By Robert Link, 30 weeks 3 days ago.

Follow CoCo on twitter.

By Robert Link, 30 weeks 4 days ago.

From the triple C home page:

The Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society provides a forum to discuss the challenges humanity is facing today.

It promotes contributions within an emerging science of the information age with a special interest in critical studies following the highest standards of peer review.

By Robert Link, 31 weeks 1 day ago.

From the text: "Reputation is a surrogate — a partial reflection representing our "best educated guess" of the underlying true state of affairs. Active evaluation by looking behind surface signals can corroborate or disprove reputations, while indiscriminate use degrades their reliability. The challenge is to encourage active evaluation,

By Robert Link, 31 weeks 6 days ago.

From the text: "...copying information actually multiplies the available resources, not only by making a new physical copy but by spreading the idea and therefore permitting others to use and enjoy it. The result is that rather than a tragedy, an information commons is a “comedy” in which everyone benefits. The notion that information will be depleted by overuse simply ignores basic economics...It is not that free riding won’t occur with information goods; to the contrary, it is ubiquitous. Everyone can use E=mc2, the words of Shakespeare, or the idea of the tragedy of the commons without compensating their creators."

By Robert Link, 1 year 23 weeks ago.

Not the first time I've been late to the party, and if you haven't already seen Howard's 2005 TED Talk, take a look now.

Around minute 9 Howard says,

"The fundamental basis of neo-classic economics would tell you it's irrational to reject a dollar because somebody you don't know in another room is going to get ninety-nine."

By Robert Link, 1 year 29 weeks ago.

P2P Foundation has announced an Open Everything topic area at the P2P Foundation wiki, and CoCo is pleased to spread the word. From the Open Everything home page:

Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open...Open is changing the game. And, while Wikipedia and open source software offer great examples of what's up, we know that openness, collaboration and participation are spreading well beyond the realm of technology. It's about value, and values. Where open is headed is huge. Open Everything gathers people who are charting this trajectory.

By Robert Link, 1 year 35 weeks ago.

The Best Place to Store My Catch is In My Neighbor's Belly

Still early in the video, Howard introduces a pivotal idea, which I will paraphrase as, "Cooperation is reinforced by surplus." This certainly seems reasonable. When hunter-gatherers were able to bag big game, such as mastodon, there was surplus, and perishable surplus at that. So the question of how best to utilize that surplus became important. And the answer would seem to be "invest it where it will likely be reciprocated".

By Robert Link, 1 year 36 weeks ago.

In conversation elsewhere I've had cause to discuss the writings of game theorist and mathematical psychologist (and peace activist) Anatol Rappoport. This, in turn, set me surfing. I was agog to read on one page that Rappoport was, allegedly, "most famous" for submitting the Tit-for-Tat strategy in Axelrod's Iterated Prisoners Dilemma tournament. However, Rappoport's work significantly pre-dates Axelrod and arguably prefiures it.

By Robert Link, 1 year 38 weeks ago.

Cory Doctorow's acerbic essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia came up in conversation today, and I thought that a good excuse to revisit this short gem. Here's a pull quote which goes to the heart of the argument:

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

What does this kind of attitude mean for folks interested in cooperation?

By Robert Link, 1 year 38 weeks ago.

I found a text on line today, but it probably isn't authorized by the rights holder. I wrote a letter to the likely rights holder, notifying her of the existence of this on line version of the text, but pleading with her to not cause it to be removed.

Had I not blown the whistle it might have lived quietly for quite some time and would likely propagate beyond the rights holder's ability to prevent. My long term purposes would be well served by such propagation and thus perhaps I should have let the matter lie. Yet I felt a duty to the author, a man I never met, for I refer to this work incessantly. I've bought many copies over the years, mostly to give to others. But the ideas expressed in that work are arguably better advanced by my doing nothing.

My fall back answer to a quandary such as this is "concurrent games".