Movements

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Working draft produced at the start of the wiki: Here is already an unedited list of P2P-related movements compiled from the endnotes to the manuscript.



C

- Center for Digital Democracy

URL = [1]

A nonprofit organization working to ensure that the digital media systems serve the public interest.


- Co-Intelligence Institute

URL = [2]

Definitions: Collective intelligence, co-intelligence, groupthink, cognitive bias

"Tom Atlee is founder of The Co-Intelligence Institute coined the term co-intelligence, which he usually defines as meaning what intelligence looks like when we take seriously the wholeness, co-creativity and interconnectedness of life. Collective intelligence is only one manifestation of co-intelligence. Others include multi-modal intelligence, collaborative intelligence, wisdom, resonant intelligence and universal intelligence."

Groupthink is a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in 1972 to describe one process by which a group can make bad or irrational decisions. In a groupthink situation, each member of the group attempts to conform his or her opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. This results in a situation in which the group ultimately agrees on an action which each member might normally consider to be unwise.

..... " and individual cognitive bias Cognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science, including very basic statistical and memory errors that are common to all human beings (first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) and drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. They also significantly affect the scientific method which is deliberately designed to minimize such bias from any one observer. (http://www.co-intelligence.org)


- The Cooperation Project

URL = [3]

Under the auspices of Paul Saffo's Institute for the Future, and supported by Howard Rheingold and the Smart Mobs weblog crew, this initiative aims 'to catalyze the interdisciplinary study of cooperation'. Their first publication was: "Toward a new literacy of cooperation in business". Focusing on cooperation-amplifying technologies, they distinguish: 1) self-organising mesh networks; 2) community computing grids; 3) peer production networks; 4) social mobile computing; 5) group-forming networks; 6) social software; 7) social accounting tools; 8) knowledge collectives.

The overview essay is at http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Technology_of_cooperation.pdf, the project is explained at http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/CooperationProject_3_30_05.pdf

The Cooperation project produced a very useful 'overview map', outlining the interrelationships between the various forms of social software.

It sponsored a first course at the Stanford Humanities Lab: http://shl.stanford.edu/hum202_syllabus.html


- Creative Commons

URL = [4]

Created by Lawrence Lessig to promote open access to intellectual content.

Good summary of the different Creative Commons Licensing schemes and the legal concepts behind it, at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/ , http://creativecommons.org/about/legal/ .

Common Content, http://commoncontent.org/, is an open catalog of Creative Commons content


Other Creative-expression related licenses:

The Free Art Licence is explained here, at http://artlibre.org/

A comparative graph of all licenses related to music, at http://www.musique-libre.com/, click on “Les licenses" or here at http://www.musique-libre.org/static.php?op=copyleftLicence.html&npds=-1

The philosophy of free music explained at http://www.free-music.com/freemus.htm ; the Open Music Registry, temporarily shut down in 2004, has announced a re-opening, see http://www.openmusicregistry.org/

The Video Liberty project, at http://www.videoliberty.org/

The Open Publication License, at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/


D

- Downhill Battle

URL = [5]

Has evolved into the Participatory Culture Foundation, see elsewhere.

The following quote shows that developers of filesharing programs are aware of the social and political import of their work. See the previous quotes on how the whole development of filesharing is driven by a political and social struggle. It's not technology causing change (technological determinism), it is technology in turn determined by the dynamics of struggle.

Question by Greplaw editors: Is there anything about Bit Torrent that helps foster a participatory culture?

Reply: “It can definitely be a part of big step forward. 'Participatory culture' is how we've started thinking about the intersection of all these phenomenons like blogs, filesharing networks, wikis, and just the web in general. They all make it easier for people to create and distribute art/ideas and also let people act as filters and editors. But we're really at the very, very beginning of all this. The shift that we're going to see from the current top-down culture model will be absolutely revolutionary. As overused as that term is, there's really no other word that captures the magnitude of what's going on here.

As for BitTorrent specifically, searching for content on napster-style search and download clients really sucks and, on its own, creates a huge bias towards corporate content that people already know about. On the other hand, websites and blogs organize and present content so that you can discover things you didn't even know you were looking for. Since BitTorrent uses web-based links, it has the potential to fit very well with blogs and content management systems while making it possible for anyone to offer very large files without worrying about bandwidth." (http://grep.law.harvard.edu/features/04/08/26/0236209.shtml)

DownHill Battle, at http://www.downhillbattle.org/ , is “a non-profit organization working to end the major label monopoly and build a better, fairer music industry"

Grey Tuesday as an example of online music activism in action, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/howard/index.html


E

- Electronic Frontier Foundation

URL = [6]

Fights for civil rights in cyberspace, and co-founded by John Perry Barlow.

