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For established industries, the sharing marketplace — with rapidly shifting social, cultural, and technological disruptions — is forcing them to respond too. Never more true than in the financial sector. Does crowd funding threaten traditional funding sources indefinitely? We'll hear from the $$$ experts about the state of funding and financial models in The Sharing Economy.
Peace activist Cindy Sheehan stopped in Chicago on June 3 to promote her Tour de Peace campaign and speak out in support of Bradley Manning, whose court martial trial began the same day in Ft. Meade, Md.
Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.
But Miller foresaw the dangers of networked computing, an irresistible temptation for the development of a surveillance state by any tech-savvy government left unchecked by its people.
"Helsinki Timebank (Stadin Aikapankki, formerly known under the name of Kumpula vaihtopiiri) was established as part of the CES network in October 2009. Since then, more then 1400 people in Helsinki have joined this Timebank, and 28 timebanks have been established in other localities, in which services are exchanged among members on the basis of Time credits. One hour of whichever service performed is renumerated with the currency of the Timebank, in the case of Stadin Aikapankki one tovi. In 2011 alone, some 2200 tovi’s were exchanged in Stadin Aikapankki. These new Timebanks in Finland operate on a fully online international CES system. As such Stadin Aikapankki is locally rooted but globally interconnected in a network of community currencies. Examples of services traded are childcare, garden work assistance, bakings, language lessons, bookkeeping, computer program skills, handicraft lessons and assistance in the solving of problems."
"Off the Network is a fresh and authoritative examination of how the hidden logic of the Internet, social media, and the digital network is changing users’ understanding of the world—and why that should worry us. Ulises Ali Mejias suggests how we might begin to rethink the logic of the network and question its ascendancy."
Councils in the UK and around the world are starting to recognise how local currencies keep money in their areas, says John Rogers
Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix are the co-founders of Xero Shoes, husband and wife, and long-time entrepreneurs who recently appeared on the ABC television show, Shark Tank. Steven is an All-American Masters sprinter and award-winning entertainer. Lena is an award winning fiction writer. They live in Boulder, CO, with their cats, Lily and Lula.
Bitcoin can be described as a deflationary currency, or even a mere (virtual) commodity. Like gold, bitcoins are valuable because of their scarcity — Bitcoin’s money supply is limited to 21 million of units. A feature, according to libertarians and gold standard advocates, yet a bug for many
Book of the Day: towards an Economy of Experiences · H.G. Wells on the need for a Open Conspiracy ». Are UK's twittering farmers at the core of agricultural innovation ecosystem? photo of Michel Bauwens.
The ultimate promise of math-based systems is to bring the principles of the Internet to money. Money is information and the Internet is the greatest information engine of all time. The missing link was a money protocol. The Hypertext-Transfer-Protocol allowed the Internet to share text and graphics. The Simple-Mail-Transfer-Protocol made communication free and instantaneous. Each of these protocols had a seismic impact on our reality. The Ripple Protocol and others like it will have a similarly profound effect. Independent businesses using shared protocols will be able to do businesses directly without requiring third-party services.
Next to loyalty and rewards, the “shared economy” or “collaborative economy” is probably the second hottest space in startup land. Startups that encourage borrowing, bartering, ride sharing, or swapping are often categorized in the collaborative economy. Startups that facilitate a direct transaction between Person A and Person B–whether it be with services, money, or goods–fall into the shared economy.
Not only tangible goods like vacant rooms, parking lots, cars, clothes, and books, but also intangible goods like knowledge, talent and experience can increase in value when they are shared. For example, if the owner of a house has some free rooms to rent, others can use them and make better use of the space. Sharing economy was selected by Time Magazine as one of 10 ideas that will change the world. The Hankyoreh will go deep into what is happening to sharing economy in Korea, and provide a vision for Korean sharing economy.
