Chris Cook: “The first thing to say is that – as that notable jurist and pedant Jeremy Bentham pointed out – “Property” is not an object. It is to be observed, that in common speech, in the phrase “the object of a man’s property”, the words “the object of “are commonly left out; and by… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2014"
Video of the day: Tom Dawkins on Peerfunding and Storytelling
If you’ve ever contemplated organising a crowdfund campaign, this video lecture by Startmesomegood’s Tom Dawkins is an excellent place to start. Tom makes the all important distinction between “crowd” and “peer” funding, arguing that most project-specific funding is partaken by the existing communities that propel those same projects. He also highlights the importance of narrative… Continue reading
Heritable Innovation Trust – Protecting Indigenous Knowledge
Heritable knowledge trusts are an interesting model for protecting indigenous knowledge. “The Heritable Innovation Trust Program was created after the 2008 “Heritable Knowledge Framework and the Development of Communal Innovation Trusts” document written by Dr. David Martin. However, reaching from the newest soil erupting from Tavurvur in Papua New Guinea, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, to… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Douglas Rushkoff on Present Shock
Our friend Douglas Rushkoff is in fine form once again in this 15 Minute recap of some of the themes expressed in “Present Shock”. As he says in the blurb for the video: “I like this very brief talk I did for PSFK about Present Shock. It doesn’t explain the whole book, but it definitely… Continue reading
The Pirate Bay’s plan to beat censorship for good
Extracted from Torrentfreak, the Pirate Bay are at it again, this time with an alternative DNS browser that could lead the way to a newly P2P based Internet. Read on: “Over the past few years The Pirate Bay has had to deal with its fair share of censorship, mostly through court-ordered blockades. In response to… Continue reading
Loomio: Making Real Democracy available to everyone
I really love Loomio. It’s an exceptional, well-developed collaborative tool that mimics general assembly-style consensus decision making and scales it up for asynchronous web usage. Additionally, it was originally developed by activists in New Zealand during Occupy Wellington, who collaborated with local, social enterprises and formed a co-op. This is precisely the sort of initiative… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Production and Governance in Hackerspaces
* Essay: Production and governance in hackerspaces: A manifestation of Commons-based peer production in the physical realm? By Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros and Christos Giotitsas. From the Abstract: “This article deals with the phenomenon of hackerspaces and sheds light on the relationship of their underlying values, organizational structures and productive processes to those of the… Continue reading
Podcast of the Day/XE: Positive Money
From our friends at The Extraenviromentalist Podcast. From the episode notes: Critics of quantitative easing highlight the absurdity of creating money from nothing to paper over terrible investment decisions. Yet, what about all of the money created by banks before 2008? Incorrect narratives of money have misdirected and befuddled our thinking on finance and currency, limiting our… Continue reading
Video: Edward Snowden Speaks about the NSA and Civil Liberties at SXSW 2014
Recorded by RT, see the video below: (see here for context and summary of the intervention)
Project of the Day: Pure Legal Code
Extracted from Liquid Law PLC is a project to create a range of domain specific languages (DSL), for the legal profession. These languages are designed to be easy to use, flexible, logically consistent, human readable, and machine readable. PLC stand for “pure legal code”. “The project builds on top of existing low level open source… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: The Student as Producer as an Institution of the Common
* Essay: Student as producer: an institution of the common? Mike Neary. From the Abstract: “This paper presents the further development of the concept of student as producer from a project that seeks to radicalise the idea of the university by connecting research and teaching, to a vision of higher learning and revolutionary science based… Continue reading
What is David Holmgren really saying?
We’ve already featured David Holmgren himself explaining what he really means in this recent Podcast of the Day interview with KMO, of the C-Realm. Here’s another view, expressed by David MacLeod and originally published at Resilience.org My deepest hope is that after all this discussion ABOUT Holmgren’s ideas, that people will actually read his work,… Continue reading
Charting a Course for Community Success
Today’s Compassionate Communities Conference in Seattle will be host to a workshop on alternative economies. Jeff Sterling has shared a very interesting draft document outlining a vision for community design. Charting a Course for Community Succes_2!23!12 by P2P Foundation
George Por on the Commons Education
An interview produced by Alain Ambrosi with Georges Por, at the Economics and the Commons Conference which took place in Berlin from 22 to 24 May 2013.
Movement of the Day: USi Organising Network
Excerpted from Walton Pantland: “Like all social media – all technology – it is ideological. But the ideology is to create a safe space for people to organise politically. ON is built on Elgg, which is Open Source. It has plugins, developed by Lorea, that enable political organising and democratic decision making. Members of the… Continue reading
The Reconomy Project: towards a combination of global infrastructure and local empowerment
A contribution by Kevin Parcell: “The problem with the existing structure of democratic government is that its top-down distribution of power tends to render illegible to the system both the structure and value of very-local natural and human systems, which are the foundation of eco-sustainability (ecologic and economic), and also the unique offerings and needs… Continue reading