The Journal Industry & Innovation, (Volume 15 Issue 2 2008), seems to have published a timely special issue on a theme dear to our heart: Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation.

Only the introduction is in free access and we quote from it:

“Online communities, therefore, can constitute an important external source of innovation for those firms able to implement a constructive relationship with them (Dahlander and Magnusson, 2005). Individuals in these communities may not only be able to develop innovations that can be integrated into the firm, but also may come up with new perspectives on and ways of framing problems. The community may develop a shared and mutual understanding of what it is about, what in the new product design or features is valuable; it may create product/firm loyalty and establish among community participants a sense of belonging and meaning (Rindova and Petkova, 2007).

(2) the issue of governance and how it is associated with the way in which firms try to harness these communities. Both themes have been relatively unattended by earlier research. The papers in this issue were selected precisely on the basis of the questions and answers they might generate with respect to these overall themes.”

As examples of the special issue, I’m selecting two significant contributions to the study of the governance of online communities:

“The paper by Langlois and Garzarelli, “Of Hackers and Hairdressers: Modularity and the Organizational Economics of Open-Source Collaboration”, is the first paper in this Special Issue and sets the stage for a discussion on governance in online communities, allowing us to tease out what are the important dimensions. In this mainly conceptual paper, the authors employ the empirical illustration of an open source online community to explore the generic question in organizational economics of how the division of intellectual labour is based on a trade-off between modularity (i.e. specialization) and the opportunity to integrate various individually developed components of knowledge. The paper claims that the trade-off allows the individuals populating the open source community to exchange efforts rather than products, under a regime in which the providers of code self-identify themselves as suppliers of products in a market, rather than employees in a firm. Through their discussion, Langlois and Garzarelli build a useful two-by-two matrix of product vs. efforts on one axis and self-identification of contributors vs. no self-identification on the other. In this matrix the firm, the market, outsourcing and voluntary production as it occurs in open source communities are situated and, hence, presented as different modes of innovation production.

Despite oftentimes trying to imitate the organization and design of organic open source communities, firm-sponsored communities face the classic tension between control and growth. This is because firms that are sponsoring an open source community struggle to maintain an open structure supportive of growth in the community in parallel with managing and maintaining control over the direction of and the activities taking place in the open source online community. For example, a firm sponsoring a community may define and potentially limit the opportunity structure for others to enter the community, as well as deciding who has access to the code/core of the community. The final contribution of this paper to the debate invoked in this Special Issue demonstrates that it is rarely the technical architecture and set-up of online communities that single-handedly determines participation frequency and structure. To better understand the differences in the character and quality of participation in different types of online communities, and thus be better informed about how innovation through these communities is managed and incentivized, we need to note that the organizational structure hinges upon the community sponsor’s decisions regarding the design of governance mechanisms.”

Reference to this project was suggested to us by Leon Benjamin, the author of “Winning by Sharing“:

Here’s a short description, for more please go here.

“Building on our experience with the Poor Man’s Broadband system, we are currently developing systems for users in the developing-world to share their unused bandwidth to accelerate download for other users. Just as systems such as SETI@Home and OceanStore permit users to share their computing cycles and storage space with others on the Internet, DonateBandwidth.net permits sharing of unused Internet bandwidth.”

or how ‘closed’ may become the new ‘open’… * (see note at end of article)

I have a friend, who up until recently, was quite a good friend, but then something strange happened. His dark, mischievous sense of humor, which had always been one of the qualities that made him unique and often terribly funny, suddenly discovered a vehicle that offered him something akin to supernatural powers. Like the power to transform himself into anyone he wished, or to be multiple people at the same time. The power to gain the confidence and trust of strangers by morphing into the identity of their trusted friends. On top of this, he had the power to anonymously wreak social havoc, distress and disorder, only to then be able to disappear like a thief in the night.

How did he obtain these supernatural powers? He signed up with Facebook, and slowly but surely became a Facebook “Troll”. Unfortunately, he is not alone. There are many individuals that exploit the unintended gaps within the fabric of sites like Facebook to impersonate and humiliate people that they don’t know.

