[P2P-F] why did the p2p blog attack open sources ecologies on April 1 2013?

[Gordon Cook]

Michel or whomever wrote this?  whatever were you thinking?  I will publish a 45 page report on them in about two weeks.  Has anyone in the p2p community paid them a visit in the past 15 months? You attempted to sign their death knell by talking the 6 most nasty comments out of 82 on their public forum very much out of context.  Did you ask anyone what had happened or did you just grab only the most negative of the malcontents remarks?  You have an item in your wiki on them that also features the nasty attack of april1 2013.  Why?  Do you want them dead?  You have the added flourish of ethical issues 
6.1 Ethical Issues at OSE
there have been repeated departures at the compound you claim and list five entries - 3 related to the same 2009 incident and two related to march 2013
why?

have you ever stopped to think what could now be written about YOU in ecuador and the ethical issues in the way you presented that project?

I spent a half a day at factor e farm obj june 25.  The place was thriving.  OSE is perhaps as popular or more so than P2p.  Is  the world not big enough for you both?  You took the worst writing of people who felt burned by their experience and when some said of their compatriots said in effect that the worst criticism were exaggerated and where there were some defenders as well as critics of marcin and you presented only the dark side… WHY?

were you ever curious about what happened to him?  I was….   and he learned from the problems that his attempt to push ahead too rapidly in 2012 caused.  Did you?

what follows is a partial draft of my exec summary for the FeF issue.  I am trying to do due diligence here and asking you to comment just incase i misinterpreted something.  Will you?





April 1 2013 Michel Bauwens P2P Foundation Blog posted an item called “crisis at open source ecologies”  see http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Ecology   and http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-there-a-crisis-in-open-source-ecology/2013/04/01 that described the third mass leaving in the organizations history with the conclusion this time there would be bad press and the organization’s sources of funding would dry up and it would likely not survive, I was extremely disappointed.  At that point in time i had no way of checking for myself. Also prior to Bauwens’ Ecuador fiasco I had no reason not to believe what he wrote.  Consequently I put it out of my mind until in June of this year, when visiting Kansas City, it also became possible to visit Marcin.

Fifteen months after Bauwens’ report, Marcin was still very much in business.  I made it my objective to find out as best i could what had happened. There was a crisis.  But it seems not to have been as grim as Bauwens described it. My best conclusion follows: in 2011 Marcin had another Ted appearance where the video truly went viral and he became a senior Ted fellow got some serious monetary support.  This led Marcin to develop an very ambitious schedule to pursue about 3.5 million in funding to embark on a schedule that would finish all the tools within two years.  Marcin began to spend a lot of the time away from the “farm”.  Two of the three of his lead designers rebelled.  Although the Hab Lab and Workshop construction had begun, life at the farm was physically difficult. Finally in March of 2013 in the OSE Forum someone announced that it had become very quiet lately and asked what was gong on.  

This prompted an outpouring of grievances all written in the month of March 2013. In my interview with Marcin I tried to find out his take on what had happened.  Marcin was quite candid, especially considering the fact that I had not located the original P2P blog piece by the time of the visit and was gong on memory. As Marcin explained it a major part of the problem was that they did not have a business model.  But they were developing one that involved a slower and more deliberate pace of builds focused on workshops held at the farm and also focused on profit sharing with the developer.  Based on what i saw and have documents with photos that I took, I can say that it seems to me that he has a solid infrastructure in place that should very adequately support the plans he described.

One thing that I do not understand and is somewhat tangential to the overall issue is the role of Michel Bauwens in using material from OSE’s forum to savagely attack it. The way the page is formatted it appears as though the comment about 3rd leaving is written by Michel as his introduction.  It is not.  It is a quote from one of the complainers.  Michel’s post is made-up of 6 quoted excerpts from the forum. Six comments out of 82. It appears to me that he choose the nastiest 6 quotes in the while discussion.  Why I don’t know. What he was thinking i don’t know.  There were several positive quotes.  Michel used none and provided no context for what he was doing.  Very strange when 5 years earlier he had written about Marcin with gushing praise.  “The most important project in the world of which i am aware . . .”   Did he ask anyone in his rather large group for opinions or for independent information?  Not that I know of.

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