Understanding the Peer to Peer Revolution
With Michel Bauwens
Fri 11th April, 10am-12.30pm
Cost: £25 (lunch included in price)
Where: The Lighthouse
Seminar Synopsis
Because of the increased distributed nature of production technology, not just for immaterial production but for physical production as well, it is increasingly possible to imagine modes of social life which combine re-localised production with global open design communities.
How can we move away from a world that is based on a false notion that the natural world is abundant, and on a equally false notion that we need to impede the free sharing of social innovations through the creation of artificial scarcities in the digital world? The answer may be a reliance on the emerging peer to peer dynamic, and the emergence of peer production, peer governance, and peer property formats as an alternative ways of organizing social life. The increasingly global availability of social cooperation technologies is empowering and enabling the creation of global-local communities that are able to directly create social value, through new types of for-benefit institutions. In this lecture, Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, will examine the key characteristics of this new mode of production, how it creates new business models, and how it could be enabled and empowered by new Partner State-based approaches by public authorities at all levels.
Biography:
Michel Bauwens was one of the internet pioneers in his home country of Belgium, where he created two startups (e-Com and KyberCo) respectively involved in the fields of intranet/extranet and interactive marketing. He was also the eBusiness Strategy Director for the country's leading telecommunications company Belgacom as well as European Director of Thought Leadership for the worldwide webconsultancy USWeb/CKS-MarchFIRST. Prior to his involment in the internet he was information analyst, and knowledge manager for BP. Along the way, he has taught post-graduate MBA courses, been editor in chief of a magazine (Wave), co-produced a 3-hour TV documentary (TechnoCalyps), and co-edited two French-language volumes on the anthropology of digital society.
In 2003, he moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, which is surrounded by 60% of the world population in a 1,500 miles radius, and started the Foundation for P2P Alternatives to research, document and promote such practices as peer production and peer governance. He is part of the handful of experts worldwide to study P2P processes, but uniquely combines it with a wide-ranging experience in the business world.
Links
Reserve a place now or contact Event Manager, Yvonne Kincaid at [email protected], call 0141 225 0103. Please note that places are limited and are allocated on a first come, first served basis.