- John Perry Barlow, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the privatization of the Commons:

" I'm spending an enormous amount of my time stopping content industries from taking over the world--literally. I feel like we're in a condition where private totalitarianism is not out of the question because of the increasingly thickening matrix of channels of communication owned by the same companies that own content, that own Web properties, that own traditional media. In essence, they're in a position to own the human mind itself. The possibility of getting a dissident voice through their channels is increasingly scarce, and the use of copyright as a means of suppressing freedom of expression is becoming more and more fashionable. You've got these interlocking systems of technology and law, where merely quoting something from a copyrighted piece is enough to bring down the system on you." (http://news.com.com/2008-1082-843349.html)


F


- The Free Cinema Initiative

URL = [7]

The “Free Cinema" initiative, at http://www.freecinema.org/about/index.html, "is an experiment with two goals: 1) To introduce independent filmmakers to the ideas behind the burgeoning free-culture movement. 2) To see if applying those ideas to feature filmmaking will result in something new and interesting."


- Free Culture Foundation

URL = [8]

The Free Culture student movement, an initiative of students of Lawrence Lessig:

“The (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Creative Commons are doing really good work, but people our age don't seem to know about it," he said. "If we could show (students) how this is relevant to their lives, they would be really excited and involved in the movement." So, Pavlosky and other Free Culture leaders are finding clever ways to illustrate the importance of copyright in their daily lives with projects like Undead Art, which challenges students to remix the cult classic Night of the Living Dead, now in the public domain, and turn it into something new -- like a zombie techno video or comic short. Participants can then mark their work with a flexible copyright license from Creative Commons so people can share the work freely and easily. These licenses allow other people to take a work and modify it however they like, as long as they don't try to make money from the new work without permission. The students also encourage their peers to get involved with legislative issues. They created Save the iPod, a site that encourages students to write their congressional representatives to stop the Induce Act." (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65616,00.html?)

Lessig on the 'war against innovation', at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1247


- Free Software Foundation

URL = [9]

Promotes the production and use of free software and the General Public License.

Principles of the free software movement, described at Fsf.org:

`Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free as in ``free speech, not as in ``free beer.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). - The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. - The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2). - The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this." (Stallman website)

See also the GNU Manifesto at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html .

- The GPL license explained:

"The GPL governs the programming instructions called source code that developers write and then convert into the binary files that computers understand. At its heart, the GPL permits anyone to see, modify and redistribute that source code, as long as they make changes available publicly and license them under the GPL. That contrasts with some licenses used in open-source projects that permit source code to be made proprietary. Another requirement is that GPL software may be tightly integrated only with other software that also is governed by the GPL. That provision helps to create a growing pool of GPL software, but it's also spurred some to label the license "viral," raising the specter that the inadvertent or surreptitious inclusion of GPL code in a proprietary product would require the release of all source code under the GPL." (http://news.com.com/Sprucing+up+open+sources+GPL+foundation/2100-7344_3-5501561.html?tag=nefd.lede)

An article about the 'Copyleft attitude' and the emergence of the free art license, at http://infos.samizdat.net/article301.html

- Richard Stallman on the free software principles:

"My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is--as a copyleft. All code added to a GPL-covered program must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file. I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.:" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html )

French-language interview with Stallman: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=214

- Richard Stallman on why it is okay to charge for free software:

"The word ``free has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software, we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of ``free speech, not ``free beer.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes. Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it." (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html )


G

- Giving Forum

URL = [10]

The rise of Giving Circles is described in a new report recently published by the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, a Washington, D.C., group. The report, Giving Together: A National Scan of Giving Circles and Shared Giving. is available at http://www.givingforum.org/givingcircles/ (http://onthecommons.org/node/570)


I

- International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications

URL = [11]

Associated open access initiatives in science:

The Budapest Open Access Initiative aims to guarantee access to scienfitic materials, at : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm ; the Science Commons initiative by Lawrence Lessig et al, at http://science.creativecommons.org/

Open Access scientific journalis are thriving, but also have their problems, nl. it is now the authors who have to pay, at http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67174,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

Open access archives: the Los Alamos e-print archive, at http://www.arxiv.org/ ; Pub Med Central life sciences archive, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov

The Public Library of Science aims to reorganize scientific publishing on an open model, at http://www.plos.org/; Wired discusses some of the difficulties of the project at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67797,00.html?

