MessageHi MIke I agree with you in some points. Absolutely agree in the circular and academic arguments of the article (you know, "experts", they must show their wisdom and scope of knowledge) and in the little engaging with your discussion. But I was interested not so much in the deterministic assumptions but in the idea of being working with theoretical models that maybe could be outdated to explain this world. I mean, Michels, the concept of oligarchies, the idea of hierarchies, the idea tha afer a revolution, the net bevame a oligarchy.... My point is that we, probably, need another quite different categories to explain the changing world around us in all orders (politics, society, business, literature), but this categories shoud be pragmatics and updated. For example, Do we need traditional structures to keep stability and equilibrium? and what about after a period of turbulence? (traditional political parties, trade unions, periods of 4 years between elections are useful or not?) or if it´s possible to build this up with the use of ICT´s and p2p categories?, but Which one? I´strongly agree with the point of selfconsciousness of the arab people. There is a new mental paradigm about the idea of getting big things together, but alone at the same time. I mean together as citizens, men and women of all religions but at the same time alone with the traditional supporters (Western countries. Just words (not even words in the UE case ) but no real/factual support at all). On the other hand Mike I Think we need some kind of model to understand the dynamics of p2p development and that drives us again to be part of the model (but not in a deterministic way) Lot of mess anyway Best Pedro ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Gurstein To: 'Pedro Gioya' ; 'P2P Foundation mailing list' Cc: 'p2p-foundation' ; 'Dougald Hine' Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 11:22 PM Subject: RE: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? Hi Pedro, Thanks for pointing to this... I was aware of Zeynep's paper but frankly could see little point in engaging directly with that discussion. To my mind Michel (and Zeynep's) arguments are essentially academic (in the worst sense) and self-fulfilling/circular... Any social movement will "inevitably" do such and such, why, because at some point they stop being movements and therefore need to transition to something else and that something else is by definition structured and thus "oligarchic" or whatever. (The arguments are "academic" in that the terms on which the discussion is engaged are self-defined and thus the subsequent discussion is limited within these definitions and of course, that being the case the author can prove whatever they choose to prove (Alice's argument with the Queen in Alice in Wonderland)--the result to my mind is a similar result to most such academic arguments--the author shows themselves to be both clever and irrelevant!) Zeynep's paper is rather cleverer than most (it at least uses data rather than simply anecdote) but is equally disempowering and in practice preposterous. What would be the consequences for action in Egypt if the active agents were to take the argument seriously... They would all go home and leave the field to Mubarek since why bother to waste blood replacing one oligarchy with another. My point was rather something different that is, what can we learn from what was done that can be transferred forward into the process of reconstruction... There will of course, need to be stability and structures of some sort but there is one (and perhaps two) differences from previous revolutions. The one difference is the use of ICTs which allow for some rather profoundly different/transformational organizational processes. The second partial difference is that there is now a "memory" or self-consciousness concerning the failures of previous revolutions and with this self-consciousness comes the possibility of overcoming this--I don't believe that anything is social behaviour is inevitable! and neither should anyone who is in any sense involved with or sympathetic to the idea of p-2-p! Best, Mike Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Director: Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training Vancouver, CANADA http://www.communityinformatics.net CA tel. +1-604-602-0624 -----Original Message----- From: Pedro Gioya [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 5:30 PM To: P2P Foundation mailing list; Michael Gurstein Cc: p2p-foundation; Dougald Hine Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? Hi Look at this post on the same issue but with different perspective (Sure you know, but anyway....) http://technosociology.org/?p=366 Pedro ----- Original Message ----- From: Michel Bauwens To: Michael Gurstein Cc: p2p-foundation ; Dougald Hine Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 6:52 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? This is really brilliant Michael and I warmly recommend it to our listmembers, Michel On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Michael Gurstein <[email protected]> wrote: Michel, I think this is one that you will find interesting... M --------------------------------------------- http://wp.me/pJQl5-5Z "In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that is-the Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important, the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective social ends." -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

