Republished from Pablo Solon, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South: “Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, the environmental crisis continues to worsen. The unsustainable development model that gained dominance in the world resulted to grave loss of biodiversity, melting of polar… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2012"
The commons law project: A vision of green governance
Republished from David Bollier: (the original has links to the source material) “For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common… Continue reading
Las Indias: an ideological reading of the hegemony of scarcity
David de Ugarte offers a critique of the scarcity movements such as degrowth, as a sign of the decomposition of capitalist society. (original article has many links) David de Ugarte: “The country of Jauja is a typical example of the popular utopias of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Modernity. It’s a good reflection… Continue reading
COMMUNIA’s Final Public Report available now!
COMMUNIA’s Final Public Report it’s available now. You can read it online or download it as PDF. The Public Report is the outcome of the work of the COMMUNIA Network on the Digital Public Domain. This Report was undertaken to (i) review the activities of COMMUNIA; (ii) investigate the state of the digital public domain… Continue reading
Person of the Day: Annie Leonard
Source: Jay Walljasper – On The Commons Annie Leonard is one of the most articulate, effective champions of the commons today. Her webfilm The Story of Stuff has been seen more than 15 million times by viewers. She also adapted it into a book. Drawing on her experience investigating and organizing on environmental health and… Continue reading
Encouraging open source could land you in trouble
From Andrés Guadamuz: Just when I am feeling like some people in the copyright industry are getting their act together, there are news that make me rethink my patient and measured approach to the issue of global intellectual property. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has submitted this year’s Special 301 recommendation list to the… Continue reading
Report from the McPlanet conference
Brian Davey and myself participated in a panel on the role of the digital commons in sustainability, at the McPlanet conference in Berlin earlier in May. We will feature a written version of our debate later on, and here belatedly because of my travels, a report on the issues by Brian, which is important in… Continue reading
Why Bitcoin is Flawed from a Monetary Reformers’ Point of View
Excerpted from Anthony Migchels: “Bitcoin’s existence is very useful for all monetary reformers as it will allow us to gather information about the strategies that the adversary will use to disable it. Notwithstanding these revolutionary breakthroughs, Bitcoin does suffer from a basic flaw. It’s designed to behave like Gold. Nakamoto clearly believes Austrian Economics to… Continue reading
Open Educacion 2012
Open Education has come of age. The tiny movement that began in the late 1990s as a desire to increase access to educational opportunity has blossomed into requirements in national grant programs, key strategies in state legislatures and offices of education, content sharing initiatives at hundreds of universities and high schools, and a wide range… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Cloud Time
Cloud Time: The Inception of the future. Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood. Zero Books. 2012. Overview This book maps capitalism’s mobilization of cloud computing in its bid to archive and enclose the future. The Cloud, hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist… Continue reading
The manyfold expressions of resistance in Greece
Excerpted from Lina Filopoulou, active in the Athens Neighborhood Assembly, and who describes the development of the Greek resistance against the austerity programmes imposed on Greece: “Social injustice has spurred new modes of resistance. The experience of Greece as the weakest link in the eurozone and its contribution regarding the resistance movement is very important…. Continue reading
Video of the Day: Jon Jandai on the Pun Pun Permaculture Seed Commons in Northern Thailand
Jon is a farmer from northeastern Thailand. He founded the Pun Pun Center for Self-reliance, an organic farm outside Chiang Mai, with his wife Peggy Reents in 2003. Pun Pun doubles as a center for sustainable living and seed production, aiming to bring indigenous and rare seeds back into use. It regularly hosts training… Continue reading
Critiques of the ‘futurist’, ‘cornucopian’, abundance literature, by Dale Carrico and Gregor McDonald
“The Future” conjured up by Diamandis and Kotler is less than a mirage, for what it offers as substance is nothing but escapism from the real present, what it offers as solutions are nothing but distractions from problems, what it offers as a championing of the intelligence of exploited, excluded millions is nothing but an… Continue reading
Trend of the Day: Homo Nexus
Mark Pesce and Robert Tercek Next Billion Seconds: “The emergence of Homo Nexus – Connected Man – happened virtually overnight, like mushrooms springing up from a damp paddock. The ground had been well sown with the electric technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries: telegraph, landline telephone and radio all converged in 1980 within the… Continue reading
LiquidFeedback: What A Genuine Democratic Process Looks Like
From David Bollier: At a time when representative democracy is increasingly revealed as ineffectual, phony or both – a kabuki theater of empty formalisms that disguise the offstage conspiracies of corporate/state elites – many people look to the Internet for salvation. After all, the Internet is far more open, participatory and meritocratic than the closed,… Continue reading
The Indignados one year after: emergence of real democracy infrastructures in Spain
This novel model of collective participation has turned Spain into one of the countries closest to the P2P society ? . The 15M have kick-started initiatives such as Goteo ? , a crowdfunding platform, Nockin ? , a search engine for P2P services, Kune ? , a platform facilitating cooperation, or Nolotiro ? , a… Continue reading