering recommendations and audience and value as it goes
-
She searched Google for “embeddable article” and up came Repost.us, already created by entrepreneur and technologist John Pettitt. Repost very cleverly allowed embeddable articles to travel with the creator’s own brand, advertising, analytics, and links.
-
First, he found that the overlap in audience between a creator’s and an embedder’s sites generally ran between 2 and 5 percent. That is to say, the embedders brought a mostly new audience to the creator’s content.
-
Instead, Pettitt found that click-through ran amazingly high: 5 to 7 percent — and these were highly qualified clicks of people who knew what they were going to get on the other side of a link
-
I call this creditright. We need a means to attach credit to content for those who contribute value to it so that each constituent has the opportunity to negotiate and extract value along the chain, so that each can gain permission to take part in the chain, and so that behaviors that benefit others in the chain can be rewarded and encouraged
-
Each creator’s ads traveled with its content — though that wasn’t necessarily optimal, because an ad for a North Jersey hairdresser wouldn’t perform terribly well with South Jersey readers brought in through embedding.
-
key factor in its failure: Repost could find many sites willing and eager to make their content embeddable. It didn’t find enough sites to embed the content.
-
But the embedders got nothing aside from the free use of content — content that was just a link away anyway
-
Our ultimate problem in media is that we do not have sufficient technical and legal frameworks for alternate business models.
-
That formula was the key insight behind Google: that links to content are a signal of its value; thus, the more links to a page from sites that themselves have more links, the more useful, relevant, or valuable that content is likely to be
-
Silicon Valley’s: Those people are your fans who are bringing value to you by sending you audiences and by contributing their creativity, and you’d be wise to build your businesses around making it easier, not harder, for them to get and share your content when and how they want it.
-
And so, we came to agree that we need new technological and legal frameworks flexible enough to enable multiple models to support creativity.
-
Hollywood’s side: People who download our content without buying it or who remix it without our permission — and the platforms that facilitate these behaviors — are stealing from us and must be stopped and punished.
-
Imagine you are a songwriter. You hear a street poet and her words inspire you to write a song about her, quoting her in the piece. You go to a crowdfunding platform — Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Patreon — to raise money for you to go into the studio and perform and distribute your song. Another songwriter comes along and remixes it, making a new version and also sampling from others’ songs. Both end up on YouTube and Soundcloud, on iTunes and Google Play. Audience members discover and share the songs. A particularly popular artist shares the remixed version on Twitter and Facebook and it explodes. A label has one of its stars record it. The star appears on TV performing it. A movie studio includes that song in a soundtrack. There are many constituents in that process: the subject, the songwriter, the patrons, the fans, the remixer, the distributor, the label, the star, the show, the studio, and the platforms. Each contributed value.
-
Each may want to recognize value — but not all will want cash. There are other currencies in play: The poet may want credit and fame; the songwriter may want to sell concert tickets; the patrons may want social capital for discovering and supporting a new artist; the remixer may want permission to remix; the platforms may want a cut of sales or of subscription revenue; the show may want audience and advertising; the studio will want a return on its investment and risk.
-
I’ve suggested they would be wiser to seek another currency from Google: data about the users, helping build better services for readers and advertisers and thus better businesses
-
We will need a way to attach metadata to content, recording and revealing its source and the contributions of others in the chain of continuing creation and distribution.
-
We need a marketplace to measure and value their contributions and a means to negotiate rewards and permissions
-
And we need a legal framework to allow the flexible exploration of new models, some of which we cannot yet imagine.
-
It took many more years for society to develop principles of free speech to balance the economic and political interests of those who would attempt to control a new tool of speech.
-
We must reimagine the business of media and news from the first penny, asking where value is created, who contributes to it, where it resides, and how to extract it
1More
Applications of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and Blockchain-enabled smart contra... - 2 views
-
Traceability concerns "the ability to record all required information relating to that which is under consideration, throughout its entire lifecycle, by means of recorded identifications" A consortium blockchain structure is adopted and supported by smart contracts for compliance code checking to improve construction quality management and better facilitate information sharing and enhanced mutual trust
2More
Open Insulin - 3 views
-
OS operates as both a legal entity (non-profit) and a philosophical paradigm for facilitating widespread access Primary focus is to research and develop the first open source protocols to produce insulin and insulin production hardware simply and economically.
-
Quote: We are looking to the precedents of the "Defensive Patent License" and the "Peer Production License", and the "Humanitarian Technology and Intellectual Property License Agreement."