[p2p-research] Poor Richard Introduction

Sat Oct 16 04:28:59 CEST 2010

Dear Richard,

I find this a fascinatig life story and it will be a pleasure to publish
this on our blog, introducing the 2 articles we already decided to publish,

I've asked chris to do this, but chris has been playing dead for me for a
while (fully legitimately of course, he must be busy), and I'm not in a
position to spent time on coding, as I didn't know what to do with the
embedded links in the format you've sent me,

If Chris can't help, then I have an alternative, i.e. to let you post the
articles directly to our blog as a writes, and it is James who gives this
access, so he is in cc,

the suggested post-dating is now, November 1 for your intro above, then 3
and 5 for your remaining articles, once in, I can add a reinforcing sentence
or 2,

I suggest starting the title heading with Poor Richard's Trilogy (1), then 2
and 3, followed by the real title

it's a honour to have your material in our context, and to have such an
interesting human being in the network,

Michel

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Poor Richard <poor_richard at att.net> wrote:

> Michel,
>
> Below is some history of my orbit around p2p issues. I hope I haven't
> departed too much from what you had in mind. Please feel free to edit or
> return to me with further instructions.
>
> Richard
> ----------------------
>
> Hello p2p peeps,
>
> Michel asked me to introduce myself and my approach to p2p.
>
> I recently started blogging this year after being "out of network" for a
> long time. A couple of months ago I also opened a FaceBook
> account--reluctantly because of the controversies. Anyway, one of my new fb
> friends kept posting links to Michel Bauwens' articles on the P2P Foundation
> Blog so I found my way to P2P Land--a place that feels a lot like "home".
> But I have some intellectual catching up and verbal retooling to do.
>
> Chunks of my life have been spent not just out of network but out of
> main$stream culture.
>
> In the late 60's I became disenchanted with the civil rights movement and
> with anti-nuclear, anti-war, and other protest movements because of what I
> saw as an inclination of my peers to "protest party" more than to build new
> realities brick by brick. I had a deep drive to "be the change" instead of
> protesting the problem (not that I'm unthankful for those who do the
> protesting).
>
> I walked away from a stack of scholarship offers and took an old school bus
> around the country and then into the mountains of Tennessee. Have you read
> or seen "Into the Wild <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild>" by Jon
> Krakauer <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Krakauer>? That story has many
> parallels with my life in the seventies, except I didn't die. With the help
> of an ingenious young junkyard owner I got the big blue bus to the top of
> Flower Mountain, and with the help of a hillbilly family I learned how to
> live off the grid.
>
> Over the years I've visited many intentional communities. I've known many
> "Mother Earth News" style back-to-the-land homesteaders. I've been exposed
> to Appalachian hillbilly culture and had work/trade relationships with
> members of a horse-and-buggy Mennonite community. Those were all places
> where peer-to-peer culture was flourishing--only they didn't call it that.
>
> Around 1980 I spent a year as a Vista volunteer working with the
> Agricultural Marketing Project to organize tailgate markets for small,
> family farmers in church parking lots all over Appalachia. I learned about
> the problem of farmland being converted to other uses because of development
> pressures. I had long been interested in the legal issues confronting
> intentional communities, community land trusts, wild habitat conservation,
> etc. and so I went to the state of Tennessee with an idea for establishing a
> conservation easement program to help protect farmland and "open space" in
> Tennessee from development. The TN Department of Conservation loved the idea
> and the TN Conservation Easement Act of 1981<http://www.wildlaw.org/easements/66-9-301.html>soon came into being.
>
> Around the same time I helped to start the Tennessee Solar Energy
> Association <http://tnsolarenergy.org/> with some help from Al Gore and
> others. I used to sit in my school bus and type out the TSEA newsletter on
> an old manual typewriter. That led to serving as a reviewer of grant
> proposals for an appropriate technology grants program for Jimmy Carter's
> Department of Energy. I would often review proposals by the light of a
> kerosene lamp.
>
> My reason for mentioning that chapter of my experience is that I discovered
> alternative ways to engage with government agencies and civil servants other
> than via protests, petitions, and other adversarial interactions. I found
> that overlaps in personal interests and causes could create influential
> peer-to-peer relationships among individuals in and out of government.
>
> But like many young men I thought I needed the constant companionship and
> attention of a woman--and women didn't seem to like my isolated mountain
> retreat for long. So I decided to move to town for a while and get involved
> with more people and more causes on a daily basis. That's when an old
> interest in computers got me involved in strange new things.
>
> My time as a Vista volunteer convinced me that non-profits were too
> dependent on philanthropy and grant cycles. I felt that many non-profits
> might generate some of their own revenues by offering specialized goods and
> services that were consistent with their core mission. Habitat for
> Humanity's popular "ReStores"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_for_Humanity_International#Habitat_ReStores>is a good example of the idea.
>
> When a friend loaned me his home-built Heathkit<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit>personal computer I was hooked and soon I was promoting the idea of a
> personal computer retail franchise (based on the popular ComputerLand
> franchise but also incorporating books, classroom education, and mail order)
> that would funnel its revenues to non-profit organizations.
>
> This took off almost too fast because my hopes for a worker-owned business
> model were in conflict with the interests of the original set of "angel"
> investors who participated in the start-up funding. There were many
> conflicting agendas (none of which included personal financial gain, by the
> way).
>
> My own agenda took an almost bizzare twist as my unconscious mind ran
