A recent article on a Society of the Commons co-authored by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Alex Pazaitis. “For much of the history of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, political conflict has been between state and market: either to use state mechanisms for the regulation and redistribution of the excesses of market players, or, conversely, to re-privatise… Continue reading
Agreement-Based Organization (ABO) has gathered lots of positive attention since I introduced it in Collaborative Technology Alliance and Enspiral Tales this March. I’d like to summarize ABO here, describe its revisions and versions, and extend my call for inclusive discussion. ABO’s all about inclusion. Why “agreement-based organization”? As peer-to-peer technologies evolve, it seems increasingly urgent and feasible for… Continue reading
Video panel discussing European Commission call on distributed architecture and financial instruments. The session presented the call in further detail to get reactions and questions from people, and to stimulate a strategic discussion on the future of open, privacy-aware and distributed architectures in Europe. With European Commission Officers Fabrizio Sestini and Loretta Anania. Note: All… Continue reading
An article on openDemocracy By Max Haiven. “All crisis phenomena have a common denominator: they reveal a general deficit of imagination. The present is being endured to the same degree as the future seems inconceivable. What will happen tomorrow with social security, education, affluence or culture? Some people bury their head in the sand of… Continue reading
Cross-posted from CommonDreams.org, Nadia Prupis breaks down the results of the BBC’s GlobeScan poll on Global Citizenship: People around the world are increasingly identifying as global citizens, according to a new BBC poll that shines a light on changing attitudes about immigration, inequality, and different economic realities. Among all 18 countries where public opinion research… Continue reading
We’re delighted to report that #MapJam 3.0 was a great success and a testament to the ever-growing interest in showcasing and utilizing community-based sharing resources. More than 200 people came to #MapJam events in cities around the world, including Beirut, Gothenburg, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Toronto, to create and update public maps of resources in… Continue reading
This kicks off the first of a series of videos I’ll be doing exploring the controversial debates surrounding the gender wage gap. While I do make reference to the gender wage gap globally, my expertise is more specifically on the gender wage gap in North American and British context. This short video offers a breakdown… Continue reading
Cities have personalities – they’re often described as we would people. They can be dry, manic, laid-back, iconic. Barcelona is what you might call a tonic. Always known as a vivid and creative city, Barcelona is taking the lead as an exemplary change agent on the European stage. Its DIY vigor and urgent form of… Continue reading
*Special Issue: Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis. By Luis Moreno-Caballud. Modern Languages Open, 2015 From the abstract: “Studies the emergence of collaborative and non-hierarchical cultures in the context of the Spanish economic crisis of 2008. It explains how peer-to-peer social networks that have arisen online and social movements… Continue reading
My colleague Stacco Troncoso was recently interviewed by Nati Lombardo and Alana Krause for the “Humans of Loomio” series. The full interview transcript is below. Introduce yourself I’m Stacco Troncoso, I was born in Madrid, Spain, but I spent my adolescence in London, England. Most of my time nowadays involves the day to day running… Continue reading
Last April 14th, only 10 days after the revelations of the Panama Papers, thanks to an anonymous source, the European Parliament passed the Directive on Protection of Trade Secrets which, regardless of its exception, establishes the general rule the protection of trade secrets over the right to information. Our elected representatives accepted that when a… Continue reading
Originally written for Brokelyn Magazine by Isaac Anderson, a former MakerBot employee, what follows is a cautionary tale about the perils of venture capital inserting itself in the Open Source community: Once upon a time, MakerBot Industries was the darling of the Brooklyn start-up world. I’d know, because I worked there. The company this week… Continue reading
Congratulations to my colleagues at the Peer to Peer Foundation, and especially founder Michel Bauwens, for winning the 2016 Golden Nica for Digital Communities from Prix Arts Electronica! This is a great and well-deserved honor. There were a total of 3,159 entries from 84 countries for this venerable prize this year. In the prize citation,… Continue reading
1. It is now more expensive to internalize than to link and network. 2. What assets were for the industrial firm, network effects are for the post-industrial firm. Excerpted from Esko Kilpi: “The basic units of the industrial era were transacting entities enabled by market, price and coordination mechanisms. It was a world of particles separated from… Continue reading
Genius or folly? “All Prior Art is “…a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able.” The following is extracted from their website: All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making… Continue reading
* Article: Vivero Pol, Jose Luis, Transition Towards a Food Commons Regime: Re-Commoning Food to Crowd-Feed the World (January 13, 2015). From the Abstract: ” Then, using the food regime theory and exploring the developments in the industrial food system (mainstream) and the urban alternative food networks (AFNs) and rural food sovereignty movement (innovative niches),… Continue reading