p2p news developments and commentaries

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/technology/circuits/10prin.html?8cir=&pagewanted=print&position=
Another important technical development, allowing for relatively autonomous print publishing. What we need now are open source equivalents:
“Take a floppy disk or CD-ROM to Bookends in Ridgewood, N.J., or e-mail the store a file, and pow! - in as little as 17 minutes a perfect-bound paperback version of your novel, family memoir, or favorite Bulgarian desserts can be printed.
Every book comes complete with a customized cover chosen from among several thousand designs. For an additional fee, it can also be trademarked and registered with a machine-readable ISBN number, essential for any author hoping to get the work stocked by a major chain and on its way to becoming a best seller.
With the large capital outlay involved in traditional publishing, which involves printing and storing thousands of copies, mainstream publishers are more reluctant to take on titles that they doubt will generate quick, substantial sales.
One alternative that has surfaced in recent years is the use of Internet-based print-on-demand companies like AuthorHouse, iUniverse and Xlibris. These online services cost more than Bookends, although they may offer more assistance in getting a book sold. Copies are printed when ordered, and royalties are split between the company and the author.

1. Sources on software industry
http://www.salvaggio.net/index.php?page=publications&cat=report
Salvino A. Salvaggio, a former colleague of mine at MarchFIRST, has just published a new report, worth downloading especially if you are part of the business community. On the same site, you’ll find some older reports that we co-authored. Below are the…

KEY MESSAGES
Any software whose code is available for users to look at, modify, reuse and redistribute freely can be called "Open Source Software" (OSS). There are however some differences between OSS and free software regarding mostly users’ duties and intellectual property rules
The phenomenon of OSS is not new : at the beginning, programmers, not software, were core ; later on, rights of usage became a way to earn money ; however, some programmers called for a return to the public sharing of software ; then Linux came...
Production of OSS happens according to a self-regulated, decentralized organization that gave OSS development unique opportunities while a new approach of collaborative work improved the sustainability of the project and made it able to impact key economic levers
Linux hype cycle has been guided, among others, by perception of PROs and CONs. Recently, perceived benefits of OSS seem overtaking barriers and increase its appeal to businesses. As a matter of fact, global comparison highlights real advantage to OSS. It is therefore not a surprise that finding evidences of OSS as a technologically and financially viable solution is becoming quite easy
Compared to vendors’ closed source software OSS secures huge IT investment savings, and total Return On Investment is highly attractive. Additionally, OSS users are empowered, for they do not depend anymore on vendors’ decisons
OSS users' satisfaction is likely to foster a viral effect of adoption as evolution of OSS market share also shows
With OSS, the concept of vendors is disappearing. Shifts in vendors’ revenue streams trigger deep changes in the culture of software business as well as in the industry at large
Available OSS solutions already meet almost the whole range of companies' needs for any IT segment (core data center, server, office, iamge manipulation, content management system, etc.)
Migrating to OSS should follow a sharp process : analysis of the pros and cons, analysis of economic efficiency/impact, implementation of the migration itself according to a planned path
Several real-life cases show migrating to OSS is a winning move from both IT strategy point of view and, especially, business strategy point of view

A very important technical development, enabling new forms of digital convergence, and especially P2P television making, distribution and watching:
“The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room. The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.”

- there’s a crisis in commercial WiFi, because customers expect it to be free and many are building alternative citizen netwoks., at http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,63732,00.html?

- how many open source developers are there? Sourceforge alone counts 80,000 projects with 800,000 developers!, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/images/atlas_software.pdf

- the business model behind the Creative Commons project, at http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,608619,00.html

https://www.wie.org/j25/collective.asp

As this fledgling field enters its second decade, several major movements and initiatives are already under way, with a vision for bringing the power of the group mind to the complex dilemmas facing our beleaguered planet. I strongly recommend ordering this special issue of ‘What Is Enligthenment’.

“Any innovative path forward through these very complex issues—whether it's the environment or water or AIDS or the kind of divisiveness that's being exacerbated around the world right now—is going to come through real conversations about questions that matter.” As co-originator of the burgeoning international “conversation movement” known as the World Café, Juanita Brown is a woman who knows whereof she speaks. Along with her partner, David Isaacs, and other World Café hosts around the globe, she is applying what she's learned in her twenty-five years as a senior-level corporate strategist and researcher toward the creation of a dialogue modality capable of nurturing large-scale social change.And it seems to be working. Since its inception in the mid-nineties, the World Café's innovative approach to large-group inquiry has spread to five continents and been engaged across a broad range of organizational and social settings. In the Middle East, it was recently used to assist in bringing new perspectives to tough Israeli/Palestinian conversations. Mexican government and corporate leaders have applied its methodology to scenario planning and national social development. And in Singapore, it is now being used in several government ministries to support the nation's goal of becoming a “learning society.” And the World Café is but one of a handful of collective intelligence movements with aspirations to transform our global culture. Mitch Saunders' Laboratory for Social Invention project is attempting to harness collective thinking to prevent civil war in Venezuela, Liberia, and Indonesia. Harrison Owen's “Open Space Technology” has been used to successfully bring about a ceasefire in a bloody, seven-year-long conflict between two ethnic nationalities in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. And here on the home front, organizations like Sandy Heierbacher's National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation are working to reinvigorate the democratic process by mobilizing groups of citizens to think together about the country's future. From Dynamic Facilitation to Deep Dialogue to Appreciative Inquiry, new collective technologies are spreading across the country and to the corners of the earth, mobilizing and empowering countless organizations and communities to reach for innovative solutions to their most troubling social dilemmas.In keeping with the inherently cooperative emphasis of the collective wisdom movement, most of these approaches tend to be self-organizing or “bottom up,” lacking any central governing structure to steer them. And this absence of a strategic body guiding and controlling the effort is certainly an important part of the magic that is allowing it to spread so far and so rapidly. But while this grassroots collective activism no doubt has the potential to play a major role in catalyzing large-scale change, there are at least a few individuals who feel that a more centrally organized approach is also needed to grapple effectively with the magnitude and complexity of the challenges we face. Inspired by the possibility of creating a unified planetwide transformative team, a small group of dynamos out of Boston are about to launch what may be the single most ambitious collective wisdom effort yet. Determined to grapple head-on with the most troubling problems facing the world today, Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, Otto Scharmer, and their team of colleagues are rolling out the Global Leadership Initiative—an effort that aims for nothing less than to “generate a 'tipping point' in humanity's ability to address its most critical global challenges.”44 By developing a network of leaders “from all sectors of the human community—who understand how to harness the collective power of small groups to co-create better futures,” over the next five years, they plan to “launch ten international projects that will address inherently global challenges, such as AIDS, malnutrition, water, and climate change.” And what's more, they intend to do it with “a standard of excellence and professionalism unsurpassed by any other organization or institution.”In our cynical age, it's not often that you find a group of people so confidently optimistic about their capacity to bring about significant global change. But before you write off this activism-on-steroids as the product of naïveté, hubris, or hyperbolic idealism, consider that the individuals at the helm are some of the most influential organizational minds in the world. In their work at MIT, Generon Consulting, and the Society for Organizational Learning, these management moguls have been pushing the envelope of collective learning and innovation for two decades. At the vanguard of large-scale systems change and leadership development, they've worked closely with multinational corporations, government agencies, and NGOs throughout the world. At the heart of this initiative is a deep conviction in the potential for small groups to generate breakthrough thinking. Over years of “action research,” they've developed what they feel is a “rigorous” state-of-the-art methodology for “creating unified learning fields in which teams made up of highly diverse individuals become capable of operating as a single intelligence.” Using collective wisdom to actually solve our most pressing global problems, it turns out, is a dream that may not be as outlandish as it seems. Even a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine such an idea being taken seriously by business and government leaders. But these are indeed rapidly changing times. And given the receptivity these pioneers are finding to their vision, there is at least the possibility that a lot more positive change may be in store for us all.

