[p2p-research] a new funding mechanism for useful online services

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Sepp,

just to re-iterate my vision of this:

- I consider democracy as one of the means for managing scarce resources,
and while current forms are obviously corrupt, we can imagine other ones

- I consider peer governance to be operative only in contexts of abundance,
where free self-allocation can occur

Projects often being hybrids, some combination of the two seems inevitable.

If we are not utopian and just see what is co-evolving with peer production,
then we must conclude that it is the FLOSS 'Foundations', mostly
democratically organized, which are managing the scarce infrastructures of
cooperation ...

It is easy to imagine, since they are now also being created for open
hardware, that this is a viable model, which could expand beyond FLOSS and
become partners with the existing but mutating government and governance
models ...

Michel

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Sepp Hasslberger <sepp at lastrega.com> wrote:

>
> On 05/gen/10, at 15:29, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
>  Hi Sepp,
>>
>> I agree with your points but don't see that multinational aspect
>> necessarily missing in my view ... but perhaps it does.
>>
>> As you suggest, some things, like space exploration, may actually require
>> a large scale organisation, so possibly/probably broadly relocalized
>> manufacturing and global knowledge sharing networks, are not enough.
>>
>> In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the instrument of scale, think
>> the Crusades, despite the local fragmentation .. what could be such an agent
>> in a world with p2p as its core?
>>
>> perhaps something akin to the FLOSS Foundations?
>>
>>
> Michel,
>
> yes, a very interesting question: What could take the place of the Catholic
> Church as an aggregator, an instrument of scale, in a world dominated by
> (predominantly local) p2p interactions.
>
> I believe that p2p will be transformative not only for economic efforts but
> also for governance/government. Instead of representative democracy, which
> we are realizing more and more to be a mere façade, we will slide towards a
> much more distributed way of decision making. Internet-enabled direct
> democracy efforts are the first beginnings of this trend.
>
> It is the transformed structures of governance that will eventually provide
> that unifying element, where great projects can be realized either by
> traditional structures like the large corporations, or by ad-hoc cooperative
> ventures that leverage the world of p2p production. FLOSS is definitely a
> first step in that direction.
>
> Sepp
>
>
>


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100125/e78ae6eb/attachment.html>