299 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2019
    1. Filippo Argenti

      Filippo is based on a Black Guelph, Charles of Valoi, Dante’s political enemy. Charles of Valoi entered Florence with the other Black Guelphs and destroyed much of the city within a few days. The harsh treatment that Filippo sufferers in The Inferno is payback for an earlier offense that the real life Charles of Valoi had done. In The Inferno Filippo’s violent temper is highlighted in the story as a man who had crossed Dante.

    2. Phlegyas

      Phlegyas is the son of Mars (god of war) who became outraged after the god Apollo raped his daughter. Out of rage, he set fire to the temple of Apollo. Phlegyas is in The Inferno because Virgil uses him to represent the sins of wrathful and sullen. In The Inferno, Phlegyas is responsible for Dante and Virgil across the Styx in his boat.

  2. Mar 2019
  3. Feb 2019
  4. Jan 2019
  5. Dec 2018
    1. New rules always create confusion but that is not a strong argument against them. The legal complexities of CC reflect the complexity of copyright. That the CC licenses are being used suggests that they are useful. The question is how? Claiming they are not useful is unlikely to be correct. Perhaps the usefulness is social not individual, so people are using them to do good. I take no position on this.

      This opinion/ editorial and the resulting dialogue adds some dimension to some of the pro and con arguments for adapting Creative Commons practices.

    1. Why, when we are so worried about preserving freedoms, do we prohibit choice on the part of downstream users as to how they can license derivatives works they make? Why don’t we want to protect that user’s freedom to choose how to license his derivative work, into which he put substantial effort? The copyleft approach of both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons makes creators of derivative works second-class citizens. And these are the people we claim to be primarily interested in empowering. I can’t stress this point enough: the ShareAlike clause of the CC licenses and the CopyLeft tack of the GFDL rob derivers of the basic freedom to choose which license they will apply to their derived work. ShareAlike and CopyLeft privilege creators while directing derivers to the back of the bus.

      I think that license compatibility is one of the least user friendly areas in the Creative Commons process. Opening resources while being attributed sounds appealing to educators who are dipping their toes in these concepts. Then we pull out Compatibility Charts and people want to run for the hills! I think that the democracy and openness that Creative Commons embodies should be inclusive and I think it's hard for people to decipher these equations which are so crucial to responsible use.

    1. Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

      I think contextualizing Creative Commons material as a component in global justice and thinking of fair distribution of resources and knowledge as an antidote to imperialism is a provocative concept.This blog, infojusticeorg offers perspectives on social justice and Creative Commons by many authors.

    1. User rights Every CC licence allows you to: Copy the work (eg. download, upload, photocopy and scan the work); Distribute the work (eg. provide copies of the work to teachers, students, parents and the community); Display or perform the work (eg. play a sound recording or film in class, or stage a play to parents); Communicate the work (eg. make the work available online on the school intranet, learning management system or on a class blog); and Format shift verbatim copies of the work (eg copy a MP3 version of music onto a CD or an MP4 version of a film onto a DVD to play in class). Source: Adapted from 'Baseline Rights'  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Baseline_Rights   Some CC licences also let you make other uses, however these are the base user rights provided for all CC material. User obligations When you use any CC material, you must: always attribute the creator of the work (for information on how to attribute a work, see information guide, ‘How to Attribute Creative Commons Material’); get permission from the creator to do anything that goes beyond the terms of the licence (e.g. making a commercial use of the work or creating a derivative work where the licence does not permit this); keep any copyright notice attached to the work intact on all copies of the work; indicate and link to the licence from any copies of the work; and where you make changes to the work, acknowledge the original work and indicate that changes have been made (eg by stating ‘This is a French translation of the original work, X’).   In addition, when you use any CC material, you must not:  alter the terms of the licence; use the work in any way that is prejudicial to the reputation of the creator of the work; imply that the creator is endorsing or sponsoring you or your work; or add any technologies (such as digital rights management) to the work that restrict other people from using it under the terms of the licence. Source:  Adapted from 'Baseline Rights'  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Baseline_Rights 

      This clear description of the rights conferred by every Creative Commons license and the limitations written into every Creative Commons license provides a clear overview for educators who may be new to Creative Commons licenses. This guide was developed for Australian educators specifically.

