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For more information on the NGS visit www.ngs.org.uk The main charities supported are: Macmillan Cancer Support; Marie Curie Cancer Care; Help the Hospices.

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Paul Krugman, also in the IHT, is somewhat naive if he thinks that we are entering merely an era of scarce, expensive oil. This is more than an era. The buried sunlight that we like to burn is running out. Scarcity is the true reality. It’s more than Half Gone. Not only is the raw material that we are critically addicted to becoming more expensive as it becomes increasingly scarce, feeding our addiction in consuming oil is one of the major causes of global warming.

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Abstract: The dynamic between free-software and open-source is often misunderstood by social and political theorists. As a consequence it is also under-theorised within socio-political theory. In this paper, I show how philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes have engendered new forms of socio-political consumption and new political economies of meaning. My emphasis on the interplay between the local and the global/structure and agency, shows new ways of ‘thinking’ the cosmopolitan, sedimented in the interconnected networks of the technical age. My thesis is concerned with our present moment of opportunity. I believe that positive possibilities for politics and political economy are presented in the philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes. In this paper I will demonstrate the contribution of these new socio-political categories and the new politics that is being ‘made public’ because of free/libre hacking.

Available online as web/HTML, as PDF (6×9 format, sorry, A4 coming) and as printed book from lulu.com. I also plan to put this up on my wiki.

I am going to continue my research and writing in this area over the coming year. I’m particularly interested in exploring free/libre and peer production, Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful economics and Benkler and Nissenbaum’s notion of virtue in free/libre (see Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue).

Here is my New Radical Political Economy paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. Here is the web HTML version, and this is the PDF version for download.

For the Liberalism and Its Critics course I wrote a paper on Communitarian criticisms of liberalism. The paper considers the various arguments with liberal theory and liberal practice that communitarian critics hold. My view is that there are indeed a number of strong communitarian critiques of liberal individualism, critiques that are more than an expression of dissatisfaction by disaffected liberals. Here is the web HTML version, and this is the PDF version for download.

The full paper is available as a PDF. As soon as I’ve got my LaTeX/HTML conversion working I’ll post that too.

MySociety are the people behind the great web tools TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP and FixMyStreet (a project similar to one comwifinet were hacking up in the distant past…)

I’ve just been emailed about mySociety’s ‘Free Our Bills’ Campaign. Please go and add your weight to the call for Parliament to publish these documents which are a crucial part of the process of making law in a way that is sensitive to the electronic use over the internet.

David ‘web’ Cameron has already endorsed the campaign. But I’m not about to give his site linkage, so you’ll have to find the video via The All Seeing Eye.

I’ve also just found the beta test version of whatdotheyknow.com which aims to provide a public searchable repository of Freedom of Information Act requests made to public bodies. GREAT IDEA! Now the information made public in FoI requests is made public in a much wider sense. The site is open and searchable. The site helps people to make Freedom Of Information Act requests of public bodies, reminds you when the request is timing out (not that it will of course, our public bodies are quick of the mark with these sort of things!) and make all the information in the request public.

Praise is due.

For some feature enhancements I’d recommend adding something that will take any attachments and process them so they are readable. These public bodies, especially councils, have a habit of replying to electronic messages in the fashion of material messages. It amuses me greatly to see a properly formatted letter, typed out in a word processor… attached to an email with a message saying ‘please read the attachment’. bonkers. So if whatdotheyknow.com could process attachments and display them in the webpage as well as giving us the files to download, that would be great!

I’m going to use that defense to cover any statements extracted from me using dubious/borderline interrogation techniques.