New Tactics in Human Rights

The Multitude answer to tyranny!

Visit the Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

What is Ushahidi?

The Multitude answer to crisis management

Visit the Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption

The Multitude Social Movement seen from the consumption point of view.

Visit Economical Alternatives

By AllOfUs

Production & distribution of agricultural products

Source of this photo

At the core of a healthy economical system resides the relationship between producers and consumers. In a large economy deprived of efficient communication systems a third entity appears between the producer and the consumer, the distributor. In this context, the producer is disconnected from the beneficiaries of its products, and the distributor bridges this gap, not only by establishing a distribution channel, offering producers access to a market, to a group of consumers, but also by giving feedback to producers about market demands. History shows that in almost all such systems the power of the distributor increases in excessive proportions, to become a nuisance for the overall economy.


The distributor controls the flow of goods for a profit. There are different ways to increase profits:

• Increasing efficiency
• Increase the flow by
• inciting consumers to buy more
• increasing the market by adding more consumers
• diversification
• etc. 
• Force the producer to sell at lower costs

The best example is the Wal-Mart network, which is rightfully criticized for chocking producers and for spreading consumerism.

In a healthy economy the financier and the distributor have secondary roles. They are service providers between producers and consumers, they MUST NOT control/rule the economy. Economy is about production and exchange of value. If too much power is granted to distributors and financiers they will inevitably suffocate production forces and reduce society to agents of consumption. Evidence of the second effect lies within official reports that talk about consumers and tax-payers instead of citizens.

The multitude movement restores the role of the producer. This is a natural process as the new technology becomes ubiquitous. It is possible now for the producer to maintain direct relations with the consumers. The role of the distributor within the exchange mechanism is greatly reduced. We are heading toward a more healthy economy!

Visit Economical Alternatives See The Food Basket

By AllOfUs

Dark forces trying to use the new technology to increase their grip on society

 I was 14 years old when I left Romania in the spring of 1990, right after the collapse of Ceausescu's regime. I have vivid memories of my life under the tyranny. Some things that are part of your normal life were considered illegal or were forbidden, like owning a small business, criticizing the government or government officials, or even killing your own home-grown cow to feed your family. We lived in constant fear of being reported to the "securitate" for transgressing ridiculous norms, including openly questioning our own condition. The government was collecting information about the population through different technological means, recording phone conversations, opening letters, bugging workplaces and public places, and also by using a vast network of informants. I heard somewhere that in America the government had no right to spy on its own population. At the age of 14, not knowing what freedom means, I thought that this was an aberration. I simply could not comprehend it.

source of this cartoon

20 years later, established in Canada, I am witnessing a gradual transition towards the same situation and climate in North America. It is now out in the open that the US government is indiscriminately spying on its entire population. Data is gathered by monitoring all forms of electronic communication between individuals and from corporate databases. You cell phone is a bug that you carry with you, it can be remotely activated to listen to whatever happens in your soundings, without any obvious warning.

Recently, Citizen Concepts, a US government tool, launched the Patriot App.

"...the world's first iPhone application that empowers citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities via social networking and mobile technology. This app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior.

Key Features:

• Integrated into Federal Agencies points of contactsFBI
• EPA
• GAO
• CDC
• Custom integration with user employers
• Fully integrated with Social Media (Facebook, Twitter)
• Multiple menus and data fields
• View FBI Most Wanted
• Simple graphical user interface"    source

Here it is if you are so degenerate to participate is this massive snitching operation.

Here is their problem though. WE also have the same tools!
You see, the new technology flattens the play-field, it introduces symmetry in technological means and potential between governments and citizens. What stops us from building a mobile+web application and to incite the population (the TRUE patriots) to log every movement of government officials, financiers and corporate managers ? What stops us from recording and analyzing all their actions with input data from the entire population? In a sense this is what the Internet is doing in a more informal way... Well, let's do it in a more coherent and organized way then! 


