In one of the Republican presidential primary debates the American people were subjected to this past year, Marco Rubio remarked that Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders would make a “good candidate for president—of Sweden.” This was not a compliment. (Also: Sweden doesn’t have a president.) Rubio could safely assume that Republican primary voters more or less… Continue reading
I’ve been trying to think about ways of mainstreaming the co-op model, and the idea keeps coming up of something like a co-op layer on top of a site like Meetup, kind of akin to Stripe’s Atlas. The goal is making it as easy as possible to turn a Meetup group into a one-click co-op—perhaps… Continue reading
Cat Johnson: Shaping San Francisco is a participatory community history project documenting and archiving overlooked stories and memories of San Francisco. A multi-faceted project that’s been going for 20-plus years, Shaping San Francisco hosts bicycle and walking tours of the city, hosts public talks, and maintains FoundSF, a growing online archive to help people discover… Continue reading
“In a 2009 essay called The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel declared that capitalism and democracy had become incompatible. Since 1920, he argued, the creation of the welfare state and “the extension of the franchise to women” had made the American political system more responsive to more people – and therefore more hostile to capitalism…. Continue reading
An update from Steve Ediger and our friends at the Chicago Chamber of the Commons (now “Commons Transition Chicago”). Sign up for their meeting on Sunday, July 31st here. Welcome to the newest iteration of commons-based events and happenings in Chicago. We’ve recently rethought our work to-date and decided on a new path forward that… Continue reading
The highlight of my recent trip to Europe was this conversation in the photograph above (also captured in this 360° video, and this audio recording). Click here to read the rest of the series. The people in this photograph are participants from the Tunisian revolution in 2010, the Spanish 15M movement and the New Zealand… Continue reading
Grassroots-driven social change is accelerating all over Europe, but particularly in the Netherlands, which had to suffer the dislocating effects of ultra-neoliberal policies since 2005, and where the population has reacted through an exponential growth of civic and cooperative initiatives, as documented in Tine De Moor’s Homo Cooperans study. All kinds of transition events draw… Continue reading
TL;DR: Almost everyone thinks academic publishing needs to change. What would a better system look like? Economist Elinor Ostrom gave us design principles for an alternative – a knowledge commons, a sustainable approach to sharing research more freely. This approach exemplifies using economic principles to design a digital platform. A special contribution by Jimmy Tidey, cross-posted from… Continue reading
This years World Social Forum in Montreal will host a dedicated Commons Space. The FSM Commons Committee have just published the first English language draft of the program for the space which you can download here in PDF format http://bitly.com/CommonsWSF . The World Social Forum is a massive gathering of activists and social movements from… Continue reading
Kojin Karatani’s book, The Structure of World History, has a special meaning for me, as it confirmed the intuition at the basis of the p2p approach, which is that the configuration between the different modes of exchange, has a huge importance in driving the logic of a society and its economy. Karatani’s overview of world… Continue reading
This interview with Michel Bauwens by Frédéric Simon was originally published on EurActiv.com Enterprises like Uber and Airbnb “basically suck value out of the local economy” by trying to work around social laws and other regulations, says Michel Bauwens. But simply banning them would be short-sighted, he told EurActiv.com. Michel Bauwens is an active writer,… Continue reading
Catarina Mota and Marcin Jakubowski introduce a new project seeded in the Open Source Ecology project, i.e. the Open Building Institute. The interview was conducted by James Corbett. From the show notes: “You wouldn’t download a house, would you? Of course you would! And now with the Open Building Institute, you can! Join us today… Continue reading
Fraternity is a key Western value since the time of the Greeks… But how did it become the yearning of the urban masses to the point of forming a triad with freedom and equality? In order to rescue the following story in this series, we will travel with Henri Pirenne to the times of the… Continue reading
This article by Igor Stokfiszewski first appeared as part of the focal point Culture and the commons, which is a cooperation between Eurozine.org and Connected Action for the Commons network. It was also republished on politicalcritique.org. After 100 days in power, Poland’s nationalist right-wing government expressed its desire to completely transform Polish culture. As the anticipated… Continue reading
Very good introduction by Nathan Schneider on why we need platform cooperatives, in a lecture co-organized by Outlandish in London. From the notes to the video: Nathan Schneider (@nathanairplane) gives an introduction to the concept of platform co-operativism, and talks about what the digital economy can learn from the tradition of co-operatives. The talk is… Continue reading
What changes in state power must occur for commoning to flourish as a legal form of self-provisioning and governance? What does the success of the commons imply for the future of the state as a form of governance? My colleagues and I at the Commons Strategies Group puzzled over such questions last year and decided… Continue reading