No, sorry - an example of a profitable business that uses open source but doesn’t rip it off. Was in support of your comment. Profitable businesses that emerge from common effort that does not exploit or rip off that effort can be hard to find. It has been the case for decades that someone would build some nice add-on to an OS, often unpatented, and before they could turn it into a business, MS or Apple would incorporate it into their OS and the creator was SOL.
Have not yet done a proper post about it, but am planning to do so soon.
We discussed that during the last open source calls.
I think we can set up a good discussion around this and generate interest with it.
Do you think we could maybe even try to invite Graeber? Seems to fit the scifi eco vibe. And the bullshit work issue seems to fit the livelihoods.
will start a post about that 1. paid duck taping vs unpaid creating and 2. about the technical the issue of how to get paid on the internet soon as a stater point for that summit conversation. (@erik_lonroth is very passionate about that topic )
A community created business might be Craigslist. In the early days there was an asynchronous forum that Craig himself tended, and pretty obsessively too, that included feedback about how to improve the service. I suppose Craig could have cooked up some sort of scheme to kick back some money to the community, but everyone always seemed to feel that the service itself carried enough benefit just by the way it was designed and operated.
By offering every classified as free except for companies offering jobs and real estate sales, the service was architected to send value from business back to the community. It was, and is, maybe along with eBay, the ultimate killer app. The massive news industry stood by helpless and watched revenue flow from them over to Craig, even while he was giving away that which the paper charged high dollars for. Advertising a yard sale was not a trivial expense. And then it was no expense at all. No competing with that.
Also, most people don’t know that Craigslist actually started as an email list to his friends of events in SF that he thought were of interest. He was a programmer but also had a range of cultural interest and a love of nature. After the email list got too big he switched it to a very early and simple web page, which he then built into greater sophistication. Now it grosses a billion dollars a year. He was one of those people who could build and maintain his own prototype until such time as he could hire others to help him. Amazon was the same that way and so was eBay.
We talked about this @MariaEuler and immediately brings us in to the extremely hot topic on ‘how to do payment’ in a global internet market.
Its not just about the ‘business idea’, it’s not even about the ‘business model’ but also the very practical element of ‘how to transfer value’ from one wallet to another.
How strong the will to actually act on this apparently popular desire for real change is something that remains to be seen. I hope it isn’t like the loud support for Bernie Sanders from younger voters who then did not show up at the polls in big numbers because the pull back toward the existing hierarchies post-pandemic will be very powerful. It’s already happening in the USA where federal financial support has already gone to the cronies first leaving the smaller businesses and families behind. Hopefully Europe is not that corrupt.
Hello John, nice to (e) meet you. Don’t want to sound naive, but the scope for change could be bigger than 10 years ago? Just came out of a seminar with young professionals from Greece, a quarter said having been laid off since the start of the corona-crisis… And this time, concrete impacts are felt not in a handful of countries, but across the EU.
Europe will not follow the US’s example I hope, but still, there is a lack of scrutiny of decision-making, and the incentives of policymakers are not always aligned with the general interest. The coming year we’ll see some huge decisions (new EU budget, 1.5 trillion recovery fund, legislation AI + online platforms), people should really be on top of this. I understand civil society is often not aware of the timelines and consultation opportunities on EU policy files, I’m exploring now how this can be improved (there is the European Commission’s better regulation website, but apparently too complicated a tool).
I took a course on how the EU functions and I’m still not sure I completely get it. I do assume that the distribution of relief and help in the EU is nothing like what goes on under Trump. Here right now all the money is being passed out as political favors. They don’t even try to hide it.
K8 Institut für strategische Ästhetik, the non-for-profit transfer agency of the artistic academies in Saarland/Germany, is going to run a project in cooperation and with financial support of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Saarland/Germany aiming for strengthening resilience of artists and creatives in times of crises, but also in so called normal times through cooperative approaches of procurement-commissioning processes, training, production and social security issues. We would be very interested in being involved in the discussions around and during the online summit “COVID19 + Resilient Livelihoods”. Thank you for telling us how a possible onboarding could happen.
@JuliaHartnik, that sounds perfect.
As a first step, it would be great if you could make a short post about the project you are already planning (around 300 words maybe?).
You can find the WIP summit programme here:
you could comment on which topics you are interested in or suggest your own topic event which we could/should realise together.
The focus on artists is very interesting. Maybe it could also be a good partner event to the one on [ Session on endangered researchers and precarity in higher education ]
(Session on endangered researchers and precarity in higher education), as you have the art academy involved and many artists go through higher education to end up in precarity situations. While at the same time art is such an essential factor of coping with stressful situations like this pandemic: Music or video art suggestions for coping with confinement blues?.
We are happy to start the conversation with you on how to address the topic of sustainable art in the sense of artists being able to make a living and also how artists contribute to a society staying “sane” in the summit!
All of our events are built on community initiatives, so start by telling us what you want to discuss and address, who you would bring and who you would like to invite :).
Hi @JuliaHartnik I’m working on the session @MariaEuler pointed out and would be happy to collaborate. Esp. this part in your website took my attention for learning/sharing from/with you: …”Over the past 5 years, K8 has attracted funding from a wide variety of sources to conduct over 50 individual projects with private and public organizations that involved different elements of our open innovation framework (which includes approaches from different design fields such as critical, game, people-centered, universal design). K8 is currently in the process of synthesizing and validating methodological outcomes across projects through the iterative development of a multidisciplinary “Collaboration Design Toolkit”. Could you tell us more or maybe we could discuss, how to possibly integrate your toolkit into the concept here?: Session on endangered researchers and precarity in higher education
Hi @JuliaHartnik, thanks for this suggestion!
Are you still interested in this? I’m in touch with a few other cultural institutions (e.g. neue unentdeckte narrative) that are facing similar questions, and I would love to catch up on this a bit further (here or happy to have a call) to see where I can help make such a discussion happen. What do you think?
I’m working on the session