Global Access to Health, at www.healthgap.org/press_releases/03/ ; Health Internetwork Acess to Research Initiative, at http://www.healthinternetwork.org


N

- Nature Institute

URL = [12]

Works for qualitative and participatory science models.

- The Nature Institute on 'qualitative science'

"We develop ways of thinking and perception that integrate self-reflective and critical thought, imagination, and careful, detailed observation of the phenomena. The Nature Institute promotes a truly ecological understanding of the living world. We study the internal ecology of plants and animals, elucidating how structures and functions interrelate in forming the creature as a whole. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates anatomy, physiology, behavior, development, genetics, and evolution. We investigate the whole organism as part of the larger web of life. By creating life history stories of plants and animals, we open up a new understanding of our fellow creatures as dynamic and integrated beings.

Through this approach, the organism teaches us about itself, revealing its characteristics and its interconnectedness with the world that sustains it. This way of doing science enhances our sense of responsibility for nature. No one who has read, for example, Craig Holdrege's paper on the sloth, thereby coming to appreciate this animal as a unique, focused expression of its entire forest habitat, will be able to tolerate the thought of losing either the sloth or its habitat. As Goethe so beautifully expresses it, all of nature's individual aspects are interconnected and interdependent: We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect." (http://natureinstitute.org/)


- The Nature Institute on the limitations of reductionism:

“We can discover the coherence of our five reductionist propositions by recognizing in them the operation of a single gesture of the cognizing mind. The gesture itself is not pathological; rather, its singleness -- its operation in conjunction with a *suppression* of the necessary counterbalancing gesture -- is alone what renders it and its reductionist results pathological. Reductionism, at root, is not so much a body of concepts as it is a way of exercising (and not exercising) our cognitive faculties.

The cognitive gesture I'm alluding to here is the inner act of isolating something so as to grasp it more easily and precisely and gain power overit. We want to be able to say, "I have exactly this -- not that and not the other thing, but *this*". The ideal of truth at work here is a yes-or-no ideal. No ambiguity, no fuzziness, no uncertainty, no essential penetration of one thing by another, but rather precisely defined interactions between separate and precisely defined things. We wantthings we can isolate, immobilize, nail down and hold onto.

How do we avoid ambiguity and approach nailed-down, yes-or-no certainty? Part of the answer is: by drawing on one of our highest achievements, which is our ever finer power of distinguishing and cleaving. Whatever looks complex and of diverse nature must be analyzed into distinct, Simple parts with clearly spelled-out relations. Such analysis and clarification is the function of logic, a discipline we have carried to extraordinary levels of sophistication.

Materialism, mechanism, and reductionism: their presuppositions and tendencies are all of a piece, because they are all expressions of a single cognitive gesture. The aim of this gesture is to lay hold of a simple, fixed, precise, unambiguous, manipulable reality divested of the inner life and qualities that might make uncomfortable demands on us. We anesthetize the world in order to possess and control it like a thing. But despite this singleness of purpose -- or, rather, because such a single-minded gesture becomes sterile without the life and movement of a counterbalancing gesture -- the presuppositions of the Reduction Complexbetray a striking incoherence. They offer us:

    • Materialism without any recognizable material.
    • Mechanism that must ignore actual machines, occupying itself instead with the determinate and immaterial clarity of machine algorithms.
    • Reductionism that produces ever more precise formulations about an evermore impoverished reality.
    • A one-sided method of analysis that never stops to tell us about anything in its own terms, but forever diverts our attention to something else.
    • A refusal to reckon with qualities despite the fact that we have no shred of a world to talk about or understand except by grace of qualities.
    • Cause wrenched apart from effect; all becoming -- that is, all active be-ing -- frozen into stasis.
    • Bottom-up explanation that tries to explain a fuller reality by means of a less substantial reality, ignores the bi-directional flow of causation between all contexts, and naively takes the smallest parts of the world-mechanism as most fundamental for explaining it.
    • Finally, a denial of mind as an irreducible and fundamental aspect of the universe -- this while scientists increasingly describe the world as driven by, and consisting essentially of, little more than collections of mental abstractions -- mathematical formulae, rules,information, and algorithms.

