Imagine a vast sea—a sea of global capitalism. Beneath the surface is a frightening place to be: a ruthless world filled with unyielding competition and greed. The logic of this ocean is kill or be killed. Every creature for itself. And the prophets of this underworld are immense leviathans engaged in an endless hunt. They… Continue reading
Agricultural Sustainability for Bioregionalism in the San Francisco Bay Watershed
Report coordinated by Patti Ellis, David Cunningham, James Quilligan et al., Biocapacity Research Team of Economic Democracy Advocates, 2018 We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not… Continue reading
Hack-a-Home: put the means of production in the hands of those who need it
Hack-a-Home has been the talk of town for months at AbilityMate HQ. We officially launched the global first initiative in March and spent the last month co-designing with some of the customers at Northott. In this special edition blog you’ll get to hear all about our Hack-a-Home project from three of our team members at… Continue reading
Providing public goods and commons: Towards coproduction and new forms of governance for a revival of public action
Providing public goods and commons: Towards coproduction and new forms of governance for a revival of public action is a new publication from Ciriec International. Read the director’s foreword below and see the links for access to all chapters. Philippe Bance: This book features the output of the transversal working group in public and social economy set… Continue reading
Port Louis, Mauritius: Power Shift campaign to support farmers with clean energy
The Power Shift Campaign is challenging Mauritius’ privately owned, non-renewable energy sector with a solar-powered, cooperative alternative, through which struggling farmers can improve local food production. Their actions have thwarted plans for a new coal plant, improved government transparency, and acquired land to produce solar power when they get the go-ahead. When Mauritius’ government secretly… Continue reading
Platform Cooperativism Consortium awarded $1 million Google.org grant
Cross-posted from Shareable. Robert Raymond: The state of precarity inherent to most forms of digital labor and the unchecked exploitation of workers on many gig economy platforms is a largely under covered issue. Although there are some conversations around regulating companies that perpertrate such practices, issues of ownership and governance as they relate to questionable practices of various… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The Algorithm Observatory
Social media platforms watch us. But who watches them? Part media literacy project and part citizen science experiment, Algorithm Observatory is a global collaborative lab for the empirical analysis of social computing algorithms. We are currently in the prototype stage, which only allows you to study Facebook advertising algorithms. Join us! Click here for more info about… Continue reading
Patterns of Commoning: Commons in the Pluriverse
An essay by Arturo Escobar I. Commons and Worlds Commons exist within worlds. Long before private property showed its ugly head and started to devour territories, people created what today we call commons as a principal strategy to enact their worlds. These worlds, made up of human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, material and spiritual… Continue reading
Making Culture for the Change in the Making: psychological underpinnings of the shift to an egalitarian society
“Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search – a search which can be carried out only in communion with other men. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeting from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair… Continue reading
Tooling Up: Civic visions, FabLabs, and grassroots activism
In February 2015, city authorities in São Paulo announced plans to open a network of 12 public FabLabs. Following in the wake of an earlier ‘telecentro’ initiative that opened up internet access and digital media to citizens, the FabLabs are meant to bring the tools of digital fabrication to the people, equipping them for a… Continue reading
PeerTube, a free and federated video platform
Help our friends at Framasoft with their crowdfund and take back control of your videos! Pledge your donation here. What is Peer Tube? PeerTube is a practical answer to all video-tubes that centralize our data and attention. With it, videos can be hosted by the people, with the people, for the people. PeerTube is a… Continue reading
For a Non-Money Economy
At the P2P Foundation, we are watching closely any development which points to post-capitalist coordination of economic production, using tools like open and contributive accounting, open and shared logistics verified by holochains, biocapacity accountability using ‘thresholds and allocations’, and other social and technological innovations being pioneered by advanced peer production communities. It is still a… Continue reading
Vinay Gupta returns to Meaning with his biggest vision yet for global systems change
Always provocative, always stimulating: the strategic visioning of Vinay Gupta. By Emily Yates, reposted from Medium.com From open source innovation to the vanguard of the blockchain movement; the ‘global resilience guru’ discusses the conflicts, dangers and opportunities of the world to come. The future we are facing calls for new perspectives, new concepts and new… Continue reading
Building a Cooperative Economy
In permaculture terms the economy sometimes feels like a segregated monoculture planted with terminator seeds, sprayed with patented pesticides on venture capital backed farms designed to maximise profits in an unsustainable market place full of thieves and cheats. No wonder people prefer to potter in their gardens and allotments – and try to forget the… Continue reading
Workplaces are commons: a conversation with Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle
One of the foundational elements of modern society is the idea of democracy. Nations were built upon it, wars have been fought over it (at least in name), and millions have struggled for the right to participate in it. Many of us truly believe that we are living in democratic societies, and that our ability… Continue reading
An Atlas of Real Utopias?
TNI presents its Atlas of Utopias, part of the Transformative Cities initiative, sharing 32 stories of radical transformation that demonstrate that another world is possible, and already exists. Sol Trumbo & Nick Buxton: In an age of Trump and trolls, it may be strange to talk about utopia. Not only has a divisive reactionary right-wing privileged… Continue reading