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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

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

Grier Miller living systems theory concepts paper

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

Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae

blockchainaccess_project paper Holochain Arthur Brock

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
  • This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
  • Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
  • What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?
  • Digital
  • Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
  • Trustless
  • don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority
  • Decentralized
  • Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
  • Cryptographic
  • This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
  • Identity
  • there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
  • Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
  • It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger
  • does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
  • Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins
  • It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may
  • if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce
  • Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
  • You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
  • if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
  • In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
  • Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
  • If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
  • We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
  • how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
  • Replicate the same processes across all nodes
  • Empower every node with full agency
  • Hold this transformed state locally and reliably
  • Establish protocols for interaction
  • Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
  • we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
  • Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.
  • Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage
  • there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
  • Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
  • Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
  • This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
  • Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
  • Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
  • If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
  • When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
  • If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
  • Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
  • By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
  • You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
  • Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
  • Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
  • Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
  • how units in a currency are issued
  • Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of
  • ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
  • In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
  • Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.
  • Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True
  • Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
  • Notice the net number units in the system remains zero
  • One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.
  • concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)
  • keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
  • What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
  • If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
  • Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,
  • Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
  • Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case
  • To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
  • Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
  • seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.
  • As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
  • Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
  • Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:
  • The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
  • Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:
  • As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
  • Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
  • a distributed network of mutual trust
  • operates across national boundaries
  • everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records
  • Hawaladars are not anonymous
  • “double-spending”
  • It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
  • After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
  • This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
  • millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
  • There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
  • By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
  • It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16
     
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Designing the Void | Management Innovation eXchange - 0 views

www.managementexchange.com/...40941

OVNi infrastructure OVN contribution accounting

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

Decision making - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Decision_making

decision making wikipedia decision making decision-making

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 15 Apr 11 - Cached
  • mental processes
  • examine individual decisions in the context of a set of needs, preferences an individual has and values they seek.
  • psychological perspective
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • cognitive perspective
  • continuous process integrated in the interaction with the environment
  • normative perspective
  • logic of decision making
  • and rationality
  • decision making is a reasoning or emotional process which can be rational or irrational, can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.
  • Logical decision making
  • making informed decisions
  • recognition primed decision approach
  • without weighing alternatives
  • integrated uncertainty into the decision making process
  • A major part of decision making involves the analysis of a finite set of alternatives described in terms of some evaluative criteria.
  • multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) also known as multi-criteria decision making (MCDM).
  • differentiate between problem analysis and decision making
  • Problem analysis must be done first, then the information gathered in that process may be used towards decision making.[4]
  • decision making techniques people use in everyday life
  • Pros and Cons
  • Simple Prioritization:
  • Decision-Making Stages
  • Orientation stage
  • Conflict stage
  • Emergence stage
  • Reinforcement stage
  • Decision-Making Steps
  • Outline your goal and outcome
  • Gather data
  • Brainstorm to develop alternatives
  • List pros and cons of each alternative
  • Make the decision
  • take action
  • Learn from, and reflect on the decision making
  • Cognitive and personal biases
  • Selective search for evidence
  • Premature termination of search for evidence
  • Inertia
  • Selective perception
  • Wishful thinking or optimism bias
  • Choice-supportive bias
  • Recency
  • Repetition bias
  • Anchoring and adjustment
  • Group think – Peer pressure
  • Source credibility bias
  • Incremental decision making and escalating commitment
  • Attribution asymmetry
  • Role fulfillment
  • Underestimating uncertainty and the illusion of control
  • a person's decision making process depends to a significant degree on their cognitive style
  • thinking and feeling; extroversion and introversion; judgment and perception; and sensing and intuition.
  • someone who scored near the thinking, extroversion, sensing, and judgment
  • would tend to have a logical, analytical, objective, critical, and empirical decision making style.
  • national or cross-cultural differences
  • distinctive national style of decision making
  • human decision-making is limited by available information, available time, and the information-processing ability of the mind.
  • two cognitive styles: maximizers
  • satisficers
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 15 Apr 11
       
      I think we are at the CONFLICT stage at this moment
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 15 Apr 11
       
      These are the steps we need to go through to make a decision of the 4 items proposed by Ivan
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 15 Apr 11
       
