July 2012
28 posts
“This past spring, researchers around the world joined a movement for free access...”
– Innovation News Daily and Guardian
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Culture Hacking: A New Collective Narrative?
Every so often a topic of conversation percolates to the surface of the internet. This current topic seems to be around the ideas of “culture hacker,” “culture creative,” “culture tech.” There is this sense in these concepts that systemic change, led by the creative class, is possible.
In 2000, YES Magazine interviewed sociologist Paul Ray and psychologist...
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A Taxonomy of Commons
At the heart of most, if not all, P2P platforms is a commons. But not all commons are the same. It’s good to understand the nuance among them. To help, here is a basic taxonomy:
Inherited Commons – e.g. earth, water, forests – are heavily under attack and becoming scarce commons. It doesn’t have to be this way i.e. in Switzerland, Austria, Japan they are well managed under an...
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When Crowd Wisdom Works and Doesn't Work.
Sometimes it’s easy to oversimplify an hot, complex idea. Case in point: crowd wisdom. David Leonhardt,in his article for the New York Times, points out exactly why and when crowd wisdom isn’t so wise.
The article provides an excellent background overview on the rise of faith in crowd wisdom. But the most important part is where he highlights the successes and failures of it. On the...
5 tags
Crowdsourced Cosmetics
One of the most important precursors to the emergence of P2P networks that compete with traditional companies is the introduction of technology that moves production from the factory floor into the home. Naturalis does exactly that for cosmetics. Naturalis allows consumers to mix up their own cosmetics at home.
Launched in April, the Rowenta Naturalis device offers both hot and cold mixing cycles...
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“Services have long been an American strength, consistently making up 30% of its...”
– “Points of Light,” The Economist
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From Communities to Emergent Cities: The...
Back in 2009, Richard Florida observed that, “Worldwide people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings.” This trend resulted in what he calls “talent-clustering.” Flowering from this clustering, Florida claims, arises “the creative class.”
I find this particularly interesting when you overlay it with the stuff...
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Growth Hacking & Creating Advantages That Leverage...
Like many new jobs popping up in our economy, the P2P designer is an odd amalgamation of various disciplines. Part interaction designer, part community manager, part analyst, part marketer, part product manager, part hacker. For this reason, I often hear people say, “That’s what an interaction designer is!” Or “You’re just describing a product developer.”...
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Lessons from the Great Depression and the Social...
A month ago, I was asked to deliver some remarks to a business forum at the Cosmos Club (wiki) regarding my work. It was a great opportunity to have conversations with people I might not have ever have met in the normal course of my work.
Here are my talking points.
As you noticed on the bio sheet, I’m not an economist, a policy maker, or a CEO. I’m a designer. Some people think...
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Is A New Design Discipline Branching Out From IxD?
In the early 1980s, Bill Moggridge designed the first notebook–style computer for GRiD Systems. When he brought the first prototype home in 1981, he basked in its ingenious industrial design. But as soon as he started playing with it, he felt himself
“being sucked down into the virtual realm, concerned only with how I interacted with the software, and forgetting the existence of the...
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Droog Downloadable Design: An Example of Mass...
When Droog launches its Design for Download website in the coming months, it will have the opportunity to do for furniture what Apple did for music: turn a commodity business into a service business. It’ll be FaaS: Furniture as a service. Simulatenously, it will be one of the earliest commercial efforts at “physibles”. Droog’s platform will offer digital design tools that...
“[C]ontemporary capitalism’s dependence on P2P is systemic. As the whole...”
– Michel Bauwens (More on Cognitive Capitalism)
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“50% of what we sell didn’t exist 5 years ago.
50% of what we’ll...”
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Every Corporation Should Make Products and, now, a...
I came across this HBR post by Grant McCracken today. It’s short, but offers a sound framework for thinking about structural innovation in corporations. As I’ve mentioned before, as small businesses grow into national corporations and into global corporations, their capacity for innovation scales SUB–LINEARLY. At each point of growth a company produces 25% less innovation (among other...
5 tags
“The final destiny for the future of the company often seems to be the...”
– Kevin Kelly, “New Rules For the New Economy”
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Why Do People Participate in P2P Communities?...
Ten years ago, if you had told any economist that you intended to establish an encyclopedia that asked people to work 20 - 30 unpaid hours a week writing articles that you planned to give away for free, that economist would have stared at you as if you had three heads. “Why on earth,” he would have wondered, “will anyone participate in that?”
Good question.
Though we Wikipedia triumphed where...
1 tag
“P2P projects are characterized by holoptism. Holoptism is the implied capacity...”
– Michel Bauwens
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Practical Advice on How to Design Massively...
Every media revolution has given individuals greater access to the control panel of civilization. Consequently, the capacity of the individual – for inquiry, invention, influence, and collaboration – now rivals that of global institutions. Individuals are no longer content to simply consume what companies make or to be “engaged” by it. Increasingly, they want to co-produce it: The product. The...
“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in...”
– John Heron Sacred Science. Llangarron, Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books, 1998
via
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“I think we’re about to see the emergence of a new way of conducting...”
– Sébastien Paquet
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A List of P2P Businesses
For those of you needing examples of P2P business models, here is a nice long list:
Housing
Roomates.com - A roomate finder and roomates search service which covers thousands of cities nationwide.
Screening for Gold: How to Find and Keep Your Good Housemate
How to Start a Housing Co-op - one of the best affordable housing options around, and shared food expenses and cooking can increase your...
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The Company with the Smartest Consumer Community...
Networked technologies lower the threshold of participation, create more modularity and granularity in products and services, relocalize physical production, and create new production models that scale fast and more efficiently than traditional models. This raises serious questions for executives about how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation underway. Yesterday, the majority...
1 tag
“Opportunities thought impractical because of perceived trust barriers are now...”
– Neal Gorenflo
Latitude Study on The Sharing Economy
The results of The New Sharing Economy study, released in 2010 by Latitude Research, still offers very three relevant insights into our changing economy.
Sharing online content is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline too. 78% of participants felt that experiences they’ve had interacting with people online have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers....
“Advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional...”
– McKinsey Quarterly
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P2P Models Create A Third Type of Property
One of the popular notions in the P2P community is to “capture value in the flow.”For example, rather than Whirlpool selling a dishwasher to consumers for $429, Whirlpool sells them access to a dishwasher for $21.99 a month. Whirlpool installs the dishwasher, fixes it if it breaks, and replaces it when a newer better model comes out. In short, its the idea of not charging people for...
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“The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in...”
– Bertrand Russell
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