Franz Nahrada’s New Year’s message to the Global Village community is also an excellent review of the state of the movement. Franz Nahrada: I have not written to the communit(ies) for quite a long time and want to give an update on many points concerning GlobalVillages. I try to be short so you can read… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2011"
Rosemary Bechler on Paul Hirst and the Pluralist State
From a long essay reacting to Paul Hirst’s ideas on Associative Democracy, which we excerpted yesterday. Rosemary Bechler: “How could such a competition for community standards be contained and the conflict of competing lifestyle groups, mitigated? The only way to contain the conflicts arising from cultural heterogeneity, he thought, is to extend the principle of… Continue reading
How to achieve sustainable monetary systems?
Excerpted from a longer and illustrated article by Paul Hartzog: “In “Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis”, Bernard Lietaer continues his interest in sustainable monetary systems. This time around he make a tie to complex systems and makes an important contrast between “efficiency” and “resilience”. Lietaer and I have been on the same page… Continue reading
Vote for Thimbl at Drumbeat
Thanks for supporting this free software-based microblogging service, i.e. Thimbl. Instructions and introduction: Thimbl from Telekommunisten on Vimeo. Dmytri Kleiner writes: “As some of you may know, I’ve gotten drawn into the world of social media, and have been hanging around in places like Facebook and Twitter. There are a few reasons for this, one,… Continue reading
Let’s go open-source with digital patterns making
Susan Spencer Conklin is a networker, she’s not a programmer, but knows about programming, she’s not a designer but knows how to sew and in the last months she’s been giving presentations to invite developers to help create a suite of open source software to produce and modify clothing patterns in open data formats to match an individual’s body measurement and generate customized patterns as printable files.
Current applications for pattern making are infact proprietary and expensive, require proprietary operating systems, and on top on that they are not designed to interoperate or give not much control on the creation process. An open source-solution would enable individuals and small labels designers to enter the market with lower investments costs and local markets would flourish more easily being able to share and exchange knowledge.
And it’s not only a matter of business. Schools and educational environment would benefit of a software without paying multiple licenses and students would be involved in the open-source community from the beginning, being able to use it in different and more creative ways.
Serval – Software to network mobile phones
Serval is an open source software allowing to directly link mobile phones. It was developed at Flinders University in Australia and is soon to be released as a free application for Android. (http://www.servalproject.org/) According to its creators, the application will come in handy in disaster situations, when provider links may be down or electricity is… Continue reading
Objections to 100% reserve requirements for private bank lending
Rudo de Ruijter writes: “Raising the capital reserve requirements to 100% will mean the most costful money system you can imagine. We will have to pay enormeous interest rates to allow the banks enough benefits to build up such a capital. The banks would have the equivalent of all money as capital. Just think a… Continue reading
Neal Gorenflo: Radicality and moderation in the struggle for the construction of commons
Full copy of the editorial text by Neal Gorenflo at Shareable: (This important editorial should in my opinion not be read as a critique of radicality, but as one of ‘righteous style’, which is one of the expressions of it.) “I didn’t expect that I’d learn anything about my identity during my Year of Living… Continue reading
Joe Griffin on the science of human well-being
I’m very impressed with this integrative approach, which includes environmental, social aspects, of human psychology and psychotherapy and has important policy and philosophical implications. Really worth listening to:
Chris Cook’s critique of trusteeship and trust law
Peter Barnes once wrote that: the trust is to the commons as the corporation is to the market Chris Cook argues trusts are not an adequate governance mechanism: “It’s not the concept of a “Trust”/ Steward / Custodian I have a problem with: it’s (judge made) Trust Law or “Equity”. I prefer (consensual) partnership law… Continue reading
In the UK: Community Supported Bakeries and Breweries
While the subscription model is still experimental, it is a great way for new businesses to look at finance, and that, having been involved in supporting many such operations, he can’t see a downside to the model. When new businesses are starting, he said, they either put their hands in their pockets, as in they… Continue reading
Waking up to the Limits of Energy Growth
Excerpted from John Michael Greer: “The New Year’s Eve blog post from Chuck Burr at Southern Oregon Permaculture was timely. At a time when plenty of people are still insisting that the whole world can adopt a middle-class lifestyle powered by renewable energy resources, Burr cited hard numbers from a representative case study – his… Continue reading
Destroying the urban commons of the poor in Motala Heights near Durban, South Africa
The bulldozing of inconvenient realities is not just a strand in the story of our past. Almost a hundred years after the Land Act millions of roving pariahs remain in the shack settlements on the edges of our towns and cities. They are often shunted around at the point of guns wielded by the state… Continue reading
Open Source Rice Farming platform takes off
Excerpted from David Bollier: “One of the more fascinating projects that I have learned about is the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI, in India. As described in a paper by Shambu Prasad, “Agriculture and the New Commons,” many Indian farmers are pioneering a new form of “agroecological innovation” by using the Internet to share… Continue reading
What does Wikileaks mean for trade union activists?
I have not seen much material from trade union activist directly mentioning the importance of peer production as Scottish “Cyber Unions” activist Panton Waltland does in this article that takes as starting point, the Wikileaks affair: It is important to see Wikileaks not as the isolated project of the maverick cyber pimpernel Julian Assange, but… Continue reading
How to Resist Contagion in the Age of Networks
* Article: Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Tony Sampson. CTheory Richard Carslon writes: an excellent article by Tony Sampson on network/contagion social theory that puts him into current perspective visa vie Durkheim, Deleuze, Thacker, Hardt and other while exploring the often unconscious transmission of what spreads through the affective feedback loops of… Continue reading