George Dafermos
Lectures / Workshops:
| Open Coding Innovation: A Roadmap to socially - responsible, sustainable economic and technological growth |
Biography
George N. Dafermos is the author of "Management and Virtual Decentralised Networks: The Linux Project", published in First Monday [http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_11/dafermos/]. He is a business graduate from Hertfordshire University and holds two masters' degrees in Management and E-Commerce Applications from the University of Durham Business School,UK and Sunderland University, UK (School of Computing and Technology) where he specialised in Innovation & Technology Management and Online Communities respectively. Most recently, George researches the increasingly central role of virtual communities premised on peer production to the evolving model of capitalism. At the moment, he is consulting the CEO of Datahost [http://datahost.gr] in the formulation of a strategic framework for product development and marketing of an Internetñenabled learning environment, called iLearn, and has embarked on the 'Organis Project' [http://ggpl.org/organis/] which he currently leads together with Professor Carl Vilbrandt (Aizu University,Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), an ambitious, nonetheless pragmatic, effort to create and support a sustainable business plan and virtual networked organisation based on the Greater Good Public License [http://www.ggpl.org]. The GGPL will provide the cornerstone around which an organic style of governance will unfold to harness the development and marketing of libre software and hardware projects. A few of the projects which emerge in alignment with the principles inscribed in the GGPL (environmental sustainability, digital freedom and protection of human rights) is the GNUbook [http://gnubook.org] led by Gerry Gleason, the Mapping Contemporary Capitalism [http://docs.metamute.org/view/Home/McC] led by Jo Walsh, and the Hyperfun F-rep modelling language [http://www.hyperfun.org] led by Alexander Pasko. In essence, the Organis project focuses on laying the foundations on which virtual networked communities of practice will coalesce around a project to form self-sustainable libre software and hardware organisations. George is also invoved in the 'Free People - Free Methods' project [http://www.libroscope.org]. In all, George feels that interacting online with others who share the same interest is quite an exciting journey and is convinced that Libre Software communities hold lessons that extend well beyond the limited scope of software engineering. On these premises, he is exploring the viability of Libre Software development models in other industries and whether their implementation is likely to be fruitful and bring innovative forms of organisational designs into life.