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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Partner_State

partner state blockchainaccess_project paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16
       
      we call this a custodian
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16
       
      we call this a custodian
  • 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)
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16
       
      so where is direct democracy in all this?
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative.
  • becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole
  • phase transition and transformation will need to occur.
  • how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.
  • 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.
  • The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature
  • 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 becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production.
  • 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
  • the role of the state
  • “the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions.
  • 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.
  • stop enclosures
  • peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value
  • 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.
  • it fulfills three contradictory functions
  • Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business.
  • protect the whole system, under the domination of private business
  • protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements
  • protector of its own independent interests
  • 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.
  • key institutions and forms of property.
  • The state managed a public sector, under its own property.
  • 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
  • Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector
  • However, this configuration is changing,
  • the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
  • participatory politics
  • 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.
Kurt Laitner

Using Nondominion to Evolve from Local to Global Commons - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/e_from_Local_to_Global_Commons

nondominium p2pfoundation *chriscook *markfrazier *elenorostrom *valnoraleister

shared by Kurt Laitner on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • 5 “As” (Architecture, Adaptiveness, Accountability, Allocation and Access) in the governance of the global commons for the benefit of humanity."
  • the new framework focuses on veto rights – rather than recognized ownership claims
  • mutual benefit.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • an association of beneficiaries.
  • A trustee (custodian) for the CHM would be elected by the representatives
  • to oversee the legal operation of a collective entity
  • The representatives would also appoint a Manager, for a parallel partnership venture, to identify opportunities to develop the common pool resource in accord with a transparent revenue-sharing formula
  • Each representative would have power to exercise a veto with regard to the resource development proposal(s) circulated by the manager.
  • Once an agreed formula (non-vetoed by the countries) emerged for recognizing needed inputs, and for overall revenue-sharing, the manager of the nondominium partnership would arrange open tenders to seek economic partners to maximize the value of the common pool resources.
  • Revenues from ensuing activities would be distributed to the association members on the originally-agreed basis
  • Oversight of compliance would rest with the nondominium’s trustee
  • Ostrom’s key principles of successful collective choice agreements and monitoring by independent auditors.
  • Moreover, it does not confer the active power of control held under common law by a Trustee on behalf of beneficiaries,
  • the proposed negative or passive veto right of stewardship differs fundamentally from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under Condominium
  • The Caspian Partnership agreement would comprise a master framework agreement within which a myriad of associative agreements between the Caspian littoral nations individually or severally would be registered.”
  • encourage Ostrom’s user association-based systems of economic governance
  • "Areas recognized as being the heritage of mankind are defined by treaties as falling outside of nation-state jurisdiction and ownership, and are to be instead developed on a basis that benefits all human beings
  • the combination of Elinor Ostrom’s economic governance strategies with nondominium legal structures can lead to a new basis for common pool resources to be developed on a basis benefiting all of humanity.
Kurt Laitner

The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...12

Michel Bauwens p2p economy civil society partner state paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • under the ‘leadership’ of corporations and those members of our society who have access to capital.
  • Despite all democratic advances, the state forms have clearly been captured by private interests.
  • in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
  • continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life
  • Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
  • consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
  • infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’
  • democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      hmm
  • which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.
  • civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
  • democratically decide
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      ? our values need be expressed in every action within the matrix, not just when a 'vote' is held, in fact general democratic 'voting' should probably disappear
  • the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      there is no such thing
  • The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      !!!
  • Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
  • true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      really?
  • Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
  • Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
  • designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
  • mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
  • surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
  • ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.
  • because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
  • A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.
  • mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract
  • Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
     
    Good synopsis of the big picture by Michel
Kurt Laitner

Asia Times Online :: Nondominium - the Caspian solution - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...MI24Dj01.html

nondominium caspian sea Chris Cook description

shared by Kurt Laitner on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
  • Nondominium - the Caspian solution By Chris Cook Twenty-first century problems cannot be solved with 20th century solutions. Nowhere is that saying so true as in territorial disputes where oil and gas are involved. The riches of the Caspian Sea have been the subject of dispute for years, and relatively simple - but still intractable - binary issues between Iran and Russia are now multiplied by the conflicting claims of what are now five littoral Caspian nations: Azerbaijan, Iran; Kazakhstan; Russia and Turkmenistan. Their claims relate not just to rights on the Caspian Sea surface, but to rights in the sea, and above all to the rights to the treasures that lie under it. There are two 20th century legal approaches: international law //ad information var tf_adModel = "FEV"; var tf_adType = "InBannerVideo"; var tf_commonLocation = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/expand/"; //leave this variable as it is var tf_cookieFlash = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/TFSObj_v2s"; var tf_isExpansionHandle = true; var tf_floatAdScriptPath = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/floating/TF_FloatAdLibrary.js"; var tf_zoomFlash = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/floating/TFScale_v1"; var tf_banner = { "flag" : "inBanner", "width" : 300, "height" : 250, "widthExpanded" : 600, "heightExpanded" : 450, "widthFloating" : 950, "heightFloating" : 570, "iWin" : [ ], "flashFile" : "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/4523336/Glow_Banner_Square_Template_V201", extraFlashVars:"tf_showPanelonLoad=true&tf_phase2=false", "video_expand" : "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/4523336/video.flv", "imageFile" : 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  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

