The upcoming Spanish General elections, to be held this coming Sunday, are noteworthy in several aspects. Not least of these is the resurgence of Podemos as a viable player, after a year of steady decline in the polls. Though a left-wing media darling, Podemos has steered away from its commons-friendly, post-15M beginnings, morphing into a… Continue reading
* Article: ENTREPRENEURSHIP, SOVEREIGNTY, AND VIOLENT SOCIAL CONFLICT. By Jurgen Brauer and Robert Haywood. WIDERAngle, Article Archive 2009-2010, May 2009 This article was presented as a keynote address to the UNU-WIDER workshop on Entrepreneurship and Conflict which was hosted in collaboration with the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) and INCORE (University of Ulster) in Londonderry,… Continue reading
I’m in Paris now, preparing to speak tonight about climate change. It is a parallel venue, not mainstream, called Place 2 B, but even here I am afraid my message is going to be controversial. You see, I think there are deep problems with the standard climate change narrative, which has equated “green” with carbon… Continue reading
The video below was produced with the help of Sharon Ede in Adelaide, as I could not attend the Mapping the Next Economy of December 14th, in real time due to my engagements in Adelaide, South Australia. This is a short seven-minutes summary of the problems associated with the emergence of commons-based peer production as… Continue reading
Shareable’s Cat Johnson interviews our colleague David Bollier about the Commons Strategies Group new book anthology Patterns of Commoning. David Bollier is a policy strategist, activist, and a leading voice in the commons movement. In a new book, Bollier and commons activist Silke Helfrich, both members of the Commons Strategies Group, collaborated to underscore the fact… Continue reading
* Book: They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy. by Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin. Verso, 2014 Here’s the summary from the publisher: “Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements,… Continue reading
A group of activists in Oregon wants polluters to pay residents for using their air. I spoke with Camila Thorndike, director of Oregon Climate, about this unusual effort to put a price on carbon. Protecting the environment is something we often equate with penance—turn the thermostat down and shiver a little; deny yourself peaches when… Continue reading
* Paper: Measuring the complexity of adaptive peer-to-peer systems. Michele Amoretti, Carlos Gershenson. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 2015 From the Abstract: “To improve the efficiency of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems while adapting to changing environmental conditions, static peer-to-peer protocols can be replaced by adaptive plans. The resulting systems are inherently complex, which makes their development and… Continue reading
How they resolve the tension between mechanical elements—structures—and organic—interpersonal relationships—is the difference between a community that empowers its members and one that drains them. The kibbutzim inspired by Gordon understood through practice that every community is the result of the development of interpersonal links between its members. Structural and hierarchy, they said, is nothing but… Continue reading
While much of the momentum to fight climate change is focused on political channels, there are parallel efforts using law to force government to take specific, enforceable actions to reduce carbon emissions. It’s a difficult battle, but in recent weeks two notable initiatives have gained further momentum – a court ruling relying on the public… Continue reading
Matthew Heskins says an emphathic “No”, here’s why: “Air is abundant. Competition was an evolutionary requirement for humans based on the fact that there was not enough to go around (scarcity). Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin believed that this was part of humanities “survival of the fittest”. If humanity had really been behind this theory… Continue reading
Excerpted from Dizzynomics: “We were supposed to be living in a utopian Tomorrowland by now, with the economic problem completely solved. None of this has happened. Instead of scaling, we’ve seen descaling because individuals need to adopt more jobs, more skills, more crafts just to get by — meaning professionalism is being lost. As well… Continue reading
On the occasion of the Opening of an Office of the Robin Hood Coop in Athens in November 2015, a discussion with Andrea Fumagalli et al.. Watch the video here at
Very important news for us in the p2p/commons community and a first in the world. In the preliminary words – as we’ll have to come back to this with a more formal description – of Darren Sharp, one of the co-organizers of the Mindful Uprising event in Melbourne: “”What an amazing day on Sunday at… Continue reading
* Article: “A peer-to-peer approach to energy production“, co-authored by Chris Giotitsas, Alex Pazaitis & Vasilis Kostakis. P2P Lab, We introduce the abstract, followed by an excerpt from both the introduction and conclusion of the article. From the Abstract: Giotitsas, Pazaitis & Kostakis: “This paper strives to provide a theoretical study for energy production and… Continue reading
Interesting presentation on the crisis of journalism: “This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. News journalism has changed fundamentally in the last 20 years. Editor Rob Orchard of Delayed Gratification magazine uses seven headlines to trace the corrosive effect of disinvestment and hyper-speedy digital news dissemination and… Continue reading