Date archives "January 2019"

How to do anything in 3 hard steps: sustaining a project with purpose, care, and humility

This post is republished from Enspiral Tales/Medium Sep 1, 2015: I was recently invited to talk with the Lifehack Flourishing Fellows, who are starting projects to improve the wellbeing of young people in Aotearoa. Since co-founding Loomio a couple years ago, I receive these invitations fairly regularly, to talk with uni students or activists or… Continue reading

The la-la land in small scale collaborative communities

This post by Tiberius Brastaviceanu of Sensorica was republished from Steemit Since 2011 I have been working almost full time on collaborative projects, with open and decentralized organizations. I can say that I’ve seen it all, but I am still trying to make sense of it all. I recently realized something that plagues a lot… Continue reading

The People’s Spring – how civic tech movements affect modern politics

Republished from The Alternative UK We’re delighted to be able to distribute the free-to-view copy (embed above) of The People’s Spring, a 2018 documentary made by Ryslaine Boumahdi and her team of supporters. (This post is an update of an earlier post.) Here’s the blurb from Ryslaine: In the 20th century, public life revolved around… Continue reading

HowlRound — Enacting Theater as a Commons

I’m happy to report that my odyssey in producing Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons — my new book on the commons with coauthor Silke Helfrich — is over….at least, the writing part. Last week we submitted the manuscript to New Society Publishers for publication in September. A German translation will be published… Continue reading

New generations meet new alternatives: the Commons and the Youth Initiative Program

Scroll down to the videos below to see young, engaged commoners describing the state of the art in Open Coops and P2P Politics. When talking about enclosures in the Commons, we usually think of natural or cultural resources. But there’s something else that’s vulnerable to enclosure, which I hesitate to describe as a “resource”: emancipatory… Continue reading

Why Germany Leads in Renewables: It Has Its Own Green Bank

The Green New Deal endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more than 40 other US Representatives has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it, but taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes. It says funding will come primarily from certain public… Continue reading

COSMOLOCALISM | design global, manufacture local: Call for a PhD student

The Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance, TalTech (Tallinn University of Technology), Estonia, is offering a doctoral position in the scope of the ERC Starting Grant “COSMOLOCALISM – Design Global, Manufacture Local”  led by Prof. Vasilis Kostakis. The successful applicant is expected to work individually but also jointly with the project members. The applicant… Continue reading

El Cuá, Nicaragua: Community-owned hydropower transforms rural economy

Association of Rural Development Workers – Benjamin Linder (ATDER-BL) Residents of the northern highlands of Nicaragua were typically overlooked by modern infrastructure development. The Association of Rural Development Workers has changed this, securing access to electricity and clean drinking water for local people for the first time. Today the association is also generating enough profits… Continue reading

Introducing the Commons Engine Holochain in the world of deep wealth

Emaline Friedman: Let’s face it: reflecting on the substantial patterns of the last twenty years of digital economic culture returns a bleak assessment. That promise to connect us that we call the “sharing economy” has turned out to be the perfect set of business practices to extract corporate profits while remaining indifferent to the well-being… Continue reading

Book of the Day: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination—and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of… Continue reading

Antonio Negri on the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons

With Assembly (2017), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have continued their trilogyEmpire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) into the new decade, expanding it into a tetralogy. The fourth episode sees these advocates of commonism once again provide a critical analysis of the most topical developments in society. Their central issue this time concerns why the social movements that express the demands… Continue reading

Algorithms, Capital, and the Automation of the Common

“autonomous ones not subsumed by or subjected to the capitalist drive to accumulation and exploitation.” This essay was written by Tiziana Terranova and originally published in Euromade.info Tiziana Terranova: This essay is the outcome of a research process which involves a series of Italian institutions of autoformazione of post-autonomist inspiration (‘free’ universities engaged in grassroots organization of public seminars,… Continue reading

Book Launch: Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto

WHEN: 21st March 2019 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pmWHERE: University of Westminster (Room UG05); 309 Regent St; Marylebone, London W1B 2HT; UKCOST: Free Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis & Alex Pazaitis (P2P Foundation) –Book Launch ‘Peer to Peer. The Commons Manifesto’ (University of Westminster Press) Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as… Continue reading

Nesta’s ‘ShareTown’ interactive shows what a cooperative, tech-enabled economy might look like

Aaron Fernando: It is common to see questionable policies enacted by state and local governments under the guise of economic development — policies which appear to serve the interests of private entities rather than the interests of society at large.

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