code.google.com/...guide_writing_scripts.html

google script apps Programming javascript tool tools infrastructure

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • Use the Script Editor to write and run scripts, to set triggers, and to perform other actions such as sharing scripts.
  • start the Script Editor from a Google Site
  • declares a function called myFunction()
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • You can perform the following tasks from the Script Editor.
  • pening, deleting, renaming, and saving scripts
  • Cutting, copying, and pasting text
  • Find and replace
  • Setting a time zone
  • scripts with time-based triggers
  • Running functions
  • Viewing log messages
  • revision history
  • write pseudocode first
  • When you're planning a script
  • narrative version of what the script needs to do.
  • A particular script is associated with one and only one Google Spreadsheet.
  • If you make a copy of the Spreadsheet, the script is also copied.
  • A particular Spreadsheet can have multiple scripts associated with it.
  • use the onOpen event handler in more than one script associated with a particular Spreadsheet, all scripts begin to execute when you open the Spreadsheet and the order in which the scripts are executed is indeterminate.
  • event handler is a function executed when a particular event takes place.
  • see Running Scripts in Response to an Event.
  • A script cannot currently call or create another script and cannot call functions in another script.
  • If you want to store the results of a function, you must copy them into a spreadsheet cell.
  • You can trigger Apps Script events from links that are embedded in a Google Site. For information about how to do this, see Using Apps Scrip in Your Ssite.
  • You can insert a script into a Site as a gadget.
  • you must grant permission for the script to run as a service.
  • You also designate whether only you can invoke the service or whether all members of your domain can invoke the service.
  • you can assign functions within the script any arbitrary name.
  • The instructions in a function must be enclosed within curly braces.
  • event handler
  • when a spreadsheet is opened,
  • when a script is installed
  • when a spreadsheet is edited
  • at times you choose
  • menu item
  • Using a drawing or button embedded in a Spreadsheet
  • Using a custom function that is referenced as a Spreadsheet function
  • Clicking the Run button
  • object-oriented programming languages
  • Google Apps Script uses the JavaScript language.
  • Operations
  • are performed using the objects and methods described in the API documentation.
  • An API provides pre-packaged code for standard tasks you need to accomplish in scripts or programs.
  • API includes objects that you use to accomplish tasks such as sending email, creating calendar entries
  • A method describes the behavior of an object and is a function attached to an object.
  • MailApp
  • use to create and send email
  • To send email, you invoke the sendEmail method and provide values for the method arguments.
  • Google Apps Script can access or retrieve data in different formats in different ways.
  • A custom function
  • is called directly from a cell in a Spreadsheet using the syntax =myFunctionName()
  • they cannot set values outside the cells
  • have some restrictions not shared by other functions
  • cannot send email
  • cannot operate on a Google Site
  • cannot perform any operations that require user authorization
  • cannot perform any operations that require knowledge of who the user
  • onInstall function
  • onOpen function
  • Other functions run when you run them manually or when they are triggered by clicking
  • Custom functions and formulas in the spreadsheet execute any time the entire Spreadsheet is evaluated or when the data changes in the function or formula's cell.
  • share the Spreadsheet
  • publish the script to the Script Gallery
  • spreadsheet template
  • the color coding for that line will not be correct
  • A script with incorrect syntax or other errors does not run.
  • The Script Editor includes a debugger.
  • view the current state of variables and objects created by a script while that script runs.
  • step through the code line by line as it executes or set breakpoints
  • The debugger does not work with custom functions, onEdit functions, event triggers, or scripts running as a service.
  • use the debugger to find errors in scripts that are syntactically correct but still do not function correctly.
  • Functions ending in an underscore (_), for example, internalStuff_(), are treated differently from other functions. You do not see these function in the Run field in the Script Editor and they do not appear in the Script Manager in the Spreadsheet. You can use the underscore to indicate that users should not attempt to run the function and the function is available only to other functions.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...the_meme_hustler

