P2P Foundation

Stephenbez,

Thanks so much for your feedback.

The post was meant to put as much information on the table as possible to solicit as much criticism as possible. Definitely not trying to sell someone on the idea right here / right now. More of enticing people to collaborate.

If I had to do an elevator pitch it would probably be along the lines of "A mobile app that allows people to trade securities for goods & services instead of cash. This lets people without disposable income for investment have a chance to participate in the market, it helps isolate people's money from risky parts of the market they dislike, it helps shift investment towards areas traditional investors may discredit but consumers advocate for, and puts something tangible behind the currency your exchanging."

Thanks for posting the Credit Theory of Money Article. I definitely agree with parts of this theory & that money is just a way to account for debts owed & credit extended. Another way I envision it is similar to PG's discussion of wealth and believe that money is just a ledger to facilitate the exchange of the wealth.

This system kind of branches off from the Credit Theory though in that the currency would not be just a representation of credits and debits, it would be backed by securities/investments in companies that have actual value. (Of course, these instruments are all just other forms of credit/debt, but at least in this case there is some form of physical / intellectual property/value…

"In the old world products were scarce - this meant that companies who provided product could profit from the demand.
In the digital world, where abundance is key (creating a digital copy costs next to nothing) it is a customer's attention that has become scarce. This means that the customer now holds the value - not the company." - Chris Saad

Some people did see this commoditisation of human behavior coming back in 2005 and promoted the idea of the 'Attention Economy' which had a goal of putting people back in control of the content they create and view online with tools like the Attention Recorder from Attention Trust (now defunct, but you can read about it here http://p2pfoundation.net/Attention_Trust ).

The current idea of social is to capture much more than eyeballs and clicks of course, with checkins for places, Runkeeper and many other health apps for tracking/sharing activities, and so on... nearly everything we do is a potential data point for commercialization that a startup will want to capitalize on. This is fine if the user clearly understands the relationship.

I expect it was too early when the 'Attention Economy' ideas emerged but now perhaps we'll see projects that resurrect some of that early work and build on it to empower users of social tools to take control of both their attention and the data points they are sharing.

addl reading: http://p2pfoundation.net/Attention_Economy

That's addressed in the first section in the document: https://github.com/waldyrious/awesome-open-company#what-is-an-open-company

In short, there isn't a standard, universally agreed definition, but there's a common pattern in:

- the definition I used ("a for-profit organization whose core practices are guided by principles of openness, transparency and interoperability. This philosophy can be summarized by the maxim: Share as much as possible, charge as little as possible.")

- the Open Company Initiative (http://opencompany.org) definition: "Companies committed to openness as a defining element in how [they] create value."

- the Wikipedia definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_business): "an approach to enterprise that draws on ideas from openness movements like free software, open source, open content and open tools and standards. The approach places value on transparency, stakeholder inclusion, and accountability."

- the P2P Foundation definition (http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Business): "a business that operates around the principles that are similar to those of the free software and open source movements, i.e. with 'free' and 'open' content."

Let me know if my synthesis (the first definition above) seems innacurate or incomplete.

I agree with him yet I find GPL deeply unsatisfying. Web companies can take GPL software and use it without returning anything etc. and it does not harm them at all.

The distinction should be between for-profit/commercial and open-source. If you're making money on open source, you should chip in to reward the authors, and license should enforce it.

That's why I'm in contact with CopyFair License people: http://p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License to create a CopyFair Software License and even a collaborative software development model CopyFair Corp: https://github.com/CopyFairCorp/copyfair

The idea is: people work on open source software and get shares in return. Software is free to use for other free projects, and must be paid for to use commercially. Any income is distributed between the authors according to "shares" in the project.

I'm reminded of the RONJA project, which accomplishes something similar but on a much bigger scale (and level of expense), but which nevertheless proved quite promising:

http://ronja.twibright.com/about.php

As a side note, this project is interesting for another reason - its a textbook example of a failed open source project:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Ronja

.. which didn't quite hit the sweet spot for mass adoption/production, because of a commercial fork of the project. Very interesting reading both from the perspective of transferring high-rate data over long distances on the cheap, technologically, and then not actually getting off the ground and doing it on a mass level, because: politics.

"Once it reaches a certain threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes counter-productive."
- Ivan Illich

This is an example of why planning doesn't work. And the unforeseen side-effect of any policy is an example of why central control is not just inefficient but often counter-productive -- why hiring processes to identify high-capacity creative individuals select for the opposite; why the school system produces not learning but limits it so as to produce ignorance; why housing policies aim to improve cities and lower inequality makes cities like San Francisco and Stockholm some of the most unequal in the world.

http://p2pfoundation.net/Counterproductivity