Date archives "April 2010"

The Fair Tracing project

Very interesting project: The aim of the Fair Tracing project is to support Ethical Trade by implementing IT Tracking and Tracing Technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information. Details: “The Fair Tracing project, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant number EP/E009018/1, aims to help… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Escape Routes (2): What is postliberal sovereignity?

Book: Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson & Vassilis Tsianos. London: Pluto Press, (2008) We presented this book here. Today, our excerpt discusses a new form of power in the network age. Excerpt: “Postliberal sovereignty is neither a substitute, nor an alternative, nor the next stage of transnational… Continue reading

Beyond Left and Right: Peer-to-Peer themes and urban priorities for the self-organizing society. By Nikos A. Salingaros

Nikos Salingaros, p2p architect and urbanist, has reacted with an extensive essay on my earlier article on the topic of: can progressives and conservatives work together around p2p themes?. The full version of the essay, with notes, a bibliography and a a review of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, is here on our wiki. In this… Continue reading

The transformation of community activism into economic activism and the revival of cooperatives in the U.S.

From a report on the California Center for Cooperative Development conference by Bernard Marszalek: “Worker cooperatives, food stores and housing co-ops are a tiny sector of the America economy, but community activists are beginning to recognize their importance. As activists across the country move beyond a resistance strategy with essentially minor victories, to proposals for… Continue reading

OpenCourseWare: IS OPENNESS ENOUGH?

A repost from Golpe de e-Estado “Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds” This is the lemma of the OpenCourseWare, or OCW, an initiative pioneered by the MIT University to provide access to university educational contents for free and ubiquitously. The project started modestly in 2002 with 50 courses published online. Now the OpenCourseWare Consortium entails hundreds of… Continue reading

Seettu in Sri Lanka: (Neo)traditional finance against neoliberalism

Source: Why is finance critical? A dialogue with a women’s community in Sri Lanka. Ishani Chandrasekara. Ephemeraweb, volume 9(4): 300-317 Abstract of recommended article: “The burst of the bubble has given momentum to the search of escape routes from the current transnational financial system and its underlying principles. For the past century, the transnational financial… Continue reading

Commons, Market, Capital and State (7): water commons, community and state (part two)

The article by Massimo de Angelis, of which we published the first part, then discusses in detail the local situation in different communities after attending a water fair, and adds a number of important conclusions: Part 2: A “resource pool” is the first constituent element of a commons, the others being a community and commoning…. Continue reading

Book: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Book: DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. Amy Kamenetz. Chelsea Green, 2010 The excerpt below, by author Amy Kamenetz, was published in Reality Sandwich, This excerpt is about the “edupunks,” the radicals who want to liberate scholarship and learning from the constraints of institutions altogether. I also call them the… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century

The central question of Escape Routes sounds quite simple: ‘How does social transformation begin?’ But the answer that the book provides is provocative and contests many dominant explanations of social change: according to the authors it is not the brimming revolutionary events occupying the imagination of the left that capture the mechanics of social transformation… Continue reading