Tag: gift

Supernova Open Space: The Economy of Free (Chris Heuer) [en]

[fr] Notes de conférence-discussion.

*Random, scattered notes. Not necessarily understandable. Might contain outright mistakes — I don’t always understand everything. No who-said-what either, sorry.*

Popcorn round: what is the issue?

– Money taboo (seen as hurting open source)
– Zero times anything is always zero, whereas a small something times something big ends up being something
– Rival goods vs. non-rival goods. How do you make money out of non-rival goods? Need to introduce a kind of exclusion mechanism (ex. Movies).
– Free building materials
– Discrimination that patronage causes (*steph-note: seems to me we’re aware of this in EU*)

Supernova Open Space 8 Chris’s core point is precisely that. Hidden patron model. Independants don’t have the ability to go to some of the events employees go to. Everybody does it “for free” — actually their company is paying for it.

Age of abundance.

Patronage: potentially disturbing effects. Women. There’s money behind this for some people but not others.

*(steph-note: ew. I need to work on my US accent parser.)*

Most of the programmers of “free stuff” are youngsters or people who have a day job — so who are supported in some way to do that.

Popular: The End of Free.

Trying to find patronage for a project involving chemists doing spectroscropy — get them to communicate/have compatible software.

Beginning of the century: huge numbers of mini-newspapers in Chicago.

In an economy of abundance, where do people make money? Make money out of being to apply knowledge/information, rather than the knowledge/information itself. (Debate: “knowledge” or “information”? Data.)

Problem: denial/taboo about patronage. We need to talk about it, and about how it works. We’re not teaching companies/individuals how to be good patrons or how not to be.

Perception: money = manipulation.

Free vs. non-measurable. Air isn’t free, we just don’t know how to measure how much it costs (keep it clean, etc).

Funding medical research for profit. Exploiting profit vs. “reasonable profit”.

Gift economy is different. Property. Money: when you fall out of relationship.

Barter.

Organisation has been vilified by the abuse of power for personal benefit and bad behaviour of a few.

At some point, if you want to produce/achieve something, you need some kind of organisation.

Chris: conference model. Exploiting profit from the knowledge of the speakers, session participants and participants. Just organised a conference co-produced by the speakers. Need to continue to think about new ways for cocreating value.
*Feel free to add notes about this session in the comments. I really didn’t capture everything that was said, and probably missed the most interesting bits.*

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