About the Festival: Festival of the Commons will take place on 6-7-8 October 2017, at the Athens School of Fine Arts. The Festival of the Commons unites the efforts of the Festival for Solidarity and Cooperative Economy and the CommonsFest. Our desire is for the Festival of the Commons to be a celebratory meeting point… Continue reading
“How did we get to accept that food, one of the three essentials for life, along with air and water, can be produced, distributed, appropriated and even destroyed on the basis of pure economic considerations?” From the Introduction Tomaso Ferrando and Jose Luis Vivero-Pol: Over the last ten years, Watch readers have become familiar with… Continue reading
Ana Manzanedo and Alícia Trepat Pont: “Everything that can become a platform will become a platform”. The potential of platforms “ is simply too compelling to deny: exponential scaling, exponential learning, and very low cost innovation and localization”. 1 The future of work will be defined by platforms, or so it seems with the “success” stories… Continue reading
Reposted from CICOPA’s Website. Brussels, 25 September 2017 – CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives, published today its second global report on “Cooperatives and Employment” [PDF]. . For Bruno Roelants, Secretary General of CICOPA: “Employment is one of the most important contributions made by cooperatives throughout the world. This report shows that people involved… Continue reading
Writing recently in Medium, Salvatore Iaconesi — a designer, engineer and founder of Art is Open Source and Human Ecosystems — offers an extremely important critique of the blockchain and other data-driven network technologies. While recognizing that these systems have enormous potential for “radical innovation and transformation,” he astutely warns against their dangerous psychological and… Continue reading
Cities are disproportionately entangled in the critical challenges that we collectively face. Cities consume disproportionate amounts of energy and produce disproportionate amounts of waste while contributing significantly to economic and racial inequality. If cities continue pursuing contemporary development strategies, things are bound to get worse as the share of global population living in cities is projected… Continue reading
So, what about politics? (#SWAP) is a fully packed symposium presenting mainly very concrete projects that deal with new forms of political action and governance in the contemporary network society. With examples from liquid democracy, e-governance, civic intelligence, platform cooperativism and autonomous self-organisation. From the event website: So, what about politics? looks at initiatives that could be… Continue reading
This work by Pablo Iglesias, leader of insurgent Spanish party Podemos, is now subtitled ‘Podemos and the future of a Democratic Europe’. It wouldn’t have been so originally, because Podemos did not exist when the book was first written. This makes the book of historical interest, though the addition of appendices in this 2015 edition… Continue reading
The emergence of a New Story — the transformational narrative which has the power of changing society and culture, along with economics — is being contentiously fought today. But the fog of this battle seems to reveal only a miasma of viewpoints, which is distracting society to the point of utter confusion. In the US,… Continue reading
A report on AbilityMate conducted in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project. AbilityMate is a Sydney (Australia) based social enterprise whose mission is to help people with disabilities access the equipment they need. Their vision starts by making custom-made 3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs) available to Australian children! The enterprise’s approach… Continue reading
Why Shareable? Economic inequality. Political instability. Environmental crisis. These are challenging, divisive times. But there’s a strong movement of people who are strengthening their communities by creating tangible, replicable solutions based on sharing and collaboration. All around the world, there are countless stories of people working together for the common good — stories of people… Continue reading