During a recent trip to Portland, I stayed with friends who maintained a plot in a Community Garden. One evening, we biked over to the garden to attend a community meal. The dishes all featured produce grown in the community garden. One of the members was a musician and provided a concert for us after… Continue reading
Qaul.net is an open software project in beta release. Networking locally through WiFi is the objective. Their approach to the problem is rather unique. They have developed software that virally creates a local network, providing mesh-network connectivity to the local cloud. “A download of the software qaul.net on wireless-enabled computers, tablets and mobile phones is sufficient in… Continue reading
The blockchain is a new institutional variable. It is a new institutional technology that directly competes with other coordinating technologies—firms, markets and government. However, it is also not new, because the social technology it is modelled on is actually the oldest of all coordinating technologies for economies—namely, the commons. On the convergence of the blockchain… Continue reading
As the illicit trade in nuclear weapons escalates alongside the risk of geopolitical conflict, it’s high time governments decisively prioritised nuclear disarmament – and that means scrapping Trident, the UK’s inordinately expensive nuclear deterrent, which would also facilitate the redistribution of scarce public resources to fund essential services. As geopolitical tensions escalate in the Middle… Continue reading
In this podcast, created by 21st Century Design, my colleague Michel Bauwens talks about design and design commons from the P2P point of view. In this episode we speak to Michel Bauwens, a Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist and cyber-philosopher. Michel Bauwens is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and director and founder of… Continue reading
A very interesting PhD thesis by Cindy Kohtala (2016). Full title: Making Sustainability – How Fab Labs Address Environmental Issues. “Citizens are increasingly involved in the design and production of their own products. Forerunner groups are exploring new ways of doing things with digital fabrication tools, a phenomenon known as the maker movement. Especially communities… Continue reading
John Thackara is a writer and event producer who has spent a lifetime searching for stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realize a sustainable future. He writes about these stories at his blog, Doors of Perception, and organizes festivals that bring the project leaders he has met together. In this interview, conducted… Continue reading
Gratipay and Liberapay are open source tipping systems for developers and creators who contribute to the commons. They have had their fair share of trouble. In the beginning, Gratipay was called Gittip, and Liberapay is a very recent fork. Legal concerns are being ironed out, and funding is now for groups rather than individuals … Gratipay 2.0 Payments… Continue reading
According to Carson, the problem with the theory of catabolic collapse is that it ignores what he calls “one of the most central distinguishing characteristics of our technology: ephemerality.” The classic example from Buckminster Fuller, he writes, is the replacing of “a transoceanic cable system embodying God only knows how many thousand tons of metal… Continue reading
Are people not united? Do they distrust each other? You don’t need courses, you need causes. You don’t need deep, emotional introspection, you need to distribute responsibilities and get to work. In times of decomposition, culture turns dark, it’s taken for granted that’s “every man for himself (or woman for herself),” defeatism is embraced, the… Continue reading
When I met biologist and ecophilosopher Andreas Weber several years ago, I was amazed at his audacity in challenging the orthodoxies of Darwinism. He proposes that science study a very radical yet unexplained phenomenon — aliveness! He rejects the neoDarwinian account of life as a collection of sophisticated, evolving machines, each relentlessly competing with maximum… Continue reading
On Tuesday night I attended a Democratic caucus in a ballroom at the University of Colorado Boulder, where hundreds of college students rallied for the man they hope will become the oldest president in history. Speeches for Hillary Clinton received polite applause, while any reference to Bernie Sanders caused a short period of rapture. Those students… Continue reading
I first learned about place-making from Mark Lakeman at his office in Portland. In addition to running an architecture/design business, (Communitecture) Mark co-founded City Repair Project. City Repair takes a hands-on approach to placemaking by sponsoring the Village Building Convergence (VBC). Hands-on placemaking programs like VBC provides three benefits: A live project brings together organizations. (see #1. North… Continue reading
Extracted from James Howard Kunstler‘s book “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape“, pages 26-27. Individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in selfishness. — Alexis de Tocqueville This is embodied today… Continue reading
This work by Alice Meniconi is an expression of the Near Future Education Lab experience in Florence, when a group of students under the leadership of Salvatore Iaoconesi and Oriana Persico, re-designed their education as a commons, faced with the crisis and closure of their institution (ISEA Firenze). It has forewords by Jon Husband of… Continue reading
Originally published on Shareable, Ann Marie Utratel of Guerrilla Translation and the P2P Foundation describes the thoughts that led to developing the #ThinkGlobalPrintLocal project. Have you ever wanted to share an inspiring book that you thought could help people and communities elsewhere, but in another language? Have you thought about combining decentralized online and offline… Continue reading