Melancholy Elephants - 0 views
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Kurt Laitner on 05 Apr 13pithy short story dealing with re-use, attribution, innovation, the idea of pure invention
trusting people because of who they are personally vs. who they are professionally
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Leading 3-D printer firms to merge in $403M deal - 1 views
The Energy Efficiency of Trust & Vulnerability: A Conversation | Switch and Shift - 0 views
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also need to trust systems
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our ability to understand the context we are in
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How much we need to trust others depends on the context,
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how much we trust ourselves,
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our own resources
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When we trust, we re-allocate that energy and time to getting things done and making an impact
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If the alternative is worse, we might opt for no trust
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Trust is a tool to assess and manage (reduce and/or increase) risk, depending on the situation.
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Trusting someone implies making oneself more vulnerable
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When we don’t trust, we exert a lot of energy to keep up our guard, to continually assess and verify. This uses a lot of energy and time.
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the more information and/or experience we have, the better we can decide whether or not to trust
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As we let ourselves be vulnerable, we also leave ourselves more open to new ideas, new ways of thinking which leads to empathy and innovation.
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Being vulnerable is a way to preserve energy
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trusting is efficient….and effective
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the more we can focus on the scope and achievement of our goals
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It lets us reallocate our resources to what matters and utilize our skills and those around us to increase effectiveness…impact.
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If we are working together, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘done’. When are we done, what does that look like?
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make sure we hear and see the same thing (reduce buffers around our response)
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Strategic sloppiness is a way to preserve energy
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Build on the same shared mental models
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use the same language
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As the ability to replicate something has become more of a commodity, we are increasingly seeing that complex interactions are the way to create ‘value from difference’ (as opposed to ‘value from sameness’).
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allow for larger margins of error in our response and our acceptance of others
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higher perfection slows down the tempo
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We can’t minimize the need to be effective.
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Efficient systems are great at dealing with complicated things – things that have many parts and sequences, but they fall flat dealing with complex systems, which is most of world today.
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“Control is for Beginners”
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timing
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intuition
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judgment
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experience
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ability to look at things from many different perspective
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to discover, uncover, understand and empathize is critical
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focus on meaning and purpose for work (outcomes) instead of just money and profit (outputs)
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When we have a common goal of WHY we want to do something, we are better able to trust
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When we never do the same thing or have the same conversation twice, it becomes much more important to figure out why and what we do than how we do it (process, which is a given)
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spot on conversation on *trust, I see creating a trustful environment quickly among strangers as a key capability of an OVN, we need to quickly get past the need to protect and verify and move on to making purpose and goals happen
Prime Deals - 0 views
How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines | MIT Technology Review - 0 views
shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jan 13
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how to deal with recommendations for objects whose value diminishes with the number of people who use it.
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Clearly the resulting distribution of these different types of particles is entirely different.
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The analogy here is with goods that any number of people can share or that only one person can have.
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explore the space between these extremes
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a single object/state can be shared with a relatively small number of users/particles
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Preventing oversubscription ensures that the population of users sample a wider range of DVDs, which in turn provides a broader range of recommendations.
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Retailers are not just interested in renting DVDs or selling books or whatever. They want to maximise profits.
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Interesting discussion of rival and nov-rival goods recommendations engine. Goes to scarcity vs abundance, how to manage deamnd for scarce goods.
Tablets on Deal Extreme - 1 views
Key management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views
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Key management
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his includes dealing with the generation, exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys.
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Key management concerns keys at the user level, either between users or systems.
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This is in contrast to key scheduling; key scheduling typically refers to the internal handling of key material within the operation of a cipher.
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it involves system policy, user training, organizational and departmental interactions, and coordination between all of these elements.
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Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
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A public key infrastructure is a type of key management system that uses hierarchical digital certificates to provide authentication, and public keys to provide encryption. PKIs are used in World Wide Web traffic, commonly in the form of SSL and TLS.
