#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 131 – Public Intelligence Blog

PDF (154 Pages): PART I: Do-It-Ourselves Telecommunications: Guifi.net Commons Coming to US from Catalonia – In Spain & US We Are Now Building Network Infrastructure Held as Commons

Background on why the public must take back control of the communications infrastructure while providing universal free access to all. Background on guifi.net in Spain and Kansas City FreeNet. Discourse on Network Governance. “It Must Be Done” summary and credo by Isaac Wilder. Conclusion includes “Not an End but a New Beginning by Jeff Michka and Comments from Dave Hughes.

PDF (185 Pages): PART II: The Global Free Network Movement The Right to Telecommunications Self-Determination with Examples from Spain, USA, Argentina and France

Importance for Self-Determination. Introduction onf “Do It Ourselves” as antidote to tyranny of the corporate state, enabling free and open networks. History of guifi.net growing to 4,000 nodes. How guifi.net runs at scale — challenges secular power. LocalRet as a learning experience. The ecology of guifi.net. The operation and governance of guifi.net. Promoting fiber optics. AlterMundi in Argentina. Kansas City Renaissance. Fedeation of French Data Networks (FFDN). Ecuador commits to an open commons-based knowledge society.

PDF (98 Pages): PART III: Citizen Involvement in Freenets Living Labs in Catalonia and Hackerspaces in Oakland California — Guifinet to Join i2Cat Foundation for Collaborative Use of Both Infrastructures

The Internet as an agent of local empowerment. i2cat and Living Labs. Entire cities as citizen laboratories. Emerging innovation ecosystems require a change in attitude on the part of city government. Appendix on i2cat projects in 2011. A guifinet – i2cat collaboration scenario. Seizing one's local economy from the bottom up in Oakland, California.

EXTRACTS (Pages 26-27):

Continue reading “Gordon Cook: Telecommunications Infrastructure as Commons Local Self-Determination”

2014/02/102014/02/12

Ecuador Initiative: Integrated Societal Metabolism

Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, Resilience

ECUADOR INITIATIVE: Transition Proposals Toward a Commons-Oriented Economy and Society

Sponsored by the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Ecuador, carried out by the Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society.

MuSIASEM in Depth

Source Page

MuSIASEM is an open framework able to take into account the economic, environmental, social, cultural, technical and political dimensions in an integrated analysis, accounting for different flows such as monetary, energy, waste or water. As a result, ultimately we can get “congruent” relations among the different set of variables.

The results of the MuSIASEM are sets of georreferenced vectorial indicators that are easy to understand, and this is one of the strengths of the method. But it is build on strong and heavy theoretical blocks. Here we summarize its roots.

Complex System Theory
From CST, MuSIASEM has taken concepts that are useful to deal with the definition of the societies as part of a broader hierarchical system and with the different levels of it that are relevant for the analysis of the sustainability.

Hierarchical levels of a Socio-Ecosystem. By Cristina Madrid.

Under the CST perspective, the Societal Metabolism is a notion used to characterize the processes of energy and material transformation in a society that are necessary for its continued existence, sustainability or Autopoiesis. In order to maintain this, those transformations cannot overpass the thresholds posed by the Ecosystem Metabolism. Both, societies and ecosystems are levels of a Hierarchical System. In them, there are relations that have to be maintained within and among the levels, including the relations that control the biophysical transformations, or metabolic patterns. The metabolic patterns of the social level of a hierarchy depend on its internal and external relations. They pose internal and external constraints to the autopoesis of the system.

More about CST: Robert Rosen, Humberto Maturana, Fracisco Varela, Tim Allen, Howard Odum, Ramón Margalef, Ilya Prigogine

Bioeconomics
From Bioeconomics, MuSIASEM has used the flow-fund model of Georgescu-Roegen. With it, MuSIASEM is able to deal with the degrees of complexity given by the different meanings a resource has in each of the levels of analysis and by the relation between them.

