Because of my lecture tour, I could not keep up with the weekly links recommendations, so here’s a monthly overview instead:

P2P Business and Economics

“Complementary” Currency Helps Local Communities

Contrasts 2 different type of currencies: local and time-banks.

Keeping the New Media new

Who owns your content? Does the video-sharing service support sharing? Is the video-sharing
service making money from your work? If so, are they sharing it with you?

Why reputation works as an identity management element

Original at onthecommons.org/node/723

You should read John Clippinger’s essay “Identity, Reputation and Social Currency,” to understand where reputation-based systems are today.

Recognition Markets or ‘open source snitching’

The application of mass participation or Crowdsourcing to help recognize people, objects, or places.

P2P Education and Learning

Internet Pedagogy – a Net Pedagogy Portal

The Net Pedagogy Portal is a resource whose purpose is to increase understanding, knowledge, and awareness of the changing landscape of teaching and learning online.

P2P Politics

Trends in the Living Networks: Can technology create world peace?

Ross Dawson interviewed for a podcast today by the enormously energetic Sanjana Hattotuwa, for his ICT for Peacebuilding blog

Wiley::Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

What’s the solution against networked terrorism? What Robb refers to as deep resilience. We need to make our economic and communication systems more decentralized. If we can’t stop an attack in advance, we can mitigate it.

Global Guerrillas: BOOK REVIEW: ILLICIT by Moises Naim

Moises Naim, the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, has an excellent new book called Illicit on the rise of global smuggling networks. It’s a must read.

Designing for Civil Society: E-democracy videos

a round-up of the videos from the recent e-democracy 06 conference

Mute magazine – Culture and politics after the net

Soenke Zehle reviews two recent books, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health and Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry

P2P Technology

Acoustic Energy Wi-Fi Internet Radio

There are thousands of Internet radio stations broadcasting all over the globe, and the AE Wi-Fi
Radio is one of the first radios that can access all of these stations from anywhere you have a wireless broadband Internet connection

A new study by the New England Complex Science Institute looks at the stability of highly connected “hubs” in social networks (quoted from NECSI Press release):

If you’re one of sixty million or so monthly visitors to social networking websites like MySpace or Facebook, you’ve probably noticed them— “network hubs,” people who have many more contacts than everybody else. While most users have a few or a few hundred connections, a tiny percentage of users have thousands upon thousands. Maybe, with a twinge of jealousy, you’ve wondered what makes them so special. Is it about coolness? Influence? Popularity? How about “none of the above”? Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the New England Complex Systems Institute have discovered that social networks and the roles of the individuals that make them up vary drastically from day to day. Until now, scientists have largely thought of networks as fairly stable, changing only slightly over time–say, when someone makes a new contact.

The reality of networks isn’t as simple as that. Dan Braha and Yaneer Bar-Yam studied the e-mails sent among thousands of users over the course of four months. When they looked at the e-mail traffic on any given day, they found that some people were hubs just as they expected. The surprise was that the identity of the hubs changed from day to day. An individual who sent and received relatively few e-mails on one day could become a hub of the network the next. Hubs rarely stayed hubs for any length of time.

“The results were astounding,” Braha says. “How important someone is changes so fast we might be better off saying it is like ’15 minutes of fame’.”

“The most influential people are not the ones with the biggest address books,” says Bar-Yam. “What really matters is who is talking to whom. By looking only at who knows whom you lose a lot of important details about when people actually talk to each other.”

Scientists have found that the existence of hubs is not unique to social networks. Hubs exist in a variety of networks, including technological and biological. These hubs are particularly interesting to researchers, because they allow information and messages to propagate quickly throughout the entire network. Hoping to take advantage of this fact, network-based strategies have been proposed in areas ranging from public health (immunizing certain individuals to slow the spread of disease) to marketing (selectively advertising to a small group of “opinion leaders”).

But the new research suggests that identifying and targeting the hubs of complex networks will be more difficult and less effective than previously thought. For example, giving the hubs of a computer network extra security against viruses only works if you know for certain the identities of the hubs.

Braha believes that these new insights will force researchers to reconsider how they think about and study networks on a fundamental level. “There should be a radical change in how we think about networks and the individuals who are part of them.”

The paper can be downloaded here

This is interesting to compare with social media networks online, like the blogosphere, which do tend to see certain people or channels stabilize as a ‘hub” for a while. But then, social media is still not direct many-to-many communication. There is likely more communication going in one direction. This was discussed a few years ago, with Ross Mayfield’s “Ecosystem of Networks” model.