DealExtreme - 2 views
3.6V~16V 925mA Constant Current LED Driver Board for Cree and SSC LEDs (4-pack) (SKU 32... - 0 views
Digital Reality | Edge.org - 0 views
edge.org/...il_gershenfeld-digital-reality
*neilgershenfeld fab labs IoT molecular computing nano star trek replicator
shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
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When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts
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first attribute is metrology that comes from the parts
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digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces
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In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
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is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
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That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts
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Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors
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detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
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The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.
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The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts
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The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
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On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process
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a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself
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There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
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There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology
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By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
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Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.
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Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today
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What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person
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The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs
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the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless
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It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it
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At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
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To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything
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conducting, resistive, insulating.
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The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.
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Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.
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We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans
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You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.
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Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
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But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials
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because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
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Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do
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And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble.
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irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring
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At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard
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We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude.
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Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university
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Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."
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Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."
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Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools
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The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally
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You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
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To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
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There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.
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Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
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If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before
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You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.
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What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?
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It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing
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2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs
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To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.
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But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
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In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
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It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before
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There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out
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The bits come and go, globally connected for knowledge, but the atoms stay in the city.
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instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally
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this may solve greece's problem, walk away from debt, you can't buy other people's (country's) stuff anymore, so make it all yourself
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The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use
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Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab
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it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
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the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever
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Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs
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To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism
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I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility
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The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally
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My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people
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The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale
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My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower
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If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry
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Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do
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The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science
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If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality
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I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.
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When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.
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the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside
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you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know
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For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.
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what is heavy is local, what is light is global, and increasingly manufacturing is being recreated along this principle
Tyddyn Teg - Tyddyn Teg - 0 views
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The Tyddyn Teg cooperative has eight members and some lovely volunteer helpers. We share a commitment to the importance of quality local food and the challenges of sustainability in the twenty first century. We see ourselves as part of the global family of small farmers and aim to become a practice based centre for research and education for sustainable local food production. Our primary objective has been to maintain vegetable production and meet the needs and expectations of our veg box customers. In this we have had a great deal of help and advice from John and Pippa (who were the previous owners of the farm). We are also supplying vegetables to Moelyci Shop and Dimensions Shop in Bangor. Our aims over the coming years are: Expand and improve our vegetable growing Develop the Farm to support WWOOFing Create new spaces for events Open opportunities to have a small scale restaurant/cafe on the farm Establish a luxury camping business where people can come and stay Provide a living wage to every member of the cooperative
How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views
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role of p2p movement
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historical role
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horizontalisation of human relationships
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allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
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a huge sociological shift
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new life forms, social practices and human institutions
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emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
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ethical revolution
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openness
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participation
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inclusivity
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cooperation
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commons
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the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
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political expressions
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the movement has two wings
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constructive
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building new tools and practices
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resistance to neoliberalism
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we are at a stage of emergence
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difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
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At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
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Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
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peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
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Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
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the horizontal meets the vertical
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mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations
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For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
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Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
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In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
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Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
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requires a clever adaptation
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use for our own benefit
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The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
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platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
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without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.
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p2p activists should work on both fronts
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using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
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The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
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So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
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One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
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we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
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No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
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the p2p dynamics
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the new networked culture
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the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
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the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs, and ignore externalities.
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we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
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abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
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open design community
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will inherently design for sustainability
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for inclusion
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conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
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entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
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The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
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accelerated end of capitalism
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Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
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I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
Designing the Void | Management Innovation eXchange - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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It is essential that autonomy is combined with responsibility.
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staff typically manage the whole work process from making sales, manufacture, accounts, to dispatch
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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.
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So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes".
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So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes".
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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.
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embodiment of meaning
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But culture is a much more personal phenomenon
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Culture is like climate- it does not exist in and of itself- it cannot exist in a vacuum, it must exist within a medium.
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underlying culture
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Incompatibility between the presenting culture and the underlying one provide a great source of tension
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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.
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SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014.
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SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014.
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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.
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A healthy environment is one that provides a blank canvas; it should be invisible in that it allows culture to be expressed without taint
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The over-arching, high-level obligations are applied to the organization via contractual and legal terms.
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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.
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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.