      This is also interesting, where are you on these 4 dimensions? 
Francois Bergeron

Conference Detail for Industrial and Commercial Applications of Smart Structures Techno... - 0 views

spie.org/...index.cfm

conference sensors structures smart

shared by Francois Bergeron on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 05 Mar 13
     
    "Three-axis distributed fiber optic strain measurement in 3D woven composite structures   Paper 8690-6 Time: 1:50 PM - 2:10 PM Author(s): Matt Castellucci, Evan M. Lally, Sandra Klute, Luna Innovations Inc. (United States); David Lowry, NASA Johnson Space Ctr. (United States) Hide Abstract Add to My Schedule  Recent advancements in composite materials technologies have broken further from traditional designs and require advanced instrumentation and analysis capabilities. Success or failure is highly dependent on design analysis and manufacturing processes. By monitoring smart structures throughout manufacturing and service life, residual and operational stresses can be assessed and structural damage identified. Composite smart structures can be manufactured by integrating fiber optic sensors into existing composite materials processes such as layup, filament winding and three-dimensional weaving. In this work optical fiber was integrated into 3D woven composite parts at a commercial woven products manufacturing facility. The fiber was then used to monitor the structures during a VARTM manufacturing process, and subsequent static and dynamic testing. Low cost telecommunications-grade optical fiber acts as the sensor using a high resolution commercial Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometer (OFDR) system providing distributed strain measurement at spatial resolutions as low as 2mm. Strain measurements using the optical fiber sensors are correlated to resistive strain gauge measurements during static structural loading."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views

wirearchy.com/...he-dominant-cultural-framework

paper Wirearchy John Husband

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 18 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • more open people processes
  • Participative processes like Open Space, World Cafes, Unconferences, Peer Circles
  • Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • maker faires
  • community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising
  • The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological
  • Technological
  • information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web
  • appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
  • Sociological
  • People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
  • get informed and take action
  • Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes
  • play and work together
  • rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
  • The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
  • Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation
  • What’s coming along next ?  “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
  • Shorter cycle-based development and release
  • Agile development
  • It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT)
  • clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
  • experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
  • The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data
  • ethical, political and social impact policy decisions
  • that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
  • ‘we’ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies
  • participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the ‘new rules’
  • What the Future May Hold
  • the ‘scenario planning’ approach
  • world’s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy
  • A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation
  • Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
  • are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
  • The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
  • cultural ‘mutation’
  • Wirearchy
  • a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
  • the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
  • The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
  • Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
  • Participative Work Design – The Six Criteria
  • in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
  • contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
  • peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world
  • Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
  • But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Fostering creativity. A model for developing a culture of collective creativity in science - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC1808036

