Franz Nahrada, known himself for his important work on Global Villages, reports on the related New Work movement, which is certainly very kindred as to what the P2P Foundation wants to achieve.

We cite extensively from his report, which include pictures and extra references to projects in Africa:

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“greetings from Vienna, Austria, where we are having an exciting weekend with Frithjof Bergmann, founder of New Work, a worldwirde movement to promote the necessary cultural changes for an Alternative to Neoliberalism and Economic Growth Madness.
Frithjof is well-known to many of us and repeatedly touring the world with speeches and lectures on New Work. In many countries, groups have sprung up to take up that concept and work in the field of not only changing the workplace, but the entire meaning and foundation of work. The most central phrase that has made it to almost proverbial popularity is that New Work encourages people to look for the work they “really, really want”. Hardly a message could be more refreshing for many people who suffer from the phenomenon of an economy who has turned work for the majority of people to a “mild disease” they rather do not apprehend as a need, but as a bitter necessity, a burden, a sickening thing – a world where people are either suffering from joblessness or overworking.

Frithjof claims that changes at technology at large make it possible for our society to totally change the attitude towards work and create a culture in which work again becomes the creative and joyful reality of the human being in actu.

So we are sitting together and browsing through some sites and ideas that
might be relevant for the immediate future of our collaboration.

We start at open.coop, a very ambitious idea of Gary Alexander and friends to link individual entrepreneurs in a way that doese not create separation and diversion within communities, but lifts up community spirit and development of all people.

Frithjof replied that – seeing the PlaNet 2010 software allows people to easily connect and identify the ones in the same region or in the same field they could work with well over the internet, something like that would be immediately needed in the Midwest of the USA. The Midwest is known worldwide as one of the concentrated manufacturing centers, and F. has worked in that area with the automobile industry, but also the IT industry, on a great range of products that will be much simpler, much cheaper much more elegant, much more useful than those manufactured now, and in particular will be products that no longer will be manufactured by colossal corporate mono-industries, but will instead be manufactured in small local, “competitive”, maufacturing sites.

The most ambitious of these projects which is at this point 12 years old is a project to manufacture a wholly different electric car that will be manufactured in a computer connected large group of small manufacturing centers – hopefully around the globe. For up to date information on this project please look for the movie “who killed the electric car?”

There seems to be total coherence between the global villages model and what Frithjof envisions as a decentralized, autonomous, community based next economy built around the next wave of the approaching technogies and on the core motives of developing individuals into fully alive human beings. Thus, in a way, new work is connected to the the age or the movement of enlightment as a philosophy and culture based on the creative individual. We understand nowadays that this individual manifestsitself also by voluntary associations with others, and cannot manifest itself fully fully outself that social framework. So “Global Villages” seems to be one of the forms in which thiose creative individuals manifest and develop their way of life.”