Peer2Politics

"Rejecting the dichotomy of centralism and horizontalism that has deeply marked millennial politics, Rodrigo Nunes’ close analysis of network systems demonstrates how organising within contemporary social and political movements exists somewhere between – or beyond – the two. Rather than the party or chaos, the one or the multitude, he discovers a ‘bestiary’ of hybrid organisational forms and practices that render such disjunctives false. The resulting picture shows how social and technical networks can and do facilitate strategic action and fluid distributions of power at the same time. It is by developing the strategic potentials that are already immanent to networks, he argues, that contemporary solutions to the question of organisation can be developed."

Wiredu discusses the consensus principle in the political system of the Ashantis in Ghana as a guideline for a recommendable path for African politics.

In my experience, people want to be amazing at their job. I can’t count the number of times that people had really great ideas but were powerless to implement them. I watched as they went from zealous excitement to indifferent cynicism.

- See more at: http://ryancarson.com/post/61562761297/no-managers-why-we-removed-bosses-at-treehouse#sthash.kuRPSLnU.6oGVifj3.dpuf

A bioregion is a geographic area that has roughly the same geology and plant life, that is different from the man-made borders imposed upon it. For example, the North Downs, South Downs and the Weald are all distinctive geographic features. Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex and Kent are all man made counties. The Weald and Downland is possibly a bioregion. It shares distinctive landscape and farming practices, and also building styles, as revealed at the Weald and Downland museum.

I was recently asked to review this World Bank publication entitled: “The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States Contexts.” I had been looking for just this type of research on crowdsourcing for a long time and was therefore well pleased to read this publication. This blog posts focuses more on the theoretical foundations of the report, i.e., Part 1. I highly recommend reading the full study given the real-world case studies that are included.

"What is complexity governance and how can this be implemented in a world complexity observatories grid? Complexity governance is the governance of any human relation (complexity pattern) on a peer-to-peer (complexity expression) level. This

= A social charter is a social and institutional framework providing incentives for the management and protection of commons resources. Creating a social charter requires the support and involvement of people across a region or community of interest who depend on specific common goods for their livelihood and welfare. A social charter can be developed for a single commons or for overlapping commons.

So what does the evidence about citizen engagement say? Particularly in the development world it is common to say that the evidence is “mixed”. It is the type of answer that, even if correct in extremely general terms, does not really help those who are actually designing and implementing citizen engagement reforms.

What do bitcoin and the sharing economy have in common?

For PeerLibrary project we had discussions on how much distributed or centralized should we make it. It is a cloud service and centralizing (unifying) user base and content has clear benefits for both end users and developers. End users have better user experience and ease of use, all content is available quickly and easily, and all other users are there, making social experience better. For developers, code can be much simpler and maintenance of only one instance makes it easier to deploy new versions and push security fixes quickly. It is easier to collect statistics and do A/B testing on a large sample. On the other hand, having multiple instances of PeerLibrary distributed around the world makes whole system more robust, specialized instances could be offered, privacy of users increased. Having PeerLibrary distributed would make forkability easier, encouraging more community control of both the project and the content (commons), preventing corruption of the main instance or core project.

"As realistically the most documented example, drawing from the history of Athens (ca. 500 BCE to around 322 BCE) direct democracy was analyzed either in its own era (Plato) or after it collapsed (Aristotle) as descending into its own forms of tyranny when corrupted. Tyranny hardly only comes from more royalist or oligarchic frameworks, they argued. It could come from a corrected constitutionalism and direct democracy as well. Following Aristotle's analysis in his Politics, a corrupted constitutional government becomes a form of tyranny which he called 'democracy.' Even most in the Enlightenment, when they discussed 'democracy,' were using this negative use of the term [lknk to the sweden and elgnad book], contrary to some that later attempted to pretend that the Enlightenment was some harbinger or precursor of more widespread mass representative thought about democracy.

business-empowered communities: they are not companies linked to a community, but transnational communities that have acquired enterprises in order to gain continuity in time and robustness [1]