how the principles of permaculture might apply to business.
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Permaculture Principles | Design Principles - 1 views
permacultureprinciples.com/principles_business.php
permaculture principles design business resilience paper
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Sep 11
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A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.
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a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing
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work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.
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either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!
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see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.
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any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive
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A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.
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moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.
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The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.
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The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.
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keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.
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ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.
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This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.
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Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation
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The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.
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This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties
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new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.
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have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.
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In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure
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this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.
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it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so
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the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.
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It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.
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Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.
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A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.
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Engaging For the Commons - Global Pull Platform - Helene Finidori - 0 views
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"activating" human agency and political will and addressing the root causes for power unbalance and resistance to change is at the heart of tomorrow's paradigm shift.
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action-oriented strategy and process methodology for generating engagement, accountability and outcomes in the political, economic, social and environmental spheres, which may contribute to enable this activation.
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treated as social objects: the nodes around which social networks are created, conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, new territories explored, meaning and intents shared, learning achieved.
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will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation
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Select or refer designated actors to acknowledge or request their engagement and action at various levels
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The Revolution at hand - Op-Ed - Domus - 0 views
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Currently, our education prepares us to perform a job — at times any job — that pays us in terms of what we can possess and consume or, in other words, the goods that design and mass production consider to be to our satisfaction — at least partially.
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creating almost nonexistent necessities that are readily available and easy to narrate rather than investigating the problems and real needs of people and communities
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the need for large-scale production is disappearing due to the crystalline democratization of the means of production
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unable to model the exchanges that serve to give way to a new mode of radically inclusive and more equitable cooperative production
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Innovation and meaning have been restricted, trapped and suffocated by mechanisms of protection, monopolies, patents and copyrights.
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If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers. Customers barely exist in the creative world now.
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A new distributed network of places of cultural and tangible production must be affirmed. The network will stem from fablabs, makerspaces and hackerspaces — the new factories — around the world, or from ambitious projects like the Italian Bottega 21: initiatives that unite the existing cultural heritage of places and traditions with currently available technologies
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We will teach students to investigate, discover and create work, products and services that the community needs, rather than merely follow any old curriculum while waiting for a "phantom" labour market to claim them
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"The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not 'how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology', but 'how can we organize a society around something other than employment?'
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Whose Capitalism is it Anyway? | Management Innovation eXchange - 1 views
www.managementexchange.com/...whose-capitalism-it-anyway
new economy collaboration commons paper blog
shared by Francois Bergeron on 06 Apr 12
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So what replaces competition—what drives growth today? We already know the answer: the kind of innovation that comes from collaboration, not competition.
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How do you encourage the invention of something entirely new that serves both the profit motive and provides social benefit—even without access to Jeff Immelt’s special fund? You “build a lifeboat,” says Chris. Create a protected space, permission, and some funding “for the people who believe in the new thing and just can’t help themselves but to follow that belief.”
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At the individual level, “that’s what they pay me to do,” is not enough of a reason to do something, argues Chris. “If you could, as a leader at any level, say ‘I’m only going to do things I believe in’ and if you can’t find work that overlaps with that, then ‘I’m in the wrong place.’” That’s a non-trivial moral stance—there just aren’t that many jobs out there that match up personal beliefs and values to everyday work. There is a way beyond this conundrum (though it’s not for the faint of heart), says Chris, “standing on the sun, it’s worth remembering that jobs are a relatively new phenomenon. Before there were large industrial organizations, everybody was an entrepreneur. And what we’re going to return to is a form of people finding their own work.”
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winning is more often the result of the alignment of different interests than of a battle between them.
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Dark Intellectual Property. Why We Need a Kickstarter for Patents - 0 views
www.wired.com/...need-a-kickstarter-for-patents
ip academia paper argument Tibi Greg university dark IP
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Aug 13
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“dark IP,” the intellectual property (IP) that remains on the shelf: undiscovered, unexplored, untapped
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our ability to catch so much in the net by dragging the surface (to use Mike Bergman’s analogy) actually still misses the invisible wealth of what lies beneath.
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But dark IP is different than the other hidden-depths knowledge since it’s also unfair. Because taxpayers paid for much of the research — whether basic understanding with long-term benefits or more applied research with shorter-term benefits — that now lies collecting dust on university shelves.
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the people of the United States spent an average of nearly $40 billion every year supporting institutional research
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most of the IP (much of which we paid for) isn’t actually on the street, where entrepreneurial folks can do something with it.
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very few people are aware of — let alone able to access — an invention outside the social circle of its inventors, the scientific community involved, or even the “crowd” that’s sometimes harnessed in open innovation
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Not democratizing the IP itself — institutions should still own and generate profits from the intellectual property they’ve created — but democratizing the ways in which we allow this IP to be discovered and licensed.
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This turns off the average entrepreneur, who doesn’t have the patience and bandwidth to engage in all the unnecessary overhead of searching, browsing, and licensing IP.
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Another missing piece is ways of allowing the crowd to interact with each other and decide which technologies should be licensed
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Most of the examples I listed above haven’t changed much over the past decade or broken into the mainstream.
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Such a website would bring together not just funds and transactions, but communities — with their attendant feedback mechanisms — that are interested in creating something novel around unused patents.