Basically, even if someone has thousands of “friends” on a social networking site like myspace, they are probably actually only talking to maybe 12-20 of them at a time. And, among those people, the “hub” of the group is shifting, because there is likely usually not much to force people to communicate with and through one person centrally.

Whereas, in the blogosphere, if you do not have the time, or sources for information, you’ll likely opt to use a pretty much fixed set of blogs and websites of your choosing as channels of information.

Very important analysis in this reblogged summary of a talk on what Digital Rights Management has wrought in our culture:

Excerpt:

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

Reblogged from the Transitioner. After explaining why the Internet is a “phronesis engine” (see the same entry), the author makes a number of propositions regarding the future of our economy, with a focus on the mode of ownership:

For related ideas, see our entry on Peer Property.

“Proposition: Economic revolutions occur when aspects of production are sufficiently amplified by cognitive technologies that new economic patterns of production come into being. Example: the printing press provided the intellectual infrastructure (a culture of epistome) for the expansion of the simple tools of production during the industrial revolution into what is called Capital in the classical economic sense.

Proposition: There is a new economic revolution under way, the Process Revolution, that is the result of the amplification of information and information processing by the cognitive technology of the Internet, and which is similarly bringing new economic patterns of production into being. These patterns are a new economic factor that can be called Information (capital I), which is defined (analogously to Capital) as the data plus the patterns and processes that use that data to organize production.

Proposition: New economic factors produce competing political systems that are answers to the question: who should own the new economic factor. Example: In the industrial revolution the question was: who should own Capital and the products produced by Capital. Communism proposes common ownership in the form of the State, and Capitalism proposes ownership by individuals.

Proposition: The new economic factor of Information is likewise producing competing approaches to answer who should own it. “Ownerism” which proposes the same answer as Capitalism (ownership by individuals, natural or corporate), and “Commonism” which proposes that its ownership be held in the commons (not by the State).

Proposition: Capitalism won out against Communism for three fundamental philosophical and systemic reasons:

1. Capitalism was better at recognizing and building on individual dignity and potential.

2. Capitalism is essentially decentralist because it pushes the intelligence out to the edges (see David Reed & Andrew Lippman’s paper on Viral Communicationexternal link for details on this idea) where local information can be used to maximum advantage in decision making.

3. Capitalism works with, not against people’s natural self-interest.

Conjecture: Commonism will win out over Ownerism because it shares with Capitalism the same first two properties as well as another property which is analogous to the third, namely that Commonism works with Information’s natural abundance and it’s tendency to flow everywhere, whereas Ownerism has to fight tooth and nail to keep it scarce and from getting out.

We have payed increasing attention on how the P2P meme is finding its way in the world of book publishing, and this is a recap page for our efforts.

1. The P2P Foundation Wiki Book pages

URL = www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Books

This is our most comprehensive list, where we maintain a Top 20, as well a list of the best of topic books in different categories. Excerpts of commentaries and reviews are copy/pasted with original links, so as to give you an idea of its contents and reception by P2P experts.

2. The Online Bookstore

URL = astore.amazon.com/p2pfoundation-20/

This is where you can purchase a best of list through Amazon. If you buy your books here, you are supporting our efforts, as we get a small percentage of the proceeds. This service is maintained by Jeff Petry.

3. The blog and its P2P Book of the Week program

URL = blog.p2pfoundation.net

Jeff Petry keeps track of new books through individual or collective (Top 5 of the week) entries, but most of all, since the last quarter, we have initiated a weekly selection of books that we deem important.

Here’s the last rundown of books that we have excerpted this year:

Michael Goldhaber, All the World a Stage. (on the The Attention Economy)
URL = blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=723

Adam Arvidsson, Brands.
URL = blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=667 and blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=666

Gerard Fairtlough. Three Ways of Getting Things Done.
URL = blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=627 and blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=626

George Siemens. Knowing Knowledge.
URL = blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=617

The previous recap page was at blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=608

Save The Internet Blog reports that AT&T has conceded in a letter to the FCC(PDF) to follow net neutrality principles for at least 24 months. The letter states in part that AT&T:

According to AT&T’s letter, the merged company: “… commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. This commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T/BellSouth’s agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, including those affiliated with AT&T/BellSouth, any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth’s wireline broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.”

