Rosa Jijón /Francesco Martone: Arts for the Commons (A4C) is a collective exercise meant to provide a platform for artists and activists exploring the connections and synergies between visual production and efforts to reclaim the commons, address outstanding issues related to human migration, borders, social and environmental justice, liquid citizenship. By creating opportunities for exchange,… Continue reading
Rob Hopkins: Last week, close to my home, was the Transition Design Symposium. It brought together people from around the world interested in what design can bring to the need for an urgent societal Transition, and for 2 days its attendees basked in glorious sunshine and fascinating interactions. I managed to catch up with Michel… Continue reading
Republished from Rethink.earth Frederik Moberg: Around the world, innovative agroecological farmers increasingly challenge the dominant industrial way of farming. Combining local and scientific knowledge, they put resilience thinking into practice to feed growing populations and cope with climate change, water scarcity, market volatility, and more. Twelve years ago, in 2006, Haregu Gobezay was unemployed and… Continue reading
Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery foregrounds forms of life in the cracks of Empire, revealing the ways that fierceness, tenderness, curiosity, and commitment can be intertwined. This is part of a series of about the project. See all interviews here. This interview with Silvia Federici was conducted in early 2016 by carla… Continue reading
Here is a good review of the political commons developments, a contribution from Birgit Daiber to the Barcelona Conference on Social Commons, Barcelona June 2018. Birgit Daiber: After years of commoning in conferences, cooperation projects, networking, discussions on the diversity of experiences and designing strategies how broaden them – I think it’s time to discuss… Continue reading
Dear friends and commoners: In the lead up to the Open Coop 2018 conference, Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum) will join me in hosting an action-oriented workshop on Commonspoly at Newspeak House, London. Commonspoly is a hacked version and critique of the game Monopoly, where the goals are to first re-municipalize private goods… Continue reading
On some accounts, we are moving from a world of hierarchy to a world of networks. A common feature of hierarchies, with its emphasis on communications as instructions, has been to promote simplicity, assigning low value to what lies outside of its frame of reference. So, can complexity now make a comeback in business? Ed… Continue reading
The Distributed Design Market Platform (DDMP) aims to strengthen a creative community of more than 10.000 registered users who are fabricators, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, amateurs, professionals, ages 5 to 75+, located in more than 40 countries in more than 1000 Fab Labs. The Platform aims at promoting and improving the connection of makers… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Shanna Hanbury: In the face of poor public services and high rates of assault and violence, how can women help each other heal and deal with the aftermath of traumatic events? A small team spread out across Rio De Janeiro, Recife, and São Paulo in Brazil, is betting on solidarity and sorority… Continue reading
In this final installment in the REMODEL design sprint program, the 10 Danish manufacturing companies were challenged to prototype a community eco-system chart based, among other things, on all the work done in the previous phases. With this, it started to become clear how essential and powerful communities of co-creators can be, but also how… Continue reading
By Morgan Meyer (Director of Research, Mines ParisTech, PSL) and Alekos Pantazis (Junior Research Fellow, Tallinn University of Technology & Core Member, P2P Lab) This is a story about people who build their own machines. It’s a story about people who, due to necessity and/or conscious choice, do not buy commercial equipment to work their… Continue reading
Two forms of government have dominated in the west over the last hundred years. In one big power is vested in the state, the government, in the other policy is dominated by the influence of big industry, big corporations, or big money. Well a hundred years after the Russian revolution, and ten years after the… Continue reading
Republished from Open Democracy By Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan and Joe Bilsborough: There is no telling when the next UK general election will come, and when the Corbyn Project could accede to national political power in what R.H. Tawney once called ‘the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world’. But there is still plenty… Continue reading
Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery foregrounds forms of life in the cracks of Empire, revealing the ways that fierceness, tenderness, curiosity, and commitment can be intertwined. This is part of a series of about the project. See all interviews here. This interview with Gustavo Esteva was conducted in 2014 by carla bergman and Nick… Continue reading
Since 2014, the Our Water Our Rights Campaign has mobilized communities and people’s groups to resist water privatization across Lagos, and broadened citizen engagement in resolving the city’s water crisis. Against the odds it has also increased government spending on water and sanitation in the capital. When ERA learned that Lagos state government was secretly… Continue reading
Frome in Somerset has seen a dramatic fall in emergency hospital admissions since it began a collective project to combat isolation. There are lessons for the rest of the country. Michel Bauwens: One of the key issues concomitant to the emergence of a neoliberal system of society is the spreading of one-sided ‘materialist’ efficiency thinking in… Continue reading