O'Reilly paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
  • the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
  • ...139 more annotations...
  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
  • It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • “free software.”
  • association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • “open source”
  • The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
  • O’Reilly’s bet wa
  • the “cloud”
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
  • O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
  • The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • “open to intellectual exchange”
  • “open to competition”
  • “For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
  • “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
  • The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
  • “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
  • Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
  • O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
  • Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views

www.panarchy.org/...livingsystems.html

Grier Miller living systems theory concepts paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
  • General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
  • a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
  • ...266 more annotations...
  • s. Euclidean space
  • metric space
  • topological space
  • Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
  • My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Physical or geographical space
  • Euclidean space
  • distance
  • moving
  • maximum speed
  • objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
  • friction
  • The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
  • information can flow worldwide almost instantly
  • Physical space is a common space
  • Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
  • They can give the location of objects in it
  • Conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Peck order
  • Social class space
  • Social distance
  • Political distance
  • life space
  • semantic space
  • Sociometric space
  • A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
  • space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
  • A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
  • These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
  • Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
  • interpersonal relations
  • one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
  • It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
  • fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
  • is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
  • or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
  • durations
  • speeds
  • rates
  • accelerations
  • irreversible unidirectionality of time
  • thermodynamics
  • negentropy
  • "time's arrow."
  • Matter and energy
  • Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
  • Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
  • kinetic energy
  • potential energy
  • rest mass energy
  • Mass and energy are equivalent
  • Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
  • Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
  • Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
  • It is one form of process.
  • information (H)
  • Transmission of Information
  • Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
  • Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
  • The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
  • .) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
  • . The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
  • Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
  • [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
  • meaning cannot be precisely measured
  • Information is the negative of uncertainty.
  • information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
  • The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
  • If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
  • Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
  • There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
  • organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
  • If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
  • The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
  • the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
  • entropy becomes a measure of the probability
  • Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
  • according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
  • therefore no principle of the conservation of information
  • The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
  • but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
  • . Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
  • transforms information into negative entropy
  • smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
  • calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
  • the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
  • in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
  • amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
  • In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
  • the flow of raw materials through societies
  • Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
  • I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
  • Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
  • transformations go on in living systems
  • One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
  • the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
  • Matter-energy and information always flow together
  • Information is always borne on a marker
  • . Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
  • If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
  • Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
  • example
  • example
  • develop normally
  • have appropriate information inputs in infancy
  • pairs of antonyms
  • one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
  • the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
  • System
  • A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
  • .The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
  • Conceptual system
  • Units
  • terms
  • Relationships
  • a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
  • expressed by words
  • or by logical or mathematical symbols
  • operations
  • The conceptual systems of science
  • observer
  • selects
  • particular sets to study
  • Variable
  • Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
  • conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
  • Indicator
  • an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
  • Function
  • a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
  • Any function is a simple conceptual system
  • Parameter
  • An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
  • The state of a conceptual system
  • the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
  • Formal identity
  • variables
  • varies comparably to a variable in another system
  • If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
  • Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
  • Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
  • A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • Concrete system
  • a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
  • Units
  • are also concrete systems
  • Relationships
  • spatial
  • temporal
  • spatiotemporal
  • causal
  • Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • patterns of relationships or processes
  • The observer of a concrete system
  • distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
  • physical proximity of its units
  • similarity of its units
  • common fate of its units
  • distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
  • Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
  • Variable of a concrete system
  • Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
  • which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
  • Examples
  • number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
  • A variable is intrasystemic
  • not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
  • The state of a concrete system
  • its structure
  • represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
  • Open system
  • Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
  • Closed system
  • impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
  • special case
  • No actual concrete system is completely closed
  • In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
  • Nonliving system
  • the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
  • Living system
  • a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
  • They all have the following characteristics:
  • open systems
  • inputs
  • throughputs
  • outputs
  • of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
  • maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
  • by taking in inputs
  • higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
  • than their outputs
  • The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
  • In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
  • To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
  • entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
  • They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
  • They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
  • or have a charter
  • blueprint
  • program
  • of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
  • may also include nonliving components.
  • They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
  • other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
  • Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
  • They can exist only in a certain environment
  • change in their environment
  • produces stresses
  • Totipotential system
  • capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
  • Partipotential system
  • does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
  • A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
  • parasitic
  • symbiotic
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 25 Jun 11
       
      The Exchange fime is a symbiotic system to SENSORICA
  • Fully functioning system
  • when it
  • Partially functioning system
  • it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
  • Abstracted system
  • Units
  • relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
  • Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
  • Relationships
  • The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
  • these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
  • The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
  • An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
  • representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
  • Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
  • are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
  • spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
  • their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
  • important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
  • Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
  • we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
  • intensity of interaction
  • in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
  • To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 25 Jun 11
       
      This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools. 
  • PARSONS
  • the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
  • culture
  • cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
  • The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
  • RUESCH
  • A social system is a behavioral system
  • It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
  • The roles are the units of a social system
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 25 Jun 11
       
      That is why we need a role system in SENSORICA
  • On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
  • What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
  • To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
  • system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
  • evolution
  • differentiation
  • growth
  • from earlier and simpler forms and functions
  • capacities for specializations and gradients
  • [action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
  • Abstracted versus concrete systems
  • One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
  • A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
  • If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
  • It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Francois Bergeron

Data-Oriented Contract.pdf - 1 views

docs.google.com/...edit

contract network legal law

shared by Francois Bergeron on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 18 Feb 13
     
    (submited by Bob) Computable Contracts This Article explains how and why firms are representing certain contractual obligations as computer data. terms. This Article explains how parties can effectively "translate" certain contractual criteria into a comparable set of computer-processable rules. This can have the effect of significantly reducing transaction costs associated with contract monitoring and compliance as compared to the traditional written-language contracting paradigm.
Francois Bergeron

WSU Animal Sciences - Dan Rodgers - 1 views

www.ansci.wsu.edu/...faculty.aspx

collaboration client

shared by Francois Bergeron on 07 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 07 Oct 12
     
    Buel (Dan) Rodgers  Associate Professor washington state university
Steve Bosserman

Scientist beams up a real Star Trek tricorder | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...ricorder-idUSBRE83C1FK20120413

sensor_technology open_source medical_applications

shared by Steve Bosserman on 13 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 13 Apr 12
     
    While it may sound like the stuff of science fiction, Jansen isn't the only one to take notice of just how useful a real functioning tricorder would be - especially as a medical tool. Telecommunications giant Qualcomm Inc this year launched the "Tricorder X-Prize Contest" with the slogan "Healthcare in the palm of your hand." Qualcomm hopes to motivate developers with a $10 million prize to make medical tricorders a reality. Wanda Moebus of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, who is not affiliated with Jansen or Qualcomm, told Reuters the X-Prize "is really cool," but cautioned that making a real medical tricorder device "would have to be measured on its safety and effect, like all other medical technologies." Jansen said he has been approached by "a couple of teams" about the X Prize, but added that his prototypes are more for science research than medical tools. Besides, he said he already is on to his next frontier, making a sort of "replicator," another "Star Trek" device that will create 3D objects and foods that are dimensional copies of real items. Jansen's "replicator" is a 3D printer, which in itself is not really new, but the scientist thinks about it in terms reminiscent of "Star Trek's" famous prologue. It's "like nothing we've ever seen before," Jansen said.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Laser Projector - SENSORICA - 0 views

www.sensorica.co/...laser-projector

laser_projector_project

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 16 Apr 15
     
    "Value accounting: [enter the project into the value accounting system] New system: You need to create a new project. Create processes associated to this project.   Old system (will be closing soon!!): you need to add the project to the following forms: time contributions form, financial contributions form, material contributions form.   "
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Blueprint for P2P Society: The Partner State & Ethical Economy - 1 views

www.shareable.net/...tate-and-the-ethical-economy-0

p2p paper Michel Bauwens

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 11 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • A new way to produce is emerging
  • through free association of peers
  • an interplay between three partners
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • A community of contributors
  • An enterpreneurial coalition
  • A set of for-benefit institutions which manage the "infrastructure of cooperation"
  • There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players.
  • The contributors create the use value
  • The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation which makes the project 'collectively' sustainable
  • The enterpreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors 'sustainable', by providing an income, and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.
  • Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy?
  • My answer will be an emphatic yes, and stronger yet, I will argue that we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Designing the Void | Management Innovation eXchange - 0 views