    1. That said, for a thoughtful survey of how the commons, cultural and otherwise, might thrive inside of, or along with, with current conditions I recommend Peter Barnes’s book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. One of Barnes’s points is that our debates about the future often imagine only two actors: the government and private business. Barnes suggests a third set, common property trusts (as, for example, the kind of land trusts devised by the Nature Conservancy). There is much to say about common property trusts but for now the point is simply that we already have a mix of cultural modes and should continue to have them going forward with, I hope, the commons recognized and strengthened.

      One of the areas I find challenging in addressing Creative Commons culture is how Creative Commons relates to capitalistic culture (or rejects it). Creative Commons can be compatible with open market, but it can also challenge some of the fundamental tenants of it. Throughout the units, as I tried to imagine applications of Creative Commons, or making licensing decisions as a creative and academic, I found that I had questions about artists and how they can earn a living in this model, and how this model supported and challenged my role as a librarian in academe.

  6. Nov 2018
    1. The author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. It can be accessed through the author’s website at http://www.twitterandteargas.com.

      A great example of academic samizdat on Zeynep Tufekci's part.

      The free creative commons version is available in the footer link at https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

  7. Oct 2018
  8. cloud.degrowth.net cloud.degrowth.net
    1. To document this confluence, and in which way we are building this knowledge—not only logical, but emotional and relational. Putting much more the tools of knowledge building.
    1. Um die Frage, ob es sich bei den dominanten Technikfirmen, die auf eine feudale Art und Weise die Infrastrukturen unseres Lebens bestimmen, nicht um öffentliche Güter handelt. Sind die sozialen Netzwerke nicht genauso ein Gemeingut?
    2. Leider herrscht in der politischen Linken – polemisch zugespitzt – so etwas wie ein technischer Analphabetismus. Da heißt es dann oft, Technik sei etwas, das uns entfremdet. Das ist ein sehr, sehr bürgerlicher Gedanke.
  9. Aug 2018
    1. 3 Steps for Licensing Your 3d Printed Stuff by Michael Weinberg. CC BY-SA 3.0 A set of instructions for how to license 3d printed materials https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/documents/3_Steps_for_Licensing_Your_3D_Printed_Stuff.pdf

      Relevant content in the unit: Unit 3.2, Acquiring Essential Knowledge, What types of content can be CC-licensed, suggested additional content (related to both paragraphs in current content).

      While the primary purpose of this paper is about 3-D printing, this resource is a great overview of copyright law related to electronic files, whether they be photographs or the files for a 3-D printing project.

      This is an especially good resource for those interested in specific examples of the delineation of the functional, non-copyrightable aspect of a work and the artistic expression, copyrightable aspects of a work.

    2. What happens if I offer my material under a Creative Commons license and someone misuses them? https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-happens-if-i-offer-my-material-under-a-creative-commons-license-and-someone-misuses-them

      I'm not sure this FAQ response actually addresses the question.

      Most of the questions I get from faculty and OER advocates who work with faculty are fear-based about their reputation. I get questions like (put more bluntly than I usually get, these are the ultimate questions after a lot of back and forth):

      What if someone takes the history content I wrote and manipulates it a political position I don’t agree with? Won’t that reflect poorly on me?

      What if someone takes my math book and modifies it and makes mistakes? Won’t that reflect poorly on me if someone finds the modified version with mistakes and my name is attached to it?

      I think things like the above examples are what people are mostly asking when they ask about "misuse."

    1. I am not, and will never be, a simple writer. I have sought to convict, accuse, comfort, and plead with my readers. I’m leaving the majority of my flaws online: Go for it, you can find them if you want. It’s a choice I made long ago.
  10. Jul 2018
    1. I also think as educators we should own what we make, or at least have it released to the Commons. Copyright on teacher created materials in the public school makes little sense. Nobody wants to steal your stuff and no municipality will ever profit on sales. Give it an open license.
    1. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

      I prefer sources that are short and to the point, with links allowing me to explore various topics if  I need to.  This piece goes over all of the basics of creating and maintaining a copyright license. While that is not the objective, typically, of someone taking a Creative Commons course, it helps to see this information from a pro-copyright perspective to understand all sides of the issue.

      It's also a primary source, meaning that the department issuing the copyrights in the United States also wrote this piece, which means it should be as accurate as possible.

    1. The Commons Short and Sweet

      This resource is very helpful in explaining, in simple and short word paragraphs (short and sweet, it is), the full context of the commons:

      "The commons is not a resource. It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources. Many resources urgently need to be managed as commons, such as the atmosphere, oceans, genetic knowledge and biodiversity."