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Another simplification is the application of virtual accounts (Profit and Loss (P&L) account and Balance Sheet) on each person within the business.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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the conventional company, which, instead of rewarding enterprise, trains compliance by suppressing individual initiative under layer upon layer of translation tools.
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apply accountability to the individual not command-and-control.
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without the divisive and overbearing management cabal the natural reaction of humans is to combine their efforts
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a new member of staff at Matt Black Systems
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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.
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jobs are passed to new staff members, a royalty payment can be established on the work passed over.
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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.
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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]
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Remuneration for staff is calibrated in a way that reflects the balance of different forces around ‘pay’
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there is an obligation upon the company to pay a minimum wage even if the profitability of the operation does not support this
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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responsible autonomy as an alternative vision to traditional hierarchy
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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).
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a new form of association of individuals working together under the umbrella of a company structure: a kind of collective autonomy
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The business is called Matt Black Systems, based in Poole in dorset
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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.
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This innovative company’s approach views business success as wholly reliant upon human agency, and its wellspring at the individual level.
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problem (of unnecessarily high overheads placed on production) that arguably is behind the decline in western manufacturing
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over-managed business
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Autonomy Enables Productivity
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organizational design brings to light the unconscious socio-philosophical paradigm of the society in which it exists, organizational development points to how change occurs.
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a mechanistic approach to organization
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scientific management employs rationalism and determinism in pursuit of efficiency, but leaves no place for self-determination for most people within the system.
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Command and Control
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today, a really “modern” view of an organization is more likely to be depicted in terms that are akin to an organism.
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When it comes to getting work done, the simple question is: are people the problem or the solution?
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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.
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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.
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voluntary slavery of ‘wagery’
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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
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Making the transition involves adherence to a whole new sociology of work with all the challenging social and psychological implications that brings.
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first principal that people in the business have the ability to provide the solution
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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?
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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
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Formal interaction between colleagues takes place via “customer and supplier” relationships.
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autonomy enables productivity
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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
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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)
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These qualities are the very ones most likely to be withheld by an individual when the environment is ‘wrong’.
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Any elements in the business environment that undermine the autonomy and purpose of the individual will see the above qualities withheld
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High on the list of undermining elements come power-hierarchy and over-specialization
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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.
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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’
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The experience of Matt Black Systems demonstrates that radical change is possible
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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%.
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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.
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the staff manage themselves
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“only variety can absorb variety”.
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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.
James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views
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reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
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General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
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a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
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s. Euclidean space
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metric space
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topological space
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Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
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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
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Physical or geographical space
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Euclidean space
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distance
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moving
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maximum speed
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objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
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friction
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The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
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information can flow worldwide almost instantly
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Physical space is a common space
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Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
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They can give the location of objects in it
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Conceptual or abstracted spaces
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Peck order
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Social class space
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Social distance
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Political distance
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life space
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semantic space
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Sociometric space
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A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
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space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
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A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
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These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
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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
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interpersonal relations
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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
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It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
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fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
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is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
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or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
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durations
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speeds
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rates
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accelerations
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irreversible unidirectionality of time
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thermodynamics
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negentropy
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"time's arrow."
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Matter and energy
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Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
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Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
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kinetic energy
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potential energy
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rest mass energy
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Mass and energy are equivalent
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Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
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Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
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Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
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It is one form of process.
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information (H)
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Transmission of Information
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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
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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.
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The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
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.) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
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. The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
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Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
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[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.'
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meaning cannot be precisely measured
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Information is the negative of uncertainty.
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information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
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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
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The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
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the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
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entropy becomes a measure of the probability
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Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
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according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
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therefore no principle of the conservation of information
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The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
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but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
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. 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.
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transforms information into negative entropy
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smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
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calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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the flow of raw materials through societies
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Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
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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
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Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
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transformations go on in living systems
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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
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the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
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Matter-energy and information always flow together
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Information is always borne on a marker
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. 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
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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
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Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
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example
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example
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develop normally
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have appropriate information inputs in infancy
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pairs of antonyms
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one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
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the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
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System
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A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
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.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.