open science paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Scientific progress depends on both conceptual and technological advances, which in turn depend on the creativity of scientists
  • creative processes behind these discoveries rely on mechanisms that are similar across disciplines as diverse as art and science
  • research into the nature of creativity indicates that it depends strongly on the cultural environment
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • create optimal conditions in a research organization with the aim of enhancing the creativity of its scientific staff
  • Creativity has been traditionally associated with art and literature but since the early twentieth century, science has also been regarded as a creative activity
  • Measuring creativity is a challenging task owing to its complex and elusive nature
  • Measurement of brain activity showed that creativity correlates with two brain states: a quiescent, relaxed state corresponding to the inspiration stage, and a much more active state corresponding to the elaboration stage
  • models of creativity
  • have a common feature: they depend on a balance between analytical and synthetic thinking, and usually describe the creative process as a sequence of phases that alternate between these states
  • Most research on creativity has focused on the individual
  • However, more recent studies suggest that creativity also depends strongly on the social and cultural context
  • breakthroughs depended on collaboration and social support
  • social environment in business organizations affects the creativity of their employees
  • Although creative individuals are essential, the strong link with the environment indicates that creativity might be greatly enhanced by generating a culture that supports the creative process.
  • Many of the interviewees repeatedly emphasized three main qualities necessary to be a good scientist: rigorous intellect, the ability to get the job done and the ability to have creative ideas.
  • almost all interviewees characterized their breakthrough moment as an abrupt leap in understanding
  • Although breakthroughs in science depend on such an ‘internal' conceptual shift, they also rely on ‘external' experimental results. However, most interviewees described their breakthroughs as largely internal:
  • Only two scientists expressed the view that their breakthroughs were purely external events, based on the observation of novel data.
  • intuition
  • must be combined with rational thinking to be effective
  • Although the synthesis of a new concept relies on intuition, which is based on subconscious mental processing, it must be subjected to conscious examination and analysis
  • specific mental skills or attitudes
  • ability to make unexpected connections
  • ability to choose relevant possibilities from an infinite set of irrelevant ones
  • interest in the unknown'
  • enjoyment of the creative process
  • stimulation by interacting with colleagues
  • undoubtedly the most crucial trait for creativity, which thrives on the exchange of ideas
  • The majority felt that the individual and the collective are equally important:
  • what interactions are optimal for creativity
  • The majority of interviewees answered that other people provided them with ‘inspiration to do something new'
  • positive feedback after the emergence of a new idea is almost as important as the inspiration that triggered it
  • collective provides the individual with technical expertise
  • Therefore, scientists would value a culture of interaction and mutual inspiration more highly than access to technology, although the latter is essential for their experiments.
  • At the end of the interviews, each scientist was asked to describe the best possible conditions for generating creativity at a research institute.
  • Cross-fertilization is absolutely essential
  • These results indicate strongly that an interactive environment is the single most important factor for stimulating creativity
  • interacting with people doing very different things
  • interacting with colleagues informally
  • interactions within any institution are strongly affected by its organization
  • Several interviewees described ‘an open hierarchy' as an important factor for creativity
  • hierarchy is based on genuine respect because people are great scientists, but at the same time they're very approachable and open towards what you have to say
  • These results suggest that the best conditions for scientific creativity come with a free-flowing hierarchy and a highly developed culture of interaction to guarantee the exchange of ideas and inspiration.
  • Furthermore, interdisciplinary interactions lead to the generation of new and unusual ideas
  • Finally, because of the freedom to try new things, these ideas can be tested and eventually generate new insights.
  • Creativity can be described as an emergent phenomenon
  • nonlinear phenomena
  • Emergence depends on dynamic interactions between individual agents within the system
  • The importance of a ‘freedom to try new things' and a ‘free-flowing hierarchy' further supports the idea that individual components in an emergent system must be able to interact flexibly without central control
  • During the interviews, it became apparent that although a culture of interaction and creativity exists at EMBL, this itself is not often the subject of discussion. The values on which this culture is based are seemingly implicit rather than explicit
  • Potentially, the EMBL culture of interaction could be strengthened further by consciously expressing and discussing the values on which it is based
Kurt Laitner

What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views

blogs.valvesoftware.com/...it-into-todays-corporate-world

valve management structure company paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 07 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
  • Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
  • the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
  • they are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within… capitalism
  • The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
  • The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
  • Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
  • Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
  • The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
  • Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
  • In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
  • Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
  • One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
  • He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero 
  • As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
  • Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
  • Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
  • Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
  • In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
  • There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views