      Emphasizing the social norms and community accountability aspects of the commons are key to truly understanding the commons, it's role in society, and how it can be sustained. 

  11. May 2018
    1. he commons and enclosure are archaic, unfamiliar terms. But this strangeness is appropriate
  12. Apr 2018
    1. For creative professionals, however, particularly those burdened by economic hardship, the risks associated with transitioning to a non-proprietary business model can feel (rightly or wrongly) prohibitive.

      Opposition from these groups killed the Eldred Act. Failure of what became Eldred v. Ashcroft gave rise both to the attempt to have this act passed and to the formation of Creative Commons.

    1. This page

      This page is the main page through which the other pages are accessed, and to which they redirect when finished. Some pages have directions to the PubMed Commons pages that in 2013 began facilitating the annotation of articles in the bioscience literature. Sadly, this was stopped in 2018, but comments can be retrieved through the Hypothesis site as detailed on my Laboratory Page.

  13. Nov 2017
    1. Arguingthatthedebate(orbattle)overcopyrightinthe1990swasbeingincreasinglypolarizedinto‘allrightsreserved’versus‘norightsreserved’extremes,LessigandhiscolleaguesfoundedtheCreativeCommonsconventionin2002toenabledigitalcreatorstomaintaincertainrightsfortheirintellectuallabourwhileprovidingitsdisseminationandcirculation.[75]Whileithasitscritics(whoarguethatitreproducestheflawsofcopyrightlaws),CreativeCommonsisaningeniousconventionthatruptures(resignifiesradically)acopyrightconventionandprovidesvariousactionsbywhichacreatorisabletospecifyrightsthatshewantstoretain

      [...] But the real interest in this convention, whether it is Bitcoin or any other digital currency, is what, once again, it demonstrates: that in the digital commons there is an inexhaustible ingenuity, and people are willing to contribute to its expansion and maintenance as a public domain.

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  14. Oct 2017
    1. Influencing unfolding realities may be less about electing different leaders and policies than about learning how to change ourselves

      Change centered in the individual/human rather than the social/political. Wondering if this is too tethered by the USA's very unfortunate tendency to recast all wider social movements as self-improvement (eg, Buddhism, environmentalism > self-health, etc).

    2. The commons has also provided a language and ethic for thinking and acting like a commoner—collaborative, socially minded, embedded in nature, concerned with stewardship and long-term, respectful of the pluriverse that makes up our planet.

      Thinking like a commoner.

    3. the commons is at once a paradigm, a discourse, a set of social practices, and an ethic

      defining the commons as paradigm, discourse, practices and ethic

    1. Principle 3. If publicly accessible repositories for data have been agreed on by a community of researchers and are in general use, the relevant data should be deposited in one of the repositories by the time of publication.

      Map to the Repositories principle for the Scholarly Commons

  15. Sep 2017
  16. Jul 2017
    1. BMI

      Test if this shows up in another list.

    2. Finally found its BMI distribution... turns out to be in demographic category. So most samples from this study have BMI > 24. Good for us.

    1. Partial loss-of-func- tion alleles cause the preferential loss of ventral structures and the expansion of remaining lateral and dorsal struc- tures (Figure 1 c) (Anderson and Niisslein-Volhard, 1988). These loss-of-function mutations in spz produce the same phenotypes as maternal effect mutations in the 10 other genes of the dorsal group.

      This paper has been curated by Flybase.

    1. Obesity rs8043757 intron FTO 16 : 53,779,538 5.000 x 10-110 NHGRI 23563607

      The top match SNP with key words: Obesity, T2D and CVD is on gene FTO.

    1. Obesity was highly prevalent among the study sample; 64.6% of females and 41.2% of males were obese according to Polynesian cutoffs (BMI ≥ 32 kg/m2). Females were less likely than males to have hypertension (31.7% vs. 36.7%) but equally likely to have diabetes (17.8% vs. 16.4%).

      Those with obesity but not hypertension or diabetes can be our candidates.

      The data set can be found here: dbGaP Study Accession: phs000972.v2.p1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?study_id=phs000972.v2.p1

    1. This T2D study measured BMI, DBP, SBP and cardiovascular disease medications as well. May have samples we need.

    1. Samoans have been studied for >40 years with a focus on the increase in, and levels of, BMI, obesity, and associated cardiometabolic conditions due to economic modernization

      This one may contain the sample we need. need to check their publications.