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Conceptual system
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Units
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terms
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Relationships
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a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
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expressed by words
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or by logical or mathematical symbols
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operations
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The conceptual systems of science
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observer
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selects
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particular sets to study
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Variable
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Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
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conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
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Indicator
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an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
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Function
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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
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Any function is a simple conceptual system
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Parameter
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An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
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The state of a conceptual system
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the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
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Formal identity
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variables
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varies comparably to a variable in another system
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If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
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Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
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Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
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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
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Concrete system
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a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
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Units
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are also concrete systems
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Relationships
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spatial
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temporal
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spatiotemporal
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causal
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Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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patterns of relationships or processes
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The observer of a concrete system
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distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
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physical proximity of its units
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similarity of its units
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common fate of its units
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distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
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Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
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Variable of a concrete system
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Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
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which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
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Examples
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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
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A variable is intrasystemic
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not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
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The state of a concrete system
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its structure
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represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
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Open system
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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.
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Closed system
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impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
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special case
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No actual concrete system is completely closed
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In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
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Nonliving system
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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
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Living system
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a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
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They all have the following characteristics:
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open systems
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inputs
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throughputs
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outputs
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of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
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maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
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by taking in inputs
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higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
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than their outputs
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The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
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In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
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To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
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entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
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They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
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They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
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or have a charter
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blueprint
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program
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of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
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may also include nonliving components.
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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.
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other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
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Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
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They can exist only in a certain environment
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change in their environment
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produces stresses
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Totipotential system
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capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
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Partipotential system
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does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
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A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
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parasitic
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symbiotic
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Fully functioning system
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when it
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Partially functioning system
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it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
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Abstracted system
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Units
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relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
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Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
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Relationships
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The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
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these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
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The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
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An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
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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
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Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
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are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
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spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
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their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
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important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
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Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
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we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
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intensity of interaction
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in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
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To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
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This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools.
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PARSONS
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the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
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culture
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cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
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The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
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RUESCH
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A social system is a behavioral system
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It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
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The roles are the units of a social system
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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.
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What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
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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
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system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
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evolution
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differentiation
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growth
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from earlier and simpler forms and functions
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capacities for specializations and gradients
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[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
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Abstracted versus concrete systems
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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
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A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
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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.
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It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Towards a Material Commons | Guerrilla Translation! - 0 views
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the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them
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I’m focused on the policy formation around this transition to a new, open knowledge and commons-based economy, and that’s the research work I’m doing here
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The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital.
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We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right
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A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge
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We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere
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instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.
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The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production
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then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops
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But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and principles of the traditional cooperative movement.
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There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.
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The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups
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They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take
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Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money
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Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system
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we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction
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I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op
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They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge
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Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.
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Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members
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What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community
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In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops
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democratically run
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much more participatory, and a much more engaged model
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The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates
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And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services
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In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops
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So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services
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This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services
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This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?
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we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement
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I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.
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In hardware, we don’t see that, because you need to buy material, machines, plastic, metal.
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Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts
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democratic foundations like the Apache foundation
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They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth
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From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes
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From a materialist point of view, it becomes obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth
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different definition of peer production
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independent producers collectively sharing a commons of productive assets
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I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods
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share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.
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One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth
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Mutualizing unearned income
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So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed
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This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration
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typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another
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But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class, which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class
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So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?
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This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.
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This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol
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The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.
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The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal
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This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal
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But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income
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venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives
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It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets
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On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers
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how do we get to that stage?
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other two being counter politics and insurrectionary finance
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do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside
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pre-figurative politics, versus statist politics
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My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from
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I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms
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To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum
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Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies
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We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions
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We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them
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What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital
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I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar
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We have to find ways to create liquidity
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to deal with economic cycles
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they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production
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if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?
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more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds
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idea of venture communism
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pooling, based on the capture of unearned income
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in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly
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The other idea I liked was trying to minimize a management class
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much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members
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I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda
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I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that
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complete rethinking of economics
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recapture the initiative around vocabulary, and vision, with respect to economics
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reimagining and reinterpreting, for a popular and common good, the notion of market and capital
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advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics
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markets actually belong to communities and people
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capital wasn’t just an accumulated wealth for the rich
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I think what we’re potentially talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative
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The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects
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Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic
The Promise of the Commons: an Interview with David Bollier - 0 views
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We need to imagine new forms of governance
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Because at a local, self-organized level, the commons can perform lots of tasks that governments just aren't doing well because they’re too corrupted or bought off or too centralized and incapable of dealing with diverse, distributed complexity.”
