Suggested Speakers 2015

P2P Society

This track explores how new enabler technologies change basic things (like "money" and "food") in society, by creating and establishing new and decentralized platforms of services, information flows, organizations and production processes. These new enabler techs are more like new "social operating systems" rather than single technologies.

Manuel Lains & Christian Lains: Bitshares & Bitcoin 2.0: The blockchain as platform and Ecosystem.

Bitshares as an example of "Bitcoin 2.0", and how blockchain technology can be used as a new platform for a lot of other services than just money/currency. The development and emergence of an entire ecosystem based on blockchain technologies."

Myriam Bouret: The Open Food Network: How open source can change the way we buy food.

Food distribution systems are not transparent: Where does the food you buy in the supermarket come from? How many intermediates have taken their margin on it? How much goes into the farmers pocket? How have the products been grown? More and more alternatives are offering alternative distribution systems to both conscious consumers and committed farmers: CSA buying clubs, food cooperatives, consumers and producers start to organize themselves to invent a new - and sense-making - distribution system. But it's hard to build and organize a community, and you need tools to be able to buy as a group. The idea of the Open Food Network project is: what if instead of each community having to find, pay for, customize, a licensed solution, we could all mutualize our energies and money to build a platform that will answer the needs of all our communities, and make it easier for the next communities to start in order to scale up the emergence of this new distribution system?

Patrice Riemens: The pitfalls of Bitcoin and the many potentials of blockchain technologies.

The limitations of Bitcoin are partly technical, and partly due to the political economy of Bitcoin within the wider context of the current crisis in financial capitalism. Blockchain technologies are promoted as enabling a lot of new potential solutions to current economic, social, and political problems. These changes and solutions will be considered within a framework of politics, ideology, sociology, economics -- and even economic and financial history thrown in for good measure.

Patrice Riemens has been the Fellow of the Waag Society in Amsterdam, is a promoter of Open Knowledge and Free Software, has been involved as a "FLOSSopher" (a 'philosopher' of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movements). He is also a member of the staff of Multitudes, and was a founding member of the Dutch Hacker Movement ("Hippies From Hell").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Riemens http://p2pfoundation.net/Patrice_Riemens http://hippies.waag.org/