This entire body of dogma defines the reductionist ideology, not science itself. However, the dogma has tremendous power to distort the practice of science, a distortion evident on all sides. At the same time, there is reason to hope that in our day the dogma will finally collapse in upon its own absurdities. If this happens, it will not be because particular discoveries "disprove" the reductionist position, but rather because --much like during the earlier break with medieval thought -- more and more people simply find it impossible to look upon the world in the old way." (http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual/)


- No Software Patents

URL = [13]

lnformation about the struggle against the adoption of software patents in the EU, see at http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/fr/m/intro/index.html

The following is an educational book explaining why these issues are important:

La bataille du logiciel libre. 10 clefs pour comprendre . Thierry Noisette et Perline La Découverte 2004

Book site located at http://www.labatailledulogiciellibre.info/; author site of Perline located at http://www.perline.org/


O

- Open Business Process Initiative

URL = [14]

OPHI is a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to developing an on-line collection of knowledge about business processes that is freely available to the general public under an innovative form of "open source" licensing. More info at: http://ccs.mit.edu/ophi/index.htm


- Open Courseware Initiative (MIT)

URL = [15]

The MIT OpenCourseWare Inititiative's catalog: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/all-courses.htm

The Curriculum Archive, http://www.buildingrainbows.com/CA/ca.home.php


- Open Money.org

URL = [16]

Develops a software and infrastructure to enable peer-based multiple local currencies.

“Open money is a means of exchange freely available to all. Any community, any association - indeed, any body - can have their own money. Open money is synonymous with LETS - an invitation to come inside and play, as in open door and open house; collaboration as in open hand and open for all; attitude as in open mind. The purpose of the open money project is to bring together and organize the people and resources necessary for the development and propagation of open money everywhere. The open money project is a work in progress - a continuation of almost 20 years of LETSystem development all over the world, two community way projects in Canada using smart cards, the Japan open money project, and, most recently, a community currencies server program, cybercredits. The intent is to develop an open money kernel - a core set of text files, administration tools and software systems that are sufficiently coherent and clear that further elaboration of the set derives from the core concepts themselves, rather than from the particular agendas of the originating writers and contributors. The open money kernel is to have a life of its own. ' (http://www.openmoney.org/


The P2P aspects of Open Money systems

- Decentralized: no need for a centralized issuer like a bank, which means no threats from a centralized power.

- Free: no interest is practiced because there is no issuer that makes a business of it. The only cost is the one of the infrastructure, which is a flat marginal cost, not an exponential one like in the interest.

- Peer-to-peer: the total quantity of money in the community is determined in realtime by peer-to-peer exchange. There is no centralized authority that determines how much, where and when the quantity of money should be allocated.

- Controlled by the communities that use it: the rules of circulation, credit limits, taxes, decision making processes, etc, are controlled by the community itself. Most of these settings can be configured via the software.

- Sufficient: because based on mutual credit, i.e. there's never a lack of money since it is created upon the needs/wants streaming.

- Holoptical: which means transparency between participants and access to global information about the system.

- Adapted to all needs and all communities: whether communities are based on a local territory or a virtual one, each community exists because it has a circulating offer/demand within it. It can be time exchange, objects, services, knowledge... in a competitive or gift economy. Scarce mainstream currrencies only serve competitive markets. Open money serves whatever market since it is sufficient and can be applied in any context.

- Connected to any "real" or "virtual" value: any community currency can be based on a "real" value (time, gold, kilowatt, kilo of potatoes, oil, distance...) or a "virtual" value (i.e. no relation to anything in the real world, it is just a unit accepted in the community).

"The term Open Money was defined by Michael Linton and Ernie Yacub. Open money is simply a medium of payment, a memory that something of value has been passed to another. One person's balance goes up, the other down. So for example suppose two people start with no money at all, so both accounts are at zero. One person then pays another CC10, their balances are now CC-10 and CC+10. Here's where it's different from traditional money: there is no requirement that that money exists beforehand. It is possible to go into negative and positive without contacting a bank. So that's it. It's really no more complicated than that. It's just mechanics from here on in, for example paying by phone, smartcard, paper notes, electronic point-of-sale (EPOS), or even SMS… The dedicated site is OpenMoney.org. TheTransitioner.org and OpenMoney.org are closely working together. TheTransitioner.org handles interactive community discussions and live projects, whereas OpenMoney.org possesses all material about it (technical, definitions, former papers, etc).(http://www.thetransitioner.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Open+Money)


- The Open Process Handbook Initiative (OPHI)

URL = [17]

"a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to developing an on-line collection of knowledge about business processes that is freely available to the general public under an innovative form of "open source" licensing." (http://ccs.mit.edu/ophi/index.htm)


- Open Source Initiative

URL = [18]

Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software certification mark and program.