One alarming aspect of this phenomenon is that these people are able to conduct this activity only by making quasi-partners of legitimate web-sites and services like Facebook and GMail, which is often used to generate fake email addresses to qualify for additional user accounts on social networking sites.

So, with human nature being what it is, one thing that we can depend on is that the trend will continue and there is very little that can be done about it. This then leads to the conclusion that in many ways the web has reached a point akin to what is known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’… meaning that the common area that became popular has now become too popular. So popular that in fact many of the benefits have been spoiled.

Its clear that many people will regret profoundly, releasing their private pictures and personal details innocently on the web, because once released, often they may never be able to be completely retrieved.

Which brings me to the idea of ‘open’ vs ‘closed’… Is it just me, or does the idea of a closed personal network to exchange information with friends seem so much more appealing than an open one?

I think there is a huge area of opportunity here, to appeal to ‘non-consumers’ of open-networks. These would be networks that people used to conduct genuine conversations with real friends from the real world. They would not necessarily be exclusive of strangers, but rather protective of relationships. New acquaintances could be invited in based on genuine qualification, again, in the real world.

My guess is that this period in the first decade of the 21st Century will be characterized by recollections of how so many people got burned by being ‘too open’.

* (NOTE: This article is not intended to be a critique on the principles of ‘open-cooperation’ which are to be lauded as forward-thinking and appropriate for internet communities. The intention of the article is to focus on some of the negative externalities of ‘centralized’ social networks like Facebook and MySpace)

I don’t know enough about the topic to offer any judgment, but though the lady sounds extremely serious and well documented, it also sounds too alarming to be true. (pro and con sources of the Codex are listed here)

It’s a video which is knowing substantial viral success over the internet and of course the issue of freedom in health and food is an important one.

This is the crux of the message:

If the WTO succeeds in harmonizing world legislation around the Codex Alimentarius,

- Seven of the most dangerous compounds, now prohibited in 176 countries, will be legal (it will be forbidden to stop them)

- Lots of therapeutic compounds will be as illegal as heroin

- And all cows will have to be treated by hormones and antibiotics

Neurologist Rima E Laibow has calculated that the resulting disruption of agriculture, and death through toxic substances, could lead up to 3 billion avoidable deaths.

The most interesting allegations against the new system start at 9:30 minutes in the speech.

Of course, this is very alarming, so caution is required with this message. One of our network members said: “I think the video greatly misunderstands and exaggerates them. For instance, the video says that only a few nutritional supplements will be allowed. I saw instead a blanket allowance to add any substance whose sole purpose was to enhance nutrition.”

The video is available here.

• Ross Dawson on the Future of the Museum « Social Media and Cultural Communication
  In our quest to highlight what is valuable and specific to the museum environment, we seem to forget that the communication of content has always been at the centre of the museum program.
• Hyderabad Plumbers, Tailors, Electricians, Carpenters, Teachers, Beauty Parlors
  Unlike Babajob, which depends on a more complicated variant of social networking, GreenMango offers a simple design and user reviews - that help one connect directly with the business.
• Internet powerhouse, Korea? Shame on its internet policies!
  We hope this meeting would be a chance for the Korean government to recognize and feel embarrassed for its information and communication policies, including Internet policies, which violate many human-rights and is lagging behind.
• Doc Searls Weblog · Is Yahoo a better search engine than Google?
  for un-linked pages, Yahoo is starting to do a better job than google, finds doc searls
• Ecological Land Co-operative
  will make land available for sustainable use. Where smallholdings are priced out of reach of a modest income, we will offer affordable leases and keep the land forever accessible.
• Politics in an age of fantasy : turbulence
  makes the case for a progressive politics that embraces fantasy and spectacle, images and symbols, emotion and desire. In essence, a new political aesthetic: a kind of dreampolitik
• commonspace: Moving to Mozilla
  Mark Surman will be joining the Mozilla Foundation in late September to take on the role of executive director
• DonateBandwidth.net
  Building on our experience with the Poor Man’s Broadband system, we are currently developing systems for users in the developing-world to share their unused bandwidth to accelerate download for other users.
• Ki Work - P2P Foundation
  ki work takes the organisational concepts of sourceforge (where open source projects are organised on a free basis) and translates them into a model where multiple online work projects can be executed with remuneration for the suppliers. just as sourceforge is a utility enabling virtual open projects, so is ki work the utility for paid virtual projects.
• CTV.ca | Copyright crusaders to launch cyber campaign
  It's not the first time this digital community has bared its teeth. The Conservative government was slated to introduce the reforms in December but delayed the bill after heavy criticism flooded the blogosphere.
• ethicaleconomybook
  to discuss first draft of adam's new book
• 789 - Hitchwiki
  On the 07/08/09, hitchhikers from all over the world will converge on a location that is kept secret up to now (because we haven't decided yet). This page will be used to coordinate the organisers until the month of October.
• Open Access and Anthropology - a free and easy interview « another anthro blog
  Christopher Kelty and a bunch of co-authors have published a conversation that deals perfectly with my research topic, titled “Anthropology Of/In Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies”. They discuss issues relating to the circulation/distribution/sharing of anthropological productions