And here's something else. What stops you from participating but only to increase the noise level in their data, by reporting FALSE, but credible information. Haha, this sounds like fun to me... They must have some mechanism to sort out credible and non-credible sources. So if you send photos of dirty toilets you will most probably be tagged as a non-credible source, and your effect on the system will be minimized. So keep it serious and credible, as much as possible.

Visit The Balance of Power

Written by t!b!
By AllOfUs

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

This is why the multitude is taking over the economy...

Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network

By AllOfUs

Template CCC infrastructre released by Multitude Project

Click to go to page

A new template CCC infrastructure was released today. This Communication, Collaboration and Coordination infrastructure was tailored to support massive and dynamic social movements. It is entirely free (0$), modular, scalable, and can be deployed within hours. It enables groups rallying behind a social cause to plan and execute very complex actions.

This CCC infrastructure connects action groups on the ground with strategic and coordinating centers scattered across the planet. It also offers to the movement tools to connect with the population at large in order to build broad support and draw in various resources.

Contact the Multitude Project for assistance. We are pleased to volunteer our time for a just cause!

By AllOfUs

Multitude Project is officially joining the coalition against Tom Flanagan

A strong coalition is forming against Tom Flanagan.

Thomas Eugene Flanagan is a political science professor at the University of Calgary and conservative political activist, recently notorious on account of calling for the assassination ofWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on live CBC television on November 30, 2010.^[1] He served as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper until 2004.

Wikipedia

Multitude Project is joining the coalition!

-----------------------------------------------

By AllOfUs

The collapse of the patent system!

US Patent # 6,293,874

I predict a major war between corporations and the multitude over intellectual property rights similar to the copyright war between the multitude and new artists on one side, and the mainstream cultural establishment (Hollywood, Sony etc.) on the other. This war will destroy the patent system as we know it.




SCENARIO

1) We are moving towards a Knowhow Economy NOT towards a Knowledge Economy

• the Internet technology enhances communication, collaboration and coordination , which gives an economical advantage to open and social entities, which in turn means that sharing information and knowledge becomes a better strategy than controlling and going for it alone.
• knowledge becomes slippery, leaky, hard to control, it "wants to be free"
• the model to extract value from society will be primarily based on knowhow, but also on who you know and on how many people you know.

Having the recipe (knowledge) doesn't mean you are able to make (knowhow) the cake!
The world is NOT short on ideas, it is rather short on people who do stuff.

2) We already see the emergence of the open enterprise and of open collaborative communities of innovation. A good source of information is the P2P Fundation.

Creative Commons is on the raise. Creative Commons is a parallel system emerging out of the conflict between the multitude and the mainstream media/culture establishment. The multitude said: fine, keep your junk for yourself, we'll design our own framework for creation and distribution, and we'll create a separate pool of value which we'll exchange based on our new framework.

3) As more and more individuals move towards open standards and Creative Commons, sooner or later we'll have an open community pushing an open "something" on the market, for which there happens to be a patent. People part of open communities usually don't do the boring and painful patent searching to see if their ideas are already protected, they are too busy co-innovating! The company holding the patent in question will try to defend it, because the open community constitutes an economical threat. The conflict will be inevitable because the two practices of commercialization are incompatible.

3) The legal battle: They closed down Napster and they punished individuals caught downloading music for free. But everyone soon realized that it is easier to win the lottery than to be sued for having downloaded a song. They tried all sorts of fear tactics which in the end proved to be unsuccessful. Gradually, the artists themselves started to realize that the open model actually benefits them. New models of remuneration emerged, which were in tune with the new media. But let's go back to our problem, in our case, who is the company going to sue? Suppose that the open community is a diffuse entity with no head office; not registered as a legal entity. Suppose it is just a bunch of passionate scientists and engineers collaborating to find solutions to solve socially relevant problems; an ad hoc, fluid group based on a wiki (this one for example, or this one, or a million others). As a social entity it looks much like the file-sharing community. Moreover, once the open community launches an open "something" as Creative Commons, this thing will be picked up by hundreds if not thousands of other entities around the world, part of different jurisdictions. It will make no sense, economically speaking,  for the company owning the patent to defend it.

