Peer2Politics

The P2P Lab is an independent media lab interested in interdisciplinary research on free/open source technologies and practices.

Our mission is to:

• strive for integrative insights on the open technologies and the peer-to-peer practices.
• provide consultancy support to organisations and institutions regarding open technologies and relevant socio-economic trends.
• produce innovative, global techno-economic solutions to local problems.
• write, edit and publish articles, reports and books in the diverse range of topics we investigate.
• organise open events for reflection and action as well as to educate people about critical and creative tools for society-changing.

We are constantly on the look-out for co-operation on interesting projects.

• "There are over 400 cities in the world today with a population of more than one million urban residents and close to 20 cities with a population of more than 10 million. Indeed, over half the world’s population now lives in cities, and by 2050 seventy percent of the world’s population will live in cities. This remarkable urban growth has created vast policy and planning challenges related to infrastructure, governance and environmental sustainability. Examining the relationship between “smart cities” and civil society, this collection explores the contours of a new era in urban design.

"There are over 400 cities in the world today with a population of more than one million urban residents and close to 20 cities with a population of more than 10 million. Indeed, over half the world’s population now lives in cities, and by 2050 seventy percent of the world’s population will live in cities. This remarkable urban growth has created vast policy and planning challenges related to infrastructure, governance and environmental sustainability. Examining the relationship between “smart cities” and civil society, this collection explores the contours of a new era in urban design.

"Anonymity is nothing new in cities. What is more unusual and perhaps even contradictory is the convergence of sociability and anonymity in the city. Through an analysis of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, we consider the growing value of systems for sharing and combining individual efforts on the Internet into collective tasks. If we look at the historical development of relationality, this may lead us to challenge any simplistic identification of P2P collaboration with anonymity. What is the potential of P2P for urban development, democratization and innovation? P2P has to be seen as an objectoriented sociality, where person-fragments cooperate around the creation of common value. What connects individuals who participate in open and shared knowledge? How does this collaborative logic seen in software and design projects connect individuals to some transcendental collective goal? How might building a universal operating system, constructing a universal free encyclopedia or constructing an open source car reshape the way we construct our cities?"