I did not report on this when the first open microblogging implementation (i.e. identi.ca, laconi.ca) was announced and this will not be news to twitterfans and specialist geekdom.

But, it is a crucial new achievement for interoperability and open standards, and seems to be speeding up.

So here is the rundown on the importance of open microblogging, we first present it’s importance in terms of open standards, through the words of Louis Gray.

1. What is Laconi.ca?

Louis Gray:

“Laconi.ca is not a service, but rather a technology, and the founder and developer, Evan, of Identi.ca I think recognizes that. We’re seeing this as so many other microblogging services have come up recently, some others even open source. Identi.ca will evolve as it builds around this basic technology of microblogging and finds new ways to use it. What’s great is that they’re sharing the basic technology so that others can do the same and build their own creative services around the technology!”

And from the self-description:

“Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services that can receive your notices.

The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).”

2. Why it is important:

Louis Gray:

“Laconi.ca is building an actual Protocol underneath it all where other types of software can also communicate with Laconi.ca. This would put it almost in the same realm as Sendmail, which communicates with other mail server software via the SMTP protocol, or even Apache, which communicate with other web servers via the HTTP protocol, or even Bind, which communicates with other DNS servers via the DNS protocol. I could go on and on - Evan Prodromou, the founder of Identi.ca, is not just building another microblogging service. He’s developing a standard, along with software that adopts that standard so that you, too can build software that communicates with that standard! This is profound, and in my opinion we haven’t seen such innovation and selfless development of new communication techniques since the invention of the web itself. Identi.ca is in many ways building an entirely new, open layer of the internet.

Twitter seems to be completely ignoring this as they shut the doors on developers, try to develop entirely in-house, and build an entirely proprietary system. Businesses will quickly realize this, build software on the Laconi.ca platform, and as the customers and communities that follow those communities flock to their platforms, they will also naturally join other supported services such as identi.ca. Users will soon have no reason to be on Twitter any more if nothing is done. I always said developers would begin the demise of Twitter, and Laconi.ca’s making it awfully easy for that to happen. Unless Twitter adopts and opens up in a major way, they will fail.”

3. Open Microblogger as proof of concept

What Louis Gray predicted, is already happening, and here is a description of an implementation that is already available, Open Microblogger:

“OpenMicroblogger.com and the accompanying open source software it is based on will talk to Identi.ca, and on a completely different code base. That means you can follow anyone on Identi.ca within the OpenMicroblogger.com service and vice-versa, and they were written from the ground up by two entirely different developers!

What’s even more amazing about this new platform is that while not a Wordpress implementation, Brian seems to have made the platform almost entirely compatible with the Wordpress plugin and theme API. So, basically, if you are a Wordpress developer, you can write your own extensions to the code, implement your own versions of the code, and write your own themes, all in the same way you do on Wordpress. ”

For more technical details about the latter project, read Jesse Stay’s report here.

