Approaching theory through the P2P Foundation wiki

[Michel Bauwens]

Since our good friend Franz Nahrada has been saying that the P2P Foundation is good for facts and factoids but not for theory, I thought it would be useful to give an idea of how we approach theory in our wiki.


First, at the bottom of the third column, the theoretical work of many people converging around oekonux and p2p foundation topics is described in varying levels of details:

1. Adam Arvidsson's Ethical Economy
2. Christian Siefkes' Peer Economy
3. Chris Cook's Open Capital approach
4. Stan Rhodes' Peer Trust Network Project
5. Patrick Anderson's User Ownership Theory
6. Nathan Craven's Roadmap to Mutually Assured Production
7. Marc Fawzi's P2P Energy's Currency
8. James Edwards" Open Platform for Sustainable Abundance


Second, we offer a selection of major, and in our opinion, the best, essays that have been written to introduce the open and free, participatory, and commons oriented paradigms. You can find this at the left column of our wiki.

See: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Essays and http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Essays_2 ??

Just to give you an idea, here's the list of articles we have collated, all in the spirit of grand theory in my opinion:

* 1 Ernesto Arias (et al.) on Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design
* 2 Adam Arvidsson on the Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy
* 3 Yaneer Bar-Yam on Complexity, Hierarchy, and Networks
* 4 Richard Barbrook on the 'High-tech Gift Economy'
* 5 Yochai Benkler on Peer Production
* 6 James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement
* 7 George Caffentzis: On the Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept
* 8 Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain
* 9 Julia Cohen, on copyright law and sharing
* 10 Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production
* 11 Mariarosa Dalla Costa on the Commons of Land and Food
* 12 Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class.
* 13 Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest
* 14 Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy
* 15 Stephen Downes on P2P epistemology
* 16 Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common
* 17 Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance
* 18 Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons
* 19 Garreth Harding on The Tragedy of the Commons
* 20 Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism
* 21 Eben Moglen on Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture

essay2 has this collection:

* 1 Cosma Orsi on The Political Economy of Solidarity
* 2 Bruno Perens on The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source
* 3 Dirk Riehle on the Economics of Open Source Software
* 4 David Ronfeldt on the Evolution of Governance
* 5 Marshall Sahlins on The Original Affluent Society
* 6 Graham Seaman: Can peer production make washing machines?
* 7 Clay Shirky on the web as evolvable system
* 8 David Skrbina, the participatory worldview
* 9 Bruno Theret, on the tradition of 'civil socialism'
* 10 Evan Thompson, on the enactive theory of consciousness
* 11 Jeff Vail, The Problem of Growth: Hierarchy vs. the Rhizome
* 12 Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance
* 13 Raoul Victor, on Free Software, the sharing culture, and Marxism

A third way we approach theory is to include, in each category-specific wiki, such as for example http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design, a mix of both concrete initiatives, and theoretical concepts, available in a unified directory at the bottom of each category page. But at the start of each such page, we select articles and essays which help you make sense of them, i.e. offer a theoretical grounding.

Here's the example of articles listed in the Open Design area, again, it would be really hard to say this a collection of facts and factoids:

Introductory Articles

Key Arguments

Read: Key Arguments for the Benefits of Shared Designs

Summary by Kevin Carson: Expanding Peer Production to the Physical World


Also:

1. The economics of open hardware (Liquid Antipasto blog)
2. Can we shift from open software to open hardware? a) Can peer production make washing machines?. Graham Seaman; b) Open Source outside the Domain of Software. Clay Shirky; c) Why Open Hardware? by Patrick McNamara.
3. In peer production, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs are no longer aligned
4. Dave Pollard on the fallacy of the Economies of Scale argument, i.e. that bigger is better.
5. What are the specific difficulties for Open Hardware?
6. Design for sustainability is inherently participatory
7. Can we design our economic policies and politics for developing abundance? See Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance

[edit] Conditions for Success

1. What would it take to move Towards a Free Matter Economy? By Terry Hancock. Free Software Magazine, Issue 7, October 2005.
2. Eric Hunting: Moving from free software to free production: what we need


[edit] Present State and Future Scenario's

1. The Future of Making by the Institute for the Future contains a summary visualization (mini-version here of "making" trends
2. The Importance of distributed digital production. By Lawrence J. Rhoades.
3. Agroblogger on the state of the Open Source Appropriate Technology movement
4. Facilitating International Development through Free / Open Source: about changing the direction of international development by giving away free designs for great and useful technologies #[2]. Vinay Gupta also offers a list of priority projects.
5. John Robb calls for the construction of Resilient Communities
6. Beautifully said: Adam Lindemann on the Harmonious Age