Mira Luna from Shareable asked me for my top recommendations of government policies to encourage open source development and the commons. While government policy usually sides with proprietary knowledge in the public sector, there is a huge opportunity to use goverments as a ally, supporter and guardian of the commons. To learn more and get involved,… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2014"
Book of the Day: How Sharing, Localism, and Connectedness are Creating a New Social Design
* Book: Sustainist Design Guide: How Sharing, Localism, Connectedness, and Proportionality are Creating a New Agenda for Social Design, by Michiel Schwarz and Diana Krabbendam. BIS Publishers, 2014 From the author, Michiel Schwarz: “A new culture of sharing is emerging. We are increasingly sharing goods, places, services, and information. It is creating social value and… Continue reading
Podcast of the Day: Michel Bauwens on why we need P2P.
Here’s Michel Bauwens in conversation with Álvaro Andoin on the need for P2P. Although the original interview was recorded over a year ago in Michel’s last visit to Spain, it’s still highly relevant and totally cool as culo. listen to ‘Why you should care about Peer to Peer. Long chat with @mbauwens founder of the… Continue reading
The emergence of peer-support families
Excerpted/republished from Warren Blumenfeld in Tikkun, the strongly recommended magazine of the Network of Spiritual Progressives: “I’ve often heard of parents abusing and even disowning young people when they suspect or when a young person “comes out” to them as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans*, though except for movies and television episodes, I have never… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The New Ecopolitical Nations
* Book: Habitat: The Ecopolitical Nation. by Ignasi Ribó. Mycelia Books, 2012 This summary description is followed by a review and an excerpt: “A new world is emerging under the rusted structures of the nation-state. Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec, Flanders, the Basque Country may soon be sovereign and independent states. The process of breaking up the… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Local vs. Centralized Resilience in Responding to Disasters
* Article: Walker, B., and F. Westley. 2011. Perspectives on resilience to disasters across sectors and cultures. Ecology and Society 16(2): 4. Brian Walker and F. Westley: “Discussion of accountability led to consideration of where responses to disasters should best originate. Participants viewed the greatest threat as originating from the highly interconnected nature of our… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Tiberius Brastaviceanu on Building the Open source Economy
It was a pleasure to see our good friend Tiberius Brastaviceanu give this presentation at last May’s OuishareFest and it’s a pleasure to watch it again now. “This keynote by Tiberius Brastaviceanu, co-founder of Sensorica, gives you a glance at open value networks, how self-organized open source hardware communities have developed and the tools they use”
What if food is considered a common good?
Food, as a basic human need, should enjoy a similar consideration to health and education in our societies and yet it is not so. The former are basic rights, guaranteed by the state to every citizen in developed countries and in most developing ones as well, whereas food is largely provided in a monetary basis:… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Geeks Without Bounds
Geeks Without Bounds (GWOB) supports humanitarian open source projects through a combination of hackathons and an accelerator program which takes promising projects through six months of mentorship towards sustainability. GWOB also engages in a range of educational programs aimed at increasing diversity in the technology workforce, helping technologists better understand humanitarian issues, and helping those who… Continue reading
From global value chains to modes of production
In the recent article, Theorising and analysing digital labour: From global value chains to modes of production, Christian Fuchs provides an compelling critic and overview of what he calls ‘Informational and Transnational Capitalism’. Identfyiny the role of ICTs in the re-design of the globa production and value networks, his argument helps us to see through which nodes industrial,… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Power of Neighborhood and the Commons
* Book: The Power of Neighborhood and The Commons. Autonomedia “The anonymous Swiss author of bolo’bolo and Akiba offers a new practical proposal for reshaping the future, based on this prognosis of the present: “Our economic system is stumbling from one collapse to the next…Our system is fundamentally flawed and destabilized by internal contradictions. To… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Infrastructures.cc
We are very happy to share with you the following project description, culled from Infrastructures.cc‘s webpage. We’re specially glad to see them choose the Peer Production License for their work. Is the PPL perfect or will it work? My answer to that is that a) No it isn’t but it’s the best option currently out… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Peer Production as a Model for the Provision by Food Services Collectives
* Article: Peer Production and Prosumerism as a Model for the Future Organization of General Interest Services Provision in Developed Countries. Examples of Food Services Collectives. By Katarzyna Gajewska. World Future Review March 2014 vol. 6 no. 1 29-39 From the Abstract: “Based on the examples of two collectives preparing lunches and giving them for… Continue reading
Distributed Energy & Wind Empowerment Athens 2014
Source: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/wind-empowerment-athens-2014 This crowdfunding campaign is organized in part by our Greek friends and authors of the excellent FLOK society policy paper on distributed energy. Please do what you can to support the campaign. Support locally manufactured small wind turbines and the electrification of rural communities. While everyone is talking about renewable energy, power generation… Continue reading
Post-Liberalism: a p2p-relational version of liberalism ?
the big questions in politics today are less about individual rights and more about the nature of our institutions and the quality of our relationships Excerpted from Nick Dyrenfurth: “Its ethos can be discerned in the post-Cold War “Third Way” politics of social democrats such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and even Bill Clinton. Some… Continue reading
Nesting Instinct, by Vera Bradova
A brilliant piece by my alexandrian friend Vera Bradova! Her essay clearly shows the advantages of the Representative In-Group Democracy, which is proposed by the human ecologist Terje Bongard. Bongard’s model would have created the ultimate commons, but his research project MEDOSS was brutally rejected by the ignorant and anonymous referees of the Research Council of… Continue reading