I just updated the “Compendium of hubs for commons-based peer production 4Dev”, which is hosted on this site. By adding the “Low-tech Lab”, I now count fourteen hubs and repositories. If you are aware of any other hub, please let me know. Check out the compendium here.
Open innovation – often based on open licensing and commons-approaches – is changing the business models of more and more businesses and social institutions. Before the advent of open innovation, innovation was kept within the boundaries of the firm (or research institution). In contrast, “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and […]
In previous blog entries, I talked a lot about commons-based peer production and learning in areas crucial to development cooperation such as Energy, Health, Education etc. A key question then is where to find such “free knowledge” for open innovation and for peer-production in the different sectors of human development? I have collected an annotated compendium […]
Some critics argue that commons-based peer production and learning only apply in the digital, non-real world (“building websites”, “building online training material”). The concept, they say, is therefore less of interest to international and development cooperation, which focuses on non-digital environments and “hard” topics such as health, energy or agriculture. Jaime from Bolivia and John […]
Frank Tilugulilwa is an IT trainer in Tanzania. He teaches local IT companies how to build services and revenues around so-called “Free and Open Source Software”. Such software can be copied and modified by every company and every individual client. Frank has written a training manual with over 80 other IT trainers and experts throughout […]
In the field of online sharing and learning, the “Massive Open Online Course” (“MOOC”) has received a lot of attention. Many are enthusiastic about what elite universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Harvard are piloting. The two schools have offered joint online courses that have attracted well over 100,000 […]
Why do peers help peers to share and co-produce knowledge? Research suggests that there is a whole set of motivations that makes people share their knowledge, a mixture between altruistic and self-serving motives summed up in the following table: 14 Reasons Why Peers Help Peers to Learn: Why Do They Share Their Knowledge? (Table 1) […]
The Internet and with it the rise of social networks have enabled a radically innovative way of producing knowledge-related goods. Software can now be jointly written by thousands of developers as the operating system ‘Linux’ shows. The encyclopedia Wikipedia is updated by roughly 1.7 million contributors worldwide. Law professor Yochai Benkler has coined the term […]
Today, I invite you to join the conversation on an article, which I just published on the issue of “Learning by sharing – how global communities cultivate skills and capacity through peer-production of knowledge“. I posit in this paper, that commons-based peer learning offers a trigger to enhance skills, competencies, connections, capacities, and the agency […]
The Stanford Social Innovation Review just published an article on “Open Innovation: A Muse for Scaling” – Good chances, that this paper will become my personal “favorite article of 2012”. Why? Well, the paper manages to explain in just two pages and in plain words, why open innovation has the potential to drastically increase the […]
So I am listening to the speakers of the panel “Learning is a two-way street: Participation in Communication and Education” of this years’ “Global Media Forum” of Deutsche Welle. And I keep thinking that the speakers on the panel seem to describe another case of a “stolen concept” here: Kanchan Malik from India’s University of […]
The it@inwent team recently added a new section to their website. This sites provides an overview of InWEnt’s main capacity building programmes and trainings in the area of “FOSS Business Models and Sustainable Development” as well as its respective training materials. Co-Editor Balthas Seibold explains that “business models based on FOSS offer great potential for […]
Knowledge Powers Development was the overarching theme of this year’s Eschborn dialoge, a discussion forum bringing together most of Germany’s development community. Balthas Seibold was a panellist of the workshop “WWW and knowledge – free access to knowledge as the basis for education and economic development”. His credo: New technologies and techniques such as “Free […]
After three exciting years as an Associate Expert at UNESCO, Balthas Seibold is going to take up new challenges in Germany: As of September, he will be working with InWEnt in Bonn, a German development agency in the field of capacity building and training. A senior project manager for programmes on “ICT for Development”, he […]