Brilliant and practical way of cutting the developers out of lining their pockets once public planning permission is granted. This policy captures what is now unearned income in the hands of private developers for a key public good – to radically increase the affordability of housing. Take a look. Not too complicated. Grounded in Commons… Continue reading
This article from George Monbiot contains a vital insight, to complement our earlier postings on increased corporate functional governance as explained by Frank Pasquale. Add the insight that one of the main planks of the Trump administration is the deskilling of the state and public services, and you start getting a picture of a preparation… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Here’s the problem: The founders of “Mietshäuser Syndikat” (tenements syndicate), a network of cohousing projects in Germany, observed many self-organized cohousing projects struggle and fail. Some couldn’t overcome the challenges in the critical early phases, in terms of dealing with legal issues, finances, and group dynamics, while others created commercially exploited housing projects… Continue reading
Adding to the body of existing tools and training material on cooperative development, ILO now launches Think.Coop, a new training tool for those interested in cooperation and its benefits for improving businesses of potential members. A great new initiative from ILO to encourage new cooperators! Think.Coop is an orientation tool that helps participants understand how mutualism… Continue reading
Commercial sharing platforms have reshaped the transportation and housing sectors in cities and raised challenges for urban policy makers seeking to balance market disruption with community protections. Transformational sharing seeks to strengthen the urban commons to address social justice, equity and sustainability. This paper uses Transformative Social Innovation theory to develop a comparative analysis of… Continue reading
Capitalism swims like a shark. And upon the shark’s fin an exciting prospect is dancing: commons-based peer production. This is the prospect we’ve been trying to understand for the last decade. In the next two years, we aim to ground our ideas for a commons transition on stronger empirical evidence. The main questions we’ll try… Continue reading
Open source products are essential to build a more sustainable, fair and circular economy Take a look at this project by some of the people in our network. If you’d like to support it, please click on this page to contribute. How does open source creates social and sustainable impact? If we make products open… Continue reading
We live in a time of terminal crisis for centralized institutions of all kinds, including the two most notable members of the genus: states and large corporations. Both a major cause and major symptom of this transition is the steady reduction in the amount of labor needed to produce a given level of output, and… Continue reading
Still not familiar with Platform Coops? This article, written by MJ Kaplan and originally published in Yes! Magazine, does an excellent job explaining the concept. You can also check out our introduction to Open Coops, for a complementary perspective. MJ Kaplan: The future of jobs, work, and workplaces is facing rampant transformation. One of the… Continue reading
To celebrate the launch of the Winter issue — Power — STIR Magazine are collaborating with Impact Hub Brixton to launch the magazine during Open Project Night on 19 February 2018. Marginalised workers and particularly those within Black, Asian and Latino communities, are most likely to fall into precarious work and the first to be left behind by the rise of… Continue reading
Claudia Gómez-Portugal M: A number of families in the small Mexican town of Tepoztlán have taken the initiative to create a space for free and independent learning that provides meaning. Some of the 14,000 people who live in the town’s seven neighborhoods are indigenous or immigrants, and in keeping with a longstanding Mexican tradition, some land… Continue reading
The European Commons Assembly (ECA) is a network of grassroots initiatives promoting commons management practices at the European level. The last stop for the network was at Medialab Prado, Madrid. These activities were part of the Festival Transeuropa program, a large meeting of political, social and environmental alternatives. Overview of Thematic Working Groups Participatory Tools… Continue reading
The following nine points regarding the moral rights of authors in the age of cognitive capitalism were written in response to Ines Duhanic’s article, “Julia Reda-Led Panel Discussion Reveals – Publishers’ Right Faces High Resistance From Academic Circles”, IP Watch: Inside Views (January 21, 2018) 1/ The current legislation under review by the European Commission’s… Continue reading
Duniter is a French cryptocurrency that squarely aims for more egalitarian outcomes and critiques the ‘propertarian’ premises of Bitcoin. The main injustice is that early entrants of Bitcoin are privileged and those that have no bitcoins have to work for those that have. It simply re-iterates the existing inequality in our societies by keeping the… Continue reading
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley: Co-op coins are not a new concept but the days of trading locally minted coins for a pint of milk or a loaf of bread are long gone. Instead, the rising interest in digital currencies and rapid increase in the number of Initial Coin Offerings looks set to make 2018 “the year of the crypto… Continue reading
Our ultimate challenge is use realistic assumptions of human beings and human design to engender collaborations that support the rhythms of the human experience with all its notions of beauty, meaning and desire. The following text is taken from Design Decode’s about page: Design Decode was established in 2015 with the aim of experimenting with… Continue reading