This is the flow... A new culture is emerging. Knowledge becomes free. The way we extract value from our knowledge is by our knowhow associated with it. Patents will die! We need to adapt.

See other reasons in this document "Why patenting doesn't make economical sense anymore"



Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network
See SENSORICA, an open enterprise making open hardware. 

By AllOfUs

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

Visit The Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

New Facebook page for Multitude Project

Follow the link to our new Multitude Project official Facebook Page.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Multitude-Project/161223167255024

Click to go to page

This is part of an effort to harmonize our infrastructure.

By AllOfUs

Sen Bernie Sanders Amazing Speech!

By AllOfUs

Does the sun shine in your country?

Innovation worth spreading. Free energy (provided by the sun) melting.
Do you want to build a melting facility based on solar energy?
Multitude, go for it! It only takes a mirror... 

Create an enterprise based on open principles and collaboration, using the Discovery Network blueprint, and attract technical expertize from all over the world. Contact the Multitude Project for assistance. We even have a specialist in optics and light interaction with matter (contact Tiberius Brastaviceanu).

Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network

By AllOfUs

The WikiLeaks Revolution!

The Multitude Movement will take new proportions if the US Government decides to press criminal charges against Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.

Federal authorities are investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the group's release of government documents, including possible charges under the Espionage Act, sources familiar with the inquiry said Monday. The Washington Post

The case will certainly go up to the Supreme Court, sparking a massive social debate on governance. Our philosophy on politics, diplomacy and international relations, secrecy vs access to information and freedom of speech, and many others, will be forever changed .

The cabal behind the Anglo-American empire is damage control mode, instead of taking care of business as usual, projecting their power over the globe. Another important aspect of the new reality, the elites have lost their ability to communicate effectively. Paranoia set's in.... They know now that lies cannot circulate freely anymore, without being exposed in an effective time!  

The Anglo-American empire is in free fall.
The diplomatic cables leak touches the ecosystem of the Anglo-American empire. This historical event unbalances the fragile system of relations set in place and maintained by the shadow government. Even if their puppets in charge of other nations are still at their service, they will find it increasingly difficult to enforce their will on their local populations. The reputation of some US politicians tarnished by these leaks is only a minor problem, which can be rapidly solved by replacing them. The major problem, the one that corporate media doesn't expose, covering it with a pile of diversions, is the ability of the Anglo-American empire to sustain itself, to sustain the very complex and fragile web of relations it is built on. It is imploding financially, economically, and now diplomatically.

 

Visit The Balance of Power 

By AllOfUs

Multitude approach for building our towns

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities." By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and "evolve to freedom."

Join this community! Use their creation and spread the word!

The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. Here designers of all persuasions can:

• Share their ideas, designs and plans
• View and review designs posted by others
• Collaborate with each other, people in other professions and community leaders to address specific design challenges
• Manage design projects from concept to implementation
• Communicate easily amongst team members
• Protect their intellectual property rights using the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licensing system and be shielded from unwarranted liability
• Build a more sustainable future

Join this community! Use their creation and spread the word!

Multitude, go for it!

Create an enterprise based on open principles and collaboration, using the Discovery Network blueprint, and attract technical expertize from all over the world. Contact the Multitude Project for assistance.

Visit Economical Alternatives

By AllOfUs

A multitude approach to movie production

1-2-3 CONNECT:

1) The ConnectedFilm project is uniting the world to produce a feature film called Connected, one dollar at a time.

2) Everyone who donates will have their name in the credits of the film, to show that each gift is equally important.

3) Revenue from the film that would normally go back to investors, will go forward to enable people like YOU to manifest the dreams of your soulfire through micro-giving.

Get involved!
Finance this project!
Support this team in their effort to design a new methodology for open, collaborative, people-founded film production. 
Support the multitude in telling it's own stories.

By AllOfUs

The days of shadow governments are numbered!

What do you see behind the Wikileaks phenomena? This is what I see: Governance moves from lies and deception towards transparency. The new technology, modern means of communication, makes it almost impossible for large organizations to cover lies for an effective amount of time. There is a big chance for the truth to come out right in time before the liars and conspirators are out of the public view. It's the end of shadow governments. What we see now is just the beginning. The global village atmosphere set's it slowly but surely. You know what I'am doing? We know what YOU're doing...

Visit The Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

Symbionomics: Stories of a New Economy

Visit Economical Alternatives

By AllOfUs

How the Russian government tries to stop real journalism

Attention, the following video shows acts of violence.

 Oleg Kashin was brutally attacked near his home in Moscow on November 6, 2010. His both hands were crashed and his jaw was broken. The message was clear, don't write and don't talk. The government seams to cooperate on this case, but I think the reality is different. In the past, other journalists that have criticized the Kremlin have been beaten and even killed. This is part of a well known tactic based on fear to stifle descent. The video of this event, showing the pain Oleg Kashin went through, was allegedly leaked by the police. Or perhaps it was intentionally released to the public to send a wave of fear into the journalist community?!

These fear tactics have been successfully used in the past. The problem is that today they don't work anymore. This is another clear example of measures that are not in tune with the new reality, showing that those in power don't understand the new world. It's like the Obama's government reacting to the latest Wikileaks release, trying to control the spread of the leaked information threatening with a fossilized law, made before the Internet even existed... We should all pay attention to these knee-jerk reactions, these panic mode reactions, these clumsy actions of damage control, using inadequate tools to address a problem they don't fully understand.

Internet is global, anyone in the world can now criticize the Russian government, this is actually what I am doing right now, outside of their zone of influence, potentially reaching the entire Russian population. Information is not only produced and consumed locally, as it was before. Moreover, information is not produced within centralized institutions anymore. The production and the distribution of information is highly decentralized, democratic and deprofessionalized.

The fear tactic doesn't work on the diaspora, nor on people like me who are sympathetic to Russian freedom fighters. Even locally, its effects are diminished when it targets independent individuals who possess their own means of analysis and distribution of information, because their own decision to brave fear in the name of freedom cannot be hindered by other relations, as it normally happens within a centralized media organization. The actions of these independent Internet journalists only depend on their own decisions. These fear tactics can only backlash. Usually these stories get amplified outside of the country, gain momentum, and the whole phenomena they entail sustains the resilience of freedom fighters within the country.      

When are these governments going to understand that hanging people in public doesn't work anymore?

Visit The Balance of Power

By AllOfUs

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead

By AllOfUs

Catherine Austin Fitts The Looting Of America

This interview is VERY important. It shows that the multitude social movement is the only way out and forward. After watching this first part watch the other 4 on Youtube.

By AllOfUs

OpenKollab Pooled Fund Intro

By AllOfUs

Multitude approach to develop the African continent from its roots up

Over the past few weeks a fascinating discussion has been taking place in the LinkedIn group, ‘Africa - All Things Business’. The discussion thread was started by Paul Kibuuka. It has focussed on ‘Africa’s Greatest Strengths’ and to date it has attracted 230+ contributions.

The group is made up largely of professional and business people with close links to Africa, and as the thread has illustrated ... a great deal of love and passion for the continent

The highly perceptive posts in the thread have effectively begun to develop into a SWOT analysis of Africa. It has provided participants with a glimpse of the magnitude of the problems faced by the continent and her people. At the same time it has revealed massive opportunities for those with the foresight to recognise them ... and the vision to realise them.

During the course of the discussion a number of suggestions were made as to how the situation could be turned around. It is critical that this time the ordinary people of Africa get to reap the benefits ... and not only the ruling-class elite who have to date largely continued the colonial tradition of leeching the continent dry.

It was agreed that for the continent to compete successfully on the global stage, it must not only explore new avenues of opportunity and new ways of doing things ... Africa in fact needs to completely reinvent and reposition itself.

Being a ‘business’ group, one issue that predictably surfaced was the difficulty that entrepreneurs (with bold, original ideas) experience when attempting to source funding for innovative new projects.

