Daniel Chavez: Uruguay’s housing cooperatives are a successful and proven alternative for the provision of shelter and related urban services to low-income families, as well as a vibrant social movement. With over 25,000 families organised in 560 cooperatives, this programme is one of the world’s most ambitious and radical attempts to solve the housing crisis,… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2018"
Can Cities and Citizens Reinvent Public Services?
In different forms, the remunicipalisation of public services has been gathering pace across Europe’s cities and towns in recent years. This trend goes far beyond a simple reversal of privatisation. It is also about reinventing local public services in a context of climate change and globalisation, and opening spaces for the active involvement of citizens…. Continue reading
Better Work Together – The Book!
Better Work Together: How the power of community can transform your business. The book will be reflective of quite a few people’s thinking – a real community effort, coordinated by a strong core team. It will be mixture of short essays, personal reflections, collective thinking and really practical guides. It’s being written to be relevant… Continue reading
Platform Coop’s Governance (II): From Coop Platforms to Platform Ecoopsystems
The solution to the three problems I outlined in the first part of the post is not easy, for it is the problem of the governance (management of risks and cares, or more precisely, the legitimacy of the game of risks and cares) of large communities with different degrees of participation and stakes. Ana Manzanedo… Continue reading
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Dispossessed community finances and builds affordable homes
When the homes of 36,000 people were demolished to expand Tanzania’s Dar Es Salaam port, Chamazi Community Based Housing Scheme galvanized displaced communities, civil society, government, donors and the private sector to build new and affordable homes for them. In 2006, Tanzania’s government demolished 7,351 houses in Kurasini to expand Dar Es Salaam port, leaving… Continue reading
Open call for ideas: Crowdsourcing open source agricultural solutions
The P2P Lab is happy to announce the launch of “The cultiMake project: Crowdsourcing open source agricultural solutions”, celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world. This 5-day workshop will be hosted at the intercultural makerspace “Habibi.Works”, which is located in Ioannina (Greece). More details on this call,… Continue reading
Blair Evans on the Synergy between Permaculture, Digital Fabrication and Autonomous Production by Disadvantaged Communities
Excerpted from an article and profile of Blair Evans by MATTHEW PIPER: “Permaculture,” Blair says, “is based in systems thinking. But it’s hard to understand systems in general unless you understand one system well that you can abstract from. Unfortunately, in communities that are disenfranchised or under-resourced, there aren’t a whole lot of opportunities to… Continue reading
Platform Coops’ Governance (I): Challenges
As I wrote in my previous post, we can build Platform Coops mainly based on thin relationships that follow maximizing individual self-interest, or based mainly on thick relationships that follow social and emotional engagement (always expect, though, a combination of the two). While governance is not the only factor that shapes relationships, it is nevertheless… Continue reading
Basic Income & Women’s Liberation
The UK-based activist network Radical Assembly interviewed Barb Jacobson, coordinator of Basic Income UK and member of the board of Unconditional Basic Income Europe, about basic income and women’s liberation. Jacobson discusses the history of the “wages for housework” movement, connecting it to the contemporary movement for unconditional basic income. Republished from basicincome.org
Transforming Governance for People and Planet
Over the past six years I’ve had the pleasure of working with many great people in the P2P Foundation and the commons movement. A large part of this life thread has to do with new forms of governance. As I’ve stepped through various projects, the same issue of governance has come up again and again… Continue reading
Patterns of Commoning: Generalizing the Commons
David Sloan Wilson: As an evolutionary biologist who received my PhD in 1975, I grew up with Garrett Hardin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in Science magazine in 1968. His parable of villagers adding too many cows to their common pasture captured the essence of the problem that my thesis research was designed to solve. The… Continue reading
The perils of INVITING STAKEHOLDERS into your community: Our learnings from the 5th week
User-driven innovation is hard and it is not always fun hearing the honest truth from your customers as you engage with them and invite them to become co-creators. This is part of a serious of blogposts about the REMODEL programme at The Danish Design Centre One thing that is really challenging when open sourcing your… Continue reading
The EU’s Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia
Republished from EFF.org Cory Doctorow: The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big… Continue reading
Blockchain as a force for good: How this technology could transform the sharing economy
Cross-posted from Shareable. Aaron Fernando: Blockchain has become one of those buzzwords that commands attention and carries a powerful social glow, yet in the likes of similar buzzwords that have attained such a prized status, it has lost much of its meaning. Blockchain has become a catchall term for just about any digital ledger system regardless… Continue reading
Paywalls vs Creative Commons: Experiments with Patreon, Medium and LeanPub
Last year I wrote about my dilemma: I have an ethical commitment to the commons, and I want to make a living from my writing. I want to publish all my creative work for free, and I am at my most creative when I have a reliable income. In that story I shared my long history of writing on the… Continue reading
Podcast: Cooperative Islands Within a Sea of Capitalism
Imagine a vast sea—a sea of global capitalism. Beneath the surface is a frightening place to be: a ruthless world filled with unyielding competition and greed. The logic of this ocean is kill or be killed. Every creature for itself. And the prophets of this underworld are immense leviathans engaged in an endless hunt. They… Continue reading