4. In conclusion:

Jesse Stay:

“This one simple and amazing example goes to show that we have only hit the tip of the iceberg here on microblogging technology. Now that a Protocol has been established, you will see more and more sites and developers write their own extensions of the protocol to implement their own creative microblogging solutions and layers. This very creative and innovative solution could just be a more advanced option than Laconi.ca to consider for Microbranded solutions in the future. Brian has taken “viral coding” to heart.”

You can download the code, try out, learn more and help out the OpenMicroblogger.org project over at http://openmicroblogger.org.

• Springwise: Avatar fashion for the real world
  Avatar clothes have become big business in the virtual world, and a new partnership between Swedish avatar dress-up site Stardoll and German t-shirt commerce site Spreadshirt could allow users to take virtual clothes they create or see online and get them made into the real thing for use in the real world.
• Springwise: Online music lessons taught by the artists
  a UK-based site that offers video instruction taught by the artists themselves.
• Springwise: Transparency tyranny hits the workplace
  aims to provide a thorough insider's look at what it's really like to work at a company, both financially and otherwise.
• Springwise: Voting transparency for individual investors
  a non-profit, non-partisan project that aims to change all that by helping individual investors get the information they need to produce positive changes in the companies they own.
• Springwise: Online bookstore with a voyeuristic twist
  Shoppers at BookRabbit can upload photos of their bookshelves for viewing by the community at large, fostering comparison, interaction and—you guessed it—more shopping.
• Fantsuam Foundation
  Shoppers at BookRabbit can upload photos of their bookshelves for viewing by the community at large, fostering comparison, interaction and—you guessed it—more shopping.
• Homo Donans
  By recognizing 'female' and 'male' as economic behavior patterns, having to do with the modes of distribution- of gift giving or exchange- we can also look at some cultures as economically 'female' and others as economically 'male'.
• Women and The Gift Economy
• Athanor: Matriarchal Society: Definition and Theory
  There are important analogies between modern matriarchal studies and the gift paradigm. The subject of matriarchal studies is the investigation and presentation of non-patriarchal societies of past and present.
• Athanor: Gift Giving in the Net
  feminist interpretation
• Predatory Capitalism vs. Simplicity Capitalism
  Voluntary simplicity is one of the top 10 trends of the the new millennium.
• The Evolution of Learning: Taking open educational resources to the next level
  Article on the current status of open (source) education. Written by Lisa Petrides, President, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education and Mark Surman, Open Philanthropy Fellow, Shuttleworth Foundation for the iCommons Annual 2007.
• Open Sourcing Education: Learning and wisdom from iSummit 2007
  This paper provides an overview of the current landscape in open education, and outlines challenges and opportunities for the future. It is based on discussions during the iSummit 2007 open education track, which took place in Dubrovnik in June 2007.
• Success Through Selflessness
  Our increased reliance on networks means a new dependence on common infrastructure: tools, data exchange protocols, reference information, the network itself. Each of us needs these tools to succeed and to meet our own goals.
• PERSPECTIVE NUMERIQUE:P2Pfoundation
  feed to our blog updates

Via The Scientific Indian:

1. Fab@Home

2. Shapeways

For updated news on fabbing and 3d printing developments, see the Fabbaloo blog.

Attended an iKMS talk last evening by Bonnie Cheuk of Environmental Resources Management (ERM). The talk was about the successful rollout of their Sharepoint portal named Minerva, which includes Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis.

What was remarkable to me was how participatory the leaders of ERM were in the rollout of the portal. The then CEO hosted a “CEO’s Blog”. Bonnie recounted how that CEO had a rough start, pricked by a challenging first comment from a junior staff in another part of the world, but slowly came around to appreciate the good intention behind that comment. A year later when the two met face to face the CEO and commenter were able to have deep conversations because of that shared context.

In another example, the Human Resource director hosted a 72-hr discussion marathon to address HR-related concerns from employees in 40 countries and across different time zones. He was nearly defeated by sceptics until after the first 24 hours he decided to use his own voice in the blog and people began to sense and accept his sincerity in addressing the issues raised.

I haven’t met these people, but they seemed to me like a courageous bunch. They opened themselves up to question and scrutiny, but by doing so they achieved transparency, alignment, openness and trust. Imagine: down to the very frontline the commander’s intent is unambiguous because there’s an opportunity for making clarifications upwards. What kind of leaders would open themselves up to such vulnerability in order to see hierarchical structure (ie power) crumble away? Bonnie listed the qualities of what she termed Leardership 2.0.

I began to wonder how many CEOs, especially in my part of the world, were willing to make themselves vulnerable publicly. So I googled “CEO’s blog” and found a wiki list of CEO’s blog from all over the world. From Singapore there’s one – Lai Kok Fung, CEO of BuzzCity Pte Ltd. Thinking that there had got to be more I refined my search and discovered another. Tan Kin Lian, former CEO of NTUC Income, also maintained a blog. That’s it. Are there other CEO blogs, perhaps internally-directed, that exist but aren’t publicized? If you know of any, please tell me.

I don’t know how Glyn Moody of opendotdotdot does it, to produce such a stream of high quality news and commentary items on open developments …

Another gem, taken from Alberto Barrionuevo, which compares the inflation in innovation-stopping patents to the subprime crisis caused by ‘fake’ financial instruments.

In summary:

“Many patents work in the same way that subprime mortgages and all its derivatives. They create false assets and so false economies that finally develop in important economical crisis. But in the case of patents it is worse indeed, because every patent is potentially a monopoly and a block to the free market.”

Here’s the more detailed argument of the havoc caused by patent inflation, by Alberto Barrionuevo:

“In many countries, many regulations (financial controls) were removed and so the market was finally flooded by what any common person would denominate “fake money”. The same fake money as the one created with a fake notes machine, but just that much more complex and nicely sold.

The result of this is a patent inflation. The most important patent offices of the world (mainly the namely “Trilateral”) have granted surely some millions of subprime patents… that at the end mean fake assets and fake money. Many of these patents are fake because imprecise, too wide and/or non inventive, but many others are fake because are just out of the limits of the patentability. Their subject matter never should have constituted an “invention”, but they were granted. “Obvious” is a word who lost it sense time ago.”

Via Glyn Moody.

Members of this community and readers of the P2P Foundation blog are probably familiar with the thesis of Adam Arvidsson and myself on the crisis of value.

In my own formulation it says that we now have a society, where the creation of use value grows exponentially, but the growth of monetization of this use value grows only linearly. This creates a non-monetary surplus of value, which is at the same time a boon for society, but also a crisis for the monetary system, and a problem for all of us engaged in the creation of use value. We indeed still need money to survive.

Tom Evslin has another variant of this argument:

“If you’re doing well but running at or close to breakeven, you’ve made it impossible for anybody to undercut you without running at a deficit which is hard to get funding for – at least in this market. ”

Let me rephrase that argument.

Any company that is working around a freely available commons, necessarily forsakes any surplus profits and monopoly rents.

This can be a disadvantage, since lesser profits mean lesser possibilities of growth and re-investment.

But what Tom points out in this article, which is located here but I couldn’t access it, is that it can also be an advantage.

The very fact that profits are lower, but robust as based on a whole business and community ecology, is also a guarantee against the rise of competitors, as it actually destroys the possibility of them getting funding.

Is this perhaps what is happening in the Linux economy, of which it is said that it creates about $36b, but also destroys about $60b in the value of proprietary companies?

Please join our discussion at Ning, or add your insights here.

• Software Patents: Subprime Patents
  Many patents work in the same way that subprime mortgages and all its derivatives. They create false assets and so false economies that finally develop in important economical crisis. But in the case of patents it is worse indeed, because every patent is potentially a monopoly and a block to the free market.
• open...: The Bankruptcy of Patents
  One of the difficulties of fighting patents is that they are so abstract. This makes explaining their deficiencies doubly difficult. It's one of the reasons why I like to hammer home that they are monopolies
• Shaping opinions in a social network
  model of opinion dynamics
• Michael Kidron: Marx's Theory of Value (Spring 1968)
  Like all societies capitalism manages to allocate its labour and distribute its output more or less systematically. Alone amongst them it does so unintendingly, without overall planning.

Matt Moore has revisited and refined his enterprise 2.0/ email detox medley. I particularly like this sensible advice for a five step approach:

1. ban attachments & instead link to files sitting in a more permanent location
2. if an email conversation involves more than 5 people then shift it elsewhere
3. make your tools as simple to use as possible
4. encourage role modelling of good behaviours by senior staff
5. begin with a small step in the right direction rather than trying to change the world in one go.

Book: The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, Editors. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press and University of Michigan Library, 2008.

Some weeks ago, I discovered this new book, which I did not read, but browsing through the chapters convinces me that it is a very high quality collection of essays.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction, to give you an idea of its themes:

“Any discussion of how to promote a healthy society offline as well as online must therefore pay close attention to links. The aim should be to facilitate the widest possible sharing of varied, reliably sourced information in order to encourage specialized groups and society as a whole to confront their past and present in relation to the future. With a cornucopia of new media technologies and millions of Web sites and blogs, it would be easy to assume this goal is imminent. Yet a wide range of critics has lamented that this is not in fact the case. Some claim that both mainstream and nonestablishment sectors of the digital media target people who already agree with them, by producing content that reinforces, rather than challenges, their shared points of view. Other critics claim that media users themselves show little inclination toward diverse ideas. On the contrary, they tend to use the Web to confirm their own worldviews—for example, by going to political blogs with which they sympathize politically or even by ignoring news on the Web and on TV altogether.

How should we understand these claims that linking is not living up to its possibilities? What evidence do we have for them? What are the political, economic, and social factors that guide linking in mainstream media firms and among individual actors such as bloggers and wikipedians?”

I asked Michael Goldhaber, one of the eminent experts on the attention economy, if he could have a look at the book, and report on it, and he started doing so, based on a first essay by David Weinberger.

So, please do read this first installment of commentary on his own blog here, and there will be more to come.

I’m just reproducing the (pessimistic) conclusion:

“So I don’t think it has been settled that the Web is intrinsically good, though it’s obvious that most people do enjoy what they find on the web. If it is good intrinsically, then either its users should become noticeably more moral than non-users, or its rise should clearly make the world a better place. If it could be convincingly shown that the Web’s presence improves the chances for world peace, for human rights, for environmental protection or other clear moral goods, then the Web could plausibly be called good in itself. Neither Weinberger nor anyone else writing in this tome offers any such assurances, at least not in any way I find believable.”

Mark Surman and David Eaves and a number of mostly Canadian friends started a great initiative to think through trends associated with openness and to map “all things open”, which is called Open Everything.

They are organizing a three day retreat in September to continue mapping and exploring this.

Heather Ford of iCommons has built on this work to present a first visualization of the open universe which you can find at Slideshare.

Given the comprehensive material already available at the p2pfoundation wiki, I decided to offer my own contribution to the mapping project by bringing all entries featuring open or ‘open source’ together in a new topic zone.

The result is that we have nearly 400 entries on open concepts, movements, and initiatives, which you can find here.

We have the various open definitions, and we are now starting to add more documentation: we have a comprehensive lists of audio podcasts already available, and in 2-3 days, we’ll finish adding the webcasts.

More information at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open

If you want to help out with this work of collating and organizing information, please contact us. I intend to do a similar project for ‘all things free’ and the ‘commons everything’.

When this is finished we will have a comprehensive resource bringing together the three paradigms of peer to peer: open and free input, participatory processes, and commons oriented output.