I proposed a solution to this problem to the group in the form of a DIASPORA BANK ... in essence a bank funded by the 60 million-odd displaced Africans around the globe with the express aim of financing disruptive new business ventures that would ordinarily struggle

Visit SICU INNOVATION

By Ian Bentley

This anouncement was first published on SICU HUB.

A multitude approach to our global problem

Don't wait for governments to save the planet, SWARM!

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement

The multitude movement takes over innovation and production. 

The economy belongs to the MULTITUDE!

ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement (1st Trailer) from Electromagnate on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

Wikileaks: Biggest leak in history

This is how the multitude movement ends wars and topples governments. 
Obama's government will definitely come out of this very weak. Tyrannical governments run on secrecy and lies. But how can you force thousands of individuals working for these governments to shut up. Sooner or later someone is going to speak out. In today's world secrets surface and lies are uncovered. Information wants to get out and spread fast.

Don't you guys get it? 

YOU CANNOT RULE ON LIES AND SMILES ANYMORE!

Where is the fingerprint of the multitude movement in all this? People use the new technology to easily gather information and to distribute it over the Internet, in this particular case on Wikileaks. Wikileaks itself is a multitude movement's creation.

"WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. We are a young organisation that has grown very quickly, relying on a network of dedicated volunteers around the globe. Since 2007, when the organisation was officially launched, WikiLeaks has worked to report on and publish important information. We also develop and adapt technologies to support these activities."   

The information leaked on Wikileaks, which is fast becoming a reference of sensitive leaked information on the Internet, is accessed by millions throughout the world, who work in collaboration to analyse it, to make sense of it, to extract what's relevant from it... The leaked information is socially processed. In a very short amount of time the public opinion is formed around the issue. The classical channels of information, which are still controlled in large part by the centers of power, are forced to acknowledge the story, or risk to be entirely discredited. They cannot ignore something raging through the Internet. We got connected individuals and independent organizations controlling the process on one side, and the classical institutions forced to follow, to go with the flow on the other. The victim in all this is tyranny.

Visit the Balance of Power, get involved!

By AllOfUs

The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers charts this movement.

WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

Visit Economical Alternatives

By AllOfUs

Better Means, a multitude initiative to production

BetterMeans proposes a very similar model to the Discovery Network.

"The Open Enterprise is a new organizational design. Unlike organizations using traditional management structures, Open Enterprises replace the command and control hierarchy with a meritocracy based on collaboration and open participation.

Organizations that adopt this new organizational structure can make decisions faster and respond quicker to their markets. They look more like living dynamic networks, and less like pyramids. People working in these organizations will have (and feel) more ownership. They’re more engaged in their work, and have the freedom to work on what they want, when they want to. Most importantly this model enables people to once again bring their full humanity – values, beliefs and passions – to the workplace, removing disconnect between organizational and personal values."

Visit Economical Alternatives

Visit Multitude Innovation and the Discovery Network 

By AllOfUs

Hermann Scheer died...

In one of his last interviews to Democracy Now he talks about the passion of his life, solar energy, a democratic and popular source. Solar is the energy of the multitude. He also talks about the fossil energy monopoly and how to brake it.

 

By AllOfUs

Rethinking social movements

In THIS new article we are focusing on the management and stabilization of a massive social movement. We describe a powerful tool for self-awareness and self-management based on the new technology.  

By AllOfUs

Dialogue with Michel Bauwens

Interview by Yvette Dubel from Cultural Fusion

Yvette: Michel is best known as the founder of P2P Foundation, this is where I first encountered his work. Since then I have become increasingly interested in the implications of his work in the transformation of organizations in the face of the level of innovation needed to address our current challenges. 

Listen to internet radio with Yvette Dubel on Blog Talk Radio

By AllOfUs

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

The Multitude Manifesto

Become a co-editor of the Multitude Manifesto http://bit.ly/aICAit

By AllOfUs

Crowdsourcing the Electric Car

eCars - Now!

