> >Who are the producers who make these decisions?
>
> The people who work in a workplace. I'm in a small software company. We
> would all get together and say, OK, I'll work so many hours and I promise
> to get these projects done, etc. After this meeting, the company as a
> whole can say, we will finish 2 new programs this period which will do the
> following things, etc. This is what gets submitted.
For small, self-selected groups of professionals, this can work, provided there's an existing public space you can latch on to (the freeware movement and those lovely, lush Federal subsidies of our information/computer net). But what about giant corporations like Intel? A chip plant runs $2 billion or more nowadays and involves the collaborative efforts of thousands of people. How does exchange get regulated when Fujitsu, say, produces a better, cheaper chip than Intel and people start buying the former, thus completely throwing the existing production and consumption plans out of whack?
> One of the goals of ParEcon was to come up with a system that
> recognizes, specifically, that preferences are socially produced
> and to deal with this fact in an appropriate manner. This is why
> A/H propose to make qualitative information
> on how products are produced publicly available. Prices just can't get
> across ideas like working conditions or waste disposal procedures.
This is an excellent idea. You'd want to create a kind of informatic public space, where the data and information are freely available to all -- starting with the CIA and Pentagon archives, of course (I keep telling myself it won't happen in my lifetime, but ya gotta dream). This would fit nicely with the democratization of the mass media, i.e. genuinely public TV, the reigning in of the media multinationals, etc.
-- Dennis