An old new resource
Great post, Alek! Much to think about here. My main takehome point is that communist-era Eastern Europe contained a lot of thinking and tinkering around the issue of how you get around roadblocks built (maybe even unadavertently) by institutions perceived as ineffective or evil. “Parallel institutions” is exactly what the most radical and “out there” Edgeryders are all about (I am thinking of the resilience crowd, for example): I had been wondering why the hacker scene is so strong in Poland and Eastern Europe in general, and now I have a better idea of what might be going on. This may be an old resource for you, but for us Western Europeans it is new! I would like to know more about groundbreaking dissidents and what we can learn from them.
I also agree (how could I not?) on the blind spot you see around funding open/free projects. But I do have a slightly different point of view, this: a business model is not necessarily about generating revenue. It can also be about reducing costs. What another Edgeryder, Shareable’s Neal, calls “the sharing economy” is sustainable, because it reduces the costs of doing things, and so takes some pressure off the people participating in it.