Tag: P2P Foundation

When the economy becomes collaborative

Cross-posted from the P2P Foundation blog, the official release of the report we’ve been working on:

The P2P Foundation is pleased to repost below the official post from Orange announcing “The report “Synthetic overview of the collaborative economy”, coproduced by Orange Labs and the P2P Foundation”.

During this month we will be serialising the report here on the blog, or you can download it immediately!

Source: Orange.com

when the economy becomes collaborative

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Exchanging houses during vacation time, sharing car with strangers, designing a lamp for one’s own living room in a FabLab, proposing a packaging design for a favorite brand, inventing a solution to help a company innovate, writing a article in wikipedia or a hotel review in a tourism site, ordering with neighbors organic vegetables… collaborative practices between individuals or between individuals and businesses are multiplying around us.

Equipped with Internet and the Web, strangers can interact, share, and cooperate at distance, consequently opening new development perspectives for our patterns of consumption, production and creation.
Therefore companies are invited to revisit their methods of organization, the way they innovate, their customer relationship as their clients become actors, as well as their models for sharing value.
Orange, as a major player in the information economy, is interested in these emerging transformations, which constitute both challenges and opportunities.

The report “Synthetic overview of the collaborative economy“, coproduced by Orange Labs and the P2P Foundation, provides a thorough mapping of the actors involved in this cooperative economy: for the first time, nearly all the dots of the emerging collaborative economy, and their inter-relation, are presented in a single overview.

P2P Foundation: Researching, Documenting and Promoting Peer to Peer Practices

The P2P Foundation is a non-profit organization, a knowledge commons and a global community of researchers and advocates that monitors the emergence of peer to peer dynamics in every field of society and human activity. Peer production, governance, and property models that are characterized by open access, participatory process of governance, and property formats that guarantee universal access are monitored. The aims of the P2P Foundation is to act as a global community of researchers, focused on understanding phenomena such as open innovation, co-creation and co-design, crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding. Of particular interest is the intersection between the newly enabled ‘horizontal’ social processes, with the pre-existing, more ‘vertically’ oriented institutions, such as corporations and governments.  In our research collection we have particularly focused on the sustainability of open practices, i.e. on open business models.

ChokePoint Project – towards a distributed internet infrastructure

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Right now, I'm mainly spending my time on doing stuff for the P2P Foundation – one of the main things being coordinating the ChokePoint Project along with James Burke.

Here's the video presentation of the project, along with the transcription.

 

Chokepoint project introduction from Choke Point Project on Vimeo.

 

Video transcription:


On Janurary 27th, 2011, the order was given to “turn off” the Internet in Egypt, limiting communications and voiding commerce conducted online. Egyptian Internet services resumed on February 2nd. Fastforward just a few weeks later, this time Libya commences its disconnect February 18th, with a blackout occurring March 4th.

Shutting down the Internet in two countries sent shock-waves across the world. We also  heard people like American Senator Liberman asking for access to a similar kill switch. These actions force us all to ask ‘Who owns The Internet?” and what are the implications of the said controls over connectivity and scenarios for their use?

If you believe the Internet is not something that can or should be soley controlled by politicians or people inside the higher echelons of nation states, resulting in situations like Egypt and Libya, we’d love to tell you about what we are building.

The Choke Point Project addresses the events of recent months with the clear aim of mapping nodes of Internet connectivity and who maintains their control and what this may mean. We believe there is the need for a more decentralized Internet beyond the complete control of nation states and corporate influence.

So let me tell you a little bit about us? The Choke Point Project team are members of the Peer to Peer Foundation, and some of our friends, comprised of web researchers, software developers and data visualization experts.

So some of the projects aims are:

to gather data from across the web to show control points,

and clearly explain the complex issues involved including the history of who owns the Internet, the current legal situation, and where are identified choke points, and possible strategies for decentralization, reasons for and against kill switches.

The Choke Point Project site will function as a living record of Internet ownership and control, documenting the key areas from domain name registration to traffic gates

We will use the site to:

– create an interactive data visualization to identify choke points, showing vulnerabilities

– document the related open projects and point to articles with analysis and strategy

– release datasets and tools used to track down Internet choke points.

#talkingabout: P2P Foundation

P2P Foundation, with Michel Bauwens from redall on Vimeo.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation was in Barcelona again last week to speak at the Universidad Nomada in the Sala Conservas and I went along with Ricard Espelt & Gemma Urgell to film this interview with him for their #talkingabout series. #talkingabout is a paltform which aims to create participation around things, people & ideas worth, well, talking about through a system of videos, votes, comments etc which is open to anyone. I previously wrote about #talkingabout here and will be recording an interview with Ricard & Gemma soon.

Here’s a video which presents #talkingabout :

Talkingabout from redall on Vimeo.

I also recorded an interview with Michel for the Citilab blog:

Here’s Michel’s presentation from the Universidad Nomada: