newspeak

David Bollier: Reclaiming the Commons.

Interesting. I wonder how this relates to open-source communities? Those that are productive in nature–and need not be, in important ways, at all nonprofit, though the organizing (or coordinating) foundation, if there is one, may well be and usually is.

Home – NTEN.

Event Description – NTEN.

Interesting, and I’m curious as to what is meant by “community.” My focus is the participatory community. That can include consumer communities, where the consumers will trade tips, ideas and freely give advice (some of it even accepted gracefully) but it usually means the more difficult and complex productive communities, such as open-source networks, but also cooperatives. These tend to be more complex because the participants have an economically identifiable stake not only in the day-to-day proceedings, as well as the overall strategy (will it survive? and who benefits from the work?) but also in the fabric of licensing and copyright, of ownership. Forming a community among sometime rivals has some resemblance to forming one around a commodity or its plurals, but has more congruence to establishing a modern, horizontal startup. (Needless to say, among my many models I include Steam.)

The five most popular end-user Linux distributions | ZDNet.

I am sure everyone who cares about this sort of thing has already seen this article, but if not, it’s fairly interesting, if unsurprising. However, isn’t the point about open source (however framed, developed) that it implies a collaborative community, or should? And the virtue of such a community–a commons-based peer network–is that is able efficiently to build, innovate, and maintain the project? All by tying up less capital and resources and thus by expanding the arc of wealth?

Creating an “Open Planning Checklist” – your feedback wanted | Subfictional Studios.

Women Have a Long Way to Go in Open Source – Dice News.

Community Data Science Workshops at UW | Network Collectives.

These workshops could be used elsewhere–and ought to be. And I’d see it as a positive use of online resources.

New platform to evaluate open source software | Joinup.

By invitation: Mariana Mazzucato: Startup myths and obsessions | The Economist.

Possibly paywall protected.

But Mazzucato’s thesis is fairly well known, by now–she has been tireless in promoting it–but for all that, it’s not seemingly altered the perception of how tech startups work, or rather, get to working. But maybe I’m just missing changes in the rhetoric of tech entrepreneurialism, on either side of the Atlantic.

Or perhaps not. Though Mazzucato counsels the UK gov’t. and its opposition, still, this is how she finishes her article:

What we need if we are to avoid the much-feared “secular stagnation” is not many small startups—or an obsession with financing “SMEs”–but an innovation ecosystem in which these new firms are made relevant through a dynamic interaction of public and private investments. This requires a public sector able and willing to spend large sums on education, research and those emerging areas that the private sector keeps out of (because of high capital intensity and high technological/market risk); large firms which reinvest their profits not in share-buybacks but in human capital and R&D; a financial system that lends to the real economy and not mainly to itself; tax policy that rewards long run investments over short run capital gains; immigration policy that attracts the best and the brightest from around the world; and rigorous competition policy that challenges lazy incumbents rather than letting them get away with high prices and parasitic  subsidies.

Unfortunately the current situation is a very lonely one for the startups.  More revolution, less celebration is needed.

We can’t stop copyright pirates until we understand why they do it.