Collective Wisdom Initiative

This Fetzer Institute research project, directed by Tom Callanan, was designed to explore collective wisdom practices and to document how collective intelligence may be used for healing and reconciliation, and for the transformation of the individual and society.http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org

The Co-Intelligence Institute

This institute was founded by Tom Atlee to further the understanding and development of co-intelligence, and to use co-intelligence in the realms of politics, governance, and cultural evolution.http://www.co-intelligence.org

The World Café

The World Café, created by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Nancy Margulies, Ken Homer and others, is an easy-to-use method for facilitating collaborative dialogue among large groups of people who want to explore real-life situations in their organizations and communities.http://www.theworldcafe.com

The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL)

SoL was founded in April 1997 by Peter Senge in collaboration with Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and others as the successor to MIT's Center for Organizational Learning. Its mission is to foster collaboration among corporations that are committed to fundamental organizational change and to building learning organizations.http://www.solonline.org

The Dialogue Group

Glenna Gerard and Linda Ellinor formed The Dialogue Group in 1991 to research, develop, and facilitate dialogue in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.http://www.thedialoguegrouponline.com

Open Space Technology

Open Space Technology, created by Harrison Owen, is an effective, economical, fast, and easily repeatable strategy for convening meetings and enabling self-organizing groups of all sizes—from five people to one thousand—to deal with complex issues in a very short period of time.http://www.openspaceworld.com

- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,63574,00.html?

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,63474,00.html?
“One legal scholar is proposing radical plans for a system that he claims will pay artists fairly and bring more digital media to the people who crave it. But convincing the music and movie industries to embrace the idea seems unlikely, at least in the near future. Harvard Law School professor Terry Fisher detailed his proposal Friday at the Internet Law Program, a three-day event sponsored by the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Fisher advocates an alternative compensation system that would pay artists based on the popularity of their music. Artists would first have to register their work with the copyright office, which would track how many times that work was downloaded. Revenue generated from taxes on things like Internet access and the sale of MP3 players would then be used to pay the artists. Similar plans have been proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and University of Texas at Austin law professor Neil Netanel, among others. He said that while record industry execs "hated" his idea, there are "much more significant prospects for building this in other countries." Fisher said Brazil is interested in exploring the idea and is building a database of digital music, an effort supported by the country's minister of culture, musician Gilberto Gil.
If, in a few years, the system is successful in Brazil and American entertainment industries continue to see their businesses suffer, an alternative compensation system may seem more appealing. "What's more likely in the United States is a voluntary version," Fisher said. That would require the participation of both musicians and music fans to be successful, and could be financed by subscription revenues. "I think it's great, but it's so far in the future," said Heather Ford, who is helping to build a branch of Creative Commons, an organization that enables creators to use more flexible copyright licenses, in South Africa.

- Blender is an open source animation program with 2 million plus downloads, at http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3350861

- New balanced report on digital rights management vs. peer to peer file sharing?
http://www.drmwatch.com/legal/article.php/3321691


“The Committee for Economic Development (CED), a Washington-based business think tank, released a policy statement, Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property, on Monday. This superb 81-page document is the most balanced and pragmatic statement on the problems of digital IP, piracy, and DRM to come out in some time.””

http://www.reclaimthecommons.net/ ; http://www.friendsofthecommons.org/

The first item shows clearly how a new public commons is created in the domain of knowledge, but how it is linked to the more general idea of a public domain, such as the sky, water, etc.. which need to be protected from private appropriation. Many new organizations are taking up that issue.

Excerpts from the site:

“The market has its advocates. They’re called conservatives.
And the government has its backers. They’re called liberals.
But who’s looking after the commons — the vast realms of nature and society that we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished, to our children?
We are. And we hope you will, too.

WHAT IS THE COMMONS? On this web site, we use the terms commons, common assets, common property and common wealth. They all refer to the same thing in slightly different ways. Commons is the generic term. It embraces all the creations of nature and society that we inherit jointly and freely, and hold in trust for future generations.
Common assets are those parts of the commons that have a value in the market. Radio airwaves are a common asset, as are timber and minerals on public lands. So, increasingly, are air and water. Common property refers to a class of human-made rights that lies somewhere between private property and state property. Examples include conservation easements held by land trusts, Alaskans’ right to dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, and everyone’s right to waterfront access. Common wealth refers to the monetary and non-monetary value of the commons in supporting life and well-being. Like stockholders’ equity in a corporation, it may increase or decrease from year to year depending on how well the commons is managed. We tend not to notice the many services the commons provides for us — in part because the commons never advertises. Here is a short list.

First of all, for most of human existence, the commons supplied everyone’s food, water, fuel and medicines — in other words, our basic sustenance. People hunted, fished, gathered fruits and herbs, collected firewood and building materials, grazed their animals in common pastures and farmed on common lands. This is still true in many parts of the world today. Secondly, the commons is the source of all natural resources and nature’s many replenishing services. Water, air, DNA, seeds, topsoil, fire, electricity, minerals, wild animals, domesticable animals, edible plants, healing plants, solar energy, wind energy, water power, forests, rivers, ultra-violet protection, climate regulation, biodiversity and much more — these are all parts of the commons. Third, the commons is our ultimate waste sink. It recycles water, oxygen, carbon and everything else we excrete, exhale and throw away. It’s the place where we store, or try to store, the toxic residues of our modern industrial system. Fourth, the commons holds and disseminates humanity’s vast accumulation of science, art, customs and laws. And it's the seedbed of all human creativity. Without the sharing of ideas, there’d be no religion, science, mathematics, philosophy, children’s games, musical instruments, dances, jazz, hip-hop, fashion, sports, democracy, universities, libraries — the list goes on and on.
Fifth, the commons is essential to human communication. We talk to each other with shared symbols and languages that are living products of many generations. And most of the spaces we communicate through — the air which carries sound, the visual environment we use for traffic signs and billboards, the electromagnetic waves we use for radio, TV and cell phones, the vast global web of wires and switches we call the Internet — are parts of the commons. Sixth, we use the commons whenever we travel from place to place, whether by land, water or air. If we couldn’t use the commons in this way, we'd be prisoners in our private homes. Seventh, we rely on the commons for our sense of community. The commons is the village tree, the public square, Main Street, the neighborhood and the playground. Outside of families, it’s the glue that holds us together.

Commons Resources

Groups building our common trust: Common Assets Defense Fund ; Friends of the Commons; Tomales Bay Institute

Learn more about these commons:

Sky, The Sky Trust Initiative ; Water, Blue Planet Project; Pacific Institute; Public Citizen, Knowledge & Culture, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge; Airwaves, New America Foundation Spectrum Program; Internet, Center for Digital Democracy, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

More in this special issue of the magazine Section Z, at http://www.sectionz.info/ISSUE_5/content.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/technology/circuits/13dodg.html?8cir

Apart from the commercial hyperbole, dodge is an interesting experiment in social networking software.