Global Community

By AllOfUs

By AllOfUs

Citizens’ and Artists’ Rights in the Digital Age

By AllOfUs

Michel Bauwens from P2P Fundation

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

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

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

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

Having problems with your employer?

The Multitude Project designed the Boomerang method to help individuals in their up-heal battle with their employers.

Have you been wrongfully terminated? 

Have you been treated with injustice by your employer? 

We've added another tactic to this method, which gives you the possibility to socially paralyze your company. You have power! The Multitude has power. Corporations need to get used to it...

See the Unleash the beast section for the new addition.

By AllOfUs

Crowdfunding Science

What a great example of multitude movement action! Scientific development IS controlled by large centralized institutions for different motives. As in communism with a planned economy, which led to disaster, we are living in a society with planned science, which is moving fast towards disaster. Scientific development and innovation must be open! Regulations must only apply to the use of new knowledge, not to its development.


ANDREA GAGGIOLI AND GIUSEPPE RIVA propose Crowdfunding Science:

We suggest crowd-funding as a possible strategy to cope with the lack of investments in research, as well as to increase democratization in the sciences. Projects seeking funding could be stored in an online repository. Each project would include a description of its objectives, duration, and requested contribution. Investors (either people or funding agencies) could decide which projects to fund. Read more in this letter to Science...  

Andrea further adds:

The closest example of crowdfunding science is Cancer Research UK's MyProjects scheme. Launched in October 2008, MyProjects allows Cancer Research UK donors to search projects by type of cancer and location to find a specific research project to donate money.

See also S.C.I.En.C.E.

SCIEnCE – Share Collaborative Ideas, Enact Cooperative Efforts – is part of the growing movement dedicated to encouraging public sharing of testable ideas. Not just ideas, but plans of action – ideas will be developed into specific, step-by-step proposals via Wiki-inspired community editing. A new system for attributing credit will be used to distribute funding for SCIEnCE projects. The projects outlined by these collaboratively written proposals will be tackled with a cooperative experimental approach. Society will benefit much more from the ensuing scientific and medical progress than any individual could benefit from the prestige of doing it first and doing it alone. 

By AllOfUs

Stafan's good reads on Innovation

Stefan is a specialist on open innovation. He blogs on 15inno.com. He shares with us a short list of good reads for the week Good Reads on Innovation

By AllOfUs

Moving Beyond Open Innovation

"Opening up R&D organizations to outside ideas has become a powerful weapon in the strategic arsenal of research managers. As Henry Chesbrough writes, “[O]pen innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.” This strategy has been associated with notable commercial successes, such as Procter & Gamble’s SpinBrush, sourced not from internal R&D but rather a group of inventors in Cleveland." Read more from Moving Beyond Open Innovation

By AllOfUs

Democratizing Innovation

From MIT Press:

"Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.

The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive.

Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license."

Get this book for FREE from Google Books now

By AllOfUs

RFID chips to track pre-school children financed with federal funds?!

This is the best example of how the elite is seeing the new technology. Those who have power only see in the new technology ways to reinforce their position.of power. This is not just an accident! To get a federal grant one must go though a screening process. The project must be approved by the government. This horrible story points directly to the US federal government, who approved and financed the project. We can now legitimately ask ourselves if the US government is planning to enslave its own citizens. This is not so far-fetched after all, we are talking here about the same government who kidnaps non-american citizens in other countries to torture them and to keep them in secret prisons for an undetermined time, without access to the justice system. Allow me to remind you that the Obama administration has defended in court the abduction and torturing practices of the CIA implemented by the Bush administration.

THIS is UnbeLLLivvveble !  

By AllOfUs

Open Source engineering approach to build a car?

These people must be crazy! Haha, this is what people form GM and Ford must say. And this is exactly the reason why those dinosaurs will disappear in the near future. The economy will repopulate with economical entities like riversimple.

From riversimple's website:

Open source design and development. By licensing designs to an independent open source foundation, the 40 Fires Foundation, engineers and designers from around the world can help develop the vehicles and any manufacturer around the world can make them.