    1. ((obesity[Disease]) NOT type 2 diabetes mellitus[Disease]) NOT cardiovascular diseases[Disease] AND 1[s_discriminator]

      NCBI can save this query for me... I can annotate this as well.

  17. Jun 2017
  18. May 2017
  19. Apr 2017
    1. Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, “The flag is moving.” The othersaid, “The wind is moving.” The sixth patriarch, Zeno, happened to be passingby. He told them, “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”—Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

      How does quote fit the idea of knowledge commons. We are the individual monks and the commons is the mind moving? Not just your mind, not just my mind, but 'all mind'?

  20. Mar 2017
  21. Feb 2017
    1. The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake).

      This is a hard problem, but the lake must have an owner, or some bizarre magical special juridical property that someone must come up with. Anyway, this whole example treats it as "public" resource, hence the tragedy of the commons follow.

      Ok, it seems that the lake may be owned by someone and the rivers that go into it owned by other people, so the problem arises. This seems to me to be a case for law: https://hypothes.is/a/PBirDvnYEeaWvjeIs4H9kg.

      Probably there could be a way for the lake owner to sue the people who are damaging the lake, or these sue the lake owner for their lack of productivity.

    1. The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.

      This is a whole new tragedy of the commons: people don't know where the commons actually are anymore.

    1. This is all great, but here's the annoying thing: it should be totally unnecessary. These are digitizations of public domain works, and there's no reasonable basis for granting them any copyright protection that would need to be divested with a CC0 mark in the first place. They are not creative transformative works, and in fact they are the opposite: attempts to capture the original as faithfully and accurately as possible, with no detectable changes in the transfer from one medium to another. It might take a lot of work, but sweat of the brow does not establish copyright, and allowing such images to be re-copyrighted (in some cases hundreds or even thousands of years after their original creation) would be pointless and disastrous.

      Interesting. I never realized there was this much of a distinction between CC0 and the CC PD license, but it makes sense.

  22. Jan 2017
    1. I don’t want the culture of open source to be organized around a legal definition. I want to zoom out and look at the broader ecosystem (of which the legal definition is one, essential node). A friendlier, more accessible term would make it easier to discuss topics like sustainability, collaboration, and people involved. Those aspects don’t need to be included in the official definition, but they still matter.I still like the term “public software” because it allows more people (including those new to, or unfamiliar with, open source, even if they use or benefit from it) to quickly understand what open source software is and how it should be protected. It doesn’t change the legal definition at all; if anything, it enforces it better, because we would want to define and protect public software exactly as we would any other public resource.

      I remember the term "Public Software" used several years ago from the Lula's initiative to migrate Brasil public software infrastructure to Free Software.

      Now there is, again, and effort to discuss the term, this time from a Anglo-centric perspective. Native English speaking people, particularly in US have the trouble with free as in freedom and as in "gratis", meanings and being immersed in a "market first" mentality, usually they think first in price and markets instead of rights.

      Dmitry Kleiner has addressed the problem of software as a commons and its sustainability with an alternative license (p2p license), that is not as restrictive as the Fair Software one, but it repolitize the capitalist friendly Open Source gentrification of the original Free Software movement, involving also a core concern of sustainability.

      Would be nice to see a dialogue between Nadia's and Dmitry's perspectives and questions about software as a commons.

  23. Nov 2016
    1. You couldn’t charge people to use Python, for example, any more than you could charge someone to speak English.

      This reminds me of Elionnor Ostrom and Antonio Lafuente examples of language as a common.

      Do we have a sustainability model for the commons?

  24. Sep 2016
  25. Aug 2016
    1. Page 3

      this is a critical juncture in building the next generation of scholarly information infrastructure. The technology has advanced much more quickly than has our understanding of its present potential uses. Social research on scholarly practices is essential to inform the design of tools, services, and policies. Design decisions made today will determine whether the Internet of tomorrow enables imaginative new forms of scholarship and learning – or whether it simply reinforces today's tasks, practices, laws, business models, and incentives.

    2. Page XVII

      Borgman on scholars access to information in the developed world

      Scholars in the developed world have 24/7 access to the literature of their fields, a growing amount of research data, and sophisticated research tools and services.

