Source: School of Commoning A major theme that came up throughout our first School of Commoning workshop with Michel Bauwens concerned the need to co-create sustainable commons based institutions. The overriding sentiment was to create institutions that are commons and are therefore inherently sustainable by their nature. In the transition to these commons based institutions… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2012"
Have we reached a P2P tipping point?
Simone Cicero of Meedabyte believes there are signs that the p2p ‘revolution is at hand’ … The original article has many links. Simone Cicero: “”Economists and theorists of innovation such as Jeremy Rifkin, Yochai Benkler, Michel Bauwens, and several others have concluded that the Third Industrial Revolution is at hand,” are the opening words of… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Casa da Cultura Digital
Source: Katie Fehrenbacher When I read that the Geeks on a Plane group, which I’m traveling with this week through Latin America, would be visiting a Brazilian hacker space, I didn’t envision a picturesque Italian villa, with a flowing fountain and a cobblestone-filled square. But that’s exactly where the folks of the Sao Paulo-based Casa… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Occupy Consciousness
The Evolver Social Movement just released a free e-book anthology that brings together a variety of perspectives on Occupy, offering a multi-dimensional approach to the ongoing insurrection. At a time when the initial energy around Occupy has flagged in some areas, we believe this anthology is a powerful tool as it explores not just the… Continue reading
Occupy in the current cycles of struggle
Excerpted from Chris Hedges: “In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there… Continue reading
Grassroot climate actions at city and regional level can mitigate Rio+20 inaction and even replace it.
The argument is by Elinor Ostrom, recently deceased commons economist: “We have never had to deal with problems of the scale facing today’s globally interconnected society. No one knows for sure what will work, so it is important to build a system that can evolve and adapt rapidly. Decades of research demonstrate that a variety… Continue reading
Project of the Day: EWS, one of Europe’s largest cooperatively owned green energy companies
A profile plus interview of the Electrizitatswerke Schonau: “1986, subsequent to the worst case scenario in Chernobyl, a parents’ Initiative was launched against atomic energy in the small Black Forest town of Schönau. As the operators of the local grid attempted to hinder these citizens’ activities, be they attempts to save energy or demands for… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Yochai Benkler on Successful Internet Rights Activism
Via Fora.tv: “After the groundswell around SOPA led to an tsunami of activism, Yochai Benkler reviews whether the way it all went down might prove to be a blueprint for future democratic participation. Using networks, he charts how the movement grew, and how the networked public sphere works in today’s world (that is to say,… Continue reading
Peer Production and the Poverty of Networks
Excerpted from Dmytri Kleiner‘s Telekommunist Manifesto: “A freer internet cannot exist within the present system of capitalist financing. Arguments for the clear technical superiority of distributed technologies over centralized ones have not been the deciding factors in the ultimate development of our global communications infrastructure, which has become more consolidated, regulated and restrictive. The determining… Continue reading
Video of the Day: David Ronfeldt on the TIMN Governance/Technology Framework
David Ronfeldt explains the evolution of governance: Tribes, Institutions (hierarchies), Markets, and Networks, each one is linked to a specific ‘information revolution’ ‘The presentation proceeds in three segments. Segment One is about how TIMN got started. It provides background and a basic description of TIMN. Segment Two is about how TIMN works. It relates my… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Bottega21, for digital manufacturing in Italy
Bottega21 (B21 from now on) is a Common, cooperative, peer production project and a – currently being equipped – physical center for enabling a new concept of manufacturing, creativity and design. B21 is an initiative to promote social and cultural change towards a new way of conceiving spaces and working methods as well as a… Continue reading
PeerPoint
(An excerpt from Poor Richard’s full version) This is an open invitation to participate in developing a crowdsourced design specification for a suite of integrated peer-to-peer applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc. This specification overlaps with several… Continue reading
Should we worry about capitalist commons?
Please note that Poor Richard has responded to the article below, here. I recommend you read that response. Michel Bauwens: There is a particular strand of thinking, which we have featured on occasion on our blog, with authors such as Massimo de Angelis of The Commoner, Sylvia Federici and George Caffentzis of Midnight Notes, and… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Jem Bendell on Rebuilding a Financial System by Ourselves
Very clear didactic treatment of what’s wrong with the current financial system and how ‘we the people’ can change it from the ground up.
Project of the Day: Research on “Building trust in P2P marketplaces”
• Thesis: Building trust in P2P marketplaces: an empirical analysis of trust systems for the sharing economy. Francesca Pick. Francesca Pick’s introduction: “As the sharing economy continues to gain momentum, the importance of security and trust between users is becoming increasingly apparent. Not only the Airbnb incident in June 2011 or the shutdown of the… Continue reading
Video of the Day: CATASTROIKA, on global finance and the destruction of the nation state
The Greek market s of the popular Debtocracy enlarge the framework for understanding what happened to Greece, and what will happen to other countries as well: