Date archives "April 2018"

User, Worker, Owner! May 2 in Oakland

Working in tech is a mix of privilege and pain. Each week, we struggle with how our values fit in our workplaces and platforms. We’re a group of tech workers who see how the tech industry shapes our lives and data, and how it is complicit in forms of oppression, including racism, classism, sexism, cisgenderism,… Continue reading

“Fake news” is the newest, fakest justification for the EU link tax

Julia Reda: The European Commission today released a proposal on combating fake news. It includes a call for the extra copyright for news sites or “link tax”, which is part of the copyright reform plans currently hotly debated in Parliament and Council. In parallel, rapporteur Axel Voss is also trying to add this justification for… Continue reading

Every One Every Day: London neighbourhood resilience and commons at work

Great case example of resilience principles at work, the extending of the commons and community economic development all wrapped up in a 4 minute video. Find out more at Participatory City

The Repair Café Foundation builds community by fixing things

Darren Sharp:  Here’s the problem – Changing people’s behavior on waste reduction and prevention is a major challenge. Too many useful products like clothing, textiles, toys, bicycles, furniture, and household appliances are discarded as waste because people lack the practical knowledge or tools to repair broken items. While some of these goods are recycled, many… Continue reading

Apply for the 2018 #PlatformCoop Propaganda Challenge

Cross-posted from Platform.coop Public trust in the investor-owned platform economy is collapsing. Business models based on selling workers and users to Wall Street are under growing scrutiny, and a small but growing number of cooperatively-owned platforms present a real, positive alternative. How might we seize this moment to show the promise of platform cooperativism? We… Continue reading

Elia Kagel on Curating for the Commons in the Berlin Supermarkt Coworking Space

Here is an excellent and clear interview with Ela Kagel on Supermarkt on the cultural commons space in Berlin. Growing together with others: an interview with Ela Kagel of SuperMarkt In this conversation Ela Kagel describes how the collectively-run project SUPERMARKT emerged and developed over the last years. Based in Berlin, the aim of the project… Continue reading

Patterns of Commoning: Commons and Alternative Rationalities: Subjectivity, Emotion and the (Non)rational Commons

Andrea J. Nightingale: When I tell people that I work on inshore fisheries management the response is inevitably disparaging. Most people continue to assume that the commons is an ecological disaster waiting to happen and that all fishermen are greedy individuals. Yet my experience on the west coast of Scotland suggests that the fishing ground is… Continue reading

Scuttlebutt: an off-grid social network

André Staltz, writing in his blog, tells the story of Scuttlebutt, a project we support at the P2P Foundation. Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm,… Continue reading

The Vibes Theory of Organisational Design

The bigger the group, the more rules they need. Can we do better than written agreements? In this article I’m going to bite off some big ideas, musing on the limitations of encoding agreements in text. To keep it grounded, I’ll illustrate the ideas with real-world stories. I’ll include a couple of practical tools you… Continue reading

Podcast: Worker Cooperatives – Widening Spheres of Democracy

The latest episode of the Upstream podcast takes a deep dive into the Worker Cooperatives movement: a broad selection of organizations, activists, and cooperatively structured workplaces that advocate for—and embody—workplace and economic democracy. The 21st century has seen an explosion in interest around Worker Cooperatives—particularly since capitalism’s 2008 crisis. In Part 1 of this 2-part… Continue reading

Next, the Internet: Building a Cooperative Digital Space

Originally published in the Cooperative Business Journal‘s winter 2018 issue. For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought… Continue reading

Drones & CAP Compliance – savvy surveying or surveillance state?

Somewhere between convenience, efficiency, cost saving and a comprehensive EU surveillance mega state, the use of drones and other in-the-sky technologies for ensuring CAP compliance represents, as it were, a Brave New World.  Helene Schulze: Imagine annual farm audits performed not by EU regulators pacing the fields and talking through the details with farmers but… Continue reading

Raising children in egalitarian communities: An inspiration

Katarzyna Gajewska: I interviewed dozens of members of two egalitarian communities, rural Acorn community in Virginia, US (30 adults and one child at the time of research in 2014) and suburban near to Kassel in Germany (60 adults and 20 teens and children in 2016). You can find links to my four articles on Acorn… Continue reading

Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy

Christina Oatfield: Have you noticed how many tech start-ups are interested in food these days? We have. There are dozens of apps that deliver food right to your door (either by a human being or sometimes even by a robot) and you can order take-out, groceries, or partially prepared meals with a few taps on… Continue reading

Who are the new Co-op weavers?

There’s something exciting happening in the world of co-ops which harks back to the very beginning of the movement. Although Rochdale is normally credited as the “birthplace of cooperation” records show that in 1761, sixteen weavers in Ayrshire set up “The Society of Weavers in Finnick”, arguably the first co-operative organisation of the industrial age. It was… Continue reading