Author Archives: Vijay Mathew

Definition and Purpose of “Co-Design”

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 11, 2012
This is an excerpt from the Design Council, a UK public benefit organization: “Co-Design” is an abbreviation for: Community design Collaborative design Cooperative design What it can do: A new way for businesses to innovate and create competitive advantage A way for the public sector to make sure their services deliver what the public wants [...]
Posted in Models | Leave a comment

Audio: The Internet as a Super-Commons

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 10, 2012
David Bollier has made his Amherst College sociology course “The Commons Rising” available as a series of audio podcasts. Here’s one called “The Internet as a Super-Commons“. Description: The end-to-end principles of the Internet and its shared protocols constitute a vital infrastructure for creating countless online commons.  This lecture gives a brief overview of this [...]
Posted in Models | Leave a comment

Audio: Occupy Wall Street and the Peer-to-Peer Revolution: a discussion with Michel Bauwens Part I

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 9, 2012
This 16 minute audio interview is worth a listen. Click here for Action Foresight’s introductory description and to listen to it. As articulated by Michel Bauwens, peer production / peer to peer is a counter-hegemonic discourse that rests on the ancient and re-emerging philosophy of the global / human commons. As such it is squarely [...]
Posted in Culture | Leave a comment

Video: “The Story of Broke”

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 8, 2012
From the Story of Stuff Project, this video was made at the end of 2011. I love the line “keeping the dinosaur economy on life-support”. The basic premise of this message is that our social, cultural, economic problems are fundamentally about the allocation and coordination of existing resources – all influenced by our system of [...]
Posted in Coordination of Resources | Leave a comment

David Bollier’s ‘Occupy + Commons: The Beginnings of a Beautiful Relationship’

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 7, 2012
This is author and commons scholar David Bollier’s report on last month’s OWS Forum on the Commons called “Making Worlds”. Here are some key excerpts: through more than 18 hours of conference-talk, I think many people came to realize that the commons can help Occupy expand from its stance of resistance and protest to one [...]
Posted in Culture | Leave a comment

You want this…and I have this…You can borrow it: Peer-to-Peer exchange

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 6, 2012
The core idea of peer-to-peer exchange is so simple, but you have to strip away decades of consumer behavior and culture to actually see its value as an incredibly exciting and efficient coordination of resources. The regional theater movement in the U.S. – for the most part – lives and dies by the values of [...]
Posted in Coordination of Resources | Leave a comment

1st ever Open Education Week: March 5-10

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 5, 2012
This is a week long event organized by the Open Courseware Consortium. Here’s the idea and vision behind “Open Education” : Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education.  It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, [...]
Posted in Models | Leave a comment

A Bucky Quote: Cooperation is not necessarily man-made

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 4, 2012
This quote could be applied to any endeavor that’s about creating knowledge commons: Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution [...]
Posted in Culture | Leave a comment

Report from the Feb 16-19 Occupy Wall Street Forum on the Commons

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 3, 2012
This report is from OntheCommons.org’s Alexa Bradley who was one of the presenters at the forum. Here are some key excerpts from her report: As the Occupy movement considers how to expand the influence and energy of last fall’s uprising into the next wave of work, it is looking at strategies for social transformation that [...]
Posted in Models | Leave a comment

It’s not the tool, it’s how you use it: Nokia’s SMS program for rural Indian farmers

By Vijay Mathew | Published: March 2, 2012
Here’s an article from the MIT Sloan Management Review about Nokia’s Life Tools program for farmers that piloted in India and is rolling out to China, Indonesia, and Nigeria. For a $1.20 per month subscription, farmers receive SMS information in their native languages about weather, farming tips, crop cycles, and market prices for crops, seeds, [...]
Posted in Coordination of Resources | Leave a comment