Peer2Politics

"The current model within which universities own the inventions made by their researchers was enshrined in the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This paper finds that the current system, in which universities maintain de jure ownership of inventions, is not optimal either in terms of economic efficiency or in advancing the social interest of rapidly commercializing technology and encouraging entrepreneurship. We demonstrate that this model is plagued by ineffective incentives, information asymmetries, and contradictory motivations for the university, the inventors, potential licensees, and university technology licensing offices (TLOs). We suggest that these structural uncertainties lead to delays in licensing, misaligned incentives among parties, and delays in the flow of scientific information and the materials necessary for scientific progress. The institutional arrangements within which TLOs are embedded have encouraged some of them to become revenue maximizers.

"The Ecuadorian government is intending to develop a Social Knowledge Economy (SKE) that would change the parameters of the countryʼs intellectual property legislation and create public policies to promote an open commons knowledge economy. 

"Making political decision-making truly inclusive is always challenging. Diversity of concerns and perspectives to be considered is a significant driver of complexity. How much inclusiveness can be achieved is limited by how much diversity can be integrated without losing the ability to organize constructive discourses that lead to adequate decisions, and that achieve this within a reasonable timeframe. I propose that “logic tree” methods of the so-called “Theory of Constraints” are highly promising as a means of managing this complexity in a logically and socially sound and inclusive manner. Mapping concerns by such logic trees allows to identify power structures (which turn up as root causes for concerns), conflicts, and to discover and discuss innovative ideas. The application of these methods to Internet governance and sustainable development objectives should be tried and researched."

"Tiziana Terranova is well known for her thesis, formulated in the early 2000s, that the free labor of users is the source of economic value in the digital economy. Free labor is an ambivalent concept, rooted in Italian post-workerist labor theories of value, such as Paolo Virno's re-reading of Marx's notion of the general intellect, Antonio Negri's theory of the social factory, and Maurizio Lazzarato's concept of immaterial labor. It defines both the outcome of the 'refusal of work' of the 1960s and 1970s and the resulting investment of subjective needs and desires for expression into production (culture, technology, the arts); and its subsequent transformation into the engine of economic production in the post-Fordist economy first and the digital economy later (branding, marketing, social media). Free labor is both free as in 'free beer' (for digital entrepreneurs) and free as in free speech (for those who perform it voluntarily). It is no more of an illusion than industrial labor was, it is simply a new source of value and engine of production which is open to capture by the capitalist enterprise, but maintains a potential to express itself in new forms of economic organizations such as the p2p economy."

"Basically you submit your paper before to get advice and reviewing from people that is part of the project (free and open),they allow open (not blind) reviewing and submission (we all knew who is the other) , there are journals subscribed that can directly contact you to publish the reviewed version or you can send your work with the reviewing data to another journal that could accept your paper or ask for some more reviewing."

"The peer economy is a framework of online, peer-to-peer marketplaces that enable people to monetize skills and assets they already have (see figure 4). To a provider, the peer economy is immediate relief. It provides an income stream while also freeing providers to choose when to work, what to do, and where to complete the work. Providers sidestep traditional constraints such as geography or rigid work schedules. Those who did not find inclusion in a traditional workplace—stay-at-home carers, the elderly, those varying in physical and mental ableness—suddenly have an empowering way to generate income.

"The Lab’s vision is of radical renewal, reform and revolutionary change to the dominant contemporary socio-economic system known as ‘capitalism’.

"Joana Formosinho is a zoologist with a background in animal behavioural research, but as she says in her introduction, she felt that her research and research methods had not brought her a profound level of insight:

"Making political decision-making truly inclusive is always challenging. Diversity of concerns and perspectives to be considered is a significant driver of complexity. How much inclusiveness can be achieved is limited by how much diversity can be integrated without losing the ability to organize constructive discourses that lead to adequate decisions, and that achieve this within a reasonable timeframe. I propose that “logic tree” methods of the so-called “Theory of Constraints” are highly promising as a means of managing this complexity in a logically and socially sound and inclusive manner. Mapping concerns by such logic trees allows to identify power structures (which turn up as root causes for concerns), conflicts, and to discover and discuss innovative ideas. The application of these methods to Internet governance and sustainable development objectives should be tried and researched."

* PhD Thesis: ANNA SERAVALLI. MAKING COMMONS (attempts at composing prospects in the opening of production). Doctoral dissertation in Interaction Design. Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication, Faculty: Culture and Society, 2014

= QLectives is a project bringing together top social modelers, peer-to-peer engineers and physicists to design and deploy next generation self-organising socially intelligent information systems