Sol Trumbo & Nick Buxton: When Donald Trump announced in June 2017 that the US would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, it was noticeable that the most effective opposition came not from Congress but from cities and states. 379 mayors representing more than 68 million Americans said they would implement the Accord regardless of… Continue reading
In phase 4 of the REMODEL programme, it is now time to dig deeper and start imagining how the open source mechanisms can be applied concretely in the business strategy of the companies’ products. The secret sauce? Not the open source bit, but rather the magic of building community. This is part of a serious… Continue reading
Aaron Fernando: In June 1968, a group of eight American civil rights and land reform activists travelled to Israel with a plan that was ambitious, if not outright radical. They made the journey in order to study the legal foundations and management practices behind the Jewish National Fund’s leasehold system, and to use this knowledge… Continue reading
Zack Walsh writing for The Arrow: The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change claims that reducing emissions by more than 1 percent annually would generate a severe economic crisis, and yet, climate analysts tell us we need to reduce carbon emissions by 5.3 percent annually to limit global warming to 2°C.1 Moreover, there is… Continue reading
With rates of trust in government at all-time lows, the legitimacy and effectiveness of traditional representative models of lawmaking, typically dominated by political party agendas and conducted by professional staff and politicians working behind largely closed doors, are called into question. But technology offers the promise of opening how lawmaking bodies work to new sources… Continue reading
Our colleague James Quilligan alerted us to this video. Worth paying attention to. Originally published at TED. From the shownotes to the video Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: “We could have a tipping… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. 596 Acres: Here’s the problem: Located primarily in areas of the city where low-income communities of color live today, more than a thousand vacant public lots languish behind fences, collecting garbage. One such lot was in Paula Segal’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 2010, she began talking to her neighbors about this lot…. Continue reading
“If something goes wrong, its not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s.” [Tweedie Waititi, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Sunday Star Times] Anne Salmond: In April 2011, a small flotilla of protest vessels headed out to sea from the Eastern Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. Among them was a fishing boat, the San Pietro, owned by the local iwi (kin group),… Continue reading
I will be attending the European Artistic Research Network Conference in Dublin on October 18th-19th this year. What follows is my abstract for the conference. You can find more details for the event itself in the second part of this post. Michel Bauwens: Karl Polanyi, in his landmark book, ‘The Great Transformation’, famously posited the ‘double… Continue reading
A recording of US professor Erik Olin Wright, speaking in Sidney Australia recently, about unconditional basic income and its anti-capitalist potential. This is not least for the support it would give to co-operative businesses and community-based care organisations. He makes the case for eroding capitalism by forming and expanding non-capitalist spaces within it. While the… Continue reading
Our colleague Torange Khonsari forwarded us this through the European Commons Assembly mailing list. Scroll down for details on how to apply. LAUNCHING FOR ADMISSION SEPTEMBER 2018 MA: Design for Cultural Commons – The Cass (London Metropolitan University) Although a movement and a model of practice there are few courses dedicated to the Commons and… Continue reading
One of the pragmatic solutions supported by the P2P Foundation is the CopyFair license, which combines free knowledge sharing, with a demand for reciprocity for the commons’ base, in case of commercialization. Coopify is an example of such a license, developed by the Coop des Communs in France, and association which works on commons-cooperative convergence… Continue reading
It might come as a surprise – but something innovative is happening in Hull. Hull is one of those cities, like Swindon and Slough, that’s long been the butt of jokes – like the one about the guy that typed ‘Hell’ instead of ‘Hull’ into his Sat-Nav, but still got there – it’s not that… Continue reading
The first run-through of the REMODEL programme in which 10 Danish manufacturing companies go through an 8-week design-sprint to explore new business strategies based on open source principles has begun – and we are now three weeks in. What have we learned from their journey so far? This is part of a serious of blogposts… Continue reading
It’s striking, when curating an event about future possibilities, just how persistent old forms of life are. Take the idea of the “new nationalism”. Just before the financial crash of 2008, the consensus was that globalisation was mutating, if not dissolving, the nation. The best that nation-states could do was adapt to planet-scale forces of… Continue reading
Zahra Davidson: Enrol Yourself is a social business that aims to redesign lifelong learning by harnessing the power of peer groups. It all began when my good friend Roxana Bacian felt stuck in our jobs and started having regular conversations about the kind of learning and development we wanted to participate in – and couldn’t… Continue reading