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Oekonux 2.0! (was: Re: [ox-en] Oekonux 2.0?)



Dear Mathieu and all!

I'll reply several times to this mail addressing the different
sub-topics. This mail addresses the general direction of Oekonux.

We
will move them to [pox] when organizational stuff comes in
            ^^^^

Oops - of course I meant the threads - not any particular mail.

From:  mathieu coombs.anu.edu.au

As a follow-up to Stefan, Christina, Christian and particularly Michel's
reaction to the Fourth Oekonux Conference, here are some thoughts on what
could be done. Like them I was truly inspired by the conference, the
people and the sense of community and common purpose.

I'd also like to emphasize that this time the speakers list felt very
much like a community again :-) .

My feeling is: the Conference brought together a wealth of resources and
expertise. To take some obvious examples, Michel's P2P Foundation has an
amazing range of material; apart from the mailing list, the Oekonux site
itself has numerous links and content; Christian's writings articulate a
convincing view of how a peer production economy would operate. And all
the people presenting on different forms of P2P hardware production are
giving us hope.

Yes. Oekonux is really a big (and old) network. I personally like it
that there are a couple of spin-offs and neigbouring projects. This is
good for Oekonux because then Oekonux can keep standing for a certain
perspective while others are free to formulate their own, different
perspective. I see this as a productive cooperative process just like
in other peer production landscapes.

Most importantly, I think the notion that peer production is a "germ form"
is powerful: the successful alternative to capitalism is happening _now_
in free software and hardware, in grassroots projects.

Yes. When we think of peer *production* then the production projects
are most important, however. It is a certain mode of production
capitalism is based on. This mode of production is the stronghold of
capitalism and if it is overcome capitalism will wither away.

And, it actually
works better than proprietary products. It is more robust and better
value. Yes, capitalism recuperates the process, uses it to sell other
stuff, but (to be optimistic for a minute) that is because we are in a
phase of transition. Realistically, peer production answers a deep human
need for cooperation, it is here to stay.

And capitalism laid the foundation for it. But now capitalism became
too rich to stay successful. A system based on scarcity gets into
trouble when scarcity becomes scarce.

The question is: what to do with all this? The theories are there.

Though there is a lot of theory there I still feel we did not reach an
end here. For instance: The thesis that there is perhaps no principal
difference between physical and information production is far from
widely understood and accepted theoretically.

Concrete examples, large and small, are there. In my view, now the theory
and examples have not only to be linked (that is being done, of course),
but to be more widely disseminated.

I'm all for it :-) .

There was actually a discussion in
Oekonux a little while ago about how to move Oekonux from theory-building
to a second phase, to an "Oekonux 2.0", as it were.

See http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Project/Future/Meeting2007_06_02

Yes. At this time we had no good idea on the direction. I think this
became clearer since then. I think it would be useful to go to the
drawing board and analyze limitations to current peer production and
design ways to overcome these limitations. That would mean to move
from a more analytic perspective into a design perspective and also
could involve elements of a movement. Then we thought it would tear
Oekonux in two parts. Now I think it could work somehow.

Since I think Oekonux did understand some fundaments of peer
production quite well I think we as a project are in a good position
to make really useful suggestions here. Could be a useful present to
the world :-) .

This is all the more important now, in the context of widespread
questioning of the benefits of the market economy which are being brought
about by the financial crisis (as Raoul pointed out at the Conference and
Michel wrote in his summary).

Yes. The current crisis IMHO is part of the final crisis of
capitalism. So it is part of the very same process as the ascent of
peer production. Still I hope capitalism will give us some more years
because we still need time for new societal designs. Though IMHO peer
production certainly has the potential to take over this is probably a
long process still needing a working basis.

Personally, I'm not really interested in
theoretical discussions about peer production: I think others in/around
Oekonux have been doing this for a while, they have got it covered, I
broadly agree with them (maybe apart from the question of the
technocratic/technological expertise needed to control complex technical
systems and the power this expertise brings), and don't really feel I can
contribute much original thinking.

Even if it is the case: We need to understand the theoretical basis of
peer production to make useful suggestions. If you don't understand
the fundaments it is easy to make completely misleading suggestions.
Just look around in the current crisis and you find lots of such
misleading suggestions.

What I'm interested in doing is finding
and implementing practical ways to make the "peer production as germ form"
message known to more people, and hopefully adopted by more people in a
meaningful way. So I have been thinking of several things that could be
done to communicate the theory.

You are wholeheartedly welcome. But this is stuff for my next reply.


						Gr?ü?ße

						Stefan
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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