www.moq.org/...ifnotglobal.html

paper nondominium Chris Cook

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11 - Cached
  • I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and “Open” form of Capitalism.
  • Open Capital
  • the concept of “Open” Capital is “so simple…. it repels the mind".
  • ...162 more annotations...
  • Open Capital is defined as “a proportional share in an enterprise for an indeterminate time”
  • ‘Enterprise’ is defined as ‘any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Value”.
  • Value is to Economics as Energy and Matter are to Physics.
  • The Metaphysics Of Value
  • division between “subject” and “object”.
  • primary reality is “Quality”
  • formless and indefinable
  • not a “thing”
  • a non-intellectual awareness or “pre-intellectual reality”
  • but an event at which the subject becomes aware of the object and before he distinguishes it
  • Quality is the basis of both subject and object
  • distinguish between “Static” and “Dynamic” Quality
  • treating Value as a form of “Quality” as envisioned by Pirsig.
  • Riegel
  • defined “Value” as “ the Relativity of Desire” again implying indeterminacy.
  • Pirsig’s approach Capital may be viewed as “Static” Value and Money as “Dynamic” Value. “Transactions” are the “events” at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which “Value judgments” are made based upon a “Value Unit”.
  • The result of these Value Events /Transactions is to create subject/object pairings in the form of data ie Who “owns” or has rights of use in What,
  • at what Price
  • accounting data
  • Neo-Classical” Economics confuses indeterminate Value with a market– determined Price –
  • Data may be static
  • This Data identifies the subject with objects such as tangible ‘Material Value’
  • Data may itself constitute ‘Intellectual Value’
  • It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of “intellectual property”.
  • Other forms of Value are however not definable by data:
  • “sentimental” Value
  • Emotional Value’
  • 'Spiritual Value’
  • We may therefore look at the “transaction” or “value event” in a new light.
  • The creation and circulation of Value essentially comprises the concept we know of as “Money”.
  • Money / Dynamic Value
  • “The purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
  • money
  • value unit dissociated from any object
  • monetary unit
  • the basis relative to which other values may be expressed
  • The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
  • The monetary “Value Event”/ Transaction involves the creation of “Credit”
  • obligation to provide something of equivalent Value at a future point in time.
  • These obligations may be recorded on transferable documents
  • database of “Credit”/obligations is not Money, but temporary “Capital”
  • “Working Capital”
  • Static Value – which only becomes “Money”/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
  • what we think of as Money is in fact not tangible “cash” but rather
  • the flow of data between databases of obligations maintained by Credit Institutions
  • or dynamic
  • Banks literally “loan” Money into existence
  • In exchange for an obligation by an Individual to provide to the Bank something of Value
  • Bank’s obligation is merely to provide another obligation at some future time
  • These Bank-issued obligations are therefore
  • claim upon a claim upon Value
  • The true source of Credit is the Individual, not the intermediary Bank
  • this Money they create from nothing despite the fact that it is literally Value-less
  • Thus there is no true sharing of Risk and Reward involved in Lending
  • issue in relation to Credit/Debt and this relates to the nature of Lending itself.
  • the practice of Lending involves an incomplete exchange in terms of risk and reward: a Lender, as opposed to an Investor, has no interest in the outcome of the Loan, and requires the repayment of Principal no matter the ability of the Borrower to repay.
  • Ethical problem
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      "The Lender has no interest in the outcome of the loan", i.e doesn't care what happens in the end. The Lender ins not interested in the economical outcome of the Lender-Loner relation. So in fact there is no real risk sharing. the only risk for the Lender is when the Loner doesn't pay back, which is not really a risk... In fact it is a risk for the small bank, who has to buy money from the central bank, but not for the central bank. 
  • Money is not
  • an “Object” circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a “Value Unit”.
  • Capital/ Static Value
  • Capital represents the static accumulation of Value
  • Some forms of Capital are “productive”
  • An ethical question
  • in relation to Productive Capital relates to the extent of “property rights” which may be held over it thereby allowing individuals to assert “absolute” permanent and exclusive ownership - in particular in relation to Land
  • our current financial system is based not upon Value but rather a claim upon Value
  • Financial Capital consists of two types:
  • “Debt”
  • “Equity”
  • Interest
  • obligations of finite/temporary duration but with no participation in the assets or revenues
  • absolute and permanent ownership/participation (without obligation) in assets and revenues
  • discontinuity between Debt and Equity
  • at the heart of our current problems as a Society
  • The Enterprise
  • ‘Charitable’ Enterprise
  • ‘Social’ Enterprise
  • Value
  • exchanged in agreed proportions;
  • Value is exchanged for the Spiritual and Emotional Value
  • ‘Commercial’ Enterprise
  • ‘closed’
  • Value are exchanged between a limited number of individuals
  • Early enterprises were partnerships and unincorporated associations
  • need for institutions which outlived the lives of the Members led to the development of the Corporate body with a legal existence independent of its Members
  • The key development in the history of Capitalism was the creation of the ‘Joint Stock’ Corporate with liability limited by shares of a ‘Nominal’ or ‘Par’ value
  • over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
  • Such “Closed” Shares of “fixed” value constitute an absolute and permanent claim over the assets and revenues of the Enterprise to the exclusion of all other “stakeholders” such as Suppliers, Customers, Staff, and Debt Financiers.
  • The latter are essentially ‘costs’ external to the
  • owners of the Enterprise
  • maximise ‘Shareholder Value’
  • There is a discontinuity/ fault-line within the ‘Closed’ Corporate
  • It has the characteristics of what biologists call a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ in the way that it allows Economic Value to be extracted from other stakeholders but not to pass the other way.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      It is a way to extract value from productive systems. It is a system of exploitation. 