> through the possibilities of what I could do with a whole inventory of
> computers at my disposal. Direct mail marketing was a relatively new (but
> already notorious) phenomenon in the early 80's, and I struck on the idea of
> using the demo computers on the sales floor to do direct-mail marketing in
> the public interest. Before long an ambitious plan took shape in my mind. I
> would market rural Tennessee real estate to the whole country (or to the
> entire world) using direct mail targeted at progressive, conservation-minded
> people. A special brokerage would handle the transactions, placing
> conservation easements and other kinds of restrictive covenenats in each
> title, making the property attractive only to conservation-minded buyers. A
> non-profit brokerage might afford to offer property at below-market prices,
> and the associated easements would also confer tax benefits under the new TN
> Conservation Easement Act. The non-profit brokerage could eventually expand
> into green real estate development, green home building, etc.
>
> I also imagined the possible political ramifications of attracting hoards
> of progressive, conservation-minded people from around the US and the world
> to sparsely-populated, rural TN counties. This could be the beginnings of an
> alternative economic and political base in a large block of rural Tennessee
> counties, perhaps with eventual influence on the politics and economy of the
> whole state.
>
> However, it turned out I did not have the skill set or charisma  to sell
> this idea to the investors and staff at the pace demanded by my own
> enthusiasm. I was eventually asked to resign from the organization I had
> created over conflicts in how resources should be allocated.
>
> Stung by this failure I turned to repositioning and re-branding myself.
> Over the next decade I progressed from freelance IT consulting gigs to
> eventually becoming one of the principle distributed computing and web
> architects at a global Fortune 500 company. However, my attempts to
> introduce open-sourced software and peer-to-peer architecture into the
> top-down corporate environment were largely unsuccessful. Deeply frustrated
> by the vision of my "peers" once again, my corporate IT career came to its
> natural conclusion.
>
> After a pointless quest to see how much money I could earn while having no
> time to spend it, and thoroughly burned out on high technology, I designed
> an occupational therapy project for myself. I spent two years restoring an
> 1890's mill-workers' house in a historic textile mill village in Burlington,
> NC.
>
> As I recycled used tools, equipment, and materials in the restoration
> project I gained a much deeper insight into the subject of recycling and
> repurposing of existing materials, structures, machines, etc. Although I was
> always interested in electric vehicles, I became concerned with the problem
> of the existing fleet of internal combustion vehicles, numbering in the
> hundreds of millions in the US alone. We could not scrap all these vehicles
> and jump into new electric cars. Even though old vehicles can be recycled,
> that carries an enormous energy cost before a new vehicle ever hits the
> road.
>
> Learning that most existing vehicles could burn high-ethanol blends, I
> started promoting the idea of a consumer- and worker-owned ethanol
> cooperative in the fairly progressive Durham, NC area. But the events of the
> mortgage bubble overtook me, and faced with difficulties converting my
> construction loan on the mill house to a conventional mortgage, I was forced
> to sell at an unfavorable price. This was another personal setback that sent
> me retreating to my counter-cultural roots.
>
> I gave away everything I owned that my friends could use and hauled the
> remaining tools, equipment, incomplete ethanol still, etc. with me to Turtle
> Island Preserve <http://www.turtleislandpreserve.com/>, a primitive farm
> and educational venue in the Blue Ridge mountains owned by Eustace Conway<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Conway>
> *,* an American naturalist and the subject of the book *The Last American
> Man<http://www.amazon.com/Last-American-Man-Elizabeth-Gilbert/dp/0142002836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1287183449&sr=8-1>
> *.
>
> There, at last, I was back among kindred spirits. Eustace and his band of
> merry men and women are some of the finest people on earth. But my stay
> there was short. I arrived in balmy July, but by January The Blue Ridge
> winter and the primitive lodgings proved too much for my advancing age and
> worsening arthritis. It seems that over a decade of city life had turned me
> into an actual city-slicker, in body if not in mind or heart. Reluctantly I
> left with little more than the down coat on my back and headed for my
> Mother's warm house in Alabama.
>
> Feeling that I had outlived my usefulness, I retired to a cozy, secluded
> cottage in Alabama to feed the birds and watch the deer play. I had no use
> for computers for a while. There was no broadband service, anyway. But
> eventually "the DSL" came to my neck of the woods and the pull of Google
> research and subversive, alternative media drew me back online. I discovered
> the world of blogging and social networking and finally I stumbled back
> around to the world of copyleft and p2p.
>
> Besides venting opinions in Poor Richard's Almanack 2010<http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/>,
> in recent months I have been hatching a plan to save the world with a new
> generation of video games, informed by neuroscience and experimental
> psychology, designed to correct irrational thinking. Since I have no video
> game, virtual reality, or neurobiolgy credentials (or any credentials other
> than IT), this will be a highly collaborative, p2p, Creative Commons type
> project. When I finish working on a time-sensitive proposal, I will be happy
> to share further details. Meanwhile, I urge anyone with experience
> implementing educational products or services in Second Life to consider
> reading my post "The Beginning of Wisdom 3.0<http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/the-beginning-of-wisdom>"
> and contacting me by leaving a comment there or at my FaceBook page<http://www.facebook.com/?sk=messages#%21/profile.php?id=100001304793048&v=wall>
> .
>
> P2P or bust,
>
> Poor Richard
>

-- 
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

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20101016/cc8bf5a0/attachment.html>