Tuesday, May 6, 2014

David Bollier — Ecuador’s Pathbreaking Plan for Commons-Based Peer Production: An Update

The nine-month effort in Ecuador to develop a new vision and policy architecture for commons-based peer production is coming into much sharper focus. To refresh your memory on this project, the Government of Ecuador last year commissioned the FLOK Society (FLOK = “Free, libre, open knowledge”) to come up with a thoughtful plan for enabling every sector of Ecuador to be organized into open knowledge commons, to the maximum degree possible. The project has now released a transition plan accompanied by more than a dozen policy frameworks for specific social and economic domains.

The main document can be read here – and here is a version that anyone can comment upon. Here is series of specific sectoral policy proposals.
What makes the FLOK Society report so significant is its informed analysis of global trends in the production of knowledge and culture -- and its bold attempt to reformulate state policies to assure maximum social benefits flow from them. The “advanced” industrial economies continue to cling to archaic intellectual property regimes that ignore network dynamics and prey upon the value created by nonmarket communities. But Ecuador’s path-breaking project seeks to go beyond neoliberal economics and policy. Many of us are excited because the FLOK Society report is a comprehensive, sophisticated and integrated synthesis for moving to the next stage of commoning and peer production on open networks....
David Bollier | news and perspectives on the commons
Ecuador’s Pathbreaking Plan for Commons-Based Peer Production: An Update

Cutting edge?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a bunch of horseshit. Ecuador, like all other modern and wannabe moderns want "development", just like Adam and Even wanted clothing. They feel "behind" and inferior otherwise, and perish the rest. If there's oil in the Amazon, well let's get it out! The Indians don't like it, think Victoria Nuland! The sacred simply isn't a category in the worldview of moderns; instead their minds have been colonized by other ideas--the ones that favor "desarrollo" at all costs, with appropriate econ-window dresssing of course. Anyway, we don't want to be called Luddites, do we?

The problem in L. Amderica has never been lack of "development" it has been the incursion of "development" for foreign interests in cahoots with an essentially foreign-minded white elite that has simply prolonged the Conquista. The US now gets to experience a modernized version of being screwed by oligarchic interests. Good. God knows they--and Europe--have it coming and a good deal more. Time they got their comuppance.