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Open Collaboration - The Next Economic Paradigm - 0 views
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The old economic paradigm was a service economy built on the digital communications revolution that began in the early 1970′s.
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This will be a profoundly social economy, built on unprecedented capabilities to self-organize people and resources in the crowd.
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Those who can leverage the wisdom of crowds for market research, product development, and efficient resource allocation will be more adept and agile in the face of rapid change.
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Those who build walls around themselves will fail to tap into the flow of knowledge and resources running rampant in the crowd
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The era of “user generated content” and “prosumption” — where consumers of goods and services co-create what they will consume — is now a decade along in its evolution. We will increasingly see collaborative design and production of consumables across society.
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In the education arena, we will see more curricula as shareware and an increased emphasis on multi-perspective teamwork as the necessary skills for engaging in collaborative projects.
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Expert/amateur boundaries have already blurred to the point where individuals can acquire graduate-level knowledge through self-directed learning on the internet.
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About Project - Dog Aging Project - 0 views
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COL Climatological Observers Link - 0 views
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Citclops project overview - Citclops - 0 views
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"The Citclops project aims to develop systems to retrieve and use data on seawater colour, transparency and fluorescence, using low-cost sensors combined with people acting as data carriers, contextual information (e.g. georeferencing) and a community-based Internet platform, taking into account existing experiences (e.g. Secchi Dip-In, Coastwatch Europe and Oil Reporter)."
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Graphene supercapacitors: Small, cheap, energy-dense replacements for batteries. - Slat... - 0 views
www.slate.com/...eplacements_for_batteries.html
graphene nanotube supercapacitor phd student dvd player
shared by Kurt Laitner on 28 Mar 13
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Then something unexpectedly amazing happened. Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in chemist Richard Kaner’s lab at UCLA, wondered what would happen if he placed a sheet of graphite oxide—an abundant carbon compound—under a laser. And not just any laser, but a really inexpensive one, something that millions of people around the world already have—a DVD burner containing a technology called LightScribe, which is used for etching labels and designs on your mixtapes. As El-Kady, Kaner, and their colleagues described in a paper published last year in Science, the simple trick produced very high-quality sheets of graphene, very quickly, and at low cost.
warren | publiclaboratory.org - 0 views
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WSU Animal Sciences - Dan Rodgers - 1 views
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Social... - 0 views
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the development of marketing is sensible to its environment and is hence already self-limiting itself according to the previously mentioned legal and social framework
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explore new inner dynamics of marketing, new directions in the field of possibilities offered by the current organology and its articulations between techniques and social organization in order to influence and shape marketing as an associative force – in opposition to its current dissociative force – in the larger psychic, social and technic organology
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empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production
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transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed
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the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
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denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions
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“if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)
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What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser
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would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information
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An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.
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is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities
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change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy
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with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation
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Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.
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the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.
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3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
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5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.
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big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm
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the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
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less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.
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means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement
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Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means
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But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities
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Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police
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a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system
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Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.
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Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers
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a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.
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the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest
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Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,
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This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.
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the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations
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What Dollar Shave Club can Teach You About Making a Video for Your Startup - Techvibes.com - 0 views
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Too often people are so caught up in their product that they want to jump right into talking about features before clearly articulating the customer need they are addressing. Don't start making a video until you have your value proposition nailed down.
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What is an ontology and why we need it - 1 views
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an ontology is a formal explicit description of concepts in a domain of discourse (classes (sometimes called concepts)), properties of each concept describing various features and attributes of the concept (slots (sometimes called roles or properties)), and restrictions on slots (facets (sometimes called role restrictions)). An ontology together with a set of individual instances of classes constitutes a knowledge base. In reality, there is a fine line where the ontology ends and the knowledge base begins.
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Here we discuss general issues to consider and offer one possible process for developing an ontology. We describe an iterative approach to ontology development: we start with a rough first pass at the ontology. We then revise and refine the evolving ontology and fill in the details. Along the way, we discuss the modeling decisions that a designer needs to make, as well as the pros, cons, and implications of different solutions.
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In practical terms, developing an ontology includes: � defining classes in the ontology, � arranging the classes in a taxonomic (subclass–superclass) hierarchy, � defining slots and describing allowed values for these slots, � filling in the values for slots for instances.
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We can then create a knowledge base by defining individual instances of these classes filling in specific slot value information and additional slot restrictions.
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There is no one correct way to model a domain— there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. 2) Ontology development is necessarily an iterative process. 3) Concepts in the ontology should be close to objects (physical or logical) and relationships in your domain of interest. These are most likely to be nouns (objects) or verbs (relationships) in sentences that describe your domain.
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We suggest starting the development of an ontology by defining its domain and scope. That is, answer several basic questions: � What is the domain that the ontology will cover? � For what we are going to use the ontology? � For what types of questions the information in the ontology should provide answers? � Who will use and maintain the ontology?
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If the people who will maintain the ontology describe the domain in a language that is different from the language of the ontology users, we may need to provide the mapping between the languages.
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One of the ways to determine the scope of the ontology is to sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should be able to answer, competency questions
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In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration | Harold Jarche - 0 views
www.jarche.com/...operation-trumps-collaboration
new economy value networks paper article blog theory
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 20 Jun 12
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Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
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Cooperation is also necessary, but it’s much less controllable than our institutions, hierarchies and HR practices would like to admit.