Michel Bauwens at Lift Austria | Enable
Friday, March 19th, 2010
I am in Vienna attending a Lift@home event organized by a local team of entrepreneurs and academics. Second talk of the day is Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives founder Michel Bauwens. John Thakara pointed in advance to this talk, he was right. Michel put some words on things “you don’t need a PHD to notice” but that, brought together in such a comprehensive way, connect into something powerful: a name for this movement most early adopters are feeling without being able to explain it further.
2 fundamentally wrong assumptions in our society:
- We think earth resources are infinite. But an infinite thinking within a finite system is wrong.
- We think we have to make cooperation difficult to make collaboration happen.There is now a conscience that these assumptions need to change, and collaboration and openness are a key answer. Steps to make this happen:
1. identifying key aspects of openess (participation, transparency, “shareability”, access)
2. finding enablers of openness (a common language, assets, etc): definitions, code, licences, standards
3. infrastructures of openness: open meeting spaces, open territories (Regiowiki), open hardware (Arduino), open objects (eCars - Now), etc.
4. Practices of openness: open software (Linux), open designs (Honeybee Network), open knowledge
5. Domains of openness: education, science, business, government, spirituality (interesting to imaginea user generated religion…)
6. Products of openness: Open course ware, open books, open journals
7. Open movements: OpenMaterials, OpenCoalition
8. Open consciousness…
You can see Michel’s talk as a mind map here.

Lift@home
When the idea came up, we thought “wow, this is really innovative and smart”. But quickly we found out that we had not invented anything: 