    3. Page 10

      Borgman on the relationship of knowledge mobilization scholarship, similarities and differences:

      once collections of information resources are online, they become available to multiple communities. Researchers can partner across disciplines, asking new questions using each other's data. Data collected for policy purposes can be used for research and vice versa. Descriptions of museum objects created for curatorial research purposes are interesting to museum visitors. Any of these resources may also be useful for learning and instruction. nevertheless, making content that was created for one audience useful to another is a complex problem. Each field that is on vocabulary, data structures, and research practices. People ask questions in different ways, starting with familiar terminology. Repurpose sing of research data for teaching can be especially challenging. Scholars goals are to produce knowledge for their community, while student schools are to learn the concepts and tools of a given field. These two groups have different levels of expertise in both disciplinary knowledge in the use of data and information resources. Different descriptions, tools, and services may be required to share content between audiences.

  26. Jul 2016
    1. Page 226

      Borgman on why we need a common effort in building a scholarly Commons

      Striking contrast exists between disciplines and artifacts, practices, and incentives to build the content layer. Common approaches are none the less required to support interdisciplinary research, which is a central goal of the research. Scholarly products are useful to scholars and related fields and sometimes to scholars in distant fields as the boundaries between disciplines becomes more porous, the interoperability of information systems and services becomes indispensable.

    2. Page 225

      Here is a great statement as to the need for a self-conscious commons :

      The content layer of the scholarly information infrastructure will not be built by voluntary contributions of information artifacts from individuals. The incentives are too low and barriers too high. Contributing publications through self archiving has the greatest incentives and the fewest barriers, but voluntary contributions remain low. Contributing data has even fewer incentives and even greater barriers. Scholars continue to rely on the publishing system to guarantee that the products of their work are legitimized, disseminated, reserved, curated, and made accessible. Despite its unstable state, the system does exist, resting on relationships among libraries, publishers, universities, scholars, students, and other stakeholders. No comparable system exists for data. Only a few fields have succeeded in establishing infrastructures for their data, and most of these are still fledgling efforts. Little evidence exists that a common infrastructure for data will arise from the scholarly community. The requirements are diverse, the common ground is minimal, and individuals are not rewarded for tackling large institutional problems. Building the content layer is the responsibility of the institutions and policymakers rather than individuals. Individual behavior will change when the policies change to offer more rewards, and when tools and services and prove to decrease the effort required….

    3. Page 184

      In the section “Description and Organization in the Sciences” Borgman discusses some of the ways in which scientific literature is better organized: for example these include uniform language, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies.

    4. page 182

      the sciences create a variety of objects the salt in the gray area between documents and data. Examples include Laboratorio field notebooks, slicer talks, composition objects such as graphic visualization of data. Laboratorio notebooks are often classified as data because their records research. Slides from talks, which were once ephemeral forms of communication, now our compost and competent person websites are distributed to accomplish proceedings. Graphic visualization data can be linked to scarlet documents to report research or to the underlying data.

    5. Chapter 8 is an excellent overview of the nature of the commons its differences and similarities

    6. Page 182 Borgman on the disciplinary differences in scholarly practice

      Despite many common activities, both the artifacts and practices of scholarship very by discipline. The artifacts very as scholars make choices about the sources of data, along with what, when, where, and what form to disseminate the products of their work. Scholarly practices vary in the way that scholars create, use, and share documents, data, and other forms of information.

    7. Page 115

      Borgman makes the point here that while there is a Commons in the infrastructure of scholarly publishing there is less of a Commons in the infrastructure 4 data across disciplines.

      The infrastructure of scholarly publishing Bridges disciplines: every field produces Journal articles, conference papers, and books albeit in differing ratios. Libraries select, collect organize and make accessible publications of all types, from all fields. No comparable infrastructure exists for data. A few Fields have major mechanisms for publishing data in repositories. Some fields are in the stage of developing standards and practices to activate their data resorces and Nathan were widely accessible. In most Fields, especially Outside The Sciences, data practices remain local idiosyncratic, and oriented to current usage rather than preservation operation, and access. Most data collections Dash where they exist Dash are managed by individual agencies within disciplines, rather than by libraries are archives. Data managers usually are trained within the disciplines they serve. Only a few degree programs and information studies include courses on data management. The lack of infrastructure for data amplifies the discontinuities in scholarly publishing despite common concerns, independent debates continue about access to Publications and data.