Open Source projects are fundamentally similar to Free Software in that they both forbid any restriction on the free distribution of the software and on the availability of the source code. The following principles are accepted to define an Open Source project:

- no restriction on the free distribution is allowed (but payment is allowed)

- the source must be freely available to all at no cost

- changes must be accepted and distributed

- the author can request a protected version number

- no discrimination in usage is allowed, for every activity, including commercial usage

- the rights attached to any program are for all the users all of the time

- the license cannot be program specific (to avoid commercial restrictions)

- the license cannot be applied to other code (such as proprietary additions)

- the license must be technologically neutral (not restricted to certain devices or operating systems)

See also at http://www.opensource.org/ ; Background on the Open Source definition, by Bruce Perens, at http://www.perens.com/Articles/OSD.html


- Open source Yoga

URL = [19]

Against the patenting of yoga techniques.


P

- Participatory Culture

URL = [20]

Makers of the - The Broadcast Machine

"It's a php tool for your website for publishing / posting video 'channels' (rich metadata rss feeds). It's the easiest way to post torrent files and it's also a really good way to make collections of videos from around the web (or to make channels out of stuff that you've posted elsewhere, eg archive.org or ourmedia.org). The goal of the software is to help people make channels of video that will be browsable, downloadable, and watchable in our video player." (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/24/publish_video_channe.html )

Information about the Broadcast Machine is located at http://www.participatoryculture.org/bm/

Interview with creator Steve Holmes at http://stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog/2005/06/holmes_wilson_i.html


- Participatory Politics Foundation

URL = [21]

Building software tools for a ‘continuing engagement with government’.


- Public Domain advocacy organizations

The Center for the Public Domain (U.S.), is at http://www.centerpd.org/

Public Knowledge (U.S.), is at http://www.publicknowledge.org/

The Union for the Public Domain (international), is at http://www.public-domain.org/


S

- The Strohalm Foundation

URL = [22]

This organisation supports peer-based local currency systems.

See the report, “Poor because of Money" by the Strohalm Foundation http://www.strohalm.nl/data/uploads/16.htm


V

- V2V Videosharing Network

URL = [23]

“A Call to Join and Contribute to the Establishment of a Video-Sharing Syndicate/Network

Project Description: For some time now the idea of utilising peer2peer structures to assemble a user-built distribution platform has been circulating. Recently, in the run-up to the G8 meeting in Evian, a concrete proposal has been made to establish a system for the sharing of video. Long-term we believe that we can assemble a sustainable and scalable platform for audio-visual materials of a critical and independent nature. This is an appeal to groups/individuals to get involved, dedicate some resources, support and expand the project generally. Works to be distributed over the system will vary from somewhat edited footage suitable for use as a stock archive to finished documentaries/films. Each file will be accompanied by metadata in an xml .info file and produced as an searchable RSS feed for people to integrate into their own sites and published on its own website (where there will also be a manifesto, how-to's. contact info for participating groups etc.) Amongst the metadata fields will be a specification for the nature of the license under which the materials may be used (e.g. Creative Commons share-alike)" (http://v2v.indymedia.de/)


- Vecam

URL = [24]

" VECAM est une association qui s’est constituée sur les constats suivants : L’information, les productions culturelles et le savoir connaissent une numérisation croissante ; Les réseaux informatiques maillent progressivement les territoires ; Toutes les forces structurant les sociétés humaines sont ou seront touchées par la combinaison de ces éléments. Le rôle de Vecam est de donner aux citoyens les moyens de s’interroger, comprendre, débattre et s’approprier ces transformations. Plus que la maîtrise technique des outils numériques, c’est au décryptage politique et social que l’association tente de contribuer. Vecam entend également faciliter les usages développés par et pour les associations, les mouvements citoyens ou les individus."