Date archives "May 2013"

Peer-to-peer trade systems rediscovered?

The Circular Multilateral Barter (CMB) project was started in 2009 by Evgeni Pandurski and Catherine Woodgold. The goal was to write server-side software for creating and trading self-issued currencies in peer-to-peer networks. In a recent email exchange, Evgeni tried to explain more about his project: Imagine you are a passionate community organizer. Luckily, your wonderful… Continue reading

Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes (Part 2)

Image: Voces con Futura Bernardo Gutiérrez Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratil – Guerrilla Translation! Original article at 20minutos.es. This is a two-part article. The first part can be found here. “15M – whether seen as a signal, a movement, a state of being or a set of human interactions – has… Continue reading

Understanding the importance of economies of scope for the commons

Michel Bauwens: “My short definition of Economies of Scope is very simple and should be understandable I think: “doing more with less”; and this is mainly achieved by mutualizing infrastructures, both immaterial (open source knowledge, code, design) and material (co-working, fablabs, carsharing, idle-sourcing …); for contemporary implementations we should add: using distributed machinery in distributed… Continue reading

Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes (Part 1)

Image: Voces con Futura Bernardo Gutiérrez Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratil – Guerrilla Translation! Original article at 20minutos.es. This is a two-part article. The second part can be found here. “The old protests, so dull and single-minded, have passed into obsolescence, and given rise to infinite possibility. We’ve rethought the concepts… Continue reading

Project of the Day: PEACH, Innovative Community-Based Cooperative Healthcare

Excerpted from Mira Luna: “Even more intriguing was my encounter with PEACH (Preservation of Equity Accessible for Community Health) at Sandhill Farm in rural Missouri. On a visit there, I asked the residents of this intentional community how they made it without health insurance and they glowed about the benefits and low cost of PEACH…. Continue reading

A critique of Morozov’s intellectual methodology

Morozov’s criticism seems to me to be neither complex, nor realistic, nor moral. He is anything but a dialectician. He has little respect for anyone whose opinion deviates from his own—surely the first quality required of a real scholar. He maintains a pyrotechnically unfortunate Twitter feed, wherein he will totally yell at and abuse anybody… Continue reading