exercism.io seems like a nice approach to learning to code in new languages where you solve problems and get advice from a mentor on your solution.

Trouble is that for elisp the mentors seem to be AWOL…

Bookmarked Decentralising geographies of political action: Civic Tech and place-based municipalism (The Journal of Peer Production)

This article introduces the concept of ‘place-based civic tech’ — citizen engagement technology codesigned by local government, civil society and global volunteers. It investigates to what extent creating such a digital space for autonomous self-organization allows for the emergence of a parallel, self-determining and more place-based geography of politics and political action.

‘For this reason, commons are not merely social spaces in which work and life might unfold in richer, more autonomous and sustainable ways beyond the scope of capital; the commons are also sites in which critique and resistance have the potential to develop’.

http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-13-open/open-access-bouillabaisse/ephemera-the-commons-and-their-impossibilities/

(Gotta chuckle though that the paper looks to be written in Microsoft Word…)

At first blush there feels like some overlap between the Viable System Model and Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework.

In that they both approach structures from a multi-level conceptual map, with units acting autonomously at each level but communicating between them. The polycentrism thing.

Would be interesting to compare and contrast them.

Also the Liberty Machine sounds pretty fun:

‘a sociotechnical system that functioned as a disseminated network, not a hierarchy’

‘treated information, not authority, as the basis for action’

‘prevented top-down tynranny by creating a distributed network of shared information’.

First introduction to the Viable System Model: ‘a general model that he believed balanced centralized and decentralized forms of control in organizations’.

I know nothing of the details, but the general overview sounds pretty good so far: ‘It offered a balance between centralized and decentralized control that prevented both the tyranny of authoritarianism and the chaos of total freedom.’

A mixture of horizontal autonomy with channels for vertical communication and stabilisation.