In MuSIASEM, flow is a semantically open definition for elements that come into or out of the relevant system level during the analytical representation. They give information about what the system level(s) does to maintain itself. Fund is a definition used for those elements that remain there during the complete time of the representation. They are the components of the system that must be maintained.

Continue reading “Ecuador Initiative: Integrated Societal Metabolism”

2014/02/092014/02/12

Ecuador Initiative: Going Open Source Everything

#OSE Open Source Everything, 08 Wild Cards, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

ECUADOR INITIATIVE: Transition Proposals Toward a Commons-Oriented Economy and Society

Sponsored by the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Ecuador, carried out by the Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society.

John Restakis and Michel Bauwens on the FLOK Society Transition Project in Ecuador

My talk for the democracy conference in Amsterdam, Crosstalk 2013 | Borders to Cross, on the p2p transition process in Ecuador.

It is followed by the first installment of a diary by co-researcher John Restakis.

Watch the video here:

John Restakis writes:

“It is now six weeks since I arrived in Ecuador as part of an international team of researchers and activists that are working with the government to radically transform the nation’s economic model.

John Restakis

In what may be one of the most innovative change programs in Latin America, the administration of Rafael Correa is proposing to transition from a neo-liberal, free market economic model to what they are calling a social knowledge economy based on a combination of commons-based economics and the promotion of open knowledge systems. It’s heady stuff and the project is placing Ecuador at the forefront of global efforts to advance human knowledge as a commons and to apply this knowledge to the creation of a new economic model based on the commons, co-operative models of production, open-source systems of sharing, and free access to information.

Continue reading “Ecuador Initiative: Going Open Source Everything”

2014/02/092014/02/09

Jean Lievens: Open Source Electronics, 3D Printing, & Robotics Creating a Revolution in Manufacturing

Hardware, Software

From www.huffingtonpost.com – February 8, 11:16 PM

2014/02/082014/02/08

Devin Balkind: The FLO Consensus

#OSE Open Source Everything

The FLO Consensus: Author's Cut

Devin Balkind

Context within the Occupy Movement

Within the Occupy Movement and, from what I understand, in many of the social movements that preceded it, there has always been a conflict between the “revolutionaries” that want to create a crisis to first disrupt, and then destroy, the existing social order; and the “reformers” who want to take control of existing power structures and change society from “the inside”. Within the occupy landscape, the “revolutionaries” gravitate towards the language of “occupy” and “direct action” while the “reformers” gravitate towards the language of “99%” and “protest.”

This essay is concerned with a third group within the occupy movement – a group rarely mentioned by the media and often discounted by the activists who spend their time doing the type of self-promotion that gets them on to panels. I’m referring to the “providers”: activists who invest their time and resources into providing services to individuals and groups within “the movement”. These people are often vocal advocates for “mutual aid” (leftist terminology) or “free aid” (rightist terminology). Since occupy originated more from the left than the right, the term “mutual aid” is most popular, defined on Wikipedia as “voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit.” Within the context of OWS, mutual aid is probably more accurately described as “the revolutionary act of helping people for free.”

Read full chapter.

2014/02/07

Stephen E. Arnold: Discover the Open Source Alternative to the Autonomy Crawler Tool

IO Tools, Software

Discover the Open Source Alternative to the Autonomy Crawler

February 7, 2014

Whether Autonomy’s product success is true or false, as proprietary software it comes with a large price tag. The average small business or user cannot afford to purchase HP Autonomy’s IDOL Crawler. Open source is the best alternative, but for the longest time you could not get software comparable to IDOL Crawler. Norconex says that has changed in the article, “An Open Source Crawler For Autonomy IDOL.” Norconex released an HP Autonomy IDOL Committer for its open source Web crawler Norconex HTTP Collector.

The HTTP Collector is available for Github. The developer encourages people to download it and contribute to the project. Its features are mostly the same as those from HP Autonomy HTTP Connector.

The article states:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Discover the Open Source Alternative to the Autonomy Crawler Tool”

2014/02/06