Re: [ox-en] A 'Sharing' project
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:58:31 +0200
Hi Magius, David, all!
Last week (11 days ago) magius wrote:
The origiinal project was abandoned and actually the most active
website is only the italian fork, but DLP basicly is a tool to
"create" instant local proximity-based and affinity-based communities
and if someone is interesed to further development the code (that was
released under GPL) could be used also to share other goods than books
and dvds. If you're a coder, you're welcomed.
Software sounds like being really useful for that purpose.
Does this project really work? I.e. do things actually flow between
people?
2006/10/14, David Collins <david hl.afraid.org>:
I have been working on a project that I thought some of you might be
interested in. It's for people living in Dublin, Ireland - but I am very
interested in criticism from people on this mailing list. The project is
basically an attempt to facilitate the sharing of items such as tools,
books, and equipment that people may have lying around but aren't using.
The address of the website is:
http://ie.uk.to/
Well, this is an approach similar to gratis shops(?, "Umsonstläden" in
German). At least in Germany there are a couple of such shops.
Personally I saw at least one similar attempt to share books. It never
took off but it was very local.
To put it more theoretically these are all attempts in the
distribution sphere - as opposed to the production sphere where Free
Software / Wikipedia / Open Access / Free Culture takes place. May be
it can be said that they are based on underuse of physical goods. As
such they can not address physical goods which are not underused -
certainly a problem if you want to generalize.
I see such attempts as a possible building block for a GPL society.
The main advantage IMHO is that they overcome exchange. Because they
are using underused goods they can do this although they are embedded
in capitalism. If they would cover scarce goods they would have an
open wound to capitalist exploitation which would quickly kill them.
Ebay seems to me as a similar example in the exchange sphere. It
allows for a similar micro-flow of goods like the projects you are
describing. Actually I was very astonished to see how Ebay flourished.
Because it is exchange based Ebay is not limited to underused goods.
BTW: I did not read Benkler's book but it is certainly near the top of
my reading list.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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