“He took control of his social fate when he signed up for Dodgeball.com, a free social-networking service that is becoming popular with young singles. The site uses cellphone text-messaging to wirelessly connect thousands of friends, and friends of friends.
Just hours after he subscribed, Mr. Battjer, 27, received his first Dodgeball message: Alyssa, a friend of his friend Greg, it read, was at Luna Lounge, only two blocks away. Mr. Battjer had never met Alyssa, but inspired by the thumbnail-size picture sent with the message, he decided to find her. The two met and shared laughs over their mutually "dorky" fascination with technology, he said. Mr. Battjer, chief operations officer of Watson Adventures, a company that organizes scavenger hunts, is now a regular Dodgeball user. "Dodgeball has changed the social fabric of everything," he said. "The technology augments the social experience in a way that has never been done before."

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1176738,00.html

- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,63343,00.html?

Drazen Pantic

Complete text: http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=pantic0704

"Recently U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attested to the revolutionary power of the wireless uploading of digital images to the Internet. Testifying in Congress about the sudden widespread appearance of photographs and video of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he did not address this subject as a technological optimist. Rumsfeld is the farthest thing from a dotcom stock analyst circa 1999, or a computer visionary. Rather, he stuck to the brutal reality, explaining that the combination of cheap digital cameras and the Internet had fundamentally changed the dynamics of news making during wartime.
Today, everyone has access to the latest high quality consumer electronic devices. Every cell phone has the ability to capture images, even movies. Once people begin to use these devices to record the significant events in their lives, there is no way to prevent them from slipping cameras into any location. When sensitive material is captured in digital form, it takes on a life of its own. Circulating across the Internet, it becomes a fact in itself. It is impossible for a military organization to control the flow of disbursed, distributed content production in a network environment. "

An index of recent social software projects, at http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/2127913924623224

Here is an outline of the categories, with the names of the sites:

business networking sites
The Conneck, Corporate Alumni, ecademy, Eliyon, EntreMate, GoingProfessional, Growth Company, I’m Not From Here, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, LinkedIn, matcheroo, Mediabistro, Monster Networking, Networking For Professionals, Online Business Networking Resource, PowerMingle, RealContacts, ReferNet, Ryze, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Spoke Software, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, TENG.

common interest networking sites
Buzznet, Classmates.com, Community Zero, Company of Friends, Delphi Forums, Globe Alive, gradFinder, HOT or NOT?, Netplaya Burning Man Community, Talk City.

dating sites
Amigos.com, AsiaFriendFinder, FriendFinder, GermanFriendFinder, IndianFriendFinder, Love.com, Match.com, MyEMatch, Passion.com, RateOrDate, RedDate.com, SeniorFriendFinder, uDate.com, Yahoo! Personals.

face-to-face meeting facilitation sites
8minuteDating, Evite, First Tuesday, The Lunch Club NYC, MeetUp, MixerMixer, Netparty, Social Circles, WhizSpark.

friend networking sites
Backwash, BuddyBridge, Chia Friend, enCentra, everyonesconnected, Friend Surfer, Friendster, Friendzy, Gruuve, hi5, hipster, Huminity, Living Directory, mrNeighborhood, Myspace.com, orkut, PalJunction, peeps nation, Ringo, Tickle by Emode, Tribe.net, Wallop, WorldShine, Zerodegrees.

international friend networking sites
easeek, eConozco.com, eFriendsnet, Friendity, Friends Reunited, HeiYou, LianQu, qpengyou, Shortcut, UUFriends, WiW, YeeYoo, YOYO.

pet networking sites
Backwash for Pets, Dogster.

social network sharing & analysis sites
BuddyZoo, del.icio.us, Dude Check This Out!, Eurekster!, Funchain.com, HelloWorld, KnowMates, The Opinion Exchange, RepCheck, Small World Project, Social Grid, StumbleUpon, Zdarmanet.

social networking software sites
Affinity Engines, Contact Network, InterAction, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Salesforce.com, Visible Path, WisdomBuilder.


And here are suggestions for further refining of these categories

Posted Feb 1, 2004, 6:37 AM ET by Marc Eisenstadt
Hi; a few quick thoughts (followup to private email, but worth posting, I figured):1. Yes, BuddySpace (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/buddyspace/) certainly belongs, since social networking is a large part of what it's all about... but, interestingly, there's no obvious 'niche' for it and similar 'highly synchronous' and 'large scale visualization' tools... *THEREFORE*, a bit of 'iterative refinement' suggests the following modifications to your categories:2. I suggest adding an additional category for 'Synchronous/RealTime Social Networking', and include all the big name Instant Messengers, plus of course BuddySpace, the general world of Jabber (www.jabber.org), and others like Odigo, which masterfully integrated IM, user-profile/matchmaking/dating capabilities, and collaborative web browsing3. I would also add an extra category for 'Large-scale Peer-to-Peer and File-Sharing Networks', which is where your Napster, KaZaa, Gnutella, et al would fit in nicely... these have a strong 'shared presence' element including adding people to 'hot lists' based on their music preferences, and it's great to see that 7,875,234 others are online with you right this moment!4. I would also add a category for 'Massively Multiplayer Online Games' (including RolePlaying, i.e MMORG), such as Everquest, Asheron's Call, etc., which have phenomenal user bases, strong social networking capabilities, 'karma' points, allegiance, etc. .. in many ways these are the Grand-daddies of Social Networking!5. Another strong category would be 'reputation/karma-based systems', such as Ebay, epinions, Amazon6. What about a category for emergent democracy and political networking?7. You ought to have, in effect, a 'Meta-SNS', which would cover 'Commenters', 'Blogging about blogging', and similar, such as SmartMobs, many2many, your own socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com, and many of the popular bloggers like Marc Canter and his circle of friends!8. Maybe your 'social network sharing & analysis' label should be augmented to be 'social networking sharing, analysis & visualization'... there are many tools that make a big point about being able to visualize networks... not only the obvious ones like BuddySpace and Huminity, but also many to be found on Martin Dodge's excellent Cybergeography.org site. 9. you can't really allow a catchall category called 'social networking software sites', as you have at the moment, because this recursively 'forestalls the evil day', since that category is essentially what your entire list is (or will become), so I would move those individual items off into more specific categories.

http://hammer.prohosting.com/~dragoeva/pages/news.htm

I am participating with a lecture on P2P and spirituality, in the New Media festival at Chiang Mai University’s Art Museum. One of the other speakers is the fascinating Russian artist Boryana Dragoeva, who specializes around the theme of robot ethics.
“Humanity is not meant to ever get hold of the center, to get nearer to the Absolute, which is always evading the field of thinking... Our lot is the eternal longing for the unattainable goal, and also the understanding of the self as marginal, as well as the tolerance to marginality in general, the representation of the shades of marginality in the context of one's realizing his or her own place... Nothing and nobody in this material world could be considered as anything more that marginal. So this project declares the universal equality of the marginalia : the human being and the computer virus, the woman and the microorganism, the man and the street dog, the lamb and the cannibal, the fly and the Pope, the president and the leper.
Everybody is equal, because everybody is marginal, and this is the only law valid for all!