  • Capital most certainly is and always has been - through the discontinuity (see diagram) between:‘Fixed’ Capital in the form of shares ie Equity; and ‘Working’ Capital in the form of debt finance, credit from suppliers, pre-payments by customers and obligations to staff and management.
  • irreconcilable conflict between Equity and Debt
  • xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
  • No Enterprise Model has been capable of resolving this dilemma. Until now.
  • Corporate Partnerships with unlimited liability
  • mandatory for partnerships with more than 20 partners to be incorporated
  • in the USA
  • it is the normal structure for professional partnerships
  • Limited Liability Partnerships
  • In the late 1990's
  • litigation
  • The UK LLP is supremely simple and remarkably flexible.
  • All that is needed is a simple ‘Member Agreement’ – a legal protocol which sets out the Aims, Objectives. Principles of Governance, Revenue Sharing, Dispute Resolution, Transparency and any other matters that Members agree should be included. Amazingly enough, this Agreement need not even be in writing, since in the absence of a written agreement Partnership Law is applied by way of default.
  • The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended – as an ‘Open’ Corporate partnership.
  • ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership
  • concepts which characterise the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership
  • it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
  • ‘Open’
  • supplier
  • employee
  • may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      Can SENSORICA be a UK LLP?
  • no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
  • Proportional shares
  • in an Enterprise constitute an infinitely divisible, flexible and scaleable form of Capital capable of distributing or accumulating Value organically as the Enterprise itself grows in Value or chooses to distribute it.
  • Emergence of “Open” Capital
  • example of how ‘Temporary Equity’ may operate in practice
  • The Open Capital Partnership (“OCP”)
  • Within the OCP Capital and Revenue are continuous: to the extent that an Investee pays Rental in advance of the due date he becomes an Investor.
  • Open Capital – a new Asset Class
  • create a new asset class of proportional “shares”/partnership interests
  • in Capital holding OCP’s
  • Property Investment Partnerships (“PIP’s”)
  • Open Corporate Partnerships as a Co-operative Enterprise model
  • A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
  • Within a Partnership there is no “Profit” and no “Loss”.
  • Partnerships
  • mutual pursuit of the creation and exchange of Value
  • Partners do not compete with each othe
  • the crippling factors in practical terms have been, inter alia: the liability to which Member partners are exposed from the actions of their co-partners on their behalf; limited ability to raise capital.
  • they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
  • The ‘new’ LLP was expressly created to solve the former problem by limiting the liability of Member partners to those assets which they choose to place within its protective ‘semi-permeable membrane’
  • However, the ability to configure the LLP as an “Open” Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
  • it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
  • the revenues
  • would be divided among Members in accordance with the LLP Agreement. This means that all Members share a common interest in collaborating/co-operating to maximise the Value generated by the LLP collectively as opposed to competing with other stakeholders to maximise their individual share at the other stakeholders’ expense.
  • facilitate the creation of LLP’s as “Co-operatives of Co-operatives”.
  • he ‘Commercial’ Enterprise LLP – where the object is for a closed group of individuals to maximise the value generated in their partnership. There are already over 7,000 of these.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      Can SENSORICA be one of these?
  • the Profit generated in a competitive economy based upon shareholder value and unsustainable growth results from a transfer of risks outwards, and the transfer of reward inwards, leading to a one way transfer of Economic Value.
  • This,
  • will very often impoverish one or more constituency of stakeholders
  • A partnership, however, involves an exchange of value through the sharing of risk and reward.
  • Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively – for mutual profit.
  • Open Capital, Economics and Politics
  • continuity between Capital as Static Value and Money as Dynamic Value which has never before been possible due to the dichotomy between the absolute/infinite and the absolute/finite durations of the competing claims over assets – “Equity” and “Debt”
  • Open Capital Partnership gives rise to a new form of Financial Capital of indeterminate duration. It enables the Capitalisation of assets and the monetisation of revenue streams in an entirely new way.
  • It is possible to envisage a Society within which individuals are members of a portfolio of Enterprises constituted as partnerships, whether limited in liability or otherwise.
  • Some will be charitable
  • Others will be ‘social’
  • ‘Commercial’ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
  • the process has already begun
  • Capitalism
  • superior
  • to all other models, such as Socialism.
  • It can only be replaced by another ‘emergent’ phenomenon, which is adopted ‘virally’ because any Enterprise which does not utilise it will be at a disadvantage to an Enterprise which does.
  • The ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is: capable of linking any individuals anywhere in respect of collective ownership of assets anywhere; extremely cheap and simple to operate; and because one LLP may be a Member of another it is organically flexible and ‘scaleable’. The phenomenon of “Open Capital” – which is already visible in the form of significant commercial transactions - enables an extremely simple and continuous relationship between those who wish to participate indefinitely in an Enterprise and those who wish to participate for a defined period of time.
  • Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate “shares” which constitute ‘Open’ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and ‘pre-distributive’: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the “Co-operative Advantage” based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to “rentier” Capitalists.
Kurt Laitner