Savetheinternet.com also suggests some actions that concerned people can take to help net neutrality become the law.

Reblogged from the Digital Universe:

Law Underground is a rule-based expert system :

“legal rules are entered in an if-then format, and the program uses them to dynamically generate interviews for end users. As a result, users are given information specific to their needs based on their responses.

The site is motivated by the vast inequality in access to legal information (I am a public interest lawyer) and many facets of its design have been inspired by Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, information is amassed in a bazaar-style collaboration. Unlike Wikipedia, it is entered as rules rather than narrative text, and only law students and lawyers, rather than the public at large, are contributors.”

1. Two cheers, not three.

We will leave the third cheer in suspense, in honour of the critics who think that the CC licenses are insufficient, or even more radically, that it should be opposed because it distracts from the fight against the very notion of intellectual property. I have asked some other associates, to discuss such critique, most lately evident in this essay here, and hope to publish some extra comments from our associates in the near future.

2. Why I support the CC initiative

There are 3 arguments that I see in favour of the CC Licenses.

The first is that it leaves the sovereignity with the individual, it does not expropriate him, but recognizes authorship and offers a range of options for sharing. I think that, yes the commons is a reality which ought to be supported, but at the same time, individual contribution is important as well.

The second is that it is important to be constructive, not just to reform or to be transgressive. What CC allows is to create a working cultural commons, which co-exists with the sphere of private intellectual property. In this sense, CC is already creating, right now, the more sharing-oriented world that we want to construct.

Finally, there is the argument of realism, that points to the lack of any majority desire to abolish intellectual property altogether, so that we must find pluralist solutions.

We conclude by refracting Lessig’s own arguments, recently written for the New Year’s wishes to the Creative Commons supporters.

3. Lawrence Lessig’s wishes for the future of CC

“I’m famous for a certain sort of pessimism. But about this, I’m optimistic that it is the second sort of change that we’re most likely to see. The creative energy of the next generation will not be stopped. The technologies of creativity are not going to become insanely expensive again. And thus, in my view, the most likely future is one in which this potential for creativity will be reconciled with a copyright system that offers protection where that’s necessary to create great new works, without burdening the world of creativity that doesn’t depend upon copyright to flourish.

Creative Commons’ most important contribution will be to help transition to this more sensible world. As I’ve described in these past weeks, we have already built the infrastructure to help the “sharing economy” flourish. The tools we’ve begun to demonstrate at ccLabs will also help support the inevitable growth of a hybrid creative economy, where works are available freely in some contexts, but commercially exploited in others. Both bits of legal infrastructure will encourage creativity, while respecting authors’ rights. Both suggest a different balance the law might strike, when politicians begin to recognize why this difference is important.

But until the day when this point is obvious, it is critical that we all continue to push this voluntary, private effort to get artists and creators to signal to the world the freedoms they believe their work should carry. We need that signal not just in hundreds of millions of licensed objects, but in billions of licensed objects. We need it built into the infrastructure where every creative work gets made. And we need this as a signal and a practice: as an effort every creator makes to encourage a certain ecology of creativity.

Over the next year, working with our new Chairman, Joichi Ito, we will push the program of interoperability that we started last fall. We will push as well the project of integration into many more applications of creativity. And most importantly, we will launch an endowment of the Creative Commons core to guarantee that the central project of CC will forever survive. Or at least if not forever, until the point is so obvious that we all can move on.”

One of the very early and most serious critics of Ken Wilber was David Lane, who has an amazing collection of material on his Neural Surfer website. Back in 1996, he was one of the first to expose that systematic misinterpretation of other’s ideas was one of the main intellectual tactics in building that version of the integral theory. But David focused on the theory of evolution as one aspect, Jeff Meyerhoff has since shown that it is truly systematic.

I have then lost David Lane from sight, wasn’t even successfull in googling for his material for a long while. Recently rediscovering his amazing collection of resources, I came to a short piece that discusses one aspect of spiritual authoritarianism, i.e. our tendency to credit others for what is really the self-production of bliss.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Spiritual experiences are not unlike orgasms (even if that seems like a stretch). Why? Because both are SELF generated via our own body but we tend to IMPUTE the bliss of such to the OTHER person, even though it was our own neurology and peripheral nervous system doing the juicing. With gurus it gets even worse, since they tend to deceive the neophyte into believing that they are really the CAUSE of inner meditative experience, wherein they are at best just CATALYSTS for it. We tend to confuse the two and end up giving way too much credit to the elevated teacher. Perhaps we can call it psychic vampirism…. though there is nothing mystical about it.

