If you’re in Brussels in late June don’t miss this conference on the social digitalisation of work which will feature, among many others, my colleague Michel Bauwens. The following is extracted from the conference’s website. The purpose of this ETUC/ETUI conference is to discuss how the world and nature of work and employment is being… Continue reading
It’s nice to hear this pledge from Labour’s Shadow Chancellor. We will follow these developments with great interested while advocating for our ideas on P2P/Commons Open Cooperativism. The following press release comes from our friends at Cooperatives UK. Co-operatives UK has welcomed the announcement (Wednesday 20 April) by the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, that the Labour Party will aim to double… Continue reading
OuiShare is on a mission to build and nurture a collaborative society. A forward-thinking, action-oriented community of thousands from around the world, the organization has been decentralized from the beginning. Formed in Paris in 2012, OuiShare is built around the notion of letting community members take initiative and enabling the community grow on its own. “It’s… Continue reading
Extracted from an article by Nikos A. Salingaros. PAVEMENTS AND HIERARCHY Architecture has in the past felt a need for pavements that are either patterned, or that embody figurative art. Our perception of space is founded on a connection with the ground via design. In creating an artificial built environment to house themselves and their… Continue reading
the 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything Regarding the question in the title above, my own proposal would be to place this in 1993, the date of the invention of the browser for the world wide web, because it made the massive interconnection of minds… Continue reading
Austerity reflects an ideology that sees the public sector as a drain upon the activities of the private sector. And that is the biggest myth of all. It is the public capacity to create and circulate public wealth, and guarantee a public currency, that sustains commerce. We need an economic policy that understands that. Mary Mellor, writing… Continue reading
I found out about MaCUS – which stands for “Màquines collectivitzades d’us social” (that is, “machines collectivized for social use”) – from Hector and Marta, CIC members I met at AureaSocial. MaCUS is one of CIC’s “autonomous projects of collective initiative”, which was launched in 2012 with the aim of becoming a commons-oriented lab in… Continue reading
Whenever you read the words “our free market system,” it should raise a red flag. See, for example an article titled “Nobel Prize Economists Say Free Market Competition Rewards Deception and Manipulation,” by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (Evonomics, Jan. 6). Now, if “free market” means anything, it means an economy where all market exchange… Continue reading
One of Shareable’s core projects this year is to produce a new book and digital database comprised of case studies and model policies to support the growth of Sharing Cities. We have covered sharing extensively in its many forms for more than six years, from little free libraries on street corners to distributed and cooperative… Continue reading
How emotions sustain collective action “All emotion is involuntary when genuine,” said Mark Twain. For anyone starting a co-op, this rings true—even more than the first cooperative principle of “voluntary and open membership.” Co-ops self-organize out of desperation and determination. With emotions running high, and without access to venture capital, co-op organizers romanticize crowdfunding as… Continue reading
Extracted from John Jacobi’s essay “The Question of Revolution“, section 6.3. Medicine is the end-all, be-all argument of industrial society. I deal with this extensively in “The Foundations of Wildist Ethics,” where I argue that while the normative science of wildists is conservation, the normative science of humanists is clearly the modern field of medicine. Whereas… Continue reading
Alanna Krause told us separately that this wonderful presentation was partly inspired by her participation in a in-depth 3-day conversation we co-organized with the Commons Strategies Group in Berlin, on the topic of Democratic Money for the Commons. This video is a very personal testimony how Alanna and other co-founders of Enspiral wanted to change… Continue reading
The Pixelache Festival will happen again in September. The festival, named ‘Interfaces for Empathy’ explores possibilities of the societal shift towards the understanding and consciousness of human species as a balanced part of the ecosystem we live at. Festival dates: 22-25 Sept 2016 Deadline to apply: 1 May 2016 For whom: Artists, activists, scientists, thinkers… Continue reading
Establishing a globally agreed tax body under the auspices of the United Nations and putting an end to dubious tax avoidance activities would bolster government revenues and help finance the provision of essential public services, especially in the Global South. Buried beneath the sensational revelations making headlines in the wake of the Panama Papers is… Continue reading
“How can organizations support our authentic and meaningful engagement in work we actually care about? How can we value openness, participation, reputation, legitimacy, connectivity, and abundance in the way we work together? How can we can organize in ways that liberate rather than stifle our creative spirit? Social philosopher Bonnitta Roy thinks we need a… Continue reading
“The ‘sharing economy’ wasn’t supposed to be this way,” write Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert Scharenberg in their preface to Trebor Scholz’s “Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy,” published in January 2016 by Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung’s New York Office. The more or less authentically expressed motivations behind the sharing economy (the maximization of underutilized resources,… Continue reading