[p2p-research] Fwd: [ox-en] keimform.de: Notes from the Fourth Oekonux Conference I

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christian Siefkes <christian at siefkes.net>
Date: Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:57 PM
Subject: [ox-en] keimform.de: Notes from the Fourth Oekonux Conference I
To: ox-en <list-en at oekonux.org>


URL:
http://www.keimform.de/2009/04/01/notes-from-the-fourth-oekonux-conference-i/

>From March 27th to 29th, the Fourth Oekonux Conference
<http://fourth.oekonux-conference.org/> (announcement
<http://www.keimform.de/2009/02/19/announcement-of-4th-oekonux-conference/>)
took place in Manchester. It was great to meet some nice people again and to
meet many nice and interesting people for the first time (in real life, that
is, since I knew many participants already from virtual communications and
it was a good experience to finally meet them in person).

Here are some quick notes which I wrote down during the conference sessions
and polished and extended a bit afterwards.

During the first day, I didn’t took many notes, since I was busy as session
helper (moderating the discussions and so on). Stefan Merten talked about
Current limitations of peer production, and ideas on how to overcome them.
Since Stefan doesn’t like idea of social agreements between producers which
might involve a coupling between giving and taking (as I discuss in my book
<http://peerconomy.org/wiki/Main_Page>), he is stuck with having to hope for
technical solutions. Computers are machines for making perfect copies of
digital goods, and Stefan hopes for machines can take make perfect copies of
physical goods—the old Replicator dream.

Among other things, this completely neglects how to get the resources
necessary for production, and how to organize tasks that cannot be handled
by machines, e.g. health and elder care or education. I don’t think that
such an approach could ever be sufficient—both technical solutions and
social agreements are necessary and need to be interwoven.

The second and last session of the first day was given by Jacco Lammers, who
talked about the c,mm,n car, which has already been discussed
<http://www.keimform.de/2007/04/30/neues-ueber-das-open-source-car-cmmn/>
(in German) in the Keimform blog. Cars, of course, are a very
individualistic and somehow “capitalistic” way of movement; accordingly,
Jacco’s talk was quite business-oriented, too. Still, it’s an interesting
project—one of the most ambitious open hardware endeavors which has made
some reasonable progress so far.

After the session, I talked with Jacco about licensing issues—most open
hardware projects use licenses designed for software (e.g. the GNU GPL) or
content (Creative Commons). These are quite inappropriate for hardware,
since the license covers only the designs, not the hardware itself—a
manufacturer who produces and sells open source hardware wouldn’t be bound
by the copyleft clause of the GPL, for example. Jacco said that they have
found a license that seems to solve this issue and are now in the process of
evaluating it—I’ll have to check that out.

The second day started with a joint introduction by Michel Bauwens and
Stefan Merten, who explained the goals and philosophy of Oekonux and the P2P
Foundation, the two projects organizing the conference. Stefan again
expressed his belief that physical production is to become a mere appendix
of information production—well, we’ll see. Michel talked about the
“distributed production of money,” a toy topic of his I don’t believe in.
Still, they’re both doing great jobs in inspiring and leading these
organizations and the world would be much worse off without them and their
dedicated work. Thanks, Stefan and Michel, for doing what you do and for
making this great conference a reality!

In the next slot, it was my turn to talk about Peer Production Everywhere
(cf. my submission <http://www.keimform.de/2008/11/02/ox4-submission/>). In
the first part of my talk <http://peerconomy.org/talks/ox4/>, I introduced
the core ideas of my book about how a society based on commons and peer
production might look like; in the second (and shorter) part, I discussed
some ideas and approaches for how to get there. (I prepared my talk slides
using the S5 file format; they’re designed for viewing on a 1024×768 display
in full-screen mode.) The discussion was quite lively and there where the
usual questions about whether and when coupling between giving and taking is
necessary, and whether it is compatible with the peer mode of production.
The general reception was quite positive, I think.

This report will be continued in a few days; there is also a report by
Michel Bauwens: Extraordinary fourth Oekonux conference marks milestone for
P2P movement
<
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/extraordinary-fourth-oekonux-conference-marks-milestone-for-p2p-movement/2009/03/31
>.
Audio recordings <http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/425566.html> of
some of the sessions are already available; more are to come.


Best regards
       Christian

--
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian at siefkes.net ---------
|   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
|   Better Bayesian Analysis:           |   Peer Production Everywhere:
|   http://bart-project.com/            |   http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
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