Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation
I met Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P Foundation, at UrbanLabs which took place at Citilab in Cornellà, Barcelona. He kindly agreed to record an interview for the PodCamp Barcelona Podcast, but due to his hectic schedule it was impossible to do until recently. I finally caught up with Michel when he was in Amsterdam and we recorded this conversation over Skype from his hotel room. I think the recording provides a very good introduction to the work of the P2P Foundation and Michel’s vision.
About the P2P Foundation (from the P2P Foundation wiki)
We function as a clearinghouse for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented initiatives.
We aim to be a pluralist network to document, research, and promote peer to peer alternatives. Our political aims could be summarized under the following maxims:
- ending the destruction of the biosphere by abandoning the dangerous conceptions of pseudo-abundance in the natural world (i.e. based on the assumption that natural resources are infinite);
- promoting free cultural exchange by abandoning the innovation-inhibiting conceptions of pseudo-scarcity in the cultural world (i.e. based on the assumption that the free flow of culture needs to be restricted through excessive copyrights etc…).
For more information, or to get involved with the P2P Foundation, check out these sites:
Michel Bauwen’s extensive collection of bookmarks http://delicious.com/mbauwens
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Adam Greenfield, Handheld Learning, Urban Labs & more…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/studies_and_observations/89041931/
This morning I finished reading Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - a remarkable, beautifully written explanation and call to participation of a new world on our doorsteps byAdam Greenfield. I’ve just read on Adam’s blog that he will be in Madrid at VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY Go and see him if you can.
The Handheld Learning conference took place in London this week and although we weren’t able to go, I discovered via their Twitter tweets that it was possible to follow a lot of the presentations through a “live” blog hosted at Cover It Live. As it was a blog format, “readers” could ask questions and add comments. It was the next best thing to being there.
The UrbanLabs page is being continuously updated with media from the event and links for future collaboration - keep up to date here
First thoughts on UrbanLabs
photos by Enric Senabre
UrbanLabs has been a very ambitious project which has brought people together from all over Spain and beyond at Citilab-Cornellà to discuss and possibly construct a common vision of where we are going digitally and the crossover to an increasingly blurred “real” life. Unfortunately due to Ana being ill I had to return to Lleida after the first day and a morning spent poking around the magnificant space that is Citilab-Cornellà, thanks to the invitation of a very busy Enric Senabre who made me more than welcome. Since returning home, I’ve followed the rest of the event on the web and although I haven’t been able to participate directly, have been able to watch the streaming of the thought-provoking talk given by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation as well the interesting presentation of David Cierco, the General Director of the Plan Avanza of the Spanish government. It also means that I was able to see this morning’s discussion of the future and organisation of UrbanLabs, and I want to say here that I would love to be involved.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with Michel Bauwens yesterday and he couldn’t praise Citilab-Cornellà highly enough. I certainly got the impression that the place is not the typical council-funded project filled with bureaucrats and powered by enchufes, but a genuine place full of imagination, ideas and the willingness and creativity to put them into action - as an old cynic I’m bloody shocked. If you have the opportunity, go and check the place out for yourself, I’m hoping to be able to go back and spend more time there soon.
As I had to leave early, I could ony participate in one session about Digital Education which was facilitated by Boris Mir. There were so many ideas and projects talked about that it would have taken weeks to discuss every pertinent point and it was hard to find a structure to encompass everything in the allotted time. As we found out at PodCamp Barcelona, it showed that there are many, many people out in the digital world trying to find the way to explore new avenues of communication and co-opereration and UrbanLabs has gone a long way towards finding a way to have that dialogue in both the “real” and digital worlds and demonstrates that for many of us, that separation is disappearing.
Minerva magazine just publised an interview with and an essay by Michel Bauwens (in Spanish).
Juan Freire blogged Urbanismo emergente: ideas para el grupo de trabajo de Urban Labs 08