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“the commons provides for more fairness, it provides for more individual freedom of participation and it provides for a sense of sufficiency for everyone without getting into the consumerist, growth forever syndrome.
All's Not Fair in Science and Publishing | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32287/title/All-s-Not-Fair-in-Science-and-Publishing/
shared by Francois Bergeron on 02 Jan 13
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My takeaway lesson was that the safest strategy was to divulge my results only after they were accepted for publication. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. Science is too often a cutthroat venture, with publications as the currency for measuring one’s success. But with everyone keeping their findings secret until they have been approved by the peer-review process, aren’t we slowing the course of scientific discovery?
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Scientists have failed to establish clear mores for crediting discoveries
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Many believe that false attribution is actually increasing in frequency, likely motivated by the steady decrease in grant-funding rates.
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Open Network
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If scientific administrators aspire to accelerate innovation by encouraging team science, they must address this issue. Our university system should reward scientists who are honest and fair in their dealings with fellow investigators. Specific protocols for guiding research and managing disagreements must be designed. Accurate laboratory records should reflect appropriate credit, and websites sponsored by international scientific organizations should be similarly designed to display accurate attribution of preliminary scientific discoveries. In addition, journals could post final drafts of papers before publication, allowing anonymous comments during a probationary period. If a substantive objection arises, the journal should require revisions or even reject the paper.
Smart Contracts - 0 views
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Whether enforced by a government, or otherwise, the contract is the basic building block of a free market economy.
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A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on the other promises.
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The basic idea of smart contracts is that many kinds of contractual clauses (such as liens, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher.
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A broad statement of the key idea of smart contracts, then, is to say that contracts should be embedded in the world.
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And where the vending machine, like electronic mail, implements an asynchronous protocol between the vending company and the customer, some smart contracts entail multiple synchronous steps between two or more parties
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POS (Point of Sale)
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EDI (Electronic Data Interchange
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SWIFT
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allocation of public network bandwidth via automated auctions
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Smart contracts reference that property in a dynamic, proactively enforced form, and provide much better observation and verification where proactive measures must fall short.
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The mechanisms of the world should be structured in such a way as to make the contracts (a) robust against naive vandalism, and (b) robust against sophisticated, incentive compatible (rational) breach.
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A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here.
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The threat of physical force is an obvious way to embed a contract in the world -- have a judicial system decide what physical steps are to be taken out by an enforcement agency (including arrest, confiscation of property, etc.) in response to a breach of contract
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It is what I call a reactive form of security.
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The need to invoke reactive security can be minimized, but not eliminated, by making contractual arrangements verifiable
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Observation of a contract in progress, in order to detect the first sign of breach and minimize losses, also is a reactive form of security
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A proactive form of security is a physical mechanism that makes breach expensive
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From common law, economic theory, and contractual conditions often found in practice, we can distill four basic objectives of contract design
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observability
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The disciplines of auditing and investigation roughly correspond with verification of contract performance
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verifiability
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The field of accounting is, roughly speaking, primarily concerned with making contracts an organization is involved in more observable
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privity
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This is a generalization of the common law principle of contract privity, which states that third parties, other than the designated arbitrators and intermediaries, should have no say in the enforcement of a contract
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The field of security (especially, for smart contracts, computer and network security), roughly corresponds to the goal of privity.
