* Article: Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2012) ‘Open education: Common(s), commonism and the new common wealth’. Ephemera, Vol. 12, No. 4. From the abstract: “Open Education, and specifically the Open Education Resources movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and increasing privatisation of the public education system. An important… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2013"
On the Possibility of a Pluralist Commonwealth and a Community-Sustaining Economy
* Essay: The Possibility of a Pluralist Commonwealth and a Community-Sustaining Economy”. Gar Alperovitz with Steve Dubb. “The current issue of The Good Society, the long-running journal of the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society (PEGS), is devoted in its entirety to “Alternatives to Capitalism,” a symposium built around my essay (with… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Reinventors
Reinventors Brief ‘A series of virtual roundtables done over the new medium of group video about how to fundamentally reinvent many of our 20th-century systems to work in the new realities of our 21st-century world. Reinventors Network is the formal name for the company making this all happen.’ For more information: Peter Leyden: “Reinventors is… Continue reading
The economy of living nature and its principles
Excerpted from Andreas Weber: “Nature, understood as a creative process of interacting, embodied subjects, can serve as a model for an economic concept of the commons. Basic structures and principles of “natural commoning” – self-organising, dynamic, creative – have been the basis of biospherical evolution. I argue that the principles of (self-) organization in nature… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: How Copyright Makes Books and Music Disappear and the Public Domain Resurrects Them
* Article: Heald, Paul J., How Copyright Makes Books and Music Disappear (and How Secondary Liability Rules Help Resurrect Old Songs) (July 5, 2013). Illinois Program in Law, Behavior and Social Science Paper. From the abstract: “A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows more books for sale from the 1880’s than… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Cyberhippietotalism
Cyberhippietotalism “Counter-culture platform, currently establishing a series of European hacker live-in labs-residences.” More here: “CYBERHIPPIETOTALISM is a theoretical & practical counter-culture platform, currently establishing a series of European hacker live-in labs-residences. CHT#1 was set up in December 2011 on Lanzarote, Canary Islands. We thought it would be a good idea to spend winters in a… Continue reading
MailPile secure email for the masses
Mailpile: IndieGoGo Campaign from Brennan Novak on Vimeo. Our friends in Iceland have launched an amibitious crowdfunding campaign to support the full time development of MailPile a secure email platform for the masses. By creating a secure, open source & free software email alternative Mailpile aims to take email back from corporations & large silo… Continue reading
Against the “conscience laundering” of the charitable-industrial complex
Excerpted from Peter Buffett; who calls for systemic change; not band aids: “Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics… Continue reading
P2P Tactics: War of Position and War of Maneuver?
Politics isn’t, first and foremost, a matter of making allegations and raising awareness; there is no one straw that breaks the camel’s back, and what’s bad can be tolerated indefinitely. Instead, it is a sort of shedding of the skin, by which we become sensitive to this or allergic to that. Nor has it much… Continue reading
Statement of Separation with Franco Iacomella
As our readers have learned before without much detail; a person working with the P2P Foundation; the Commons Strategies Group and others, has intercepted and blocked email communications; forged emails; and substituted himself on various occasions. Franz Nahrada has published a first short analysis of this theft of social capital; which we will publish separately…. Continue reading
How Does Technology Change the Balance of Power in Society
* Article: Communicating Power: Technological Innovation and Social Change in the Past, Present, and Futures. Jim Dator, John A. Sweeney et al. Journal of Futures Studies, An excerpt: “This is the final report for a research prospectus submitted in May 2011 by Jim Dator, John A. Sweeney, and Aubrey Yee in response to a call… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Seats2Meet
Seats2Meet Brief By Maria Grusauskas: “Sign into the online Seats2meet interface, list your skills and talents, take a seat in one of the 61 physical spaces at the reserved time, connect with a network of hundreds of by-chance coworkers doing the same as you, then sign out at the end of your reserved time. In… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Knowledge and Praxis of Networks as a Political Project
* Article: Knowledge and praxis of networks as a political project. By Yannick Rumpala. Twenty-First Century Society: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences. Volume 4, Issue 3, 2009 From the abstract: “Modern-day society is increasingly described as an extensive web of networks, but as such, it is often perceived and experienced as elusive. In… Continue reading
Whistleblowing Is the New Civil Disobedience
Excerpted from Danah Boyd in Kosmos Journal: “Computer scientist Nadia Heninger flipped my thinking upside down with a simple argument: Snowden is offering the public a template for how to whistleblow; leaking information is going to be the civil disobedience of our age. In recent years, increasing numbers of concerned citizens have been coming forward… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca
PAH is the platform for those affected by foreclosures in Spain. The Democratic Underground blog writes: “Grown out of the 15-M or Indignados movement, they have managed to halt 692 evictions up until now. When they and 15-M jointly call for street protest such as the “white sea” or the “sea of citizens”, hundreds of… Continue reading
Project of the Day: CoPass
CoPass ‘to enable mobile workers to work from any of the spaces in the network with one single account’ More details here: “The way we work, travel and meet people has been changing like never before these last few years. Coworking spaces, fablabs, hackerspaces and other like-minded collaborative spaces offer fantastic ecosystems and infrastructures for… Continue reading