P2P Summer School – The Art of Commoning 25 – 27 August 2015 Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland Many roads lead to the commons: the collaborative economy, open culture, community ownership, co-operatives, technology and knowledge sharing, shared meaning-making, protecting biodiversity, seed saving, our natural resources, and more. We invite you to join us in shared inquiry for a… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2015"
Essay of the Day: Data-Driven, Networked Urbanism by Rob Kitchin
Data-Driven, Networked Urbanism by Rob Kitchin offers a a useful overview of the various critiques of smart cities. Abstract: For as long as data have been generated about cities various kinds of data-informed urbanism have been occurring. In this paper, I argue that a new era is presently unfolding wherein data-informed urbanism is increasingly being… Continue reading
Video: Ellen Brown on the Need for Public Banking
Excellent intro by Ellen Brown. * Watch the video here:
The Art of Changing a City
What happens with city officials think outside the box and empower and trust in citizens? By ANTANAS MOCKUS “BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Between 1995 and 2003, I served two terms as mayor of Bogotá. Like most cities in the world, Colombia’s capital had a great many problems that needed fixing and few people believed they could… Continue reading
A documentary on the community energy revolution in the Netherlands: Power to the People
Well-done documentary by ‘VPRO Tegenlicht’, with english subtitles, on the explosion of bottom-up energy generating initiatives, inspired by the Danish island of Samso, and spreading to many other countries. Here is the description of the program: “”In the Netherlands, ordinary citizens are assuming responsibility for generating their own sources of energy through the installation of… Continue reading
Rebel Architecture – Part 2 A traditional future
“Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari uses local building techniques to rebuild villages in the flood-stricken Sindh region.”
The Gentrification of Hacking
Excerpted from Brett Scott: “Here is where the second form of corruption begins to emerge. The construct of the ‘good hacker’ has paid off in unexpected ways, because in our computerised world we have also seen the emergence of a huge, aggressively competitive technology industry with a serious innovation obsession. This is the realm of… Continue reading
On the emergence of a global working class
Excerpted from Nick Dyer-Whiteford: “The idea of a ‘global working class’, which a decade ago would have been dismissed as leftist phantasm, is attracting increasing attention (Baranov, 2003; Linden, 2008; Mason, 2007; Struna, 2009; Breathnach, 2010). ‘Global worker’ designates collective labour that is : i) internationalized by the world-scale expansion of capital, a process in… Continue reading
100 Women who are co-creating the P2P Society: Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield on the commons, art and technology
Continuing our series on P2P women, we present Ruth Catlow’s interview with Penny Travlou Q: Dear Ruth, tell us something about your general background and what Furtherfield is about? A: In the mid-90s, the web changed for ever what it meant to be an artist. In London the Brit Art scene – agencies, galleries and media for… Continue reading
Video: An introduction to real-life economics (MMT)
An interview with Bill Mitchell, one of the founding fathers of Modern Monetary Theory. It answers the question: why are European governments repeating the mistakes of the 1930’s ? Watch the video here:
Rebel Architecture Part 1 Guerrilla Architect
Santiago Cirugeda is a subversive architect from Seville who has dedicated his career to reclaiming urban spaces for the public.In austerity-hit Spain where the state has retreated and around 500,000 new buildings lie empty, “people are doing things their own way,” says Cirugeda. “In times of crisis, people come together to find collective solutions.”So, can… Continue reading
Ecological Land Cooperative
Greenham Reach Smallholdings & the Ecological Land Co-operative from Ecological Land Co-operative on Vimeo. The Ecological Land Cooperative are currently into the last few days of their community share issue. It is worth taking a look at how their financing model is structured. http://ecologicalland.coop/sites/ecologicalland.coop/files/ECOLAND_ShareOffer2015.pdf “The Ecological Land Co-operative will make land available for sustainable use…. Continue reading
Pia Mancini on Redesigning our Political System for the Internet Era: the Democracy OS experience in Argentina (video)
A presentation at OuishareFest 2015: “In Buenos Aires, an open source platform called Democracy OS, designed for citizens to get informed, to debate, and to vote on how they would like their representatives to vote, is reimagining politics. Democracy OS founder Pia Mancini discusses how the platform has changed the political landscape and argues that… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The Community Economies Collective
“The Community Economies Collective (CEC) and the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) are international collaborative networks of researchers who share an interest in theorizing, discussing, representing and ultimately enacting new visions of economy. By making multiple forms of economic life viable options for action, these diverse, engaged scholarly and activist efforts aim to open the economy… Continue reading
On the subordination of public knowledge to private capital
Excerpted from Nick Dyer-Whiteford: “Futuristic accumulation is the commodification of publicly created scientific knowledge, which via copyright and patent, is privatized as intellectual property for the extraction of monopolistic technological rents. Its central site is the research university, whose entrainment to business gradually evolved over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Europe and… Continue reading
Video: Rohan Wakefield on Setting Your Own Salaries
“Enspiral Dev Academy is an intensive bootcamp helping people gain skills to start a technical career. Rohan Wakefield tells the story of how they facilitated a process for all the staff to set their own salaries transparently.” * Watch the video here: