Category Archives: ¿Cuándo? @en

Response to the accusations made by Michel Bauwens

Xabier E. Barandiaran / David Vila-Viñas

As co-editors of the book we feel in need to clarify a number of
accusations made by Michel Bauwens.

1. The editors have never used political insults to qualify Michel. He calls us “Stalinist”.Trivializing with this kind of adjectives contributes nothing to the commons.

2. Michel Bauwens is not in the author list because there is no chapter authored by him.

3. The book does not include any chapter written by Michel Bauwens [2] for a very simple reason: the editorial team decided not to include his document. There are two main reasons that justify this decision:

3.1. The quality was not good: The manuscript had many problems as an academic document: extremely long quotes from other authors (up to two pages) that also appear in other chapters, lack of references, repeated paragraphs, etc. We have no time to rewrite the document to meet the standards. Moreover, it is important to note that when Michel Bauwens published the content of his manuscript with a publishing company [3], the content had to be almost fully rewritten, to the extent that the person that helped rewrite the manuscript (Vasilis Kostakis) ended up as first author. And this brings us to the next point

3.2. Copyright issues: As mentioned before, to our surprise, when the editorial team of FLOK met in Quito in March 2015, we discovered that Michel Bauwens had published a book with Vasilis Kostakis with Palgrave MacMillan publishing company [3]. The content of this short book considerably overlaps with Michel’s manuscript for the FLOK project, (with a very good rewrite, cleaning, referencing, editing, and improvements by  Vasilis). The book is published with a restrictive copyright license and MacMillan has a history of severe copyright infringement prosecution. We are a small project in a small country, we cannot afford a copyright lawsuit against a copyright monster like
MacMillan.

4. Michel Bauwens has not been “censored”. A quick pdf search shows that the name of Michel Bauwens appears in the book 27 times! He is also acknolwedged as “the research director of the project till June 2014”.

5. Michel decided to publish yet another book in english independently of the project [4], with a license different to the one the project used, without including the content of other authors (including our).
We never complained. We did never consider that Michel was an Stalinist, or that he had censored us. This is the commons, this is copyleft land: you are free to use, remix, copy, modify and distribute. No need to insult, no need to complain, no possibility for censorship. And we love that!

Enjoy the book: http://book.floksociety.org/ec/

yours,

Xabier E. Barandiaran / David Vila-Viñas

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
[2] https://floksociety.co-ment.com/text/xMHsm6YpVgI/view/
[3] http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/network-society-and-future-scenarios-for-a-collaborative-economy-vasilis-kostakis/?k=9781137415066
[4] http://commonstransition.org/

Buen Conocer /FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social knowledge economy in Ecuador

The Buen Conocer / FLOk Society research project, presents the results of its work in the book Buen Conocer / FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador. The book analyzes and proposes lines of political action and productive projects in 14 subjects of the Ecuadorian economy considered strategic to change the productive matrix, such as education, science, culture, agri-food and bio-diversity, design and manufacturing, software, hardware, connectivity, ancestral knowledge and the popular and solidary economy.

The launch of the book Buen Conocer / FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador will take place on June 16, 2015 in Quito, Ecuador.

The book contains the results of the research on public policies for the construction of a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador; the edition of the book includes along its 800 pages, 14 documents, 27 authors, 14 reviewers, 911 comments of 122 people on the digital platform Co-ment, 196 participants (co-creators) in the Buen Conocer Summit in Quito and a total of more than 1,500 participants.

During the presentation of the book, the content of the Declaration of Buen Conocer, issued at the end of the Summit, held in Quito from 27 to 30 may 2014, will be re-edited. This declaration synthesizes the proposals of this transition to a common and open knowledge economy.

The Buen Conocer / FLOK Society book will be available for download since Tuesday, june 16 2015, at the site http://book.floksociety.org/, licensed by Creative Commons BY-SA (attribution share equal) Ecuadorian (v.3.0) and international (v.4.0) and GFDL (GNU free documentation license. The book was published in its digital version for the Buen Conocer /FLOK Society community, with the collaboration of aLabs association. It also has a co-edition in print by IAEN/CIESPAL.

The Buen Conocer/ FLOK Society project could be done under agreement between the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Ministerio Coordinador de Conocimiento y Talento Humano and Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación.

Book Index

Introduction

The Buen Conocer /FLOK Society process

PART 1. Enhance the collective intelligence

    1. Education: Open educational resources

    2. Science: Collaborative, participative and open research

    3. Culture: Access and sustainability on an open culture era

PART 2. Productive material capacities aimed to commons

2.1 Agri-food: Open and sustainable agri-food system in Ecuador

2.2 Bio-diversity: Citizen science, ancestral knowledge and bio-diversity applied to social knowledge economy

2.3 Manufacturing: Open design and distributed manufacturing

2.4 Energy: Free/libre knowledge, distributed energy and social empowerment for energetic matrix change.

PART 3. Institutions, society and communities

3.1. Institutions: Knowledge society, social economy and partner State

3.2 Communities: Originary, traditional and popular knowledge

PART 4. Open and free/libre technical infrastructure

4.1 Hardware: Innovation and production ecosystems based on open hardware

4.2. Software: Free/libre and open code programs in public administration

4.3. Conectivity: Accessibility, sovereignty and self- management of communications infrastructures.

 

 

FLOK Society invites you to contribute in its research

FLOK Society project makes available its com-ment platform. It´s an open system that will allow the community to review, discuss, comment, and contribute on the draft of policy proposals developed by the research team in collaboration with different social groups, public institutions and civil society.

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