Here are some more links to explore her work: http://autobot.fact.co.uk/ ; http://www.roboriada.org/ ;

And some interesting links recommended by Boryana:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoism, http://www.neoism.net , http://www.thing.de/projekte/7%3A9%23/Neoist_Text_Path.html, , on the artistic/philosophical movement of Neoism, a celebration of the new

- do we have to grant feelings to robots, or do they already have them?, a discussion of robot rights at http://www.techcentralstation.com/102903B.html

- American Society for the Prevention of Cruely to Robots, at http://gamma.sitelutions.com/~toucans/aspcr/index.html

- Background and text on R.U.R., the play at the origin of the naming of Robots, at http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/RUR-Capek-1920.htm

“Texting and electoral politics are the strange bedfellows of the 21st century. The use of SMS for political action is only in its infancy, but has already enabled citizens to topple governments and tip elections from Manila to Madrid. The electoral power of texting could be an early indicator of future social upheaval: whenever people gain the power to organize collective action on new scales, in new places, at new tempos, with groups they had not been able to organize before, societies and civilizations change.

The alphabet made empires and armies possible, the printing press made democracy and science possible; railroads and telephones, corporations and bureaucracies co-evolved. Now the fusion of the mobile telephone, the PC, and the Internet is beginning to make new forms of collective action possible on new scales, at new tempos, in new places, with groups that not been able to organize before. When I wrote Smart Mobs in 2001, the technopolitical outbreaks I cited included the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, where mobile-phone equipped protestors used swarming tactics to out-maneuver the, and the 2000 Manila "People Power II" demonstrations in that gave birth to the legend of "Generation TXT" and signaled the end of the Estrada regime. Since the book was published, however, the election of President Roh in South Korea, the emergence of the Howard Dean candidacy in the USA, the SMS-organized demonstrations in Madrid in the wake of the March 11, 2004 terrorist bombings (and on the eve of the election), are headline events. Less widely publicized but equally noteworthy as potential harbingers of a world-wide trend, elections in Kenya and Ghana were kept honest by monitors who used a network of mobile phones and radio stations; India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party uses SMS to maintain contact with the press and voters; in South Africa, SMS registration was part of the official voter registration process.”

http://v2v.indymedia.de/

The building of the new public domain continues.

“A Call to Join and Contribute to the Establishment of a Video-Sharing Syndicate/NetworkProject Description: For some time now the idea of utilising peer2peer structures to assemble a user-built distribution platform has been circulating. Recently, in the run-up to the G8 meeting in Evian, a concrete proposal has been made to establish a system for the sharing of video. Long-term we believe that we can assemble a sustainable and scalable platform for audio-visual materials of a critical and independent nature. This is an appeal to groups/individuals to get involved, dedicate some resources, support and expand the project generally. Works to be distributed over the system will vary from somewhat edited footage suitable for use as a stock archive to finished documentaries/films. Each file will be accompanied by metadata in an xml .info file and produced as an searchable RSS feed for people to integrate into their own sites and published on its own website (where there will also be a manifesto, how-to's. contact info for participating groups etc.) Amongst the metadata fields will be a specification for the nature of the license under which the materials may be used (e.g. Creative Commons share-alike)Participants in this project range from SO36 provider in Berlin to people from the No Borders network, Candida TV in Rome, New Global Vision (Italy), Radioserver (Germany), Big Noise Films (New York), Free Speech TV (Colorado), NoWarTV (Roma), Hackitectura (Spain) and individuals from Autonomedia, Mute etc. Groups in the UK, Korea, US and Switzerland have also been approached. If you are interested in the project please get in touch immediately as actions around the g8 will commence on May 29th. Responses should include an email contact, an expression of general agreement with the aims of the project and expected contribution. Please email the mailing list at v2v@coyote1.kein.org. See below for the call for participation in Geneva and the long-term project of video file-sharing: GENEVA03 is a temporary broadcasting studio during the g8-summit transmitting video and audio streams live from the cultural center l'usine in geneva from may 29 to june 3. The livecast will be streamed on the internet and picked up and redistributed by local and international broadcasters as well as projected in the streets and theatres of Geneva. In order to cover the protests between Geneva, Lausanne and Anmasse in real time, media activists will work from the "everyone-is-an-expert" mobile studio van, which - with a self-adjusting bi-directional satellite dish - will provide a mobile internet connection and transmit live-footage from the roaming protests. The GENEVA03 project is a joint effort of a growing number of video activists and independent filmmakers together with dozens of indymedia reporters, to organize and broadcast independent news coverage from the G8 events. We are currently programming a stream, that, besides the live coverage of the mass-protests, will include movies, concerts, talk-shows, vj sessions, subvertisements and other radically innovative formats.The project is an exploration of new forms of collaboration in film and videomaking; a hybrid sending and receiving experiment crossing borders between media. In Geneva we will launch V2V, a peer-to-peer video-sharing network, which will work as both a content management and archiving system. Filmmakers, local and remote, can make contributions. They can upload their films, videos reports and roughly edited material onto more than a dozen servers, which will host the material in the P2P-networks. The V2V standard suggests a set of specifications for the encoding with half of the standard broadcast quality as a compromise between a modest upload-time and a tolerable resolution for screening, in order to facilitate the global exchange of images. At the occasion of the live stream from geneva the V2V virtual video filesharing network will be launched and beta-tested. But the project of an opensource video production and distribution network will be developed further on.This is an open call to join in the production and distribution of the GENEVA03 broadcasts and the launch of the V2V network.1. Take and rebroadcast the stream, or download broadcast quality video of your choice directly from the server, to rebroadcast in community screenings or on local TV, Radio broadcast, or to simply post the URL of the stream on other web-sites.2. Upload your video and become part of the stream! Broad themes for content are:- Freedom of movement and freedom of communication (Migration, Borders, technology, copyright/left?) - Movement of movements (the view from the ground) - Control, surveillance, warWe are looking for a range of formats, from documentary to comedy, from subvertisements to talk shows, vj sets to animation, and whatever you can imagine.

http://socialarchitect.typepad.com/

How much can happen in just 18 months!! When this compiler started his sabbatical, he was specialized in ‘digital trends’, but social networks were only a dim prospect, as it had known a series of failures. And now, it is an exploding area of many successful projects. Here’s a good summary by one of the specialized blogs, and at the end of the newsletter, an index of social network sites.

“Online communities are old-skool. The heat these days is around social networks, buddy lists & blogs -- all bottom-up social tools that place the individual at the center, and grow outward from there. This is a very different design model than message boards, chat rooms and virtual worlds, which are virtual places where where like-minded people congregate.
This people-centric design model intersects with the social patterns of cellphone users. Cellphones are intimate, personal communications devices -- which also happen to be increasingly powerful computers. Young people use cellphones to stay connected to their buddies, get info from the Net, and to meet new people via flirting or gaming. Net-connected cellphones are dramatically increasing people's ability to form lightweight, transient social groups. This works great for people that are young, single and socially mobile -- yet not so useful if you're family-oriented, and interested in maintaining relationships with stable, long-term groups.

