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This article considers the emergence of large-scale "commons-based peer production" projects such as Wikipedia.org from an institutional development perspective. The argument it makes is threefold. First, that that the lowered transaction costs and information abundance found online transform a subset of public goods problems, essentially replacing free ridership with mass coordination as the central challenge. Second, that the boundaries of this subset are defined by a "power law topology" that leads to the emergence of online hub spaces and serves to resolve search problems endemic to the anti-geographic online landscape. These boundary conditions limit the overall impact of commons-based peer production for the political space. Third, that all such hubs move through a common five-stage institutional development process, directly related to standard models of the diffusion of innovation. Identification of the institutional development process behind Wikipedia leads in turn to the stipulation of seven hypotheses: the "Field of Dreams" Fallacy, the "Interest Horizons" thesis, "Political Strategy is Not Like Computer Code," the "Location-based Wave" thesis, "Power Law Fragility Under Moore's Law," the "Punctuated Equilibrium" thesis, and "Code-Forking the Public Sphere." Each thesis holds direct implications for the potential and limitations of "open source" applications in the political arena

In the last 60 years, we have seen the growing development and articulation of human rights, particularly within international law and within and across supranational organizations. However, in that period, the right to maintain one's language(s), without discrimination, remains peculiarly underrepresented and/or problematized as a key human right. This is primarily because the recognition of language rights presupposes recognizing the importance of wider group memberships and social contexts; conceptions that ostensibly militate against the primacy of individual rights in the post-Second World War era. Drawing on theoretical debates in political theory and international law, as well as the substantive empirical example of Catalonia, this article argues that language rights can and should be recognized as an important human right.

"Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) has been discussed in Bolivia since the 1970s. The first Educational Act with a bilingual and intercultural curriculum adapted to cultural and linguistic diversity - Ley de Reforma Educativa - was passed in 1994 with implementation starting in 1996. However, discussions continued: when the Evo Morales government was installed in January 2006, it abolished the act initiating work on a new law - 'Ley Elizardo P rez y Avelino Si ani' (decolonised community education) - arguing that intercultural education is more than bilingualism; the new law would emphasise the main values of Amerindian communities. The article will focus on the contextual background of educational reforms in relation to IBE. How is IBE defined and related to an Amerindian context? Why did the government dominated by ministers of an indigenous background abolish an educational act that emphasised intercultural education? Why would a revision not have sufficed? As the historical process is the basis for the current situation, I will begin by presenting the country's history emphasising the state of education and progress."

This article explores the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) and its attempts to translate international women's rights norms into national law, examining the problematic geographies of women's networks from local to global levels and showing how Ethiopia remains on the periphery of global human rights networks. In their campaign for legal reform to protect women against violence, activists had to show how the proposed reforms were 'African', as invoking international human rights risked dismissal as evidence of 'Westernisation'. Activists face practical difficulties, including lack of funding and technology, limiting networking beyond the national level. The article shows how the state shapes local activists' ability to form global connections. Legislation banning civil society organisations such as EWLA from conducting work around rights threatens to marginalise Ethiopia further from global human rights networks and norms. Local connectivity to the global is only partial, mediated by the power relations in which activists and the state are embedded.

"The questions that animate Sangeeta Ray's engaging new book on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak bear upon teaching and learning. The push and pull of being both student of Spivak's work and teacher of that work in the classroom and in the medium of the book are palpable from the first pages. We begin with a heading of "Partial Beginnings," and soon the "impossible" task of a book on Spivak is invoked (1). "[H]ow would I write her without diminishing her presence?" (1) asks Ray, facing, in fact, the double bind confronting every teacher: how to respond responsibly to the subject they have to teach. As Ray points out, Spivak calls attention to the play in Derrida's French between répondre à and répondre de that formalizes several options here. Thus, "give an answer to," "answering to," "being answerable for" (Spivak, "Responsibility," 61; Ray, 72).1 None is predictably the right thing. Caught in this double bind, the teacher is left without a reliable device with which to calculate what her answerability to the material to be taught should be. So we receive "a version of the many possible books that were discarded and rewritten" (Ray, 1). Maybe it all sounds a bit dramatic, but in fact it's an experience of everyday life: like everyone, the teacher must decide how to go on, but every "instant of decision is a madness . . . a decision of urgency and precipitation, acting in the night of nonknowledge and nonrule" (Derrida, "Force of Law," 255). In her continuously reflexive engagement with the texts of Spivak, Ray does not cease reminding her readers that the urgent, productively anxiety-inducing scene of pedagogy is acted out in those texts."

This paper explores the structure of the project-based innovation networks promoted by tax incentives to innovation activities in the Brazilian ICT sector ("ICT Law"). It proposes a framework for characterizing the decentralized governance of innovation projects in sectors, identifying (i) the boundaries between firms and technological partners, (ii) the specialization of actors in types of activities and (iii) the speed of change in the collaborations between firms and technological institutes. The empirical analysis is based on the data of more than 10,000 innovation projects conducted between 1997 and 2003. The results show a strong re-organization of the innovation networks in the sector during the period, attributed mainly to a shift from investments in middleware to software-related innovation activities, the re-specialization of the subsidiaries of multinational companies, and the emergence of private research institutes as central nodes inside the sectoral innovation system.

"Throughout the history of film, plots have required that a character be rendered unconscious for a finite period with no explanation of the process and with no other consequence, to which end, the medium invented the "magic-single-punch." All one character has to do is say: "I hate to do this but . . ." then throw a swift punch to jaw, and the recipient agrees to pass out for however long the plot requires. More significant than this compliant character is the equally compliant viewer, who accepts this miracle of anesthesia, that works to perfect effect even on a character who, in other scenes, might have a chair broken over his head or receive several karate chops to the trachea with barely a blink or stagger. Although I believe that car chases were the reason God invented "fast-forward," even more bewildering than the apparent popularity of this screen event is the fact that audiences have failed, over the last two decades, to wonder why not one of the cars involved has a working airbag. Such thoughts, of course, disrupt the pleasure that has been paid for with money, time, and attention, in the same way, for example, that disputing the comparably absurd tenets of Reaganomics disrupts the myth of satisfaction purchased with (low) taxes, lip-service patriotism, and self-serving citizenship.1 In 1984-in the middle of Reagan's reign over morning in America-federal law required that all cars have passive restraints by 1989. Since Reagan's second term, in other words, in defiance of legality and common sense, the premises of Reaganomics and of movie car chases have remained unchallenged. Fueled on the one hand by pleasure industries, and on the other, by think tanks and talk radio, the speeding of the economy and of the movie-chase car, along parallel courses toward disastrous crashes could be glossed by saying that, as usual, American mass media had disabled the wrong airbags. Although we do not n