OTF is an open source hardware cooperative that wants to create an ecology for open factories. They´re launching a crowdfunding campaign, see below. Here´s a short intro to their activities: ” We’ll be developing open source hardware, producing and selling some for income, and doing some training and capital assistance programs. Johnathan is starting an… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2013"
Incredible Edible Todmorden
“A short film highlighting the work of radical new food growing movement ‘Incredible Edible Todmorden’.” Incredible Edible Todmorden from haymedia on Vimeo.
Book of the Day: Greening Through IT
* Book: Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability. by Bill Tomlinson. The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, USA, UK, 2010 Review excerpted from Rob Harle: “Greening through IT is well written, incredibly well researched, and most timely. There is no doubt now that the planet is in trouble, and that our present energy consumption… Continue reading
Bitcoin’s Energy Use vs. Internet’s Energy Use
Excerpted from Brad Plumer: “Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour … That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Land and Resource Scarcity Under Capitalism
* Book: Land and Resource Scarcity: Capitalism, Struggle and Well-Being in a World Without Fossil Fuels”, Routledge, 2013, edited by Exner, Andreas; Fleissner, Peter; Kranzl, Lukas; Zittel, Werner. The book is an outcome of the projects “Save our Surface” and “Feasible Futures” funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund. Here’s a summary: “ This… Continue reading
Project of the Day: the Community of Repair crowdmap
An initiative for mapping repair communities all over the world! Here is the description: “A spontaneous, global, grassroots repair movement Sitting in London, we at The Restart Project have been inspired by Holland, the US, Australia, and now we realize that there are many more community repair and fixit groups than we ever knew of… Continue reading
The crisis of optimal scale and the transition to an economy of scope
Republished from David de Ugarte of Las Indias: (the original has links to supporting material) “A key result of what we’ve worked on for the last year has been understanding that technological development has reduced the optimum scale of production continuously since the end of WWII, and that the way financial capital has defended itself… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Cybernetic Revolutionaries
* Cybernetic Revolutionaries. Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. By Eden Medina. MIT Press, 2011. Here’s a summary of this important book, which relates the historical experience with the first failed experiment with achieving large scale mutual coordination for material production, in Chile: “In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian… Continue reading
Project of the Day: the Earthworker Cooperative in Australia
Earthworker Cooperative is a social enterprise with a mission to create solutions for transitioning Australia’s workforce into a low carbon economy, through the manufacture of renewable energy infrastructure. Here are more details: “Earthworker Cooperative is a social enterprise with a mission to create solutions for transitioning Australia’s workforce into a low carbon economy. It aims… Continue reading
George Por on Don Tapscott’s Global Solution Networks
you may get a glimpse of what enthuses me about the possibilities that this radically new model of global cooperation, problem solving and governance opens up. According to Don Tapscott: “Today, there are myriad fresh new collaborative models that are self-organizing to address twenty-first century realities. These models have various names including global action networks,… Continue reading
Project of the Day: the Alternative Economies Subgroup of OWS Arts and Labor
Here is a short description of this active and interesting group from New York City: “The Alternative Economies subgroup of OWS Arts and Labor explores new methods of sustaining the livelihood of artists, art-workers, and other low-income populations. We view the concept of labor through the lenses of time, choice, and value, and we research… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: Fossil Fuel Resistance
Excerpted from BILL MCKIBBEN: “Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country’s history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which… Continue reading
Assange: Facebook, Google, Yahoo are spying tools for US intelligence
Watch the video here: (it’s from an older program but the key thesis is still of great interest) Key thesis: the named services have built direct interfaces for the intelligence services to use their data without legal subpoena.
A critique of national cultures
Republished from David de Ugarte from Las Indias: “While the word “people” is in ever-greater danger of sliding, the word “culture” was born in a dangerous place, because, in spite of how it might appear, it’s very much a political term, a concept formed and created in the bosom of German romantic nationalism. It carries… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Seeds and Sparks for Fair Trade in Film-making
Here is a short description of an interesting project recommended to us by Jennifer Sertl: “We’re mostly a group of filmmakers who worked together on a feature film called Like the Water and decided we’d like to make films forever, but we wanted a friendlier environment in which to do it. One where all the… Continue reading
Water crisis – The path to P2P water
This is the 3rd and final part of our series by Silvia Garcia Alonso on P2P responses to the water and energy crisis. Click here for Part 1 and Part 2 Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related illness. Women spend 200 million hours a day collecting water. Three times more people lack… Continue reading