Peer2Politics

Even GitHub uses GitHub: Co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner recently experienced in a very meta way the power of his online hosting service for software-development projects (and the largest open-source community around). Preston-Werner asked users to help him build a new type of data format; within two days, hundreds of contributions to the project had been made.

 

Customizable objects from plastic dollhouse furniture to medical prosthetics can now be designed and printed out by almost anyone at the press of a button, and is going to lead to an 'explosion of new stuff,' predicts author Chris Anderson.

Actor and angel investor Ashton Kutcher says he will invest only in companies that have a mobile component. He made the revelation in an interview I hosted on-stage at the CTIA wireless conference.

Advocates often argue that victory for Android is inevitable because Google’s platform is more open and open always triumphs over closed. That proposition is debatable at best. But the arguments is muddled by the confusion of several different concepts of openness. I’m going to try to at least clarify the terms of the debate. There are at least three concepts of open clamoring for our attention; I am going to call them open hardware, open software, and open systems.

 

In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads. Those ...

This research project aims to shed light on the conditions of transferability of Commons-based peer production (CBPP) processes to physical manufacturing. We draw from the political economy of CBPP and its conjunction with digital, desktop manufacturing technologies, the concept of “voxels”, and the case of a hybrid RepRap-based, Lego-built three-dimensional printer-milling machine, to discuss the importance of modular design. We show that modularity, not only in terms of development process but also of hardware components, is necessary to make possible CBPP’s replication for tangible products, decreasing the need for coordination and enabling parallel developments to various directions.

Participatory online platforms and visual tools are lowering the barriers to participation and empowering citizens to design their communities. These crowd planning systems facilitate an open dialogue between city agencies and the people they serve, establishing a structured process for collaboration and encouraging a higher level of participation at the civic level. By seeking input throughout the development process, these crowd-planned systems help ensure greater transparency and buy-in that ultimately results in an end solution that meets the actual needs of the population.

I believe there is a historic opporunity to reconstruct a progressive majority around enabling the commons, which would be based on the following political and sociological complementarity between political forces and parties.

A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes.

How leading actors in the MOOC providing industry deal with the growing trend of monetization.

Name a target anywhere in China, an official at a state-owned company boasted recently, and his crack staff will break into that person’s computer, download the contents of the hard drive, record the keystrokes and monitor cellphone communications, too.

 

From the mind of a 19-year-old to the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) — WordPress has done some serious growing up in 10 years. Used by major publishing houses such as CNN and the New York Times and influential blogs like TechCrunch, the CMS has making publishing easy for a decade.

Peer production, modularity & voxels: The RepRap-based, Lego-built 3D printing-milling machin

Every day, the government does some stupid thing or enacts some idiotic law that prevents the free market from functioning properly. Yet, every day, entrepreneurs, innovators, and creators find their way through the proverbial crack to bask in the metaphorical sunlight. The Google driverless car, 3D printing, and Bitcoin are three marvelous recent examples of the free market at work.

 

 

Marcin Jakubows­ki dreams of liv­ing off the grid. Over the past few years, he’s been work­ing on a set of 50 machines he believes nec­es­sary to found and sus­tain an inde­pen­dent, mod­ern com­mu­ni­ty. He wants to “take every­thing that

A mechanical engineer (awesomely) named Anjan Contractor has won a NASA grant to prototype a 3D printer for food -- specifically pizza.

Hacking in China thrives across official, corporate and criminal worlds and is openly discussed and promoted, whether for breaking into private networks, tracking dissent or stealing trade secrets.