“Federation issues” may look like a “bug”, but they are really the result of an agreement, an implicit contract: to be part of a conversation on another node, I first have to have received the trust of someone who is taking part in it. The Facebook and Twitter socialization model, the FbT model, is like… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2015"
The Rise of Biocultural Rights
Can law be used to protect and advance the commons? One of the most promising new developments here is a new jurisprudence of “biocultural rights.” Biocultural rights represent a bold new departure in human rights law that recognizes the importance of a community’s stewardship over lands and waters. Instead of focusing on individual rights and… Continue reading
How vehicle makers are trying to lock out farmers and drivers from ownership
Excerpted from Kyle Wiens: “JOHN Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway. In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers… Continue reading
[Re]Build: A Call for Contributors and Participants
By edmundberger – Source Shock and austerity. Stock market instability. Stagnant wages and the decline of purchasing power. War. Climate change. Despite these multiplying crises, capitalism retains an essential tool that allows it to perpetuate itself on a global level despite its internal contradictions: the ability to leverage technological developments to liquidate the political power… Continue reading
Benkler on the Uber-ification of Services
Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler gave attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos a dire warning about future instability if the “Uber-ification of all services” continues. In his intense six-minute talk, “Challenges of the Sharing Economy,” Benkler notes how open networks and collaborative production models have led to the “destabilization of the firm,” and… Continue reading
100 Women Co-Creating the P2P Society: Ana Von Teschenhausen on knowledge commons and citizen science
Ana is an independent researcher currently working on two projects: knowledge as a ubiquitous commons, a topic she will discuss as part of the Citizen Science Track at Ouishare 2015, and a project proposal for community-based forest monitoring, which is to be 100% driven by a p2p and commons rationale. This project has been developed as… Continue reading
University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation: London School of Economics #UK
‘LSE is the epitome of the neoliberal university. It is managed and organised around corporate interests, which promote elitism and perpetuate inequality.’ Photograph: Alex Kurunis This week we are serialising extracts from an article by Rebecca Ratcliffe at the Guardian looking at how students around the world are fighting back against the commercialisation of University education…. Continue reading
Commons Jam Sessions London Apr 26th
Source: https://www.facebook.com/events/1586645661622423/ Do you know of any exciting projects experimenting with alternative forms of managing and sharing resources? A community garden, a hackspace, an energy co-op, … Or of groups who are protecting common resources from State or Market capture? Library sell-offs, land grabbing, copyright, water ownership, etc Come along to a Commons Jam Session… Continue reading
The time for a new economics is at hand
The crises we now face illustrate the limits of neoclassical orthodoxy by Julie Matthaei @JulieMatthaei for Aljazeera In early January I passed out a leaflet to my colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Boston, which brought together more than 11,000 economists and social scientists. The leaflet pointed out the profession’s… Continue reading
EU trade secrets directive threat to free speech, health, environment and worker mobility
Multi-sectoral civil society coalition calls for greater protections for consumers, journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and workers We strongly oppose the hasty push by the European Commission and Council for a new European Union (EU) directive on trade secrets because it contains: An unreasonably broad definition of “trade secrets” that enables almost anything within a company to… Continue reading
Organising the unorganisable? Voices from the bottom up 23rd – 24th April
Source – http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/news/events/2015/organising-the-unorganisable-voices-from-the-bottom-up.html Precarious Workers Poster Final
Towards a peer society based on the commons
By George Dafermos, research coordinator, FLOK Society; and research associate, P2P Foundation. Originally Published – http://openthoughts-peerproduction.blogs.uoc.edu/towards-a-peer-society-based-on-the-commons/ If the previous decade brought the business embrace of Linux, free software and the knowledge commons of science and technology to the fore, the present one marks their entry into the field of politics as discourses with broad social… Continue reading
Isaac Asimov on the promise of peer to peer learning (in 1988!)
Interesting video intervention:
Changing the world together
Here we present a translation from French to English of the postface from of the recent book by Jean Lievens and Michel Bauwens. By Dirk Holemans — Coordinator of the independent think tank Oikos Society faces an unprecedented challenge: the 20th century model of production and consumption has been utterly spent. It is no longer… Continue reading
SQUATTING HOUSES, SOCIAL CENTRES AND WORKPLACES: A WORKSHOP ON SELF- MANAGED ALTERNATIVES
International workshop on “SQUATTING HOUSES, SOCIAL CENTRES AND WORKPLACES: A WORKSHOP ON SELF- MANAGED ALTERNATIVES” Barcelona, IGOP, Autonomous University of Barcelona, May 21st-23rd 2015 https://sqekbcn.squat.net/sqek-meeting/ The meeting will join, for the first time to the extent of our knowledge, squatting experiences from the three spheres of housing, social centres and workplaces. We understand squatting as… Continue reading
University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation: University of Toronto #Canada
This week we are serialising extracts from an article by Rebecca Ratcliffe at the Guardian looking at how students around the world are fighting back against the commercialisation of University education. University of Toronto, Canada What’s happening? Graduate students at the University of Toronto have been on strike for three weeks. What prompted the strike? Graduate… Continue reading