www.managementexchange.com/...40941

OVNi infrastructure OVN contribution accounting

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable.  You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable.  You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that. 
  • The system is not made up of artifacts but rather an elegantly designed void. He says “I prefer to use the analogy of rescuing an endangered species from extinction, rather than engaging in an invasive breeding program the focus should be on the habitat that supports the species. Careful crafting of the habitat by identifying the influential factors; removing those that are detrimental, together with reinforcing those that are encouraging, the species will naturally re-establish itself. Crafting the habitat is what I mean by designing the void.”
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • It is essential that autonomy is combined with responsibility.
  • staff typically manage the whole work process from making sales, manufacture, accounts, to dispatch
  • they are also responsible for managing their own capitalization; a form of virtual ownership develops. Everything they need for their work, from office furniture to high-end machinery will appear on their individual balance sheet; or it will need to be bought in from somewhere else in the company on a pay-as-you go or lease basis. All aspects of the capital deployed in their activities must be accounted for and are therefore treated with the respect one accords one’s own property.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes". 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      ...
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes".  
  • The result is not simply a disparate set of individuals doing their own thing under the same roof. Together they benefit from an economy of scale as well as their combined resources to tackle large projects; they are an interconnected whole. They have in common a brand, which they jointly represent, and also a business management system (the Say-Do-Prove system) - consisting not only of system-wide boundaries but also proprietary business management software which helps each take care of the back-end accounting and administrative processing. The effect is a balance between freedom and constraint, individualism and social process.
  • embodiment of meaning
  • But culture is a much more personal phenomenon
  • Culture is like climate- it does not exist in and of itself- it cannot exist in a vacuum, it must exist within a medium.
  • underlying culture
  • Incompatibility between the presenting culture and the underlying one provide a great source of tension
  • The truth of course is that when tension builds to a critical level it takes just a small perturbation to burst the bubble and the hidden culture reveals itself powered by the considerable pent-up energy.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014. 
  • Consider again the idea that for the health of an endangered species; the conditions in their habitat must be just right. In business, the work environment can be considered analogous to this idea of habitat.
  • A healthy environment is one that provides a blank canvas; it should be invisible in that it allows culture to be expressed without taint
  • The over-arching, high-level obligations are applied to the organization via contractual and legal terms.
  • But it is these obligations that the traditional corporate model separates out into functions and then parcels off to distinct groups. The effect is that a clear sight of these ‘higher’ obligations by the people at the front-end is obstructed. The overall sense of responsibility is not transmitted but gets lost in the distortions, discontinuities and contradictions inherent in the corporate systems of hierarchy and functionalization.
  • employees are individually rewarded for their contribution to each product. They are not “compensated” for the hours spent at work. If an employee wants to calculate their hourly rate, then they are free to do so however, they are only rewarded for the outcome not the duration of their endeavors.
  • Another simplification is the application of virtual accounts (Profit and Loss (P&L) account and Balance Sheet) on each person within the business.
  • The company systems simply provide a mechanism for cheaply measuring the success of each individual’s choices. For quality the measure is customer returns, for delivery it is an on-time-and-in-full metric and profit is expressed in terms of both pounds sterling and ROI (return on investment).
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      They have a value accounting system. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      They have a value accounting system. 
  • The innumerable direct links back to an external reality -like the fragile ties that bound giant Gulliver, seem much more effective at aligning the presenting culture and the underlying embodied culture, and in doing so work to remove the existing tension.
  • With a culture that responds directly to reality, the rules in the environment can be “bounding” rather than “binding”- limiting rather than instructive; this way individual behavior need not be directed at all. The goal is to free the individual to express himself fully through his work, bounded only by the limits of the law. With clever feedback (self-referencing feedback loops) integrated into the design, the individuals can themselves grow to collectively take charge of the system boundaries, culture and even the environment itself, always minded of the inherent risks they are balancing, leaving the law of the land as the sole artificial boundary.
  • the conventional company, which, instead of rewarding enterprise, trains compliance by suppressing individual initiative under layer upon layer of translation tools.
  • apply accountability to the individual not command-and-control.
  • without the divisive and overbearing management cabal the natural reaction of humans is to combine their efforts
  • a new member of staff at Matt Black Systems
  • recruited by another staff member (sponsor) and they will help you learn the basics of the business management system- they will help you get to know the ropes.
  • jobs are passed to new staff members, a royalty payment can be established on the work passed over.
  • Along with that job you will be given a cash float (risk capital), P&L Account, a Balance Sheet and computer software to help plan and record your activities. Your operation is monitored by your sponsor to see if you increase the margin or volume, and so establish a sustainable operation. Training and mentoring is provided to support the steep learning curve - but without removing the responsibility of producing a return on the sponsor’s risk capital.
  • You will, in the meantime be looking to establish some of your own work for which you will not have to pay a commission or royalty to your sponsor and this will provide you with more profitable operations such that eventually you might pass back to the sponsor the original operation, as it has become your lowest margin activity. It will then find its way to a new employee (along with the associated Balance Sheet risk capital) where the process is repeated by the sponsor.[4]
  • Remuneration for staff is calibrated in a way that reflects the balance of different forces around ‘pay’
  • there is an obligation upon the company to pay a minimum wage even if the profitability of the operation does not support this
  • there are therefore two aspects of the basic pay structure: one is “absolute” and reflects the entrepreneurial skill level of the employee according to a sophisticated grading scale
  • A further 20% of the original profit will be paid into his risk capital account, which will be his responsibility to deploy in any way he sees fit as part of his Balance Sheet. Of the three remaining 20% slices of the original profit, one is paid out as corporation tax, another as a dividend to the shareholders and the last retained as collective risk capital on the company’s balance sheet- a war chest so to speak.
  • Julian Wilson and Andrew Holm sell products / services to their staff (such as office space and software) they have an identical customer/supplier relationship with the other employees.