Hi Michel, Thanks very much for the below and I must confess to not having read the comments on Zeynep's original post. I found the comments, particularly those of "Parliament of Things" more or less directly parallel to my own thoughts. I've never had a lot of interest in network analysis or network theory--thinking about it. I realize that the reason for this is that to my mind network analysis is a way of avoiding class or (in my case) community analysis where the issues are not simply about analysis but also about social change ("networks" are to "communities" (or P2P?) as "social and economic status" (SES) is to "class"--I go into this in a bit more depth in my little book "What is Community Informatics..." http://www.docstoc.com/MyDocuments/ ("Networks" in this approach, at least as presented in "network analysis" are statistical constructs a la SES and bear little relationship to the lived world of real networks, P2P associations, communities or whatever... The issue is not, I think, some "iron law" (or statistical regularity) but rather what it is that one wants to do and what the best way is of accomplishing it. If one wants the opportunity for democratic participation then there are potential means for achieving this and examples where it has been done. If one believes that P2P relationships are the necessary underpinnings for democratic participation then one can work through ways of realizing these. Of course after the fact it is possible to design analyses that show why one or another approach is more or less useful in achieving the goal (or not), but the pragmatics of moving forward toward the objective are, as several of your commentators pointed to, rather more in the hands of the participants than they are constrained by any kind of social behaviourism. (But maybe that's why I stopped being an academic sociologist 20 years ago or so... :-) Mike -----Original Message----- From: Michel Bauwens [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 9:00 AM . To: P2P Foundation mailing list Cc: Pedro Gioya; Michael Gurstein; Dougald Hine; Paul B. Hartzog Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? Hi Pedro, I follow Zeynep closely and we've covered this particular entry in our blog as well, these are if you will, the two sides of the same coin, and do not necesseraly contradict each other, Michael points out the real changes that took place through the use of these media, and their further potential, while Zeynep points to the dangers that do not just come from outside, but from within the peer to peer dynamic itself from the blog, http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/preferential-attachment-in-p2p-networks-is-tha t-really-the-issue/2011/02/21 but especially this: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/debating-the-iron-law-of-bureaucracy-and-the-p ower-law-knowing-networks-as-an-alternative-to-scale-free-networks/2011/02/1 8 Paul Hartzog also had a comment on this, Michel On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 3:30 AM, Pedro Gioya <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Look at this post on the same issue but with different perspective (Sure you know, but anyway....) http://technosociology.org/?p=366 Pedro ----- Original Message ----- From: Michel Bauwens <mailto:[email protected]> To: Michael Gurstein <mailto:[email protected]> Cc: p2p-foundation <mailto:[email protected]> ; Dougald <mailto:[email protected]> Hine Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 6:52 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? This is really brilliant Michael and I warmly recommend it to our listmembers, Michel On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Michael Gurstein <[email protected]> wrote: Michel, I think this is one that you will find interesting... M --------------------------------------------- http://wp.me/pJQl5-5Z "In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that is-the Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important, the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective social ends." -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens _____ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Hi Michel, Pedro and everyone, I really don't want to launch into an on-going discussion of epistemologies here but I think that much of sociology and sociological (read network in this instance) analysis (now) suffers from precisely the same sets of issues as those of classical economics i.e. that once one accepts certain assumptions everything else flows forward with a smooth consistency until the system confronts reality and then the whole thing is demonstrated as being the ideological mind game that it is... The necessary process of reconstruction has to begin either from a philosophical or a practical critique of those assumptions (the best situation is when both are done at the same time)... Accepting these "approaches" as "theoretical insights" is I think rather in the form of choosing a particularly insightful monetarist theory to explain and thus provide a strategy in response to the recent/current financial crisis--the problem isn't in the theory but in the assumptions (and thus the overall conceptual structure) on which it is based. So, to my mind looking for insights useful to for example the p2p project in network analysis leads inevitably