What I see all around me now are networked social tools that have 'emergent purpose.' This is an old theme in new clothing -- the 'build it and they will come' belief that connecting people is STEP 1, and the purpose and business model for a cool online social tool will emerge over time. I saw a lot of companies fail as they followed this ethic - particularly those that created and marketed FREE tools & services built around chat, message boards and virtual worlds. The companies who made real money connecting people online -- Amazon, eBay, SOE (makers of Everquest) -- built their community infrastructure around a shared, meaningful activity other than pure socializing.
So what is a Net community circa 2004? A set of overlapping links in a social network? A group of cross-linked blog owners and readers? People who participated in the Dean campaign? Kids who meetup in a club using their cellphones to coordinate? Lightweight content-building tools like blogs and social networks are enabling social groupings that are fluid and dynamic, and Net-connected cellphones enable 'just-in-time' socializing.
I find all this fascinating - and it makes me wonder when and where we'll see small, focused, semi-structured groups (e.g. teams, bands, guilds) emerge in networked services -- 'cause that's a cross-cultural social structure that gets stuff done.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08stat.html?th

“Nerds have been making PC-to-PC Internet calls for years, using their computers' microphone and speakers. But VoIP is different: you dial and talk using a conventional phone. The computer doesn't even have to be on. The gold rush began last year when a startup called Vonage offered a $35-a-month calling plan. Soon it was joined by a crowd of similarly little-known services with names like VoicePulse, Packet 8, Broadvox and VoiceGlo.
Recently, though, some much bigger names began taking the technology seriously: AT&T arrived on the scene last week with an Internet-based service, CallVantage, and last fall Cablevision, the cable TV company, began offering its own phone service, Optimum Voice. (Technically, Optimum Voice isn't an Internet service; it connects to the regular phone network by cable TV wiring. Most of these services have a jaw-dropping list of features. They include call waiting; caller ID; caller ID blocking (your number is invisible to those you call); call forwarding (incoming calls are automatically routed to, say, your cellphone when you're not home); call return (dial *69 to call back the last person who called you); call transfer ("You'll have to ask my dad in Denver about that; here, I'll transfer you"); automatic busy-line redial; Do Not Disturb (all calls go directly to voice mail during specified hours); Find Me (incoming calls try various phone numbers until you answer); multiple ring (incoming calls make all your various phone numbers ring at once); three-way calling, and more. Now, $20 to $40 may not necessarily represent an earth-shattering discount from your existing phone bills. Verizon, for example, offers unlimited local and long-distance residential phone service - the usual way, over phone wires - with five calling features for $60 a month (not counting all those exciting taxes and fees). SBC, another Baby Bell, offers unlimited calling with 11 features for $55. Still, even $20 a month is a decent savings. Besides, Internet phone services often use the power of the Web to enhance those standard calling features. For example, you can listen to your voice mail by dialing *123 on your phone, by visiting a Web page or by sitting back and letting your new Internet phone company send you sound attachments by e-mail. VoIP fans love that; not only can they save important messages forever, but they can also retrieve their messages from anywhere in the world.”

From my good Kretan friend George Dafermos, The Common Good Public License, http://www.cgpl.org/

- An essay on weblogging in business, at http://radio.weblogs.com/0117128/blogpaper/blogging_the_market.html

- Social software in companies, at http://www.socialtext.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/technology/05music.html?th

“But what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales?
It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.
"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The industry has reacted with the kind of flustered consternation that the White House might display if Richard A. Clarke showed up at a Rose Garden tea party. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out three versions of a six-page response to the study. The problem with the industry view, Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf say, is that it is not supported by solid evidence. Previous studies have failed because they tend to depend on surveys, and the authors contend that surveys of illegal activity are not trustworthy. "Those who agree to have their Internet behavior discussed or monitored are unlikely to be representative of all Internet users," the authors wrote. Instead, they analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002."While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing," the professors wrote.
In an interview, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said that previous research assumed that every download could be thought of as a lost sale. In fact, he said, most downloaders were drawn to free music and were unlikely to spend $18 on a CD.

The following is a contribution by friend and teacher, Ingrid Hens, from whom I requested an explanation and recommended links on the topic of this new collective method of inquiry. Ingrid was (and is) a member of the integral discussion group which I co-founded and is a student of the great master of comparative religions Ulrich Libbrecht.

“In Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium a method of socratic dialogue has been developed, by Nelson, Kessels and others, and a ‘school’ of neosocratici has come into being. I am very interested in this method and this school, but do not consider myself as belonging to this school. For the moment I am participating in a course for learning how to facilitate this kind of dialogues. In the process my own ideas about learning, self development, group development, truth, socratic investigation and learning are clarified and differences of opinion with the ‘school’ are becoming clear. So, below you find a kind of mixture of what is claimed to be the socratic dialogue in this school and my own ideas.

In this socratic dialogue/conversation participants join to find ‘answers’ or ‘the answer’ to a ‘philosophical’ question, that is important to them (in person) or to the group as a whole. Examples of questions are: What is cooperation? How far do you have to go in cooperation? What is courage? What is freedom? What is helping? What is adjustment?…) Participants in such a group could be total strangers and participate because they like this kind of investigation. The group of particpants can also consist of people who have to deal with each other in other ways and participate for reasons which are important to the group.
The procedure is that you start with a question as mentioned above. Then every participant finds a concrete situation in his own experience (in the past) where the question was important and which he can evaluate in terms of the question. A situation is chosen by the group and clarified so that the ‘facts’ are clear. In the remainder of the dialogue opinions, arguments, beliefs, values are voiced, critical refelcted upon and weighed. Participants join to find differences and (often) seek consensus. (At least they have to find a way to live with the differences.) When the process goes deep, they also link what they say, to what they actually do in the conversation and to who they are.
What happens then, in my opinion, is that people through the process have to look to differences. The differences they see teach them about themselves, about the other participants and about ‘the world’, the reality that they also share. For me, it is a method of ‘worldbuilding’: we make a joined place in which differences can find their place. We build an common ground where each perspective is important, where different members are searching to understand themselves, the others and the world. In a good conversation ther e is room for struggle, for playing, for laughter, for seriousness and for relativation.

Here are some links which might be helpful.

http://www.philosophisch-politische-akademie.de/englppa.html#top ; Some information on the groups in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK and on the method.
http://www.rongen.com/english/socrat/moral.pdf ;
http://www.philosophisch-politische-akademie.de/ic2002progr.html ;
http://www.environ-mediation.net/english/toolbox.html ; http://space.ihs.ac.at/departments/soc/xeno-pta/project_abst.html (neo-socratic dialogue about ethical issues in biotechnology) ; http://business.unisa.edu.au/research/aapae/socratic.htm

“WiFi holds the promise of bridging America's much discussed digital divide — if we make it ubiquitous and free to use, like the public library system. After all, just as roads and bridges were among the most important public investments in the industrial period, wireless access to the Internet is arguably the most crucial public investment of the information age.”

But for now, it is already a budding social movement:

“On Nodeb.com, people list their open nodes, essentially inviting strangers to join a worldwide community of users. This site has more than 11,000 registered access points in the United States. Even if service providers can make it more difficult for users to share Internet access, techies will eventually find a way around them.”

2. The end of the (CD) Album?
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&s=hajdu032904


Users of P2P music distribution are no longer downloading ‘albums’ as such, changing the experiencing of music that has been typical of the 20th century.

“Is the album dying, or is it just passing into another plane of existence? Some fifty years after Columbia Records introduced the 331⁄3 rpm vinyl LP, and more than twenty years since Philips and Sony initiated its displacement by the longer-playing compact disc, the album's days as the pre-eminent format for serious (and less-than-serious) works of popular music appear to be dwindling. Annual CD sales have been declining (despite the occasional spike for a popular release such as Norah Jones's latest) ever since file-sharing made it possible--if not necessarily legal--for virtually anyone with a computer to download songs for free. To date, the flourishing young Internet technology has denied the record labels an estimated $700 million, according to a report issued in January by Forrester Research, which also forecasts a five-year decline of 30 percent in CD purchases by the end of 2004 and, inevitably, the demise of the CD format some time afterward. "On-demand services are the future of entertainment delivery," predicts the study's author, Josh Bernoff. "CDs, DVDs, and any other forms of physical media will become obsolete."