    8. Chapters 4 and 5 the continuity of scholarly publishing and the discontinuity of scholarly publishing

      These are both useful and important chapters for the scholarly Commons working group. They discuss the things that are common across scholarly communication as well as the different functions comma and they also discuss a new technology is disrupting this common area.

  27. Jun 2016
    1. especter les dispositifs réglementaires et adhérer à l'utilisation des licences Créative Commons

      Though licensing issues may be less of a focus in Francophone work on Open Educational Resources, this portal mostly focuses on material under Creative Commons.

  28. Apr 2016
    1. The problem with cooking up a system is that it trades the creative contributions of thousands of individuals for the more refined and articulate plan of a small number of elite advocates. If the advocates were not as accomplished as they are, it would be easy to dismiss any proposed system out of hand. But intelligence is a great seductress; it slyly leads us to assume that being smart and being right are the same thing. Meanwhile, the evidence to the contrary is messy and contradictory.

      Nicely stated.

  29. Mar 2016
    1. Hochberg, M. E., Chase, J. M., Gotelli, N. J., Hastings, A., & Naeem, S. (2009). The tragedy of the reviewercommons.Ecology Letters, 12, 2–4
    1. The commoners who participate are just as importantly the commons, making it a dynamic and evolving eco-system.

      Love this phrase! A prevailing sense at this workshop was that not just the PhD's inhabit the commons; everyone does.

  30. Feb 2016
    1. Experienced maintainers have felt the burden. Today, open source looks less like a two-way street, and more like free products that nobody pays for, but that still require serious hours to maintain.This is not so different from what happened to newspapers or music, except that nearly all the world’s software is riding on open source.
  31. Jan 2016
  32. Nov 2015
  33. Oct 2015
    1. Internet Commons

      European Parliament conference on “Internet as a Commons: Public Space in the Digital Age”, organised in cooperation with Commons Network and Heinrich Böll Foundation. Discussing how to re-decentralize and reclaim the Internet for all.

      [ Prologue ]

      The Internet as a whole has become an important part of our global public sphere. Internet provides access to a wealth of information and knowledge, and the possibility to participate, create and communicate. This public space made up of internet infrastructures is increasingly threatened from two sides; by the centralization and commercialization through the dominant positions held by giant telecom and Internet companies, as well as by an increasing trend in state regulation and censorship of the net. This poses important questions about how we choose to organize and regulate our digital societies, and how Internet governance models can be developed and implemented to ensure fair and democratic participation.

      When it comes to the future of the Internet, a key discussion is one of infrastructures; who owns, runs and controls them. The question of regulation, and who oversees the regulators, is made complicated by the transnational nature of the net.

      As much as people expect a broadly and equitably accessible Internet open to diversity, we are, slowly but surely, moving away from it. Monopolization of Internet infrastructures and services by companies such as Facebook and Google has gone hand in hand with privacy intrusions, surveillance and the unbounded use of personal data for commercial gain. As we all interact in these centralized commercial platforms that monetize our actions we see an effective enclosure and manipulation of our public spaces. Decentralization and democratization of the Internet infrastructure and activities is essential to keep a free, open and democratic Internet for all to enjoy equitably. But can the “small is beautiful”-idea be compatible with the building of state-of-the-art successful infrastructure in the future?

      The debates around net neutrality, infrastructure neutrality and Internet monopolies reflect the important choices that are to be made. It is essential the EU formulates a comprehensive vision on the internet that addresses the protection of civil liberties such as free speech and privacy, but also the growing commercialization of our digital public spaces and the commodification of personal data with the effect of the market encroaching on all aspects of our daily lives. Only then can it make relevant interventions regarding the Internet and its governance.

      Let´s discuss how to re-decentralize and reclaim the Internet for all.

      [ Introduction ]

      Opening remarks from Benkler & Bloemen:

      2:16 Yochai Benkler (Harvard Professor)

      The two major challenges of 21st Century Capitalism are the result of the impact of increasing well-being and welfare throughout the globe. The impact on the natural environment and the social environment.

      And while the last forty years has seen a steady struggle to increase understanding of the threat to the natural environment. We've actually seen over the last forty years a retreat in the understanding of the impact on the social environment.

      Throughout the industrialised world in particular, we've seen increased inequality and a series of ideas around Neoliberalism, initially finding root in the United States and the United Kingdom, then expanding to liberalisation in Europe and ultimately translating into the Washington consensus as a core development policy.