If you want to sample our material, here’s an example of the podcasts we have collated:

1. Alan Rosenblith on Open Money Protocols and Agreements; Open Money Blogtalk Radio ; Open Money as a Commons
2. Anne Margulies on Open Courseware ; Steve Carson on MIT OpenCourseware
3. Barbara Aronson on Open Access to Biomedical Research in Developing Countries ; David Lipman on Open Science and Biology
4. Conversation on Open Access Publishing
5. Ben Haggarty on Open Source Storytelling
6. Bill Allison and Greg Elin on Open Government Initiatives ; Greg Elin on Open Data from the US Government
7. Bill Witherspoon on Open Book Management
8. Bob Sutor on Open Source and Open Standards at IBM ; Bob Sutor on Open Standards vs Open Source
9. Brenda Dayne on Knitting as an Open Craft
10. Business Interests in Open Content
11. David Glazer on OpenSocial
12. David Orban and Roberto Ostinelli on Open Spime
13. David Wiley on Learning Objects, Openness and Localization ; David Wiley on the Open Education Movement
14. Economics of Open Archives
15. Evan Prodromou on Open Microblogging
16. Greg Whisenant on Open Crime Data
17. Marc Canter on Open Standards and Structured Blogging
18. Melissa Hagemann on the Open Access Movement; John Willinsky on Open Access to Academic Literature and Open Education
19. Open API and the Commons ; Web 2.0 and Open APIs
20. Open Business Models ; Social Commerce and Open Business Models
21. Open Congress Downloads ; Open Congress on Creativity and the Public Domain
22. Open Curatorial Practices
23. Open Identity and Identity Brokers ; OpenID Podcast
24. Open Media Directory
25. Open Spectrum Panel ; Spectrum Policy, Open Networks, and a Free Society
26. Richard Baraniuk on Open Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
27. Richard Poynder on Open and Free Developments
28. Ronaldo Lemos on Open Culture in Brazil
29. Simon Phipps on Open Formats
30. Taking Action on Free Culture and Open Access on University Campuses
31. Economics of Open Content Symposium ; Economics of Open Text
32. Tim Hubbard on Open Access to Medicines
33. Wendy Seltzer on Open Law

• Ignatia Webs: My Top 10 Mobile Tools for Learning
  The tools run a gamut from the Opera mini browser, find.mobi, flickr, youtube and more. Ignatia gives a quick explanation for choosing each tool. The array is robust and practical — and a heads up to the real progress toward mobile learning.
• Douglas Rushkoff » Testament is Complete
  this story - which depicts a near-future plagued by a war over oil and a technologically enabled, viral global currency
• Twilit Grotto -- Esoteric Archives
  Renaissance philosophers sought to integrate these traditions with the view of unifying the rapidly disintegrating religious factions and also ending the constant political strife. Thus they are the forerunners or prophets of the Rosicrucian and Illuminati movements.
• The Magickal Review: Enochian Materials
  The Angelic Conferences of Dr. John Dee and Sir Edward Kelley
• Enochian Magick Reference Document
  The systems of magick now known as Enochian magick derive from the work of the Elizabethan scholar Dr. John Dee and seer Edward Kelly. Dee had a passion for discovering lost knowledge and spiritual truths; in particular he wanted to recover the wisdom he believed to be in the lost books of earlier times.
• Table of Contents: Calder on John Dee: RENAISSANCE METAPHYSICS AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
  explore à travers Dee le rôle du néoplatonisme et des mathématiques dans la naissance de la science moderne.
• Sympathy or the Devil
  pour saisir le contexte de l'hermétisme à la renaissance, un texte absolument fascinant:
• Wiki:Main Page | Social Media CoLab
  Instructor: Howard Rheingold
• SLurl: International Schools Island in Second Life
• Category:Resources - P2P Foundation
  This is a section for 'tools', such as software, organizational techniques, how-to material, etc..
• Dave Gray » Q-tools: An approach for discovery and knowledge work
  You can think of a question as a tool that you can use to increase your knowledge or reduce uncertainty. In fact, a question may be the most basic tool for gaining knowledge and working with information.
• Can Online Video Support Its Next Generation?
  Video creators need to distribute, organize, and promote their content, and multiple startups are building on what YouTube already provides
• Facebook: No. 1 Globally
  The social network site has vaulted over rival MySpace in worldwide audience growth, thanks to tools that translate content into many languages
• BlogTalkRadio: For Business
  The two-year-old Internet radio site aims to profit by offering a service for companies to broadcast to employees and the world