Have broader company ownership. The corporate structure of Riversimple is designed to ensure that all stakeholders in the enterprise have a voice in the governance of the business and share in the benefits of its success.

Go the riversimple homepage.

By AllOfUs

The Multitude Moon Project

Google and the XPrize are offering 30M$ to the first independent team that sends a robot on the Moon. Multitude Project created the Multitude Moon Project, a collaborative approach to solve this problem. 


The first goal of the Multitude Moon Project is to find the best solution. Not to build anything, but to look around and see if already existing technologies can be put together to solve the most important aspects of this challenging problem. For example, can we think of new efficient ways of propulsion? Do we have the technologies to put it together? Who would be the key contributors, who has these technologies. Is there something that needs to be improved and how? Can somebody simulate the proposed solution?   


Please take a look and join if you like the initiative. 

By AllOfUs

What's the best path towards a better world?

Every time I meet new people they ask me about the Multitude Project. After giving them updates about the movement and our activities they almost inevitably bring up the problem of social change. Is real change possible? Is it worth the fight? Is every system equally corruptible?

How to initiate real, positive social change? This question has followed me for years. I think I have an answer, and I would dearly like to get your opinion on it.

My solution is to offer people value, for themselves, their families, as well as for their communities. If the process through which they must go in order to acquire this value goes against the established order we have a wining formula for positive social change. 


More and more individuals and groups will be naturally drawn towards the new alternatives, simply because they constitute value for them. As the new order (established by a system of new alternatives) becomes increasingly populated, the old order gradually becomes abandoned. The weight of society gradually and naturally shifts from the old society to the new. This is what I call a CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION. There are many instances of such revolutions in human history, for example the Industrial Revolution. I contrast this with the type of radical and sudden change that characterized the Bolshevik Revolution, where one order was demolished first, to be replaced by a new, untested one. A constructive revolution is in essence a metamorphosis process. It is a gradual shift in human resources from an old set of processes to a new one, one that can provide more (hopefully in a more sustainable manner) for the same effort. 


At this moment, everyone involved in the multitude movement, either knowingly or not, is working hard to propose and to build alternatives that are based on a different paradigm, and which constitute a real source of value for every individual, and particularly for the creative and hard working ones among us. In more concrete terms, I am referring to those individuals who created and are involved in maintaining and improving the Internet; democratic and p2p infrastructures for communication, for massive collaboration and coordination; affordable tools for data analysis, automation, decision-making, etc. This includes these individuals who gave us Linux, Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Twitter, alternative currencies (see Cyclos), peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, the infrastructure for networks of local and sustainable food production and distribution, Connexion, personal energy production, value networks... 

These people embracing the values embedded within the Multitude Movement are not agitators driven by some abstract cause. They are working hard to provide people with whatever they need RIGHT NOW to insure their survival: education, affordable energy, new forms of transportation, of communication, etc. 

What I am proposing are new institutions! 

Human beings are malleable, they have a tremendous ability to adapt to changing conditions and circumstances. I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania and I spent my first 14 years witnessing first-hand how institutions change and how people change with them. Institutions reinforce social patterns and shape relations between individuals in society. 

People inherently respond to institutions by adaptation. The state may induce a nationalistic mentality and corporations induce a corporate mentality. An institution is not a building. It is a process by which a set of constraints and incentives shapes human relations and interactions, and forges culture. By changing these constraints/incentives people will also change, re-adapt to the new environment. The alternatives we propose help establish a different set of constraints/incentives. We hope that enough people will adopt them to become mainstream, thus changing our entire culture. There are enough individuals out there who are naturally compatible with the system we propose to spark the fire... In fact the fire is already burning and growing.


Are YOU involved in the creation, improvement, maintenance of democratic and popular systems which allow peer-to-peer exchange of any sort? Then YOU ARE PART OF THE MULTITUDE MOVEMENT. 

Please visit our homepage, you might find yourself at home there.

By t!b!