Martin Dennemark wrote to us recently to tell us about his Open Source City Development project. We liked his ideas and encouraged him to send us more. In reply, he sent this video and text: How can we plan our environment openly and collaboratively? Finding an answer to this question was the main motivation for… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2016"
Frome, a town divided: Part 2 of a 3 part podcast series
Last week we introduced Episode 1 of the new audio documentary series Welcome to Frome, produced by the Upstream podcast. Episode 1 explored the mini-revolution that took place recently in Frome, a small town in the sleepy western countryside of England. It also looked at some of the radical new initiatives developed and supported by the new… Continue reading
Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can
Jason Hickel: Earlier this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, floods sent… Continue reading
No, Capitalism Isn’t Making Us All Richer and Richer
If you frequent mainstream right-libertarian publications on anything like a regular basis, you’ve probably seen more than one of those breathless articles about how capitalism is making the ordinary poor person richer than a medieval king. For example Calvin Beisner: “No matter how rich you might have been” 150 years ago, “You could not have… Continue reading
Las Indias: new and (much) improved
How we are organizing our node of what will be a phyle, and how you can become a member, depending on your needs, preferences, and commitment. At the end of last year, we began the fusion of Enkidu and Las Indias. Not only was it the logical conclusion of the logic of integration, but also… Continue reading
Village Towns for Norwegian Countryside
Henry Ford was a farmer’s son and he wanted the car to be a tool for farmers. Surely, for the farmers the car was a blessing. The problem arose when the farm market was saturated, how to keep the assembly lines moving? Unfortunately, the solution was to move city people out into the farmland, away… Continue reading
Transnational Republics of Commoning 2: New Forms of Network-based Governance
The text below is a second installment from my essay, “Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing Governance through Emergent Networking,” published by Friends of the Earth UK. The third and final part of the essay will appear next. Digital Commons as a New Species of Production and Governance To return to our original question: How can… Continue reading
Young Researchers Program: “Linking the food sovereignty debates”
“The Young Researchers Program, a mentorship programme by the Hands On the Land Alliance in cooperation with TNI, FIAN International and Friends of the Earth, is open for applications until the 19th of September 2016. This program enables young engaged scholars and activists to strengthen their capacities around understanding food sovereignty and the human right… Continue reading
Ours to Hack…
The Internet we’ve been waiting for is now available for pre-order—or, at least, a book about it. For the past couple of years, New School professor Trebor Scholz and I have been working the support and build a movement to develop more democratic, fair, and accountable ownership models for the online economy. We organized a… Continue reading
OPEN! Methods and tools for community-based product development
OPEN! Methods and tools for community-based product development is a research project which started in March 2016. It is co-financed by the German and the French national research foundations DFG and ANR for a period of three years. “This project aims at: understanding open source product development, showing concrete evidence of this emerging practice and… Continue reading
P2P Foundation receives the Prix Ars Electronica 2016 Award
The P2P Foundation is very honoured to have received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica 2016 for Digital Communities. We announced the good news a few months back and last week I traveled to Linz, Austria, to receive the award on behalf of the Foundation and present our work in a plenary. My partner, Ann… Continue reading
Project Of The Day: Open Building Institute
I arrived home last week to find my wife busy with a tape measure and a pad of graph paper. When I asked her what she was doing, she showed me her plans for a new master bathroom. New, as in she wants to knock out the back wall of our bedroom and build an… Continue reading
Help liberate the Economy, Help liberate Yourself : Buy from Cooperatives
An excellent introduction to the social and personal advantages of sourcing your needs from the co-op movement. Written by Ozgur Zeren and originally published in A Better Future is Possible: Buying from cooperatives is one of the smartest and easiest methods which all of us can use to transform our economy today. It brings real… Continue reading
The Next System Project’s Pluralist Commonwealth
In a new short film from The Next System Project, Gar Alperovitz explains how the pluralist commonwealth—grounded in democratized ownership and deep concern for community—can provide an alternative to our current inequitable, unsustainable, and unjust system. From the shownotes to the video: In the video above, produced by Democracy Collaborative staff working with Softbox Films,… Continue reading
Douglas Rushkoff’s TEAM HUMAN
Douglas Rushkoff has a great new podcast series out now called Team Human. We will be republishing the episodes here in the P2PF Blog but, for now, check out Douglas’ intro to the new show: Douglas Rushkoff: I thought long and hard about how best to respond to the thousands of emails I’ve received since… Continue reading
David Bollier and the City as a Commons
Originally posted at Pakhuis de Zwijger: “With the New Democracy series we investigate democratic change as a transition, looking for socio-economic trends on the one side, and practices of social innovators on the other, that simultaneously puts pressure on the existing system, forcing it into change. Tonight we will continue our research by identifying what… Continue reading