      These were anchored in a set of ideas, we largely think of as Neoliberalism, that argued that uncertainty and complexity makes centralised economic planning impossible, and so prices and decentralised decisions in markets by individuals will produce good information.

      They modelled universal rationality as self-interested, self-maximising human behaviour. They understood collective behaviour as always failing, always corrupting into illegitimate power. And that then meant that deregulation and freeing of markets from social and legal controls were the way to increase both welfare and liberty.

      What we've seen in the last twenty-five years is that the idea of the Commons is beginning to offer a framework, to respond to these deeply corrosive ideas, and begin to allow us to create frameworks that teach us how we can increase human welfare, improve the human condition, but without undermining the social relations in the way that has been so corrosive for the last forty years.

      Three schools of the Commons: The work that came out Elinor Ostrom's work and the Ostrom School, the Global Commons work coming out of the environmental movement, and what's most relevant to us here in today's meeting, is the Internet Commons.

      The thing that became clear with the Internet Commons, is that even at the heart of the most advanced economies, at the cutting edge of technology and in the areas of greatest economic growth and innovation, commons are at the very heart.

      From the very Internet engineering task force that created the internet protocols, through the World Wide Web, to core infrastructure like spectrum commons like WiFi or software, all the way to this great knowledge facility of Wikipedia.

      We've seen commons work, we've seen how they work, we've seen their limitations, we've been able to learn how to make them operate and we continue to learn about them. But from the mentally, they offer existence proof that there is another way.

      The past quarter century of commons, both on and offline, has taught us that people can affectively act collectively to govern their own utilisation of resources. They've taught us with many details that people respond to diverse motivations and that economic utility is valuable, but it's only part of a range of social emotional and rational ethical commitments.

      Property and markets vs State planning and ownership, don't exhaust the capabilities, we live with a much more diverse set of ways of organising economic production, and in particular voluntaristic actions in commons, can support growth, can support innovation, can be more efficient, while at the same time being sustainable and socially more integrated.

      At a higher level of abstraction we have come to understand that production and resource management are socially embedded activities, social embededness is not something from which we need to free markets, it instead something we need to achieve.

      Freedom is self-governance, individual and collective, not free choice in the market, and property based market as we saw in copyright and patents, as we saw in a variety of our other areas, can actually undermine freedom in both of these senses.

      So what are we to do?

      Our experience of Internet Commons tells us, that three major shifts needs to happen before the 21st century capitalism challenge can be answered in a socially sustainable way.

      We need to increase our use of peer cooperativism. Taking the experience we've garnered over the last fifteen years with commons based peer production and translating into a way that expanded to ever larger propositions of provisioning, so that it can provide a practical anchor and a normative anchor to material production in the market.

      We also cannot give up on socially embedded market production, there is no one right path to market production, there is genuine room for ethical choice, not only on the environmental side, not only on the rights side in terms of human rights, but also on the side of economic equality and social sustainability.

      And finally, we need to turn our political understanding to one that has peer pragmatism, that understands the limitations of the traditional State, while it also understands the limitations of the Market. That builds on our experience in self-governing communities like Wikipedia, with the overlapping and nested relationship, with the distinct continued ethical commitment of Citizens to their practices. With continuous challenging, but also with distribution of power to much more local bases, to form a new political theory- based in our commons based practices, of our relations as Citizens and the State.

      So however important a particular part of the Internet Commons may be from a practical level, at the level of ideas, our experience in Internet Commons over the last quarter of the century, is beginning to teach us how to shape Capitalism for the 21st Century, so that is not only sustainable from the natural environment perspective, but that it is also embedded and supportive of it's social environment.

      9:25 Sophie Bloemen (Commons Network)

      The Commons is a perspective that looks at stewardship, equitable access and sustainability, and it looks at the collective good beyond individual rights exclusively. So instead of conceiving of Society as a collection of atomised individuals, principally living as consumers, Commons points to the reality of people's lives being deeply embedded in social relationships- communities, histories, traditions.

      So this perspective is very helpful when conceiving of the Internet as a public space, as a common good, and how we might want to organise this public space. What kind of infrastructure is provided and who controls the infrastructure. This is what it insists on, on the protection of the Internet as a public space, accessible to everyone. So just like a bridge or street, it's an infrastructure, and it must be controlled and managed in the interests of Citizens.

