In 2011, a professor at Girona University set his students an assignment – to come up with a cooperative business model. A small group of friends and students used the challenge to address the lack of action on generating green energy, and thus Som Energia was founded. Today it has 45,000 members and 70,000 clients… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Aaron Fernando: We recently explored how blockchain is being used as a force for good and conducted a handful of interviews with practitioners in the industry. Yet the blockchain space is fast-moving and constantly brimming with new projects that could make the sharing economy increasingly accessible to all. This is a list of some… Continue reading
By Philine Krosse (NL) Co-editing Kate Kingston (AUS), Letitia van der Merwe (NL), Manuela Bosch (DE) and Mich Levy (USA), republished from collaborationincubator.net A series of Collaboration Incubator workshops are being put out into the world to gather like-minded people to combine forces for building global grassroots democracy. I am Philine Krosse, a ‘transformation architect’… Continue reading
This week, scientists, politicians, and policymakers are gathering in Brussels for a landmark conference. The aim of this event, organised by members of the European parliament from five different political groups, alongside trade unions and NGOs, is to explore possibilities for a “post-growth economy” in Europe. For the past seven decades, GDP growth has stood as… Continue reading
There have always been movements with dissenting views on the money system: how it runs and whom it works for. But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a new wave of money agitators has emerged, each with very distinct ideas about what money means. From bitcoin evangelists to advocates of modern monetary theory,… Continue reading
Software licenses are about USAGE constraints of software — Do you have a right to run it, copy it, distribute it, for how many people, under what conditions, etc… However, in a new era of decentralized software, I believe we must also uncover an assumption buried into past licenses that a licenses also implicitly includes ownership of… Continue reading
This summary of our in-depth report on the Catalan Integral Cooperative was originally published in Outgrowing Capitalism. During my research I have encountered several sources which have mentioned the work of the Catalan Integral Cooperative and its philosophy of “Open Cooperativism”. Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation especially promote this organization and its approach, and… Continue reading
Republished from Medium.com Impacts of resource hungry exploitative economies “What is 120 times the size of London? The answer: the land or ecological footprint required to supply London’s needs.” — Herbert Giradet Our ecological footprint exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate. A number of useful indicators and frameworks have been developed to measure the ecological impact that humanity… Continue reading
What is the Kit? The Platform Co-op Development Kit is a multi-year project that advances the cooperative digital economy. The Kit is a project by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, homed at The New School in New York City, in collaboration with the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University in Toronto, and platform co-op communities… Continue reading
Douglas Rushkoff, speaking at this summer’s Future Fest explores the importance of human connection in the digital age. About Team Human A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork.”―Walter Isaacson Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital… Continue reading
The P2P Foundation has followed the work of Nathan Schneider for years, starting with his reporting on Occupy, followed by his visit to our FLOK project in Ecuador in 2014 (the first commons transition project undertaken at the invitation of nation-state institutions). Nathan was then instrumental in setting up, with Trebor Scholz, the platform cooperative… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Nithin Coca: The Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium (PCJ) is the first organization in Asia focused on promoting the idea of platform cooperatives — businesses that bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance — to the digital world. PCJ was founded by Mathias Sager and is directly connected to the New York City-based Platform… Continue reading
Presentation by Prof. Donnie Maclurcan (@donmacca) of the Post Growth Institute (@postgrowth) on the Not-for-Profit World model, designed in collaboration with Jennifer Hinton (@hintojen) and Sarah Reibstein (@sarahreibstein) Hosted at London South Bank University (@LSBU), 6th Oct., by Prof. Ros Wade (@RosWade1). Filmed by Jeremy Williams (@jeremy_willaims) of www.makewealthhistory.org. Event organised by Gudrun Freese (@doshorts)… Continue reading
Republished with permission from UK technology site Computing John Leonard: The Decentralized Web Summit is over – what’s next? Earlier this month a rather unusual tech event took place in San Francisco. The Decentralized Web Summit played host to a gathering of web luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle and Vint Cerf. On… Continue reading
An article by Hug March that was recently published at the Journal of Cleaner Production. Find the full article here. Highlights Smart City is a technology-led urban response to global environmental challenges. Smart City may imply technological determinism, privatisation and depoliticisation. ICT may open the prospect of alternative, non-capitalist urban transformations. Degrowth should establish a… Continue reading
Vasilis Kostakis, Andreas Roos: In a book titled Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?, MIT scientists Henry Lieberman and Christopher Fry discuss why we have wars, mass poverty, and other social ills. They argue that we cannot cooperate with each other to solve our major problems because our institutions and businesses are saturated with… Continue reading