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For established industries, the sharing marketplace — with rapidly shifting social, cultural, and technological disruptions — is forcing them to respond too. Never more true than in the financial sector. Does crowd funding threaten traditional funding sources indefinitely? We'll hear from the $$$ experts about the state of funding and financial models in The Sharing Economy.
On June 9, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the last few years the National Security Agency has been relying on a software program “with the quirky name Hadoop” to help it make sense of its enormous collections of data. Named after a toy elephant that belonged to the child of one of the original developers of the program, “Hadoop,” reported the Journal, is a crucial part of “a computing and software revolution … a piece of free software that lets users distribute big-data projects across hundreds or thousands of computers.”
I’ve had a few notes from friends over the last two weeks that all ran along the lines of “this is CauseWired coming to life!” meaning Egypt and seemingly-spontaneous January 25th uprising, which deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak today. Yet I hesitated at accepting congratulations for the foresight of my 2008 book on the rise of online social activism. I’m not a cyber-utopian of the version identified in Evgeny Morozov’s excellent book Net Delusion, which offers a darker digital vision that – in some ways – balances the rosier version I set forth two years ago ago in my book CauseWired, which chronicled digital activism through the first half of ‘08 (ancient history now). And I was deeply affected by the arguments in Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, my pick for non-fiction book of 2010, particularly his dystopian vision of anonymous hackers serving as judge and jury for individuals, companies, and governments well outside of the participatory social commons.
Who controls the Internet? To explore this question I participated in the five day NETworkshop Behind the Screens of the Internet. The question is too multilayered to yield a singular definitive answer but the crash course in computer networking made one thing painfully clear: it isn’t We The People.
The new economy will be an economy of renewable resources, that’s why access to land and soil will become one of the main sources of abundance again if it will be combined with access to new information technologies and information exchange, argues Michel Bauwens. Countries with heavy exposure to solar input and large reserves of land and biomass will be particularly well placed in this transition.
ERT will not keep the Greek state from sliding down the slope. Those, who obediently accept positions given by the government, will be regime’s cannon fodder. Despised by citizens, selling their souls for a decreasing dole of privileges, will be thrown away when the state – new, strong state – gets its legs again. If not, they will be easy sacrifice to the revolted masses, buying some time for their masters to escape.
Biohackers explores fundamental changes occuring in the circulation and ownership of scientific information. Alessandro Delfanti argues that the combination of the ethos of 20th century science, the hacker movement and the free software movement is producing an open science culture which redefines the relationship between researchers, scientific institutions and commercial companies.
“”Common Struggles” is a documentary that tells the story of the search for the meaning of Common Goods (Commons) in Central and Eastern Europe. European Alternatives (EA) — an organisation that advocates democracy and equality beyond the nation state- together with Rome’s Teatro Valle Occupato began in 2012 a transnational discussion over the meaning of the Commons beyond borders. The desire to find out more about different struggles for the re-appropriation or the protection of commons goods in former communist and socialist societies gone through years of privatization took them through Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. This took the form of a “caravan of the common goods”, made up of different actors and other occupants of the Teatro Valle, who travelled across Central and Eastern Europe to visit cities who were participating to the Transeuropa Festival, EA’s cultural festival that took place in 14 European cities in May 2012. “
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
To end a protection racket in Sicily, a group of businesses banded together to tell customers that they didn’t pay organized crime, so shopping there meant you weren’t, either.
The book brings together diverse voices with strong arguments against our money-based system’s ability to improve lives and prevent environmental disaster. It provides a strategy for undercutting capitalism by refusing to deal in money, and offers money-free models of governance and collective sufficiency. Life Without Money is written by high-profile activist scholars, including Harry Cleaver, Ariel Salleh and John O’Neill, and is an inspiring manifesto for those who want to take action.
In 2008, three young Americans in San Francisco set up Airbnb (Air Bed and Breakfast) with the idea of putting up spare rooms for rent. It began as a service that allowed travelers from around the world to use Facebook to find available rooms in the homes of ordinary people.
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