      The central issue of the debate on net neutrality, has also been will it be continue to be managed as a mixed use of commons, or will discriminatory tiers of service transform the internet to a predominately commercial system, for production and distribution.

      So the key questions are: Who controls the infrastructure? What are the terms and conditions under which the public gets access? and this has far reaching implications for our society.

      The domination of the Internet by several large actors raises important policy questions, about how to manage it. The thwarting of net neutrality rules in Europe just suggests just how vulnerable the open internet really is and it's therefore necessary for policy makers to have a real vision that acknowledges the gravity of these issues.

      It was reading professor Benkler's book 'Wealth of Networks' years ago, that give me enlightened research, key insights, why we are and how we are living in a time of deep economic change, change of the modes of production, due to digital technologies, and what the role of social peer production can be, might be.

      But also, that it's not a given in which direction we will go. It's not pre-determined, we have to give it a certain shape.

      What he also alluded to now is that, our institutional frameworks to a certain extent, reflect outdated conceptions of human agency. The idea of the rational individual who is just out there to increase his material gain through rational calculation. We create and we share because of curiosity, because of social connectedness, because of psychological well-being, there is an element of cooperation and human reciprocity there as well.

      So this human capability has really been shown or has really been brought out by the Internet, by digital technology, but it's also taking place, these forms of cooperation and collective action, are also taking shape offline; lots of commoning initiatives, community gardening, co-housing, ethical financing.

      So to go back to these institutional frameworks, how can we as professor Benkler said, he named these three things, how can we increase the use of peer cooperativism, and how can we make sure there's a shift towards socially embedded market productions where there's self-governance as well, which is community based. The third point he made is to enhance the political understanding of these commons based practices that are beyond the Market and beyond the State, and I guess that's partly what we're doing here, enhancing this political understanding.

      So how do we need to tweak the institutional frameworks, what do we have to take away, what do we have to add? and that's also why in the analysis in our paper 'A Commons Perspective on European Knowledge Policy' we discuss this and we talk about copyright legislation and net neutrality and european positions at the world intellectual property organisation, which are all relevant to this.

      What kind of sharing economy do we want, do we want a democratised one where we empower everyone to be a producer, or are most of us still consumers in this economy. Are we producers just in the sense that we share our data, and all our actions online and offline are commodified, we pay with our privacy to be part of it.

      So in order to get a good grip on where we should go, how to go ahead, we should take a step back. Take a step back and see what kind of society we would like.

      And a key question is: How can we create a structural environment that enables society to fully reap the benefits of knowledge sharing and collaborative production, in a way that's also socially sustainable?

      And what could the role of EU be? At this moment, the European parliament is considering a new copyright framework, there's a digital single market strategy, there's the data regulations, lots of things going on. So the next panels will set out some big ideas, and will also give some very practical examples of people engaging with building these peer to peer networks or other initiatives, that will make more concrete what we are talking about.

  34. Aug 2015
    1. Imagine, for instance, a bike-rental system administered by a DAC hosted across hundreds or thousands of different computers in its home city. The DAC would handle the day-to-day management of bikes and payments, following parameters laid down by a group of founders. Those hosting the management programme would be paid in the system’s own cryptocurrency – let’s call it BikeCoin. That currency could be used to rent bikes – in fact, it would be required to, and would derive its value on exchanges such as BitShares from the demand for local bike rentals

      Se parece a la idea de Sebastian para Popayan y el Cauca.

    2. And yet, on reflection, Rifkin’s examples turn out to be anything but collaborative at their heart. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are fiercely profit-driven, taking large cuts from all the exchanges they facilitate. They are middlemen themselves, albeit somewhat more efficient and open than their predecessors. What’s more, the digital payment systems that underpin their services are also highly centralised and very expensive.

      Un nuevo intermediario, de proporciones inmensas y transnacional, concentrándolo casi todo.

  35. Jul 2015
  36. Jun 2015
    1. the com

      The commons itself has many similarities but just as many differentiations due to its materiality. Eleanor Ostrum's groundbreaking work on the commons focused on fishing and the oceans, which will have different affordances from a shared body of knowledge.

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  37. May 2015
    1. inspirational organizational

      Indeed, it becomes a matrice. It is not a coincidence if free software share its source : the core of the paradigm is both the source and the sharing itself. It is a recursive and viral paradigm.

  38. Jan 2015