(This proposal of mine was first published at per-cloud.com in February 2017. It is now published again here, on invitation by M. Bauwens. For more context and details, I strongly suggest to also read, before or after this proposal, the posts from my own blog linked at the bottom) important update, 2018/02/06: a new version… Continue reading
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, […] if we judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks… Continue reading
Fernanda Marin: In the last few years, a couple of multi-billion dollar companies – initially marketed as part of a new sharing economy – devoured people’s attention. After these giants discredited the concept, many thought the ideas behind it were too naive and unrealistic to begin with. The forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, and our human nature… Continue reading
General Theory of the Precariat is essential reading for all commoners that want to think through the right strategy for social change. It squarely places itself from the point of few of the new social groups (or classes in formation, as its author, Alex Foti would have it) that have grown under the conditions of… Continue reading
(This update of my 2015 account is based mostly on the report by Dafermos, 2017.) This is a remarkable and inspiring movement in Spain, now involving hundreds of people in what I regard as an example of The Simpler Way transition strategy… which is primarily about going underneath the conventional economy to build our own… Continue reading
Strongly recommended video about how we are bio-physical-social beings and how relationships directly affect health. “Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, as well as the study and treatment of addiction.” Photo by dno1967b
“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Ambika Kandasamy: Cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Madan says open-access data or data that is freely shared among researchers to use in their studies can not only save time and money, it can enable scientists to “skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it,” if the datasets they need already exist. Madan… Continue reading
Originally published in Red Pepper a few months ago, but still hugely relevant: ‘As an open platform, anyone can use our platform no matter who they are, where they live, and what they believe… This is why you’ll see an extremely wide range of petitions, as they’ve all been created by people in the community.’ Ben… Continue reading
The Ecovillage as a Regenerative Peacebuilding Agent: Tamera – Healing Biotope I and the “Global Campus” in the West Bank. Author: Ana Margarida Esteves Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro de Estudos Internacionais, Lisboa, Portugal; [email protected] Abstract This article explores the nature of the agency of ecovillages in regenerative peacebuilding through the analysis of the… Continue reading
Bruno Roelants, a longstanding champion of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), has been appointed Director-General of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA). The ICA is the global umbrella body for the international co-operative movement and represents more than 300 co-operative federations across 105 countries. From 2002 Roelants has been secretary general of CECOP-CICOPA Europe, the… Continue reading
Following up on my prior posts about responsible cryptocurrencies and moving towards a more Ethical ICO, I want to dig into some of the nitty-gritty about what kinds of things can make an ICO more ethical than the norm. At the very least, I’d like to open up some dialogue about how to make this space safer, even… Continue reading
What are we really trying to do at the P2P Foundation, along with many other similar movements ? One of the best ways to express our underlying philosophy is here very well expressed by John Ringland, who, using complexity theory insights, distinguishes ‘generative cooperative networks’ from ‘generative adversarial networks’. We recommend reading the following text… Continue reading
A few days ago, we pointed to a remarkable presentation by Frank Pasquale, who showed how the new ‘netarchical’ corporations like Google, Facebook, Uber or AirBnB are taking over more and more former ‘state’ and ‘governmental’ functions, replacing democratically accountable public power (however feeble that accountability can sometimes be), by what he calls ‘Functional Governance’…. Continue reading
Brief: Barcelona city administration has prepared the roadmap to migrate its existing system from Microsoft and proprietary software to Linux and Open Source software. Great news from Barcelona. This article was originally posted at ItsFoss.com: A Spanish newspaper, El País, has reported that the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer… Continue reading
When was the first co-operative or mutual? The spread of customer owned co-operatives in nineteenth century Britain is well-known and celebrated. Yet there are also precursors of co-operation and mutuality before this in countries right across the world. In his new book, Ed Mayo brings together this rich story for the first time in A short… Continue reading