BPM vs. BPMS: How To Think Big and Act Small « Welcome to the Real (IT) World! - 0 views

isismjpucher.wordpress.com/...how-to-think-big-and-act-small

BPM business process evolutionary

shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Kurt Laitner on 05 Nov 12
     
    "IN ACM the business performers create the processes by doing them" a laudable goal, fits with "if this then that" approach bob mentioned in his github post
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...31

marketing paper p2p

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

The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...26

commons law project governance legal David Bollier Michel Bauwens

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • “commons law” (not to be confused with common law)
  • Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
  • Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
  • reframe the very notion of “the economy” to incorporate non-market sharing and collaboration.
  • we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
  • the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems
  • We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
  • An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
  • Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
  • We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
  • The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
  • These are, however, precisely the attributes of natural systems.
  • Exchange value is the primary if not the exclusive concern.
  • anything that does not have a price and exists ‘outside’ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
  • industry lobbies have captured if not corrupted the legislative process
  • regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
  • we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
  • it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
  • It requires that we enlarge our understanding of ‘value’ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
  • articulate and foster a coherent new paradigm
  • deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
Kurt Laitner

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 - No Cached
  • When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts
  • first attribute is metrology that comes from the parts
  • digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
  • is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
  • That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts
  • Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors
  • detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
  • The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.
  • 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
  • The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
  • 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
  • a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself
  • There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
  • 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
  • By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs
  • 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
  • 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
  • At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
  • 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
  • conducting, resistive, insulating.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.
  • Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
  • 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
  • because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      great quote (replace challenges with changes for effect)
  • 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
  • And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble. 
  • irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring
  • 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
  • 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. 
  • 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
  • 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."
  • Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."
  • Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools
  • 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
  • You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
  • To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
  • 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.
  • Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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?
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      !!!
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
  • In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
  • 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
  • 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
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      worse actually.. the trash stays
  • The bits come and go, globally connected for knowledge, but the atoms stay in the city.
  • instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      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
  • 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
  • Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab
  • it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.  
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      our challenge in the OVN space
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
     
    what is heavy is local, what is light is global, and increasingly manufacturing is being recreated along this principle
Kurt Laitner

Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views

p2pfoundation.net/Crowding_Out

crowding out p2p Michel Bauwens financial reward incentive

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      in other words, people are financially motivated until they are financially secure, then other motivations come in
  • "leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees
  • At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so part of the dynamic is that everyone is paid fairly, if not there is the feeling of exploitation
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      which are... abundance?
  • There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      the real question though is why, and whether it is the paying them that is the problem, or perhaps how that is determined, and who else gets what on what basis..  if you have to have them question the fairness of the situation, they will likely check out
  • giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them
  • It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
  • Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
  • If you pay me for it, it must be work
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      only because a dichotomy of work and play exists in western culture
  • It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes, why is key
  • interesting examples of an effect called crowding
  • Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
  • A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
  • Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
  • Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      or perhaps the key was to help her fit the medication into her day, which she was having trouble with...
  • The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      absolutely, in some sense the guilt of being late is replaced by a rationalization that you are paying them - it is still a rationalization, and parents in this case need to be reminded that staff have lives too to reinforce the moral suasion
  • "The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
  • External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      emphasis on "if" and replacing that with "in so far as"
  • External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      interesting footnote
  • In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc.  If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
  • cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      are these learned or intrinsic?
  • this is labor, this is work, just do it.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      except that this cultural meme is already a bias, not a fact
  • When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      true, and part of our challenge then is to remove this dichotomy
  • So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and perhaps the problem is simply the conversion to money, rather than simply tracking these activities themselves (went to church 50 times this year!, helped 50 orphans get families!) (the latter being more recognition than reward
  • Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and tracking them causes them to conform to cultural expectations
  • You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and we are left with the challenge, how to work to purpose but still have our scarce goods needs sufficiently provided for?  it has to be for love AND money
  • When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so pay them highly for highly valued labour, and don't forget to recognize them as well... no?
  • you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is a non argument, these are just interacting but separate problems, use ether or bitcoin, change legislation, what have you
  • Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      exactly, so use commonsource, they can use it all they want, but they have to flow through benefit (provide attribution, recognition, and any financial reward must be split fairly)
  • You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc.  if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
  • No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is an utter cop out - figure out what is close enough to fair and iterate forward to improve it, wow
  • too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes to the human evaluation part, but "it's too complicated" is disingenuous at the least
  • Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes indeed, so get your metrics right, and be prepared to adjust them as they are gamed - and ultimately, as financial penalties are to BP, even if some people game the system, can we better the gaming of the capitalist system.. it's a low bar I know
  • They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      it doesn't have to be this way, unless you think that way already
  • If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      wow, talk about entrepreneurial taker attitude rationalization
  • People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and getting paid for others free work isn't sleazy, somehow...?
  • Donate.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      better yet, give yourself a reasonable salary, and give the rest away
  • Thank-you gifts
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      cynical.. here have a shiny bobble you idiot
  • Pay bounties
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      good way to get people to compete ineffectively instead of cooperating on a solution, the lottery mechanism is evil
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
     
    while good issue are brought up in this article, the solutions offered are myopic and the explanations of the observed effects not satisfying
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Value network - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Value_network

value network wikipedia

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 Aug 11 - Cached
  • a business analysis perspective
  • describes
  • resources within and between businesses
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • nodes in a value network represent people
  • nodes are connected by interactions that represent tangible and intangible deliverables
  • Value networks exhibit interdependence
  • Companies have both internal and external value networks.[1]
  • customers or recipients, intermediaries, stakeholders, complementary, open innovation networks and suppliers
  • key activities
  • processes and relationships that cut across internal boundaries
  • Value is created through exchange and the relationships between roles
  • F&S's value networks consists of these components
  • customers
  • Some service the customers all use, and enables interaction between the customers
  • service
  • contracts that enables access to the service
  • the network formed by phone users
  • example
  • example
  • car insurance company
  • how a company understands itself
  • value creation process
  • value creating system
  • all stakeholders co-produce value
  • systematic social innovation
  • strategy as
  • the Value Network to emerge as a mental model
  • Verna Allee defines value networks [5] as any web of relationships that generates both tangible and intangible value through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups or organizations. Any organization or group of organizations engaged in both tangible and intangible exchanges can be viewed as a value network, whether private industry, government or public sector.
  • Allee developed Value network analysis, a whole systems mapping and analysis approach to understanding tangible and intangible value creation among participants in an enterprise system
  • participants, transactions and tangible and intangible deliverables that together form a value network.
  • knowledge
  • benefits
  • favors
  • know-how
  • policy
  • planning
  • process
  • biological organisms, including humans, function in a self-organizing mode internally and externally
  • no central “boss” to control this dynamic activity
  • The purpose of value networks is to create the most benefit for the people involved in the network (5)
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 Aug 11
       
