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Lessig on Digital Barbarism
Lawrence Lessig has posted a review of David Halperin's recent book, Digital Barbarism.
Halperin, who authored the (in)famous New York Times article calling for perpetual copyright, has now compiled his ideas into a book. Lessig offers a much-needed critique, including citing misconceptions about Creative Commons (Halperin conflates it not only with "freeware" with software... more
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Virtually obsessed... with the peer-to-peer world
Heather Ford · Johannesburg (South Africa) · Jun 09th, 2006 10:54 pm · 20 votes · no comments made
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 This article, by Frederick Noronha, is edited from the full version on the Asia Commons Conference website. Fred is the founder of www.bytesforall.org, the award-winning website on ICTs for South Asia and is a prolific blogger on ICT for development issues. He writes here about Michel Bauwens (p2pfoundation.net) who participated in Asia Commons in Bangkok this week.
Michel Bauwens, 48, turned his back on a senior corporate position, and moved from his homeland of Belgium to another continent... and a very different way of doing things.
Today, researching the P2P movement worldwide is a virtual obsession. Pun intended.
So what's the idea behind Michel's p2pfoundation.net and the 2,000 pages of wiki-based information it contains?
"The basic idea I had was that there's a new social movement emerging which is really about extending the realm of participation to the whole of life. We live in a representative democracy, which says you can vote every four years, and choose which people will exercise power on your behalf... now we're building tools and resources which say everybody needs to be involved, and everybody should have a voice."
This movement takes varied forms, and comes in different shapes. It basically has a free-and-open paradigm, which ensures that people can work together and create a pool of resources that they can use.
"There's the participative processes itself. There's peer production (working together). And there's peer governance (how you manage that kind of cooperation). The result of all these processes is the commons," he adds.
Michel sees that a whole lot of action is taking place on the ground. But there's a catch. There's no place where you can find this information easily. It's all scattered across the globe. To make things worse, one end of this global movement doesn't recognise the other end.
"People in open politics, open money, participatory culture, participatory spirituality... they don't realise that they are doing something broadly similar and they can all reinforce each other," he argues.
So go to p2pfoundation.net and see the way he's trying to link them all together.
"There's a newsletter, which is distributed according to weekly themesâ?¦ We also have a blog, which is a day-to-day commentary. You can find it at blog.p2pfoundation.com," says Michel.
"My goal is to document commons-related projects worldwide," he says. Anything that's collaboratively produced in common. It could be from the realms of peer production, peer collaboration, peer governance.
The site hosts a P2P movements' directory, a webcast directory, a P2P encyclopaedia with about 800 terms - from concepts like the open car project, to open ecology."
Open car? What's that?
"Some people, including expert designers working with major corporations, are volunteering their time to design freely-sharable plans for a environmentally-friendly solar car project. The car isn't physically being made, but it's part of the open design movement," he explains.
Some insight: "You realise, when you do this work, how strong this movement is. Two years ago, the anti-globalisation movement didn't know it was connected to the free software movement. Now they know.
It's all about people creating something in common, and creating a universal thread through that. We all think we are doing a small thing and that we are a small group, but if you look worldwide, this is a very strong global movement," he adds.
Michel started off as a librarian, working for the US Information Agency. Then he shifted to being knowledge manager for British Petroleum. He also created a Wired-like magazine in Dutch, and built two dotcoms - one on extranet-intranet issues, and the other on cybermarketing.
"My last job was as e-business strategy manager for a telco. That was a 25,000 people company in Belgium. I got tired of the corporate world. So, in 2002 I took a six months holiday, and came here in March 2003. Then, I took a year's sabbatical. This followed with a year reading and a year writing. This year I've put everything online. Next year I plan to physicalise all things - with conferences and face-to-face meetings of participants," he laughs when it's pointed out that he obviously believes in a lot of careful planning. He says: "I used to do scenario planning and read a lot of science fiction too."
He points out that in the 1950s, a lot of 'time capsules' were buried across the globe, but people simply forgot where these were located. "Memories of humankind are very short. We are now making nuclear waste dumps (that will last) tens of thousands of years. How would people remember where these are?" he worries.
Michel quotes an anthropological perspective that sees four ways of interacting - equality matching (as in the gift-economy of tribal societies), authority ranking (in feudal societies), market pricing and communal shareholding.
He believes that peer-to-peer could be the "new form of communal shareholding". And, he hopes this new form will "contaminate the rest".
Unfortunately, we've got it all wrong, he says. "We treat rival (one-use) resources as if they were non rival - we destroy nature. And we treat non-rival resources as if they were rival - we make information scarce," he says.
"But I'm not a pessimist. Our environment is going down, and inequality is growing. But the alternative is there. It's very strong. When you create free software, you're already creating an alternative. In Belgium, you have peer-to-peer conflict resolution among students. In Canada you have peer-to-peer mentoring. And, in Thailand, you have peer-to-peer knowledge management," he argues.
Pic: Michel Bauwens, imagine-magazine.com, cc BY-NC-ND 2.0 Belgium licence
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