Amador Fernández-Savater speaks to Catalan-Mexican writer and activist Guiomar Rovira about collective action, technologies, the online, “off-life” divide and more. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties, there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common… Continue reading
There are very few shelters for homeless people in India, and those that do exist are primarily for men. In 2001 ActionAid India launched Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan – an intervention to create a nationwide network of homeless shelters that has pushed the number of shelters in Delhi from 10 to 269. In India, homeless people… Continue reading
In the face of environmental crises and global inequality, how can we work together for more sustainable futures? What can we learn from great transitions and transformations of the past? How did we do that? The possibility of Rapid Transition, by Andrew Simms and Peter Newell, STEPS Centre & New Weather Institute, 2017 shows what… Continue reading
Martijn Arets: At the Open Coop conference in London I interviewed Maru Bautista, Director of the Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York. For the past 5 years, she has worked with her team and the Sunset Park community to strengthen immigrant-led worker cooperatives in New York City. She… Continue reading
Republished from Aral Balkan Mariana Mazzucato1 has an article in MIT Technology Review titled Let’s make private data into a public good. Let’s not. While Mariana’s criticisms of surveillance capitalism are spot on, her proposed remedy is as far from the mark as it possibly could be. Yes, surveillance capitalism is bad Mariana starts off… Continue reading
Republished from Stop.zona-m.net with the author’s permission Marco Fioretti: A landmark legal decision makes it possible for everybody to make their own, untraceable assault rifles at home. What now? Radical gunsmith Cody Wilson, says Wired, just “won the right to distribute digital blueprints for DIY untraceable weapons -including AR-15s. Now anyone can make them”. What… Continue reading
By Calimaq; original article in French translated by Maïa Dereva (with DeepL) and edited by Ann Marie Utratel Last week, Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published a rather surprising article on the Wired site entitled: “Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia”. The starting point of her reasoning was… Continue reading
Adam Arvidsson (translated from the Italian by Tiziano Bonini) The Political Economy of the Common. Ed. by Andrea Fumagalli (as yet untranslated Italian-language book) Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism. Capitalism has changed. Andrea Fumagalli says so. And he said that,… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens: Commoning is not inherently inclusive, and neither are initiatives such as ecovillages that have some relation to commoning. The natural resource commons described by Ostrom were often communautarian and reflected the accepted gender and class typologies and expectations of the day. Ecovillages and landed common initiatives may require initial investments that filter participants and… Continue reading
Republished from Medium.com Laura James: OPEN 2018 last week was an exciting event, not only because of the incredible people the organisers brought together, but because it felt like something new was starting to take off. There were people from many different organisations, sectors, and backgrounds, and they found sometimes unexpected things in common with… Continue reading
We are very happy to announce that Synergia and Schumacher College are partnering to offer the Synergia program at Schumacher College in Totnes, UK from October 15-26. Join us for this intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and Synergia Institute. This course offers participants a practical guide on how we can shift our economy… Continue reading
A CommonsCamp will take place at Grenoble (France) August 22 to 26, during the Summer University of the French social movements An open and self-organized gathering, this event is structured into 3 modules: COMMONS, MUNICIPALISM and RIGHTS TO THE CITY and MAPS and SYNERGY meetings, both dedicated to making digital tools for the commoners. The… Continue reading
republished from Baltic Times First ever ERC Starting Grant at Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance Vasilis Kostakis, Senior Researcher at the TTÜ Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance received today the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. Estonian Research Council has confirmed that this year Tallinn University of Technology is the… Continue reading
APPLY NOW FOR ADMISSION SEPTEMBER 2018 MA: Design for Cultural Commons – The Cass (London Metropolitan University) Although a timely model of practice there are few courses dedicated to the Commons and even fewer for Cultural Commons. This course is not only to reward you with a post graduate qualification but also to support the movement of… Continue reading
For the last few years, there has been a huge debate about how automation will possibly destroy tens of millions of jobs; this fear has even moved Silicon Valley luminaries to join the basic income bandwagon. At the P2P Foundation, we have always insisted that though automation may indeed affect an important number of future… Continue reading
The Amrta initiative works to end water privatization in Jakarta and enable a transition to good, publicly run water services. Through research, public discussions and collaboration with civil society, this initiative has pushed the city government to announce plans to remunicipalize Jakarta’s water supply. Jakarta’s governors have traditionally been (quietly) supportive of ending water privatization… Continue reading