Still, the Internet is something other than a new kind of flat, round disk. Being interactive and open-ended, it offers listeners a freewheeling new way to obtain, to organize, and to listen to recordings; it is not so much a package as an absence of packaging. I don't know what the semiologists are telling the undergraduates about this, but the matter is not just academic. In fact, the phenomena of sharing files, downloading songs, and custom-burning CDs at home appear to be changing not only the mechanics and the economics of pop-music consumption, but also the nature of the music--and even the nature of the authorship of the recordings that many of today's listeners, particularly young people, are playing.
What we are witnessing, then, is not the death of the album, but something more intriguing: a transformation in the nature of its authorship. While professional recording artists are creating all the materials that end up on home-recorded CDs, the art of their assemblage--of selecting, compiling, and editing (or even altering the tracks electronically)--has shifted into the hands of the individual at home. The process is a kind of collaboration not unlike the old one between a Tin Pan Alley sheet-music composer and a parlor-musicale pianist: the first does the primary creative work, the second contributes interpretively. The selection and sequencing of previously existing recordings is copyrightable as a creative work; moreover, digital processing with commonplace software can alter songs radically, as in the case of The Grey Album, the bootleg morphing of music from the Beatles' White Album with vocal tracks from the rapper Jay-Z, wildly popular as an Internet download.”

- Extramadura in Spain is routing out Microsoft in favour of Linux, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A59197-2002Nov2&notFound=true ; http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/view.html?pg=4

“Luis Millan Vazquez de Miguel, a college professor turned politician, is succeeding where multibillion-dollar, multinational corporations have failed. He is managing to unseat Microsoft Corp. as the dominant player in the software industry, at least in his little part of the world.”

- A report of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Program of the Social Science Research Council.

www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/.

The full report—which profiles civil society organizations that have successfully appropriated the Internet and the challenges they continue to face.

- Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P

http://r.hotwired.com/r/wn_story_mailer/http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62830,00.htmlTwo senators introduce legislation to impose jail time for sharing as little as one file, while the House may consider a bill that would lower the bar to take people to court. Entertainment lobbyists appear to be winning their war against peer-to-peer networks. By Xeni Jardin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/technology/circuits/26stat.html?th


“It's bizarre that five years into the digital video-recorder era, you still can't buy a digital VCR for radio. Why has the electronics industry developed so many machines that let us time-shift Dr. Phil and "Saturday Night Live," but so few that do so for Dr. Joy Browne and "Science Friday"?Actually, there is one such device. Radio YourWay (pogoproducts.com) looks at first glance like a pocket-size (2.2 by 3.9 by 0.7 inches) AM-FM transistor radio, which, in part, it is. But it also contains a built-in timer, so that you can set up a schedule for recording radio broadcasts. Programming it is exactly as easy - or as difficult - as programming a VCR, except that it uses a military-style 24-hour clock instead of AM and PM designations. At the specified time, the radio turns itself on. It tunes in the station, records for the requested interval and then turns off.Once you've captured a show, you can play it back at a more convenient time (or in an area with no reception), pause it while you take a shower or a meeting, fast-forward through the ads, or even archive it to a Windows PC using a U.S.B. cable. As if all this weren't enticing enough, the Radio YourWay (RYW) has a built-in microphone that captures voice notes with a single button press. It, too, can record according to a schedule, a feature sure to be a hit with private investigators and spies. There's also a line input that can record from CD players and other gear, and even a small but crisp-sounding speaker so that you don't have to wedge earbuds into your ear canals every time you want a playback. (Take that, iPod!) But wait, there's more. The RYW can also play MP3 music files from your computer and even act as an external PC hard drive for transporting data files from place to place. All of this comes in a package about the size of a deck of cards for $150 (for the 32-megabyte model, which holds 4.5 hours of recordings) or $200 (128 megabytes, 18 hours). Both models accept Secure Digital memory cards that can hold even more recordings. The bad news is that, well, that's all the good news. Despite the overwhelming brilliance of the concept, the rest of the story is all downhill.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040301&s=sifryweb

While written in blog mode, i.e. not very organized, this article still has some interesting points about how politics is changing through the use of the internet. See in particular the links to social software, and its increased use by teenagers.

“There was optimism in the air about the potential of the Internet to change the balance of power in America that was pleasantly contagious.

Nowhere was that optimism thicker than during Joe Trippi's morning speech, which was a frontal attack on what he called "broadcast politics" as well as a spirited defense of the Dean campaign and his role in it. For Trippi, broadcast politics began to take hold in 1960, with the Nixon-Kennedy debate and the realization that TV tipped the election. "What no one could've predicted," Trippi said, "was that it would have become a race for money, a race to buy a one-way communications tool that would take the American people essentially out of the process. It was no longer about average Americans, it was about, 'How do I find a rich guy to write me a $2,000 check and then how do I take that money and buy television with it?' " But in Trippi's view, that system is now vulnerable to challenge. First, the Internet and the social software being invented to help people come together in collective action is changing the role of money in politics. Trippi is fervently critical of how the Democrats came to be the party most dependent on large donors, calling it "a betrayal of our birthright." The Dean campaign, with its success at raising small dollar contributions, is "returning the party in this country to where it belongs--in the hands of the grassroots and everyday Americans." The second change is what is happening offline, in what the digerati refer to as the "analog world" or "meatspace." Here Trippi talked about the now-familiar tale of Meetup.com, and how the campaign started with literally "one person in Seattle...trying to meet up, one person in LA, one person in San Francisco, one person in New York." Despite these modest beginnings, the campaign embraced Meetup and promoted its use, and now "nearly 200,000 people are registered at Meetup.com for Howard Dean. They meet the first Wednesday of every month in their city and towns, and I think it's now over a thousand cities and towns in the country." Trippi's speech earned him a standing ovation from the crowd, which was full of Dean fans as well as a larger circle committed to opening up the political process to greater citizen participation. But is their optimism justified? As I wrote on my own weblog last week, "People here talk like all that's needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There's almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why."
On reflection, perhaps that comment was a bit too black and white. The beauty of blogging is that I've already heard back from knowledgeable participants who are indeed struggling to integrate this technology into local political struggles and to address issues of poverty and power that make Internet activism still largely the province of white, well-educated, well-off types (and their college-age kids). Perhaps folks who are used to working in an industry where revolutions happen every eighteen months and computing platforms get discarded every few years have reason to be optimistic about how easily change can happen. But even if they're too optimistic, their hopeful vision is of mighty value. The question on everyone's mind is, what's next? At a granular level, the movement-in-formation is moving in different directions. Trippi has started a blog called " ChangeforAmerica" (a deliberate variation on the "DeanforAmerica" website) and is talking about keeping "the fight" going through that vehicle. A core group of 500 or so "Dean Leaders"--local activists who self-organized after getting too many run-arounds from Dean HQ, is reportedly ready to declare independence from the Dean campaign and just do its own thing. Other activists are trying to sort out whether they go with John Kerry or hold out for John Edwards. But from a distance, the answer is easy. "The cat is out of the bag," said Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup.com. "The people have it in their brains that they can organize themselves." Hold on, the ride can only get more interesting. “

More in another article on the Dean campaign: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/dean.html

http://www.extremetheorycongress.de/

Has the extreme form of atomistic individualism run its course, now calling for the pendulum of civilization to swing back to forms of community? But forms that are not necessarily grounded in tradition, but are new creations of contemporary individualistic community. My own research on peer to peer, and the rapid emergence of this new template of relationship, would seem to indicate so. In this extremely timely and important congress, to take place in Cologne in January 2005, the curators have attempted to bring together some of today’s most relevant and radical theorizers, starting with the work of Giorgio Agamben, “The Coming Community”. Some quotes from the website (ID extreme; PW congress):

