Republished from Soundcloud.com In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published a revolutionary white paper that described a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would later become Bitcoin. In the decade since the launch of the digital currency, the nascent blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has been heralded as having the… Continue reading
The Latent, Unused Power of Citizens and the Production of Public Collateral
This post by Ann Pettifor is reposted from TNI, as part of their Longreads series, State of Power 2019. It was just a montage of words uttered over a video in the summer of 2018. Soon the words went viral. They helped unseat a Wall St-friendly Democrat – one primed to be the next Congressional… Continue reading
Community Wealth Building and the Preston Model: Call for Contributors.
CERG/RDLAC Silvertown Session 9th May 2019 Community Wealth Building, Albert Road, North Woolwich E16 2J This is a call for people interested in contributing to an economic, social and cultural development workshop happening in the Silvertown/North Woolwich area of the Docks on the evening of 9th May 2019. The workshop is part of a series… Continue reading
Self-organized to perpetuate Nonsense?
This post by Betty Lim is republished from Medium.com Check out this video to ponder whether this is the paradigm we are in. This extract from Social movements powering the future of money attempts to explain how the Age of ‘I win, you lose’ Nonsense (paradigm) has us blindly perpetuating the root cause of all… Continue reading
From Global to Glocal: How to shift from extractive to generative entrepreneurship
As the challenges we face in the world become more complex and systemic than ever before, viewing business as regenerative instead of extractive could be the radical new approach we need. The following article was written by Jenny Andersson and is reposted from the RSA’s Website. The globalisation of business has brought many positives, especially… Continue reading
Why We Need a New Open Source License
Mary Camacho:Our developer and application communities have been asking for more clarity on our licensing models, and we are very happy to share our progress and some exciting news. Last September, we wrote about the licensing needs for truly peer-to-peer software. As part of that post, we said that it was time to develop We understand… Continue reading
Mutating the Future: the Anticipatory Experimentation Method
Reposted from Medium.com We human beings for most of our history have solved the problems of the present. Problem arises, people respond. See problem, act on problem. But now we find ourselves in a new context, beset by not just the problems of the present but as well of the future. These include automation and… Continue reading
Human waste: the latest enclosure of the commons?
I’ve always been amazed at the things and activities around which commons have been unexpectedly developed – noncommercial theater, humanitarian rescue maps, specialized scientific microscopes. Little did I suspect that I would encounter a commons based on….human excrement. Even more surprising is that this valiant little commons, dedicated to using the human biome to benefit everyone, may soon… Continue reading
Designing for positive emergence (Majorca as a case study)
[…]The last three sections on ethics, aesthetics and complexity might seem theoretical, but, as we saw earlier, to break through to a new way of thinking about our problems, we need to ask deeper questions about the theories that currently inform our practice. Let me make the theory more palpable by relating it to aspects… Continue reading
Better Work Together: Reflections from a nascent movement
Last March I was sitting at the dinner table in Wellington with Susan and Anthony, two fellow members of the New Zealand-based collective Enspiral. “We are starting a book project to share stories and learnings from 8 years of building Enspiral with the world,” they said. “Do you want to join as a co-author, along with 10 other… Continue reading
Commoning Our Cities: Mary Miss, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh
Reinventing our cities and re-enchanting the world. Who gets a say in designing where they live? What if more of us did? This week, we visit Mary Miss, a Guggenheim fellow and celebrated artist, whose organization, The City as Living Laboratory, strives to empower people to create not the cliché of the sustainable city, she… Continue reading
Co-ops Need Leaders, Too
Originally posted on Medium on 21st January 2019. I frequently encounter a notion, among those drawn to cooperatives, that a cooperative should be an amorphous, faceless collective in which old-world skills and norms of leadership can be discarded. How does this work out for them? Not well. Usually one of two entirely predictable things happens… Continue reading
Digital Democracy and Data Commons (DDDC) a participatory platform to build a more open, transparent and collaborative society.
Originally posted on LabGov.City on 21st February 2019, written by Monica Bernardi, The Urban Media Lab The interest for citizens co-production of public services is increasing and many digital participatory platforms (DPPs) have been developed in order to improve participatory democratic processes. During the Sharing City Summit in Barcelona last November we discovered the DDDC, i.e. the Digital… Continue reading
How one city in France is working together to reduce waste
This post by Marco Quaglia is cross-posted from Shareable With an annual average of 243 kg (over 535 pounds) of waste per capita, citizens of Roubaix, in the north of France, were producing less than half their country’s average Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). Yet their aim to reduce it even further has brought about the… Continue reading
Towards Co-operative CommonWealth: Transition in a Perilous Century. Sign up now!
Across the Planet Young People are Mobilizing “I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” 16 year – old Greta Thunberg at Davos – January 2019 Towards a Co-operative CommonWealth: Transition in… Continue reading
Multilateralism and the Commons
What a pleasant surprise to learn that some people at the United Nations – specifically, its Inter-Parliamentary Union – want to know more about how commons might be relevant to the “multilateral system” of international governance and assistance. I was happy to oblige by participating on a conference panel last Friday, February 22, called… Continue reading