Peer2Politics

A new app allows you to scan a product in the supermarket aisle and learn who exactly is behind that box of cereal.

Although there is still the possibility of a volatile market, the Bitcoin ecosystem looks more promising than ever.

· Scale and acceleration. The whole purpose of Mesh was to build a community to scale and accelerate the sharing economy. So, as you’d expect, keynotes focused on this. Steven Johnson talked about themes from his new book, Future Perfect. What stuck with me was what he’s researching now – how "translational medicine" accelerates the diffusion of medical innovations into society. He related that attendees where translational economists working to smuggle the sharing economy into the mainstream. Robin Chase gave a convincing, data-packed presentation that showed the deep trouble we’re in with global warming (even the conservative World Bank is worried) and how open sourcing the solution is the only way to meet the challenge. She quotedBanny Banerjee of Stanford’s d. school: “You can’t solve exponential problems with linear solutions.” She urged people to design solutions that leverage excess capacity, foster participation, and result in cooperative gain.

 

Humans see the world through largely unconscious frames that determine what we believe our nature to be and therefore what we believe to be possible. To address our biggest global challenges, we can shed this non-ecological mental map—what the author calls “scarcity-mind”—based in lack and fear. Locked in scarcity-mind, we remain blind to our own power and end up creating together a world that none of us, as individuals, would choose. But humans can actually change how we see, moving from a frame of lack and limits to one of alignment with nature. Based on research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, this article explores a world seen with the emergent “eco-mind” in which possibility is all around us. Thinking like an ecosystem, no one is bereft of power.

The attached document presents the basic theory of time-based economies, as I hope to present at the conference, probably in the location called the, “Speakers Corner.”  I will bring copies of the attached document as a handout.  I also have much more written about time-based economies at:  www.CultureMagic.org

 

Peter Day hears from the pioneers of the rapidly-advancing world of digital manufacturing.

3D printers allow us to print any object, theoretically making any home can have the object that comes to mind. However, you first have to create a digital model of the part you want to print, using complex software, then the printer can interpret.  Thinker Thing seeking anyone to create real objects without prior experience in 3D software. For that, they created a system that “reads your mind” to create three-dimensional model, without the user having to get involved with complicated programs.

 

The great green panacea for salvaging the market/state economic growth model from its own environmental consequences is that it may somehow be possible to “decouple” GDP growth from resource consumption. The rationale for decoupling GDP is summarized in the 2011 United Nations Environmental Programme report, Decoupling Natural Resource Use and Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth:

Wikipedia has won much “marketshare” (or: “mindshare”) while the Encyclopedia Britannica has stopped the presses. Their production model – so called “commons-based peer production” – is proving hegemonic at least in the area of encyclopedias. This logically draws resources from the market into the commons.

 

Can computer games help to solve the problems of the world? Alex Butterworth investigates.