“What will the future, and present, of human community look like. Taking as starting point, the book The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben, the congress will also look at emerging new forms of community, through the internet, flashmobs, and elsewhere.”New Communities abound, depending on the perspective. Anorexic girls (and boys) meet in the internet to share advice and to support each other’s "lifestyle". The upcoming Bienniale in New York investigates "fandom" as a means of social organisation away from the given norms. The Aids-Communities all over the world organise themselves with distance to the State and away from commercially shaped ideas of the Good Life. Flash-Mobs are investigated as a way of organising community while radically disjointing means from any specific ends. Patient organisations form research communities or seek funding for science that cannot be figured in the terms available to the systematic logic of the State or the financial markets.””The concept of community has gained major importance since neo-liberalism started to flourish in the Reagan and Thatcher era of the 1980s – a development that, in the 1990s, was continued by social democrats in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere, and which has continued to progress with undiminished strength. As "the social” - a notion closely linked to the welfare state as it had emerged in the 19th and 20th century - began to disintegrate, communities, as Nikolas Rose argues, have started to replace "society.” At the time, the political and theoretical movement of communitarianism proposed establishing the community as a third pillar of collective life aside from the individual and the state. Communities were meant to make up for the responsibilities the state was no longer willing or able to bear.” One of the goals of the congress is to throw some light on the genealogical nexus between the prospering of communities and the transformation of the welfare state into a neo-liberal system.””Many communities – the most prominent example is the AIDS community – have emerged around collective identities based on a biological understanding of life (a phenomenon for which Paul Rabinow has coined the term "biosociality”). That way they have contributed to the politicisation of life itself. When such "biopolitics” (Michel Foucault) came into being in the 18th century, the driving force was the state which began to take measures to control its population by watching and manipulating parameters such as birth rate, mortality, or longevity and by fostering hygiene and public health. For the state, the most effective way of maximising health and productivity of its citizens’ bodies has been to make them take care for themselves. Eventually, this strategy led to the creation of autonomous, self-replicating cells of biopolitical activity within the population thus governed. The formation of "biosocial” communities – Rose and Carlos Novas, following Adriana Petryna, speak of "biological citizenship”

In The Coming Community (1993) Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures. "The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less."
Among the topics Agamben takes up in Homo Sacer (1998) are the "properly" political paradigms of experience, as well as those generally not viewed as political. He begins by elaborating work on biopolitics begun by Foucault, returning the natural life of humans to the center of the polis and considering it as the very basis for politics. He then considers subjects such as the state of exception (the temporary suspension of the juridical order); the concentration camp (a zone of indifference between public and private and, at the same time, the secret matrix of the political space in which we live); the refugee, who, breaking the bond between the human and the citizen, moves from marginal status to the center of the crisis of the modern nation-state; and the sphere of pure means or gestures (those gestures that, remaining nothing more than means, liberate themselves from any relation to ends) as the proper sphere of politics.

More Literature: 1) Agamben, Giorgio. "The Coming Community". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993. 2) Agamben, Giorgio. "Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life". Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Interview at http://vacarme.eu.org/article255.html ; http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben.html

More websites: www.artbrain.org; www.chrisleetrance.org ; www.susanlawly.com

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62353,00.html?tw=wn_culthead_8

Program directors would like you to believe that commercial radio gives the listener a pretty good idea of a city's urban soundscape. But two radio shows -- one in the United States, the other in London -- are exploring the idea that the urban soundtrack is best heard through the headphones of residents' personal stereos. On National Public Radio, reporter Gideon D'Arcangelo produces an occasional radio column for The Next Big Thing show called "Walkman Busting." In it, D'Arcangelo approaches people in public spaces who are listening to personal stereos. With their permission, he plugs in his minidisc recorder to record whatever music they are listening to, as well as their conversation about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html

This article gives a quite good description of the copyleft movement, the issues involved, some of its opponents and alternative solutions such as Digital Rights Management. A long excerpt here below, but for the full article, seethe archives of the New York Times Magazine,The Tyranny of Copyright?January 25, 2004. By ROBERT S. BOYNTON

“According to Benkler, the cultural commons not only offers a better model for creativity; it makes good economic sense. Like Lessig and other members of the Copy Left, he takes his bearings from the free software movement and views the success of products like Linux and services like Google as evidence of a viable collaborative (or ''peer to peer'') model for producing and sharing ideas -- a model that will augment and, in some cases, replace the current model. (He concedes that some products, like novels and blockbuster movies, will never be produced peer to peer, though they will draw on the work of artists before them.) Benkler predicts that the recording industry will be one of the first businesses to go. ''All it does is package and sell goods,'' he said, ''which is technically an unfeasible way of continuing. They are trying their best to legislate the environment to change, but that doesn't mean we have to let them.''The battle between the Copy Left and its opponents is as much a clash of worldviews as of legal doctrine. Aligned against the Copy Left are those who sympathize with the romantic notion of authorship and view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned bysomeone or other. Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in copyright law, fears that in the Copy Left's rush to secure the public domain, it givesshort shrift to the author. A self-described ''copyright enthusiast,'' Ginsburg considers the author the moral center of copyright law and questions equating copyright control with corporate greed. ''Copyright cannot be understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way station on the road to the public domain,'' she writes in a recent article titled ''The Concept of Authorship in Comparative Copyright Law.'' ''Because copyright arises out of the act of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can (straightfacedly) assert.'' Ginsburg and others embrace many elements of the ''permission society'' demonized by the Copy Left and cite developments like the iTunes store as a sign of greater consumer choice and freedom. In his book ''Copyright's Highway,'' Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School, writes that ''the logic of property rights dictates their extension into every corner in which people derive enjoyment and value from literary and artistic works.'' He characterizes the permission society as a ''celestial jukebox'' in which access to every creation -- music, literature, movies, art -- is available to anyone for a price.An entire ''digital rights management'' industry has arisen to bring this vision to fruition, each company calibrating a particular license through a system of micropayments -- play a song on your computer for one price; transfer it to your MP3 player for a slightly higher fee. Goldstein argues that the scheme of a business like iTunes is actually more efficient and democratic than the commons model championed by the Copy Left. ''The problem with the commons is that it doesn't take into consideration the direction of the payment; it doesn't reveal what kind of culture gets used and what kind doesn't,'' he says. ''I think it is good to have a price tag attached to each use because it tells producers what consumers want; it lets them vote with their purchase for the kinds of culture they want.''But the Copy Left is convinced that there is a better way for the entertainment industry to adapt to the Internet age while still paying its artists their due. William Fisher, director of the Berkman Center, has spent the last three years devising an alternative compensation system that would enable the entertainment industry to restructure its business model without resorting to cumbersome micropayments. He has worked out a modified version of the system that artists' advocacy groups currently use to make sure that composers are paid when their music is performed or recorded. According to Fisher's plan, all works capable of being transmitted online would be registered with a central office (whether government or independent is unclear). The central office would then monitor how frequently a work is used and compensate the creators on that basis. The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders. It is a brave proposal in a political culture that is allergic to taxes and uncomfortable with complex solutions. Still, if his numbers do indeed add up, Fisher's proposal might be the best thing that ever happened to the cultural commons: the creators would be paid, while every individual would have unlimited access to every cultural creation. Fisher and Charles Nesson, his colleague at Harvard Law School, have showed this proposal to movie executives and lawyers for several media conglomerates. Fisher says that his ideas have been received with great interest by the very industries -- music, home video -- that see their business models disintegrating before their eyes.When asked whether he thinks his ambitious scheme has a chance, Fisher says that the likeliest possibility would be for it to be adopted in countries that are neither so developed that they have signed on to international copyright protocols nor so undeveloped that they are desperate to do so. Only second-world countries, like Croatia or Brazil, he speculates, are unfettered enough to try something new. ''The hope is in the rain forest,'' he says, in countries that ''are more like the United States was before 1890, when we were a 'pirate' nation.''And in the United States, is there any future for this sort of payment system? Perhaps when the various current schemes fail, Fisher's plan will seem more attractive, he says. ''What is involved here is nothing less than the shape of our culture and the way we think of ourselves as citizens,'' he adds. He describes a recent letter he received from a supporter of his work. ''When they come for my guns and my music, they'd better bring an army,'' it read. ''People are used to being creatively engaged with the culture,'' Fisher explains. ''They won't let someone legislate that away.''The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts to establish a cultural commons to those of the environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century's advances in industrial production, the growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than just my pond, yourforest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus.html