That’s why websites like whywontgodhealamputees.com/god5.htm are so vitally important. They point out the absurdity of believing that some super luminal being actual does something. Yet, as I can attest from my own experiences, when it comes to yogis and gurus of India devotees tend to check their brains in at the ashram gate and give Spock a sleeping pill. If one could just think rationally and dispassionately about the subject, even for a few minutes, it would become readily apparent that these so-called god men actually do NOT do anything. And, yet, they are taking your hard earned neurological discharges to the bank, because you think they are performing miracles. No, our brains are doing that.”

Such material can be found in the following out of print book:

“EXPOSING CULTS: WHEN THE SKEPTICAL MIND CONFRONTS THE MYSTICAL (New York: Garland Reference Library Edition, 1994. Out of Print).

This website cites an abbreviated version of it here: and a pertinent excerpt is here .

David Lane is monitoring the cultic mind here, where you’ll find lots of info on various guru’s and movements.

Last week we published excerpts of Michael Goldhabers book on the Attention Economy.

Here’s the overview page for common access to the different pages, followed by an assessment of Goldhaber’s work by John Hagel at Edge Perspectives.

Introduction page and first excerpt at blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=698

Second excerpt at blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=703

Third excerpt at blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=705

Fourth excerpt at blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=707

John Hagel on what makes Goldhaber’s approach so promising:

* Unlike many people who have written about the relative scarcity of attention relative to information overload, Goldhaber never loses sight of the fact that attention is ultimately about the connection between people, as illustrated in the following quote

In paying attention to the words, then, we are actually paying attention – as best we can – to the person who seems to have uttered them . . . This suggests that the prime purpose of words is to make possible this kind of connection between people.

* Goldhaber appears genuinely intent on mapping out a systematic set of economic principles that will shape where and how value gets created and captured in the attention economy

* Goldhaber also avoids the trap of viewing attention as a commodity – “Commodities are usually standardized, more or less generic things or substances that can be bought and sold in measurable amounts. None of this holds for attention.”

In fact, Goldhaber is close to viewing attention as a flow, rather than a stock – something that must continually be refreshed, if it is to be maintained. One can only continue to attract full attention if one offers something new along the way.

Goldhaber’s rich view of attention as an “aligning of minds” helps to make it clear that the multi-tasking and continual partial attention that many digerati believe will reduce attention scarcity is at best a weak remedy. His perspective helps to explain why, as Linda Stone has suggested, full attention will become the new aphrodisiac.

In reflecting on what I have seen of Goldhaber’s work, there are some areas that I hope he will develop in much more detail:

* Right now, Goldhaber’s writing seems focused on the consumer sphere and, as a result, the connection between attention and talent development is much less explicit than it could be – the bottom line is that attention becomes critical for production/creation and not just consumption, as I have briefly suggested here and here. It also helps to explain why the demand for attention will rapidly increase while the supply remains limited.

* Goldhaber’s perspective on attention provides an interesting lens to view the distinction between transactions and relationships and I hope he will explore this distinction in greater depth. One important way to amplify the value of attention for all parties is to build relationships.

* Goldhaber makes an interesting observation that “the norm in attempts at getting attention, the sine qua non of this new economy, are more in the line of self-revealing than either self-concealing or merging into some mass.” I hope he develops this theme more – it will help to draw together a broad range of phenomena including the demand for more corporate transparency and the success of social network sites in creating more visibility for its participants. Transparency may paradoxically become an increasing requirement for visibility.

Now, for most executives, this can seem like a pretty abstract discussion without any clear relevance for near-term actions. That impression would be a mistake. The attention economy is surfacing around us today – it is not some distant future. As with most economic trends, those who spot them and act on them early are most likely to create significant value. Here are some early action items:

* Explore the implications of attention scarcity for firm structure – I view attention scarcity as a key catalyst driving the unbundling and rebundling of firms that is occurring on a global scale

* Master the management techniques required to increase return on attention, not only for customers but for employees and business partners as well

* Create mechanisms to help customers and employees attract the attention they need to become more successful in their endeavors, especially in terms of their talent development.”