  • Naturally there are some people that can’t generate a profit. The sponsor’s risk capital will eventually be consumed through pay. After a process of rescue and recovery- where their shortcomings are identified and they are given the opportunity to put them right, they either improve or leave, albeit with a sizeable increase in their skills.
  • there is a gradual process of accustomisation; the void of the new employee is surrounded by others dealing with their particular activities, offering both role models and operations they may wish to relinquish. One step at a time the new employee acquires the skills to become completely self-managing, to increase their margins, to make investments, to find new business, to become a creator of their own success. Ultimately, they learn to be an entrepreneur.
  • responsible autonomy as an alternative vision to traditional hierarchy
  • Matt Black Systems it is not simply commitment that they targeted in their employees, rather they aim for the specific human qualities they sum up as magic- those of curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality).
  • a new form of association of individuals working together under the umbrella of a company structure: a kind of collective autonomy
  • The business is called Matt Black Systems, based in Poole in dorset
  • Turning an organisation on its head- removing all management, establishing a P&L account and Balance Sheet on everyone in the organisation and having customers payment go first into the respective persons P&L account has revolutionised this company. 
  • This innovative company’s approach views business success as wholly reliant upon human agency, and its wellspring at the individual level.
  • problem (of unnecessarily high overheads placed on production) that arguably is behind the decline in western manufacturing
  • over-managed business
  • Autonomy Enables Productivity
  • organizational design brings to light the unconscious socio-philosophical paradigm of the society in which it exists, organizational development points to how change occurs.
  • a mechanistic approach to organization
  • scientific management employs rationalism and determinism in pursuit of efficiency, but leaves no place for self-determination for most people within the system.
  • Command and Control
  • today, a really “modern” view of an organization is more likely to be depicted in terms that are akin to an organism.
  • When it comes to getting work done, the simple question is: are people the problem or the solution?
  • the Taylorist approach may be more real in theory than in practice: its instrumentalist view of the workforce is cursed by unintended consequences. When workers have no space for their own creative expression, when they are treated like automata not unique individuals, when they become demotivated and surly, when they treat their work as a necessary evil; this is no recipe for a functional organization.
  • The natural, human reaction to this is unionization, defiance and even outright rebellion; to counter this, management grows larger and more rigid in pursuit of compliance, organizations become top heavy with staff who do not contribute directly to the process of value creation but wield power over those who do.
  • voluntary slavery of ‘wagery’
  • Even when disgruntled employees strike free and start their own businesses they seem unable to resist the hegemony of the conventional command-and-control approach
  • Making the transition involves adherence to a whole new sociology of work with all the challenging social and psychological implications that brings.
  • first principal that people in the business have the ability to provide the solution
  • In the “theory of constraints” the goal is to align front-line staff into a neat, compact line for maximum efficiency. Surely the most considered approach is to have front-line staff self-align in pursuit of their individual goals?
  • The removal of hierarchy and specialization is key to a massive improvement in both profitability and productivity. In summary: there are no managers in the company, or foremen, or sales staff, or finance departments; the company is not functionally compartmentalized and there is no hierarchy of command. In fact every member of staff operates as a virtual micro-business with their own Profit & Loss account and Balance Sheet, they manage their own work and see processes through from end to end
  • Formal interaction between colleagues takes place via “customer and supplier” relationships.
  • autonomy enables productivity
  • if one creates a space in which staff pursue their own goals and are not paid by the hour, they will focus on their activities not the clock; if they are not told what to do, they will need to develop their own initiative; if they are free to develop their own processes, they will discover through their own creative faculties how to work more productively- in pursuit of their goals
  • The human qualities which are of greatest potential value to the business are: curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality)
  • These qualities are the very ones most likely to be withheld by an individual when the environment is ‘wrong’.
  • Any elements in the business environment that undermine the autonomy and purpose of the individual will see the above qualities withheld
  • High on the list of undermining elements come power-hierarchy and over-specialization
  • the responsibility of the individual is formalized, specified and restricted. An improved system is not one where responsibility is distributed perfectly but rather one where there is simply no opportunity for responsibility to be lost (via the divisions between the chunks). Systems must be reorganized so responsibility -the most essential of qualities -is protected and wholly preserved.
  • Matt Black Systems believe this can only be done by containing the whole responsibility within an individual, holding them both responsible and giving them ‘response-ability’
  • The experience of Matt Black Systems demonstrates that radical change is possible
  • productivity is up 300%, the profit margin is up 10%[3], customer perception has shifted from poor to outstanding, product returns are at less than 1%, “on time and in full” delivery is greater than 96%, pay has increased 100%.
  • staff develop broader and deeper skills and feel greater job security; they get direct feedback from their customers which all go to fuel self-confidence and self-esteem.
  • the staff manage themselves
  • “only variety can absorb variety”.
  • What is particular about their story is that behind it is a very consciously crafted design that surrounds the individualism of each person with hard boundaries of the customer, the law and the business. It is these boundaries rather than the instructive persona of ‘the boss’ that gives rise to the discipline in which individuals can develop. Autonomy is not the same as freedom, at least not in the loose sense of ‘do as you please’. An autonomous person is a person who has become self-governing, who has developed a capacity for self-regulation, quite a different notion from the absence of boundaries. Indeed, it is with establishing the right boundaries that the business philosophy is most concerned. The company provides the crucible in which the individual can develop self-expression but the container itself is bounded. Wilson calls this “designing the void”. This crucible is carefully constructed from an all-encompassing, interconnecting set of boundaries that provide an ultimate limit to behaviours (where they would fall foul of the law or take risks with catastrophic potential). It is an illusion to think, as a director of a company, that you are not engaged in a process of social conditioning; the basis of the culture is both your responsibility and the result of your influence. The trick is to know what needs to be defined and what needs to be left open. The traditional authoritarian, controlling characters that often dominate business are the antithesis of this in their drive to fill this void with process, persona and instruction. Alternatively, creating an environment that fosters enterprise, individuals discover how to be enterprising.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Social... - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...31