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enforceability
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Reputation, built-in incentives, "self-enforcing" protocols, and verifiability can all play a strong part in meeting the fourth objective
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Smart contracts often involve trusted third parties, exemplified by an intermediary, who is involved in the performance, and an arbitrator, who is invoked to resolve disputes arising out of performance (or lack thereof)
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In smart contract design we want to get the most out of intermediaries and arbitrators, while minimizing exposure to them
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Legal barriers are the most severe cost of doing business across many jurisdictions. Smart contracts can cut through this Gordian knot of jurisdictions
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Where smart contracts can increase privity, they can decrease vulnerability to capricious jurisdictions
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Secret sharing
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The field of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), in which elements of traditional business transactions (invoices, receipts, etc.) are exchanged electronically, sometimes including encryption and digital signature capabilities, can be viewed as a primitive forerunner to smart contracts
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One important task of smart contracts, that has been largely overlooked by traditional EDI, is critical to "the meeting of the minds" that is at the heart of a contract: communicating the semantics of the protocols to the parties involved
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There is ample opportunity in smart contracts for "smart fine print": actions taken by the software hidden from a party to the transaction.
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Thus, via hidden action of the software, the customer is giving away information they might consider valuable or confidential, but the contract has been drafted, and transaction has been designed, in such a way as to hide those important parts of that transaction from the customer.
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To properly communicate transaction semantics, we need good visual metaphors for the elements of the contract. These would hide the details of the protocol without surrendering control over the knowledge and execution of contract terms
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Protocols based on mathematics, called cryptographic protocols, tre the basic building blocks that implement the improved tradeoffs between observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability in smart contracts
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secret key cryptography,
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Public key cryptography
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digital signatures
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blind signature
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Where smart contracts can increase observability or verifiability, they can decrease dependence on these obscure local legal codes and enforcement traditions
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zero-knowledge interactive proof
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digital mix
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Keys are not necessarily tied to identities, and the task of doing such binding turns out to be more difficult than at first glance.
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All public key operation are are done inside an unreadable hardware board on a machine with a very narrow serial-line connection (ie, it carries only a simple single-use protocol with well-verified security) to a dedicated firewall. Such a board is available, for example, from Kryptor, and I believe Viacrypt may also have a PGP-compatable board. This is economical for central sites, but may be less practical for normal users. Besides better security, it has the added advantage that hardware speeds up the public key computations.
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If Mallet's capability is to physically sieze the machine, a weaker form of key protection will suffice. The trick is to hold the keys in volatile memory.
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The data is still vulnerable to a "rubber hose attack" where the owner is coerced into revealing the hidden keys. Protection against rubber hose attacks might require some form of Shamir secret sharing which splits the keys between diverse phgsical sites.
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How does Alice know she has Bob's key? Who, indeed, can be the parties to a smart contract? Can they be defined just by their keys? Do we need biometrics (such as autographs, typed-in passwords, retina scans, etc.)?
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The public key cryptography software package "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) uses a model called "the web of trust". Alice chooses introducers whom she trusts to properly identify the map between other people and their public keys. PGP takes it from there, automatically validating any other keys that have been signed by Alice's designated introducers.
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1) Does the key actually belong to whom it appears to belong? In other words, has it been certified with a trusted signature?
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2) Does it belong to an introducers, someone you can trust to certify other keys?
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3) Does the key belong to someone you can trust to introduce other introducers? PGP confuses this with criterion (2). It is not clear that any single person has enough judgement to properly undertake task (3), nor has a reasonable institution been proposed that will do so. This is one of the unsolved problems in smart contracts.
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PGP also can be given trust ratings and programmed to compute a weighted score of validity-- for example, two marginally trusted signatures might be considered as credible as one fully trusted signature
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Notaries Public Two different acts are often called "notarization". The first is simply where one swears to the truth of some affidavit before a notary or some other officer entitled to take oaths. This does not require the notary to know who the affiant is. The second act is when someone "acknowledges" before a notary that he has executed a document as ``his own act and deed.'' This second act requires the notary to know the person making the acknowledgment.
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"Identity" is hardly the only thing we might want map to a key. After all, physical keys we use for our house, car, etc. are not necessarily tied to our identity -- we can loan them to trusted friends and relatives, make copies of them, etc. Indeed, in cyberspace we might create "virtual personae" to reflect such multi-person relationships, or in contrast to reflect different parts of our personality that we do not want others to link. Here is a possible classification scheme for virtual personae, pedagogically presented:
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A nym is an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community
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A nym may gain reputation within its community.