to the profoundly disempowering, cynical and ultimately ideological and wrong headed (and misdirectional) analysis that Zeynab's "analysis" presents. M -----Original Message----- From: Michel Bauwens [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 6:31 PM To: Michael Gurstein Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list; Pedro Gioya; Dougald Hine; Paul B. Hartzog Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? Hi Michael, I completelely agree with the critique of the reductionist aspects of network theory, which removes human intentionality from its considerations. Nevertheless, even from our point of view of human emancipation and how to get there, seeing that some structures and network topologies are more likely than others to result in hierarchical solidification, is of paramount interest. Seen in this way, network theory insights, divorced from their philosopical reductionism, can be very useful, But you are right, people like Martin Luther King or Gandhi didn't ask themselves, what are all the reasons why we will fail, but how can we overcome the obstacles, Michel On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 8:07 PM, Michael Gurstein <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Michel, Thanks very much for the below and I must confess to not having read the comments on Zeynep's original post. I found the comments, particularly those of "Parliament of Things" more or less directly parallel to my own thoughts. I've never had a lot of interest in network analysis or network theory--thinking about it. I realize that the reason for this is that to my mind network analysis is a way of avoiding class or (in my case) community analysis where the issues are not simply about analysis but also about social change ("networks" are to "communities" (or P2P?) as "social and economic status" (SES) is to "class"--I go into this in a bit more depth in my little book "What is Community Informatics..." http://www.docstoc.com/MyDocuments/ ("Networks" in this approach, at least as presented in "network analysis" are statistical constructs a la SES and bear little relationship to the lived world of real networks, P2P associations, communities or whatever... The issue is not, I think, some "iron law" (or statistical regularity) but rather what it is that one wants to do and what the best way is of accomplishing it. If one wants the opportunity for democratic participation then there are potential means for achieving this and examples where it has been done. If one believes that P2P relationships are the necessary underpinnings for democratic participation then one can work through ways of realizing these. Of course after the fact it is possible to design analyses that show why one or another approach is more or less useful in achieving the goal (or not), but the pragmatics of moving forward toward the objective are, as several of your commentators pointed to, rather more in the hands of the participants than they are constrained by any kind of social behaviourism. (But maybe that's why I stopped being an academic sociologist 20 years ago or so... :-) Mike -----Original Message----- From: Michel Bauwens [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 9:00 AM . To: P2P Foundation mailing list Cc: Pedro Gioya; Michael Gurstein; Dougald Hine; Paul B. Hartzog Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? Hi Pedro, I follow Zeynep closely and we've covered this particular entry in our blog as well, these are if you will, the two sides of the same coin, and do not necesseraly contradict each other, Michael points out the real changes that took place through the use of these media, and their further potential, while Zeynep points to the dangers that do not just come from outside, but from within the peer to peer dynamic itself from the blog, http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/preferential-attachment-in-p2p-networks-is-tha t-really-the-issue/2011/02/21 but especially this: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/debating-the-iron-law-of-bureaucracy-and-the-p ower-law-knowing-networks-as-an-alternative-to-scale-free-networks/2011/02/1 8 Paul Hartzog also had a comment on this, Michel On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 3:30 AM, Pedro Gioya <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Look at this post on the same issue but with different perspective (Sure you know, but anyway....) http://technosociology.org/?p=366 Pedro ----- Original Message ----- From: Michel Bauwens <mailto:[email protected]> To: Michael Gurstein <mailto:[email protected]> Cc: p2p-foundation <mailto:[email protected]> ; Dougald <mailto:[email protected]> Hine Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 6:52 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels? This is really brilliant Michael and I warmly recommend it to our listmembers, Michel On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Michael Gurstein <[email protected]> wrote: Michel, I think this is one that you will find interesting... M --------------------------------------------- http://wp.me/pJQl5-5Z "In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that is-the Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important, the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective social ends." -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens _____ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens