Interview with Michel Bauwens, founder of Foundation for P2P Alternatives by Lawrence Bird, on Furtherfield.org:

Michel Bauwens is one of the foremost thinkers on the peer-to-peer phenomenon. Belgian-born and currently resident in Chiang-Mai, Thailand, he is founder of the Foundation for P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Alternatives, and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

Lawrence Bird is a designer, instructor and writer with an interest in cities and their image. He has been trained in social science-based urban design (MSc), and in the phenomenology of cinematic architecture (PhD). He’s currently working on the postdoctoral project Beyond the Desert of the Real, based in Winnipeg, Canada. He also makes films, and is currently developing a hybrid film and animation project WPG_POV.

Economies of the Commons 2 :: November 11-13 2010 :: De Balie & Hilversum - Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Amsterdam.

Economies of the Commons 2 is a critical examination of the economics of on-line public domain and open access resources of information, knowledge, and media (the ‘digital commons’). The past 10 years have seen the rise of a variety of such open content resources attracting millions of users, sometimes on a daily basis. The impact of projects such as …Wikipedia, Images of the Future, and Europeana testify to the vibrancy of the new digital public domain. No longer left to the exclusive domains of digital ‘insiders’, open content resources are rapidly becoming widely used and highly popular.

While protagonists of open content praise its low-cost accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim it undermines the established “gate keeping” functions of authors, the academy, and professional institutions while lacking a reliable business model of its own. Continue reading

City as Studio: EXB 10.03 presents Ghumakkad Baaja — An open collaboration between Prayas Abhinav, Hemant Babu, Ram Bhatt and Nishant Sharma :: June 26, 2010; 6:30 pm :: Sarai-CSDS, 29, Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi, India.

Ghumakkad Baaja is a demonstration of an open and unregulated way of doing audio transmissions along with discussions about transmissions, public networks and “selling air”.

* Can we be active broadcasters and not just passive consumers? * Can we create and share audio/video content in a widely accessible way? * Could there be a platform much like satellite T.V, but in an on-the-move outdoor friendly format without needing a multi-crore license? Continue reading

Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing by Janneke Adema, posted on Open Reflections, September 20, 2009

“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?” — Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)

Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Continue reading

Twitter Fileshare (or, How to Tweet Any File on Twitter) by Greg Leuch and Theo Watson, F.A.T. (Free Art and Technology):

“… So why is filesharing on Twitter important to FAT Lab? Governments and private organizations continue to lock down legitimate file sharing through raids, law suits, and “consumer protection” laws & treaties. Continue reading

Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage by Axel Bruns: We the users turned creators and distributors of content are TIME’s Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge’s advertising agency of the year. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what’s really going on?

In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments from open source through blogs and the Wikipedia to Second Life. He shows that what’s emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. Continue reading

Critical Point of View: Second international conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative :: March 26-27, 2010 :: OBA (Public Library Amsterdam, next to Amsterdam central station), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam.

Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta- ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie. Continue reading

Manhattan Bridge Piers by kvertrees

From Uploading the Avant-Garde: “… YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde… (It is) still incubating novel forms of creative expression and cultivating new audiences…”

Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, is one of those who believe in open spaces and creation without incentive. In this interview he talks about the Free Software and Wikipedia movements as pointers to a genuine change in the way we think, create and distribute goods. He believes that we have never before had such real-time possibilities for human cooperation and collective intelligence on a global scale.

The economic collapse of 2008 is leading many people to question the suitability of the capitalist economic system. At the same time, many people are unsure about the system that can replace capitalism. The most common solution is, of course, socialism. But there are those who wonder whether there could be alternatives, though no serious discussion seems to have taken place on this subject. Continue reading

[Image: Garden of Forking Paths by wasabicube] Nate Tkacz wrote: Hi all,

I would like to add to the discussion about recursive publics*, consensus and forking. Anna briefly mentioned Christoph Spehr’s discussion of “withdrawal” in Free Cooperation. Her point, as I understand it, was to emphasise dissensus rather than consensus as the aspect of recursive publics that makes it significant as a political structure. Chris Kelty (from now on CK to avoid confusion) pointed to the practice of forking as an instance of productive dissensus. Through the practice of forking people can leave a project, taking the (non-exclusive) source code or whatever other materials that constitute the public with them and continue in a different direction. The fact that forking is a possibility, writes CK, keeps contributors responsive to each other and this presumably also works to legitimize the recursive public: Continue reading