Darren Sharp: Here’s the problem – Changing people’s behavior on waste reduction and prevention is a major challenge. Too many useful products like clothing, textiles, toys, bicycles, furniture, and household appliances are discarded as waste because people lack the practical knowledge or tools to repair broken items. While some of these goods are recycled, many… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Platform.coop Public trust in the investor-owned platform economy is collapsing. Business models based on selling workers and users to Wall Street are under growing scrutiny, and a small but growing number of cooperatively-owned platforms present a real, positive alternative. How might we seize this moment to show the promise of platform cooperativism? We… Continue reading
Here is an excellent and clear interview with Ela Kagel on Supermarkt on the cultural commons space in Berlin. Growing together with others: an interview with Ela Kagel of SuperMarkt In this conversation Ela Kagel describes how the collectively-run project SUPERMARKT emerged and developed over the last years. Based in Berlin, the aim of the project… Continue reading
Andrea J. Nightingale: When I tell people that I work on inshore fisheries management the response is inevitably disparaging. Most people continue to assume that the commons is an ecological disaster waiting to happen and that all fishermen are greedy individuals. Yet my experience on the west coast of Scotland suggests that the fishing ground is… Continue reading
André Staltz, writing in his blog, tells the story of Scuttlebutt, a project we support at the P2P Foundation. Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm,… Continue reading
The bigger the group, the more rules they need. Can we do better than written agreements? In this article I’m going to bite off some big ideas, musing on the limitations of encoding agreements in text. To keep it grounded, I’ll illustrate the ideas with real-world stories. I’ll include a couple of practical tools you… Continue reading
The latest episode of the Upstream podcast takes a deep dive into the Worker Cooperatives movement: a broad selection of organizations, activists, and cooperatively structured workplaces that advocate for—and embody—workplace and economic democracy. The 21st century has seen an explosion in interest around Worker Cooperatives—particularly since capitalism’s 2008 crisis. In Part 1 of this 2-part… Continue reading
Originally published in the Cooperative Business Journal‘s winter 2018 issue. For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought… Continue reading
Somewhere between convenience, efficiency, cost saving and a comprehensive EU surveillance mega state, the use of drones and other in-the-sky technologies for ensuring CAP compliance represents, as it were, a Brave New World. Helene Schulze: Imagine annual farm audits performed not by EU regulators pacing the fields and talking through the details with farmers but… Continue reading
Katarzyna Gajewska: I interviewed dozens of members of two egalitarian communities, rural Acorn community in Virginia, US (30 adults and one child at the time of research in 2014) and suburban near to Kassel in Germany (60 adults and 20 teens and children in 2016). You can find links to my four articles on Acorn… Continue reading
Christina Oatfield: Have you noticed how many tech start-ups are interested in food these days? We have. There are dozens of apps that deliver food right to your door (either by a human being or sometimes even by a robot) and you can order take-out, groceries, or partially prepared meals with a few taps on… Continue reading
There’s something exciting happening in the world of co-ops which harks back to the very beginning of the movement. Although Rochdale is normally credited as the “birthplace of cooperation” records show that in 1761, sixteen weavers in Ayrshire set up “The Society of Weavers in Finnick”, arguably the first co-operative organisation of the industrial age. It was… Continue reading
d@w’s Paul Sliker and Dante Dallavalle talk with Michael Hudson, one of the world’s six economists who accurately predicted the 2007-2008 financial crisis. He explains how Orwellian doublethink is used to conceal how the economy really works. Republished from leftoutpodcast
Cross-posted from Shareable. This opinion piece by Boyd Cohen explores how a new blockchain layer for mobility could allow shared mobility startups to quickly launch their services and have immediate access to a network effect. Cohen is the co-founder of IoMob, which combines open source and blockchain technology to decentralize mobility, and the dean of… Continue reading
What is Open Source Circular Economy? A video in English explaining Circular Economy and why it is in combination with Openness a promising pathway to a sustainable future on this planet. I started a Youtube channel, and here is the first video I made: One more time on “What Is Open Source Circularity?” It is… Continue reading
I have argued elsewhere that degrowth is entering into the parliaments. Some political parties have started to adopt degrowth oriented or degrowth compatible proposals in their political programmes. With two large conferences to be celebrated this year in Malmö and Mexico City, Federico Demaria, writing for the Ecologist, charts the evolution of the Degrowth movement over… Continue reading