      Verna starts with relationships. I think this is wrong. Perceived value and how to get  to it determines the type of relationships we forge with other people with whom we robe shoulders.  
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software, and More - NYTimes.com - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...-open-source-software-and-more

article

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • GitHub has no managers among its 140 employees, for example. “Everyone has management interests,” he said. “People can work on things that are interesting to them. Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow.” He does, however, retain his own title and decides things like salaries.
  • Another member of GitHub has posted a talk that stresses how companies flourish when people want to work on certain things, not because they are told to.
  • Asana bases work on a series of to-do lists that people assign one another. Inside Asana there are no formal titles, though like GitHub there are bosses at the top who make final decisions.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • For all the happiness and sharing, real money is involved here. In July GitHub received $100 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This early in most software companies’ lives, $20 million would be a fortune.
  • GitHub’s popularity has also made it an important way for companies to recruit engineers, because some of the best people in the business are showing their work or dissecting the work of others inside some of the public pull requests.
  • Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.
  • “For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”
  • Can this really be extended across a large, complex organization, however?
  • As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly.
  • Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.
  • Still, these fast-rising successes may be on to something more than simply universalizing the means of their own good fortune. An early guru of the Information Age, Peter Drucker, wrote often in the latter part of his career of the need for managers to define tasks, and for workers to seek fulfillment before profits.
Francois Bergeron

Data-Oriented Contract.pdf - 1 views

docs.google.com/...edit

contract network legal law

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

Private 'Distributed Ledgers' Miss the Point of a Blockchain | Bank Think - 0 views

www.americanbanker.com/...of-a-blockchain-1077435-1.html

paper blockchainaccess_project

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • a new buzzword making waves throughout the financial industry: “distributed ledger.”
  • Some say it's a tool to enable transparency by ensuring that all members of a group receive cryptographically secured messages about participants’ activities
  • Some are even bold enough to predict that distributed ledgers will end the madness of managing multiple database and reconciliation structures.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Distributed ledgers have primarily claimed to supplant the need for Bitcoin's mining process by introducing trust requirements among participants. These ledgers also promise users the immutability of Bitcoin without the need for expensive mining operations.
  • the technology powering distributed ledgers predates blockchains by well over 20 years.
  • Proponents of distributed ledgers argue that they can displace centralized providers such as SWIFT,
  • by moving money faster
  • There’s no doubt that blockchain technology will facilitate disruptive innovations in finance
  • But a world of private ledgers sounds eerily similar to a range of “private Internets.”
  • Blockchain technology is useful not because it offers efficiency in a world of message-passing but because it uses a complex process to settle value between untrusted parties.
  • But distributed ledgers do not offer users the ability to easily convert their tokens and messages into fungible units of value. Nor do distributed ledgers escrow value between parties that don't trust each other.
  • If a ledger is not a public resource, it will have the pressures incumbent to existing settlement systems plus the overhead of maintaining a shared database among competitors. What efficiency will remain thereafter remains dubious.
  • Permissioned Blockchains
  • their institutional users will probably find it expedient to hash their private-chain transactions and use those hashes to create bitcoin addresses and then send tiny fractions of a bitcoin to them to register their data at a location that cannot be hacked or changed.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 27 May 16
       
      This is also a problem with access, if an access event needs to be recorded in a way that cannot be altered, in a data location that cannot be altered, it will need to be stored on a block chain. 
  • In other words, all private ledger/blockchains will lead to Bitcoin's Rome, driven there by its low cost and high public accountability.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 27 May 16
     
    the case against private chains.
Steve Bosserman

Designing great data products - O'Reilly Radar - 1 views

radar.oreilly.com/...in-approach-data-products.html

data_prediction data_products drivetrain predictive_modeling

shared by Steve Bosserman on 30 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 30 Mar 12
     
    Note from Bill Fulkerson: The Drivetrain Approach: A four-step process for building data products. We are entering the era of data as drivetrain, where we use data not just to generate more data (in the form of predictions), but use data to produce actionable outcomes. That is the goal of the Drivetrain Approach.
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