Try out this peer to peer search engine, which learns from what your friends are doing, at http://home.eurekster.com/default.htm

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/opensource.html

Last year I participated at the conference of Oekonux.de, a group of people who believe that the principles of free software could be applied to society at large, in a concept of a General Public Licence Society. During the conference, engineers from Siemens and Volkswagen confirmed that it was entirely feasible to consider the use of open source methods in the world of industry, which is now essentially centered on design, i.e. groups of people working online.
Something similar is confirmed by this important article in Wired magazine. The quote starts after introducing how a cholera project was changed through the use of open source methods:

“ThinkCycle, is a Web-based industrial-design project that brings together engineers, designers, academics, and professionals from a variety of disciplines. Soon, some physicians and engineers were pitching in - vetting designs and recommending new paths. Within a few months, Prestero's team had turned the suggestions into an ingenious solution. Taking inspiration from a tool called a rotameter used in chemical engineering, the group crafted a new IV system that's intuitive to use, even for untrained workers. Remarkably, it costs about $1.25 to manufacture, making it ideal for mass deployment. Prestero is now in talks with a medical devices company; the new IV could be in the field a year from now.ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is modeled on a method that for more than a decade has been closely associated with software development: open source. It's called that because the collaboration is open to all and the source code is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole - putting informal networks of volunteer coders in direct competition with big corporations. It works like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single contributor. Open source, of course, is the magic behind Linux, the operating system that is transforming the software industry. Linux commands a growing share of the server market worldwide and even has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warning of its "competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry." And open source software transcends Linux. Altogether, more than 65,000 collaborative software projects click along at Sourceforge.net, a clearinghouse for the open source community. The success of Linux alone has stunned the business world.”

See also this very interesting article in the New York Times which describes how the TiVo remote control (personal video recorder which allows for digital taping of programmes, filtering out of advertising, and sharing over the internet) was the process of a collaborative process: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/technology/circuits/19remo.html?th

http://www.orgnet.com/IHRIM.html

The way in which knowledge, and thus creativity and innovation, is exchanged and produced in an organization no longer corresponds to the formal hierarchical models. In this example, social network analysis is used to uncover the real knowledge exchange patters within a typical HR organization.

http://www.etes.ucl.ac.be/PVP_INTERVENTIONS/Brazil(Brasilia).pdf

From the speech by Philippe van Parijs, BIEN, in Bresil:

“What will now happen? As initially formulated, the 2001 Suplicy proposal stipulates that, subject to it being endorsed by a national referendum in 2004, "an unconditional basic income, or citizenship income" will be introduced in 2005 for every Brazilian citizen or foreign resident for five years or more, that it will be of equal value for all, payable in monthly amounts and sufficient to cover "minimal expenses in food, housing, education and health care", "bearing in mind the country's level ofdevelopment and budgetary possibilities". Two main amendments were made before unanimous approval by the senate: the idea of a referendum was dropped, on the ground that everyone would be in favour anyway, and a new article was added, stipulating that the basic citizenship income "will berealized in steps, at the discretion of the Executive, giving priority to the neediest layers of the population". It is with these two amendments that Suplicy's proposal was signed by Lula. From the second amendment it follows, no doubt, that Brazil is bound to remain stuck for quite a while with a means-tested system. But this does not make the law meaningless. Firstly, the existence of the law makes progress easier towards a stronger integration of existing assistance schemes withone another, and towards a stronger integration of the social assistance system with both the social insurance system and the income tax system, as Brazil's federal government is henceforth legally entitled to take any number of further steps, in a financially responsible way, towards a fulluniversal basic income. Secondly, the long-term perspective firmly asserted in the new law shouldhelp face the powerful objections that will no doubt arise soon, as the federally funded means-tested system keeps getting more comprehensive and less stingy, and as individual and collective beneficiaries strategically adjust to its getting established. When over 50% of the active populationworks entirely in the informal sector, the income test needs to rely essentially on declarations of income earned by the beneficiaries. As the officials in charge of the existing income-tested Bolsa Familia system arewell aware, there is no realistic way of seriously checking whether thedeclarations are correct. This generates a dilemma. Either one needs to be ready for major problems of arbitrariness in and resentment about local decisions of inclusion and exclusion, in particular of a clientelistic kind. Or one needs to devise more observable alternative proxies of income poverty, such as the number of light bulbs, the quality of the material used for the house or how well fed the children look, at the expense of discouraging systematically a diligent use of the modest resources poorhouseholds have.A genuine citizen's income would get rid of theses problems in one swoop,while extending support to low-paid formal sector workers. Of course, progress towards a full-fledged basic income must be gradual - for example through turning the existing means-tested Bolsa familia and the existing income tax exemption for dependent children into a universal child benefitsystem that would also benefit the working families that are neither poor enough to be entitled to welfare payments (about EUR 50 per capita per month) nor rich enough to pay tax (about EUR 400 per month). Nonetheless, the objective unambiguously stated in the law offers the promise of tacklingeffectively the criticisms the existing means-tested schemes are bound to trigger without feeling compelled to roll them back.”

Everybody is probably familiar with the Open Universities as distance education projects. But “University Open” is something altogether different, which transcends the institutional frameworks of learning, relying instead on the collective intelligence of community of learners. Amongst the features of these collaborative learning environments, using the principles of peer to peer, i.e. the collaboration amongst equals, are the Open Libraries. Participants list their books, and through this, get access to the collections of all participants, which agree to function as a lending or copying library for all. This is undoubtedly one of the more significant social iniatiatives of the networks, and differs from the already existing ‘Knowledge Exchange Networks’, in their being based and organized around internet technologies. The original Mouvement des Reseaux d’Echanges de Savoirs, founded by Claire Suffrin cited below, has 600 branches in mostly Francophone countries.
The London University of Openess: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/et la Copenhagen Free University: http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/ ; List of documents on knowledge exchange, at http://alexweb.injep.fr/Thesaurus.htm&numrec=051915435919720
One of the foundational works on the movement:
HEBER SUFFRIN, Claire ; HEBER SUFFRIN, Marc Desclée De Brouwer , 1992, 319 p. L'histoire, l'aventure de cette idée "d'échange de savoir" sont présentées et analysées ici. Les savoirs, parfois barrières entre les hommes, peuvent devenir de formidables multiplicateurs de lien social, si au lieu de les retenir, on les échange.