Duniter is a French cryptocurrency that squarely aims for more egalitarian outcomes and critiques the ‘propertarian’ premises of Bitcoin. The main injustice is that early entrants of Bitcoin are privileged and those that have no bitcoins have to work for those that have. It simply re-iterates the existing inequality in our societies by keeping the… Continue reading
Oliver Sylvester-Bradley: Co-op coins are not a new concept but the days of trading locally minted coins for a pint of milk or a loaf of bread are long gone. Instead, the rising interest in digital currencies and rapid increase in the number of Initial Coin Offerings looks set to make 2018 “the year of the crypto… Continue reading
Our ultimate challenge is use realistic assumptions of human beings and human design to engender collaborations that support the rhythms of the human experience with all its notions of beauty, meaning and desire. The following text is taken from Design Decode’s about page: Design Decode was established in 2015 with the aim of experimenting with… Continue reading
Reposted from iasc-commons.org: PLEASE NOTE: CHANGED DATES! WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ON JUNE 21-22, 2018 EXTENDED ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: FEBRUARY 25, 2018 The organizers of the IASC Workshop ‘Social mobilization and the commons: a virtuous circle?’ welcome proposals and letters of interest for this workshop. Theme The frontiers of theory and research on the commons have notably… Continue reading
Our friends at Artfarm in Hvar pinged us to highlight their donations campaign. Read the text below to get a feel for their project, or visit them at the fantastically named starwingartists.com ArtFarm: Since 2013, when we bought 1300 m2 of land and small stone house, Artfarm has been our international project combining art and organic… Continue reading
The FairShares Model enables you to (re)design companies, cooperatives, associations and partnerships to fully recognise and reward enterprise founders, workforce members and users/customer who invest natural, human, social, intellectual, manufactured and financial capital. We recognise that wealth is generated by stewarding nature to enhance human skills and capabilities, building relationships between people, enabling them to generate and share ideas that stimulate goods to meet human,… Continue reading
Bitcoin was created to be a new kind of money rooted in a vision of a market not bound by geography, banks and governments. Despite the intentions of its creators, Bitcoin is not money. It was designed with a faulty understanding of money, and as a result has a bug, a kind of a short… Continue reading
Julia Reda, writing in her own blog, warns of the dangers of the new EU copyright law. Please share this video and text widely. Julia Reda: For months now I’ve been raising the alarm about the plan to limit the freedom to link that has been slowly but surely making its way through the EU legislative process. The… Continue reading
Which knowledge, skills and learning environments can boost Open Design & Manufacturing at meaningful scale? How can OD&M become the ground of collective experimentation and co-creation between Universities, Makerspaces and Enterprises? OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and… Continue reading
(This proposal of mine was first published at per-cloud.com in February 2017. It is now published again here, on invitation by M. Bauwens. For more context and details, I strongly suggest to also read, before or after this proposal, the posts from my own blog linked at the bottom) important update, 2018/02/06: a new version… Continue reading
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, […] if we judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks… Continue reading
Fernanda Marin: In the last few years, a couple of multi-billion dollar companies – initially marketed as part of a new sharing economy – devoured people’s attention. After these giants discredited the concept, many thought the ideas behind it were too naive and unrealistic to begin with. The forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, and our human nature… Continue reading
General Theory of the Precariat is essential reading for all commoners that want to think through the right strategy for social change. It squarely places itself from the point of few of the new social groups (or classes in formation, as its author, Alex Foti would have it) that have grown under the conditions of… Continue reading
(This update of my 2015 account is based mostly on the report by Dafermos, 2017.) This is a remarkable and inspiring movement in Spain, now involving hundreds of people in what I regard as an example of The Simpler Way transition strategy… which is primarily about going underneath the conventional economy to build our own… Continue reading
Strongly recommended video about how we are bio-physical-social beings and how relationships directly affect health. “Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, as well as the study and treatment of addiction.” Photo by dno1967b
“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the… Continue reading