marketing paper p2p

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • the development of marketing is sensible to its environment and is hence already self-limiting itself according to the previously mentioned legal and social framework
  • neuromarketing
  • explore new inner dynamics of marketing, new directions in the field of possibilities offered by the current organology and its articulations between techniques and social organization in order to influence and shape marketing as an associative force – in opposition to its current dissociative force – in the larger psychic, social and technic organology
  • ...70 more annotations...
  • find new ways of efficiency
  • arbitration between efficiency and care
  • a global thinking of the problem
  • Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?
  • The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower
  • empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production
  • Should marketing stop using psychopower?
  • marketing ethics guidelines
  • transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • putting freedom as a criteria of morality
  • the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom
  • neurotechniques – to capture the attention
  • psychotechniques – to attempt to create motivation
  • Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits
  • advertising
  • denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions
  • right to avoid attention capture by advertising
  • progress made in cognitive sciences proving that
  • reward system being abnormally stimulated
  • Advertisements exploit
  • vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors
  • “if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)
  • What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser
  • liberty of non-reception
  • would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information
  • Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm
  • Economy of contribution and peer production
  • An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.
  • example
  • is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities
  • minimize the gap between the producer and consumer
  • blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs
  • The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm
  • change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy
  • consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention
  • with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation
  • Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.
  • the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.
  • To be free
  • 1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.
  • 2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.
  • 3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
  • 4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
  • 5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.
  • This is a profoundly game-changing approach
  • big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm
  • VRM system working as a marketplace
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.
  • 3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process
  • Promoting the end of advertisement
  • means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement
  • Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means
  • But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities
  • Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police
  • a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system
  • Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.
  • 3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power
  • Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers
  • self-regulative function
  • a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.
  • the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest
  • Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,
  • long-term valuable strategic choice
  • long term satisfyingly high ranking
  • It would be utopic to think that the “being cool” marketing
  • would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.
  • This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.
  • the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations
Francois Bergeron

A model for device development | Researchers at the Stanford University Program in Biod... - 2 views

medicaldesign.com/...model_device_development_0908

medical device development

shared by Francois Bergeron on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • clinical need.
  • estimated market size and clinical impact associated with each.
  • prior art related
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • barriers to further development exist from an intellectual property perspective
  • Inventors must also determine if they are in a position to efficiently seize the market opportunity.
  • regulatory considerations, reimbursement strategies, intellectual property, and business development objectives. This leads to Phase I of the development model.
  • R&D in Phase II is responsible for generating early concepts. Brainstorming sessions are often held during this stage of development with members of R&D, marketing, and physician consultants. Computational analyses, such as stress and flow studies, are conducted to further understand the behavior of a proposed device. The team often develops a 3D CAD model of a proposed device
  • Francois Bergeron on 10 May 12
     
    medical device development steps
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Is it time to change the way we work? | What Would The Internet Do? - 2 views

