* Essay: Par Cum Pari. Notes on the Horizontality of Peer to Peer Relationships in the Context of the Verticality of a Hierarchy of Values. Michel Bauwens. In: Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work Together. Fourteenth Plenary Session, 1-6 May 2008. Acta 14, eds Margaret S. Archer and Pierpaolo Donati. Vatican… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2015"
Robin Hood Coop, an Activist Hedge Fund
Now here is an improbable idea:an activist hedge fund.Out of Tampere, Finland, comes the Robin Hood Asset Management Coop, which legally speaking, is an investment cooperative. It is designed to skim the cream off of frothy investments in the stock market to help support commoners. As the website for the coop describe it: We use… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: The Australian Sharing Law Network
The Australian Sharing Law Network is “an informal network of organisations and individuals interested in using the law to support the collaborative economy and the sharing of resources in our community”. Organisations participating in the network include AELA, UNSW Australia, and Melbourne Law School’s Sustainability Business Clinic. AELA is interested in building the role of… Continue reading
Platform Cooperativism Conference Disrupts Silicon Valley’s Disruptions
Reposted from our friends at Shareable, Jay Casano reports from the recent Platform Cooperativism Conference in NYC. “Silicon Valley loves a good disruption. So let’s give them one.” Thus Trebor Scholz kicked off the first-ever conference on platform cooperativism to a packed auditorium of technologists, students, academics, co-op developers, and activists at The New School… Continue reading
Doing more together, together: seeding a Collaborative Technology Alliance
Tarragona Concurs Castells taken by calafellvalo, on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license. Edward West takes us through a new initiative featuring many of our common friends. Doing more together, together: seeding a Collaborative Technology Alliance From the beginning. Last month, a group of 35 designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world… Continue reading
TPP and TTIP-Free Zones are being created by communities across the US and EU
Reposted from Citizen Action Monitor, TPP-Free Zones are being created by communities across the US and EU. Why aren’t Canada’s political, social, labour and environmental NGOs jumping all over this initiative? “You can join communities that are rejecting these rigged corporate ‘trade’ deals that are being negotiated in secret and will undermine our ability to… Continue reading
The Shift from Open Platforms to Digital Commons
Universitat de Oberta Catalunya — Open University of Catalonia — just published the following essay of mine as part of its “Open Thoughts” series. The UOC blog explores the benefits and limitations of various forms of peer production: well worth a look! From open access platforms to managed digital commons: that is one of the… Continue reading
Call for participation for Art residency: Culture of permanence
A thematic residency around the questions of communal shareholding and knowledge build-up at Arc, in Romainmôtier, Switzerland.In the second decade of the 21st century the neoliberal model is in crisis: we live in a society where 30 to 40 % of the population are knowledge workers within a system that is speculative and expresses the… Continue reading
Contentious Moments at the Platform Cooperativism conference
Excerpted from a conference review by Jay Cassano: “Some of the most exciting developments came from the self-organized breakout sessions, such as one on where@ — a proposal for a secure location-sharing app for activists. Other workshops focused on alternative currencies, ethical user interface design, and data science. The most contentious moments of the gathering… Continue reading
Video: Dreaming of P2P Finance
The Robin Hood investment cooperative held an event at its Open Office in London to imagine a p2p-based financial world. Note the strong libertarian bent of most contributions! Watch the video at
Imagining the (R)Urban Commons in 2040
A guest post by our friend and colleague Silke Helrich and written for her keynote at the recent City as a Commons Conference, held in Bologna, Italy. I was delighted to give a key-note talk at the First IASC Thematic Urban Commons Conference last week in Bologna. Here are my speech and the slides. The… Continue reading
Participatory Economics and the Commons
What is the relation between the Parecon proposals and the Commons Excerpted from a longer article by Robin Hahnel: “* Who Owns the Commons? In a participatory economy the commons belongs to everyone, and no more to one person than any other. While individuals own personal property, everything we need to produce our way of… Continue reading
Video: Cesar Hidalgo on the Meritocracy and Topocracy of Networks
Markets operate through networks of agents, but how democratic are they ? Cesar Hidalgo has mathematically calculated, that it would take between 17,000 and 22,000 connections to have a true meritocratic network, i.e. where merit is correlated to contributions ; otherwise we have topocratic networks, where your merit depends on your place in the network…. Continue reading
The City as Commons: The Conference
To judge from the fascinating crowd of 200-plus commoners who converged on Bologna, Italy, last week, it is safe to declare that a major new front in commons advocacy has come into focus – the city. The event was the conference, “The City as a Commons: Reconceiving Urban Space, Common Goods and City Governance,” hosted… Continue reading
Is crowdfunding charity?
Ilias Marmaras is a media artist based in Athens. He is member of the Personal Cinema network, which plans and organizes projects and activities that encourage the critical stance toward the new forms of production, presentation and distribution of audiovisual products. One of its most recent initiatives is a documentary on mesh and community Networks in… Continue reading
Video: Rachel O’Dwyer on the Blockchain as Governance by Design
A clear explanation on the occasion of the Blockchain Dublin Meetup #1 : “New kinds of governance are emerging from the convergence of state actors and information and communication technologies. New institutions are emerging from big data and algorithms. This has significant implications for questions of security, law and citizenship, as states partner with or… Continue reading