This is a very nicely designed site and the lab looks very elegant and professional. The photos are excellent. But it may be worth considering noting the location of the lab more prominently. People in this forum might easily deduce this project being in Greece, having heard much about the activity and folks involved previously, but the random visitor will only be able to find the location noted on the 'contacts' page. It might help to note location on a few more pages, particularly on the 'about' and 'facilities' pages. I'm very interested in the 'design global, manufacture local' aspect of the planned research and am wondering if there are project plans for local experimental implementation in Greece or if the plan is, for now, just to document projects of other organizations and programs. My own Open House project ( http://www.appropedia.org/Open_House:_Building_an_Open_Source_Lifestyle ) is looking to do something similar or related by cataloging, and eventually showcasing with a video documentary, the open source designs necessary for a functional owner/local-built lifestyle. There's a certain focus on personal 'unplugging' in this (ie. the use of new production on the household/personal level to unplug from market dependency) but I also intend to illustrate the potential in the community context as well. It's one of a number of concepts I've been exploring recently to apply the approach of 'living museums' (like the many viking or bronze age village re-creations in Europe or the colonial era villages in the US) to the exhibition of future culture and lifestyle rather than their usual focus on the distant past. I think that one of the key things that could facilitate a grounding of theory into practice is to look at the logistics of lifestyle; how our daily routine actually works as a system to meet our needs at a given standard-of-living. Those living museums go to great lengths to illustrate for the public how past, pre-industrial, lifestyle functioned, but, ironically, we generally have a very dim awareness of how our lifestyles actually work in the present, let alone the near future. This is because the market system conceals its workings from us--now putting much of them in other distant countries--leaving us industrially illiterate and unable to imagine viable alternatives. And so we interface to the market as though it were an enormous vending machine, its inner workings mysterious and locked away, our means of interaction strictly limited to just a coin slot and some buttons as designed by--and suiting the interests of--whoever built this thing. As I often say, as far as the average American is concerned, the supermarket gets restocked each night by Santa Claus and his Chinese elves. And this results in a lot of difficulty when we try to implement alternative infrastructures or attempt to create intentional communities. People are always underestimating just how much goes into maintaining their standard of living since they've never seen anything but the front end of that great vending machine and rely largely on fractured and romanticized myths about life in the past to imagine some 'simpler' life without it. People are always thinking living off the land is as easy as a cob cottage with a victory garden until that day they're drawing straws to see who gets to give the axe to one of the chickens they named. Maybe we should be reverse-engineering our lifestyles as a start to hacking that machine, revealing its inner workings, and re-engineering it to suit our interests.
Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: P2P Lab: Papers, Call & Plans for 2016 From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> Date: 10/13/15, 8:32 AM
To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]>
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Vasilis Kostakis* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 8:18 PM Subject: P2P Lab: Papers, Call & Plans for 2016 To:
Dear colleagues and friends,
In this email you may find links to the published work of the P2P Lab collaborators & fellows for 2015. You may also find of interest our call for visiting scholars as well as our plans for 2016.
Best, Vasilis Kostakis *------------*
-- Eric Hunting [email protected]