Michael Bauwens — 'Occupy' as a business model: The emerging open-source civilisation

Lots of good stuff in here, as well as the basis for an economics of anarcho-communitarianism based on voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit in a commons.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a model for a new economic paradigm, in which value is first created by communities.

Last week I discussed the value crisis of contemporary capitalism: the broken feedback loop between the productive publics who create exponentially increasing use value, and those who capture this value through social media - but do not return these income streams to the value "produsers".

In other words, the current so-called "knowledge economy" is a sham and a pipe dream - because abundant goods do not fare well in a market economy. For the sake of the world's workers, who live in an increasingly precarious situation, is there a way out of this conundrum? Can we restore the broken feedback loop?

Strangely enough, the answer may be found in the recent political movement that is Occupy, because along with "peer producing their political commons", they also exemplified new business and value practices. These practices were, in fact, remarkably similar to the institutional ecology that is already practiced in producing free software and open hardware communities. This is not a coincidence.

Read it at Al Jazeera
'Occupy' as a business model: The emerging open-source civilisation
by Michael Bauwens | Co-founder of the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Foundation
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

A recent study by the makers of the Open Governance Index, which measures the openness of software projects, confirms that more open projects do much better in the long-run than more closed projects. In other words, it makes sound business sense: open businesses tend to drive out business models based on proprietary IP. So it doesn't matter whether you are a "commonist" free software developer, or a capitalist shareholder of IBM. Both sides benefit and they outcompete or "outcooperate" traditional proprietary competitors.