Dear Webheads,

Michel Bauwens is at the center of a loose global network of amateur and professional innovators in the field peer-to-peer (i.e. grassroots) collaboration. He's someone anyone interested in this area should hear and meet, and his talk will attract some interesting folks that you might not otherwise meet. I highly recommend this lecture.

Read on for Michel's full bio, and the lecture topic.

Best,
Matt Cooperrider

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Michel Bauwens is an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has been an analyst for the United States Information Agency, knowledge manager for British Petroleum, eBusiness Strategy Manager for Belgacom, as well as an internet entrepreneur in his home country of Belgium. He has co-produced the 3-hour TV documentary Technocalyps with Frank Theys, and co-edited the two-volume book on anthropology of digital society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is currently Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008). He currently lives with his family in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

About the talk:

Network Civilization: Peer-to-Peer and the Rise of Green Capitalism

Just as the three quarters of oil engineers now agree that Peak Oil is in sight within the next decade (after that, oil production can only decline), can we also posit that we may have reached a moment of Peak Hierarchy, a moment in history in which it is no longer large centralized organizations that are most efficient or productive, but rather those that are organized as distributed networks and can draw on peer producting communities?

This is the thesis explored by the P2P Foundation, a global network of researchers investigating the emergence of peer production, governance and property, showing how this new 'hyperproductive' mode of producing value is out-competing and out-collaborating traditional organizations. Such a change will have huge implications for society, business, and education. The election victory of Barack Obama, and his program of green capitalism, opens up, because it cannot succeed without huge strides in participation, the possibility of a 'high road' transition towards a peer to peer society, based on the voluntary aggregation of productive communities united around the creation of common value.

How would our society function, if Linux and Wikipedia were not just emergent, but the model of a new type of institutions residing in the core of our economy and politics?