By sdohrn, 1 day 3 hours ago.

This week's Economics Focus on The Economist is entitled Commons Sense and talks about the study of the commons and the IASC conference.

Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom are quoted, and the article comes to the conclusion that the study of the "traditional" commons might teach us something about how to handle new commons including many global commons such as the atmosphere or the world's oceans:

By mdangeard, 1 week 5 days ago.

From what I see, there are 2 ways to look at Twitter:
- an instant messenger for exhibitionists
- a tool to add another layer of randomness into your life

Now who would want to use this? Are you an exhibitionist? some people are... Or are you so bored, stuck and so lazy to work on it that randomness seems to be a nice way out?
Or could there be something else?

By mdangeard, 3 weeks 1 day ago.

Ever wondered what you could do to change the world?
Just decide, say it publicly, and things will start to happen.

By sdohrn, 3 weeks 2 days ago.

The IASC Conference started yesterday with a series of pre-conference workshops. One of them was on New Commons organized by Charlotte Hess. She was presenting an overview of academic work on 'new' commons - new in contrast to the traditional commons such as forests and rangelands, but also new because some resources are new of have never been looked at through a commons lense. The aim was to start a debate about defining 'commons'.

We tried to tease out some characteristics of commons:
1. shared resource

By sdohrn, 4 weeks 2 days ago.

Next week the 12th Biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) will be held at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, England.

One of the events that are part of the conference will be a Policy Forum sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) on Tuesday (15 July) afternoon, which CAPRi helped organize on Creating a political voice for 'commons'.

By Robert Link, 4 weeks 2 days ago.

The Best Place to Store My Catch is In My Neighbor's Belly

Still early in the video, Howard introduces a pivotal idea, which I will paraphrase as, "Cooperation is reinforced by surplus." This certainly seems reasonable. When hunter-gatherers were able to bag big game, such as mastodon, there was surplus, and perishable surplus at that. So the question of how best to utilize that surplus became important. And the answer would seem to be "invest it where it will likely be reciprocated".

By Robert Link, 5 weeks 2 days ago.

In conversation elsewhere I've had cause to discuss the writings of game theorist and mathematical psychologist (and peace activist) Anatol Rappoport. This, in turn, set me surfing. I was agog to read on one page that Rappoport was, allegedly, "most famous" for submitting the Tit-for-Tat strategy in Axelrod's Iterated Prisoners Dilemma tournament. However, Rappoport's work significantly pre-dates Axelrod and arguably prefiures it.

By Robert Link, 7 weeks 4 hours ago.

Cory Doctorow's acerbic essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia came up in conversation today, and I thought that a good excuse to revisit this short gem. Here's a pull quote which goes to the heart of the argument:

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

What does this kind of attitude mean for folks interested in cooperation?

By Robert Link, 7 weeks 2 days ago.

I found a text on line today, but it probably isn't authorized by the rights holder. I wrote a letter to the likely rights holder, notifying her of the existence of this on line version of the text, but pleading with her to not cause it to be removed.

Had I not blown the whistle it might have lived quietly for quite some time and would likely propagate beyond the rights holder's ability to prevent. My long term purposes would be well served by such propagation and thus perhaps I should have let the matter lie. Yet I felt a duty to the author, a man I never met, for I refer to this work incessantly. I've bought many copies over the years, mostly to give to others. But the ideas expressed in that work are arguably better advanced by my doing nothing.

My fall back answer to a quandary such as this is "concurrent games".

By Robert Link, 7 weeks 3 days ago.

One Web Day is an initiative started in 2006 to create for the web something akin to what Earth Day is for the planet. As humans are doing things to the planet which in time (short time!) could destroy most of the life forms we cherish, starting with our own, likewise there are developments with the web which could undo all the wonderful things about the web that we love.

In support of One Web Day I committed to this blog post, which may seem a little short, but it’s backed up by the video below. So go look at the video, spread the word, tell your friends. It’s your web too, and it’s all about people.