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With Chaumian credentials, a nym can take advantage of the positive credentials of the holder's other nyms, as provably linked by the is-a-person credential
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A true name is an identifier that links many different kinds of information about an person, such as a full birth name or social security number
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As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one's enemies
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A persona is any perstient pattern of behavior, along with consistently grouped information such as key(s), name(s), network address(es), writing style, and services provided
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A reputable name is a nym or true name that has a good reputation, usually because it carries many positive credentials, has a good credit rating, or is otherwise highly regarded
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Reputable names can be difficult to transfer between parties, because reputation assumes persistence of behavior, but such transfer can sometimes occur (for example, the sale of brand names between companies).
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Blind signatures can be used to construct digital bearer instruments, objects identified by a unique key, and issued, cleared, and redeemed by a clearing agent.
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The clearing agent prevents multiple clearing of particular objects, but can be prevented from linking particular objects one or both of the clearing nyms who transferred that object
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These instruments come in an "online" variety, cleared during every transfer, and thus both verifiable and observable, and an "offline" variety, which can be transfered without being cleared, but is only verifiable when finally cleared, by revealing any the clearing nym of any intermediate holder who transfered the object multiple times (a breach of contract).
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To implement a full transaction of payment for services, we need more than just the digital cash protocol; we need a protocol that guarantees that service will be rendered if payment is made, and vice versa
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A credential is a claim made by one party about another. A positive credential is one the second party would prefer to reveal, such as a degree from a prestigious school, while that party would prefer not to reveal a negative credential such as a bad credit rating.
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A Chaumian credential is a cryptographic protocol for proving one possesses claims made about onself by other nyms, without revealing linkages between those nyms. It's based around the is-a-person credential the true name credential, used to prove the linkage of otherwise unlinkable nyms, and to prevent the transfer of nyms between parties.
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Another form of credential is bearer credential, a digital bearer instrument where the object is a credential. Here the second party in the claim refers to any bearer -- the claim is tied only to the reputable name of issuing organization, not to the nym or true name of the party holding the credential.
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Smart Property We can extend the concept of smart contracts to property. Smart property might be created by embedding smart contracts in physical objects. These embedded protocols would automatically give control of the keys for operating the property to the party who rightfully owns that property, based on the terms of the contract. For example, a car might be rendered inoperable unless the proper challenge-response protocol is completed with its rightful owner, preventing theft. If a loan was taken out to buy that car, and the owner failed to make payments, the smart contract could automatically invoke a lien, which returns control of the car keys to the bank. This "smart lien" might be much cheaper and more effective than a repo man. Also needed is a protocol to provably remove the lien when the loan has been paid off, as well as hardship and operational exceptions. For example, it would be rude to revoke operation of the car while it's doing 75 down the freeway.
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Smart property is software or physical devices with the desired characteristics of ownership embedded into them; for example devices that can be rendered of far less value to parties who lack possesion of a key, as demonstrated via a zero knowledge interactive proof
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One method of implementing smart property is thru operation necessary data (OND): data necessary to the operation of smart property.
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A smart lien is the sharing of a smart property between parties, usually two parties called the owner and the lienholder.
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Many parties, especially new entrants, may lack this reputation capital, and will thus need to be able to share their property with the bank via secure liens
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What about extending the concept of contract to cover agreement to a prearranged set of tort laws? These tort laws would be defined by contracts between private arbitration and enforcement agencies, while customers would have a choice of jurisdictions in this system of free-market "governments".
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If these privately practiced law organizations (PPLs for short) bear ultimate responsibility for the criminal activities of their customers, or need to insure lack of defection or future payments on the part of customers, they may in turn ask for liens against their customers, either in with contractual terms allowing arrest of customers under certain conditions
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Other important areas of liability include consumer liability and property damage (including pollution). There need to mechanisms so that, for example, pollution damage to others' persons or property can be assessed, and liens should exist so that the polluter can be properly charged and the victims paid. Where pollution is quantifiable, as with SO2 emissions, markets can be set up to trade emission rights. The PPLs would have liens in place to monitor their customer's emissions and assess fees where emission rights have been exceeded.