www.wwtid.com/...time-to-change-the-way-we-work

document post blog value networks new economy

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • company culture
  • how important some values are for them to prosper and generate value
  • We are seeing some organization being more successful in creating a culture than others
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • some of the principles of the Internet culture are actually becoming critical in creating successful organizations
  • the Internet culture is setting the foundation for a different way of generating economic and social value.
  • set of values that I believe are relevant for all organization wishing to reinvent their model to be more successful, attract talent and be more sustainable.
  • Resilience
  • more chances to successfully face complexity, speed and unpredictability
  • Bouncing back is more valuable than being tough.
  • establish a circle of trust
  • resources from your network, from outside, rather than stocking them.
  • Compasses (instead of maps)
  • through clear principles and transparency.
  • Pull (instead of push)/ Smart crowd (instead of experts)
  • post-sale structure
  • Portfolios (instead of planning)/ Practice (instead of theory)
  • Prototype, and leverage the ecosystem to fail fast (or scale rapidly).
  • testing less than perfect products into a receptive and responsive ecosystem
  • Systems (instead of objects)
  • the social components, and the interdependence of people, groups and objects.
  • a new set of currency that will merge the intrinsic value with the extrinsic social components associated with it.
  • groups of people can produce a better outcome than single individuals.
  • planning everything excludes the unexpected
  • keeping the eyes open
  • Encourage rebellion (instead of compliance)/Constant learning (instead of education)
  • asking questions and not accepting the traditional answers as given
  • structurally encouraged to question in order to guarantee future development and innovation
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

code.google.com/...guide_user_interfaces.html

google script apps Programming javascript tool tools infrastructure

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • Google Apps Script provides you with the ability to build a user interface for displaying or capturing information.
  • Viewing the Available User Interface Elements
  • Your scripts can display the user interface in two ways:
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • from a Spreadsheet
  • from a Site
  • As a stand-alone servlet
  • Deciding Whether to Run a Script from a Spreadsheet or as a Service
  • The built-in code autocomplete functionality in the editor requires you to type the trailing period that follows app.
  • Plan the script. What tasks should the script accomplish?
  • Write down the specific information you want to display to or collect from your users.
  • Draw the user interface
  • Determine what the script and interface should do in response to any user input.
  • Determine the conditions for exiting the script.
  • you need a UiApp application object to contain the user interface elements. After you create the UiApp application object, you can add buttons, dialog boxes, panels, and other elements to the UiApp application object.
  • The general syntax for these operations is as follows:
  • To create a UiApp application object, use the syntax var your_application_object_name = UiApp.createApplication();
  • To create a user interface element and associate it with your UiApp application object, use the syntax var your_ui_element_name= your_application_object_name.createElement_Name();.
  • To add one user interface element to another
  • use the syntax your_ui_element_name1.add(your_ui_element_name2);
  • a button with the text Press Me on it:
  • creates a vertical panel.
  • other kinds of panels
  • pop-up panels, stack panels, focus panels, form panels, and so on.
  • code for displaying your button on the panel:
  • add the panel to the application:
  • nstruct Google Apps Script to display the interface elements:
  • You can create the user interface elements in any order.
  • the display order
  • Creating the elements and adding them to your application are separate steps requiring separate instructions.
  • a short script that does nothing but display a panel with a button on it.
  • You can chain together setter methods
  • sets its title
  • set the size of the object:
  • how to use Grid objects and the setWidget method to create a more complex layout and also how to create text boxes and label them.
  • To make a user interface useful, you need the ability to update a Spreadsheet with information a user enters from the interface.
  • a short script that responds to an action in the interface by updating the Spreadsheet.
  • looping structure in the script to keep the panel displayed and active
  • Server-side means that the actions are performed by a server
  • same script, with functions added that enable the form to be used multiple times before a user chooses to exit.
  • script collects some information from text fields on a panel and writes that information into the Spreadsheet.
  • You can make a script's user interface available to users from inside a Spreadsheet or Site or by running it separately as a service.
  • how to make the user interface as a service.
  • A script that provides a stand-alone user interface must invoke the doGet(e) function or the doPost(e) function for an HTML form submit.
  • A script that provides the user interface from the Spreadsheet invokes doc.show(app).
  • The doGet(e) function takes the argument e, passing in the arguments for the user interface, including the user name of the person invoking the script.
  • After you write the script, you publish it as a service. During the publishing process, you define who has access to the script.
  • In a Google Apps domain, you can publish the script so that only you have access or so that everyone in the domain has access.
  • In a Google consumer account, you can publish the script so that only you have access or so that everyone in the world has access.
  • Updating a Spreadsheet from the User Interface, the user interface is displayed from the Spreadsheet where the script is stored. The following code defines how the user interface is displayed:
  • Here's the skeleton code for displaying a user interface as a stand-alone service:
  • some aspects of the two ways to display a user interface.
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