provide greater user value

For numerous reasons the services provided by the commercial companies do not adequately meet the creative, social, political, and financial needs of the 99%

allows self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums, and movements.

With the PeerPoint approach, each user will own her own inexpensive internet appliance and all the data and content she creates

If a FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack.

The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are: world class, best-of-breed open source p2p architecture consistent, granular, user-customizable security management and identity protection integrated with other apps in the suite via a common distributed database and/or “data bus” architecture. consistent, user-customizable large, medium, and small-screen (mobile device) user interfaces ability to interface with its corresponding major-market-share service (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) GPS enabled

First tier applications: distributed database social networking  (comparison of distributed social network applications) trust/reputation metrics crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management  (wiki, Google Docs, or better) project management/workflow data visualization (data sets, projects, networks, etc.) user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better) crowd funding (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform) voting (LiquidFeedback or better) universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content

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)

we cannot actually see this in the figures for economic growth.

a problem of measurement. Of the way in which GDP itself is a useful but not complete measure.

certain uses of the internet actually reduce GDP: even while making us as individuals richer.

we’re measuring economic growth wrong.

We have managed to build an economy where trying something new has become increasingly difficult.