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Franz Nahrada recently wrote a letter to Claude Lewenz of the Village Forum, which contains useful background information on new participatory architectures and urban visions.

Lewenz wrote the book “How To Build a Village” in which he has applied pattern theory to create a flexible and parallel village scheme to be realized around the world.

continue reading "Background to the Global Village movement"

Back in 2006, designer’s designer Ezio Manzini (of the Politecnico di Milano) and Giacomo Mojoli of the Slow Food movement, proposed a very important seminar, which as far as I’m concerned, should be considered a landmark event for the different streams of thought and practice that it brought together. Because the ideas are still so pertinent, I’m reproducing parts of the brochure.

continue reading "Slow approach to distributed economy and sustainable sensoriality"

We continue the discussion/presentation of Rich Carlson’s essay on the ideological aspects of the contemporary integral movement. We first presented his general ideological critique, followed by an extensive excerpt on the neoconservative nature of Beck and Wilber’s theorizing.

In a further part, Rich Carlson tackles Recapitulation Theory, the idea that individual human development ‘recapitulates’ the evolution of the species,i.e. the cultural evolution of mankind up to the present time.

continue reading "Rich Carlson’s critique of Integral Theory (3): Wilber’s approach as hyper-rational"

This is a small technical notice for readers wanting to print articles posted on this blog. Now you don’t get any of the bloated extra and unnecessary pages, only the pure content of each post you choose and any pictures that go with it. Links are limited to headlines (permalinks), as i noticed that reading with links scattered throughout is highly distracting. Sorry for the delay on this one folks. Fixed.

continue reading "Admin: Print P2P posts without wasting half a tree!"

I played around with Wordle, which can generate different kinds of wordclouds, and this one represents the Delicious tags. The number of tagged items recently surpassed the 15,000 mark, but it is very much a collective endeavour as I draw a lot on the findings of the p2pfoundation network, that can be accessed through the network feature of Delicious.

continue reading "P2P Word Cloud"

This is a blog post in reply to http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/marcin-jakubowski-on-a-policy-to-expand-material-peer-production-through-land/2008/06/25, and the quote therein from James Edwards:

“I feel that if the movement doesn’t free itself from its dependence on corporate support it can’t legitimately claim to be a viable and credible alternative to the current system.”

continue reading "A reply to ideas about the loss of credibilty and viability of “the movement”"

I discovered this scintillating project on the WMMNA blog by Regine Debatty, which provides an overview of sensitive and promising practices emerging from Platoniq’s work with volunteers in Spain.

Burn Station

“The Barcelona-based group Platoniq (aka Susana Noguero, Oliver Schulbaum, Ignacio García and Joan Villa Puig) gained world fame a few years ago when they launched Burn Station, a mobile self-service system for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge. Legally and under a Copyleft Licence. With the motto “taking the Internet to the streets” and inspired by the way the web works, Platoniq explores new models to distribute, shape and share information, knowledge and cultures.

continue reading "Video: Bank of Common Knowledge - knowledge generation and transmission among citizens"

Via Bruce Perens, an excerpt from Technocrat:

“RepRap is an attempt to create a Fused Deposition Modeling engine, in other words a “3-D printer”, that can make solid objects. Its designs are in Open Source. The design is getting to the point that a prototype unit can begin to replicate some of its own components.