Saturday, October 9, 2010

Happy Birthday Multitude Project!


Multitude Project has 2 years

This post provides a short historical overview of the Multitude Project, a description of the current state of play and our plans for the future.

Multitude Project was founded in October 2008 by Tiberius Brastaviceanu. Initially, the scope of the project was narrower: to give employees alternative ways to fight employment injustice (see Improve employment conditions!), by bypassing the biased justice system. It was based on the realization that the new technology empowers the individual, by providing tools to access and to disseminate information. The Boomerang method was the result of this first effort of understanding how the new technology was changing the employee-employer balance of power. A broader method was also proposed, which is still awaiting implementation (contact us to get involved). This initial project only took into consideration the communication aspect of the new technology. Tiberius soon realized that the Internet platform also enables free collaboration and coordination, which offers still greater power to individuals who are open to sharing and who possess the skills to work in collaboration. Free communication, collaboration and coordination is the foundation of a new pattern of value creation and distribution; of a shift in the equilibrium of social forces; of new forms of property, of new laws and institutions, etc.


Through free one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many exchanges of all sorts, we are moving towards a broader redistribution of power; towards increased individual freedom, towards more self-determination and towards a more participative society. This is what we call the Multitude Social Movement … a constructive revolution.


Over the past 12 months the Multitude Project has broadened its scope, seeking to understand the Multitude Movement in its various manifestations, and to informing the movement by exposing the implicit philosophy on which it is built. This emerging philosophy and its associated culture are responsible for aligning people's attitudes and actions, for increasing the level of coherence within the multitude towards building, distributing and using new tools of empowerment. Our goals are to expose this philosophy, to foster the new culture, to create a new language, and to attract people's attention towards this movement by creating and offering key empowering alternatives. Multitude Project has created, tested and released the Viral Labeling technique and a method to fight predatory commercial practices. We also created the Discovery Network concept, an open collaborative network of innovation, production and distribution of goods and services, which is currently being tested. An example of a modular and dynamic infrastructure to support massive social movements and collaborative networks was released, which can be set up free of charge in only a few hours. Other concepts dealing with the organization of the masses against oppressive regimes are still under development, see The balance of power. Our infrastructure has improved progressively over these two years. Beginning with the Multitude homepage, we have subsequently created the Multitude Blog and have established a presence in major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Digg, Idealist, New tactics in human rights, LinkedIn, NING, and many more.


Recently, Multitude Project branched into Multitude Innovation and Multitude Moon Project. Soon we will launch our open science initiative, Multitude Science. Multitude Project also actively supports Integration and Automation Community (IAC), and the Rosia Montana movement. Until now, we have only operated at a small scale. We are a collaborative network, but not yet entirely open. We believe that in the next year we will enter a fast exponential growth (see the graph bellow). Once the large scale effects begin to manifest themselves our collaborative platform will become completely open. Multitude Project will continue to branch into many sub-projects managed by independent but interconnected entities. In order to manage the global and decentralized multitude movement, we've proposed a new and revolutionary tool, revealed for the first time here.




What's on our agenda?

Our priority is to upscale the Multitude Project. We'll do this by becoming entirely open and by interfacing with existing like-minded organizations. We are also actively looking for sources of financing in order to support operations that are not easily adapted to volunteering.

Multitude needs a thriving cultural component. We encourage all our members, friends and observers to invite artists of every kind to seek inspiration in our work.  by AllOfUs

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Michel Bauwens from P2P Fundation

I think I could not articulate Multitude Innovation, nor the philosophy behind my Multitude Project better than Michel Bauwens. 



Saturday, October 2, 2010

Reflections on Open Innovation

What is the big buzz about open innovation? What’s the big change? The subject was discussed at the Connecta 2010 Congress in São Paulo and at Stefan Lindegaard´s workshop (during The Hub SP Winter School). It´s been approached in books and web communities and accounts for more than 12 million links at google search. Here are some thoughts about the theme from the last few weeks. Read more... 

By AllOfUs

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Using Technology to Start a Successful Business in (Spite of) a Depression

An interesting article about technological skills you NEED to survive this economical storm. The world in changing, you need to adapt! 
Did you know that some of the most powerful entrepreneurial ideas in the lexicon of human knowledge arose from the ashes of economic catastrophe? It’s true. And the reason is a lot simpler than you think: when times get tough, unemployment increases. So what do people do? They become entrepreneurs.  Read more... 

By AllOfUs

Monday, September 27, 2010

The use of social media as a tool for marketing

A few months ago we warned corporations to be very careful in using social media as their new playground for marketing. They don't control this medium! They don't control the narrative anymore! It was easy for them to make you believe almost anything they wanted in a society provided only with one-to-many communications, controlled by them. Many-to-many communications are changing the game. The message doesn't  move directly from them to the consumer. It propagates from person to person, and at every step anyone can play with it. In order to get your message around it must be a powerful meme, it must resonate with people to make them push it further, share it with their peers. If the public perception of a company is bad, the message released by that company WILL get distorted and WILL play against. It's harder now to fool everyone...  If you do things wrong, sooner or later the shit will hit the fan. The certain way to prevent a branding and marketing disaster is to be honest.

Social media will make organizations responsible by making it harder for them to lie and to hide their dirty stuff.

A lesson in AT&T's Facebook approach
More companies are embracing social media these days for marketing purposes. But at the same time, there's always the risk of PR disaster. Kenny Malone reports on one approach companies can take when Facebook turns unfriendly. Read more...

By AllOfUs

Science publication 2.0

Here's how the power structure which consolidated within the scientific community is getting dissolved...  Oh, don't tell me you thought that science was objective...  Science is highly instrumentalized and used by different centers of power! One lever of control is the publication process. This is how they manufacture truth. Is it in  Nature or Science? Then it MUST be true...

I am a scientist myself, I believe that the scientific method is a valuable tool to acquire practical knowledge about our physical environment. Don't get me wrong... I am not telling you no to believe in science. What I am telling you is that scientific knowledge is never clear cut, there is always debate, and because of this reason there is room to temporarily influence the scientific community and the public as well.

Do you want a good example of mixing science with politics, economy and finance? The debate around climate change... There might be negative anthropogenic climate change. But one thing is clear, the hype around this subject became exaggerated. It was infused with pseudo science, emotions, irrationality, etc. What's the drive behind it? Follow the money! The entire "market-based" solution, including a global carbon tax and strict regulations are designed to strengthen the grip on power of the global financial and economical cabal. I am not saying we are not damaging our environment! I am just saying that this debate was intrumentalized by the global elite in order to strengthen their global system of economical enslavement. The science was compromised under tremendous pressures, publications were filtered, data was massaged, etc.


A new European-funded initiative is advocating an entirely new system of science publishing, in which scientists avoid the hassles of traditional peer review by taking a quietly radical step: post their results on their websites.  
As the news release for Liquid Publication simply states: "Don't print it; post it." To disseminate the information, the program has a software platform that lets other scientists search for what's been posted, leave comments, link related works, and gather papers and information into their own personalized online journals -- all for free. Read more: Publish or post? - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences 

See also the Scientific Oeuvre article and concept.

If you are interested in participating in discussions around this subject become a member of Science 2.0 on LinkedIn, or of Science 2.0 & Publication 2.0 group on Research Gate

By AllOfUs