Cross-posted from Shareable This article was adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Download your free pdf copy today. Myriam Bouré: Up until a few years ago, the residents of Loos-en-Gohelle, a small town in rural northwestern France with over 6,000 residents, consumed imported industrial food products despite significant local production. In addition to… Continue reading
March 27-29, 2019 Oakland, California Application due December 5th, 2018 The Nonprofit Democracy Network is a community of practice and peer support network for organizations working to make their organizations – and the broader nonprofit sector – more liberatory and transformative. We want the nonprofit sector to be more effective at creating a just, joyful, and sustainable world…. Continue reading
In the final narrative session, and keynote debate of OPEN 2018, Niki Okuk, Founder of Rco Tires, Guy Watson, Founder and Chair of Riverford Organic and Indra Adnam discuss how we can challenge the dominant model of capitalist business and the de facto pyramid structure of management in order to enable a more equitable society…. Continue reading
Reposted from Institute of Network Cultures By FELIX MASCHEWSKI & ANNA-VERENA NOSTHOFF: In 2017, Denmark sent the first digital ambassador, Casper Klynge, to Silicon Valley. The aim of this move of ‘techplomacy’ was, as Klynge explained, not simply to distribute greetings notes by the Danish queen. Rather, the intention was to ‘update diplomacy’ based on… Continue reading
Reposted from corporateeurope.org A coalition of more than 75 civil society groups, unions, mayors and progressive parties running major European cities has come out to oppose a controversial proposed EU directive that has been pushed by business lobbies and would create major new obstacles for progressive municipal policies and initiatives. To sign the statement, send… Continue reading
A Roadmap to Digital Urban Governance This publication is an output of the Interactive Cities URBACT network that explored how digital, social media and user generated content can improve today´s urban management in European cities, whatever size. This challenge has been tackled in two ways. This challenge has been tackled in two ways. Firstly, as an opportunity… Continue reading
In 1999 a small group of Berliners found out that almost 50% of shares in the Berlin Water Works had been covertly sold to Veolia and RWE as part of a public-private partnership deal. After demanding a referendum so that citizens could vote to see the secret contract, the Berlin city government felt under so… Continue reading
Freelancers Union promotes the interests of independent workers through advocacy, education, and services. Nearly one in three working Americans is an independent worker. That’s 53 million people – and growing. We’re lawyers and nannies. We’re graphic designers and temps. We’re the future of the economy. And we’re stronger together than we are alone. Freelancers Union… Continue reading
Reposted from Investing in Regenerative Agriculture Welcome to Investing in Regenerative Agriculture. Where I interview key players in the field of regenerative agriculture, people who are scaling up the sector by bringing in new money or scaling up the practises on the ground. Observations from the podcast: – A lot of speculative cash has moved… Continue reading
Republished from LSE Review of Books The threat posed by global warming and environmental degradation are the most pressing examples of what has become known over the past several decades as the ‘tragedy of the commons’. In this book, Derek Wall explores the work of the late Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom, on how humans can… Continue reading
When looking at contemporary cities around the world today, one could easily conclude that they seem increasingly designed to accommodate the requirements and interests of powerful financial actors, over those of the citizens who inhabit them. As these faceless players encroach ever further onto a range of spaces – both physical and intangible – in… Continue reading
Originally posted on thinkdif.co In this podcast, Michel Bauwens joins some dots together and explains why the open source movement, the growing prevalence of peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms and new technologies like blockchain create the potential to create a fundamentally different economic model that circulates vale between businesses, people and the environment, rather than extracts… Continue reading
After 20 years of privatized water supplies in Valladolid, Spain, residents led the way to remunicipalizing this key service by successfully taking on the existing private contract holder, and central government too. As a result, a 100% public entity has now very successfully taken on running the utility. For decades, citizens in the Spanish city… Continue reading
Vassilis Gkisakis: Will hi-tech save agriculture from its otherwise intractable problems? Certainly technological stakeholders want it to appear so, as digitisation increases both in the fields and in the policy documents and future plans for the sector. Hi-tech solutions are promoted as unavoidable and necessary and are broadly publicised as the ultimate innovative path for the modernization of farming…. Continue reading
Trebor Scholz, reposted from The News Coop: The Platform Cooperativism Consortium’s annual global conference was held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) – the first time the event has moved away from the New School in New York City. This two-day conference, and the 48-hour hackathon that preceded it, involved more than 250 participants from 18 countries, including 40… Continue reading
Guerrilla Translation (GT) began its life as an activist translation collective of politicised, conscious translators. Our motivation is to create a plurilingual knowledge commons, accessible through GT’s websites (English and Spanish so far). But GT is also a translation/language agency offering a variety of communication services and its governance model ties these two facets together. GT’s model is an extensive… Continue reading