Most of us have heard about the impending arrival of “peak oil,” after which oil supplies will inexorably dwindle, causing all sorts of havoc as societies try to cope and remake themselves. But my friend Michel Bauwens of the Peer to Peer Foundation, recently suggested that we may be approaching another inflection point of equal or greater significance, if we have not already – the arrival of “peak hierarchy.” By this, he meant the time at which distributed organizations become stronger and more versatile than centralized hierarchies. ...
What is new about our times – the age of the Internet – is that you can now functionally coordinate small groups of people on a global scale. Social trust doesn’t need to be organized by hierarchical organizations; it can arise from the bottom up and self-organize into small groups that share common values and purposes. Such distributed networks have given us GNU Linux and open source software, Wikipedia, social networking, the Public Library of Science and other open-access journals, and countless other online commons. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 12/05/2008 12:28:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
