A VERY PROMISING NORWEGIAN RESEARCH PROJECT (download pdf): – ModEling a Democratic green ecOnomy for a Sustainable Society (MEDOSS)
Movement of the Day: Red de Evolución Colaborativa
Excerpted from Victor Valenzuela: “We are a Chilean group called “Red de Evolución Colaborativa” (Collaborative Evolution Network), RedEC. We work in the study, analysis, implementation and promotion of alternative production models. Our goal is to reach a society that allows an indefinite, collective and individual development (social evolution). We are profoundly convinced that the peer… Continue reading
Video: Local Currencies for Global Resilience
Via OuiShareTV: “In the recent year we have seen a boom in complementary currencies. What are they? What can they do? How can Citizen, Companies and/or Local municipalities use and design their own currency to serve a mission that they agree on? With concrete examples of Toulouse and a time-bank Projet in Barcelona we will… Continue reading
New Intertrading Protocol for Complementary Currency Systems
Press Release An international group of monetary experts met at The Hague in June and engaged a process to define a common Intertrading protocol. By using this protocol, complementary currency systems become interoperable and able to exchange in a global marketplace. Culminating substantial discussions in the group, some experts met in Berlin this September and… Continue reading
Presenting the Open Source Beehives project
“The Open Source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world. We design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way, to monitor and track the health and behaviour of a colony as it develops. Each hive contains an open source sensory… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Free Seeds, Not Free Beer
* Article: Free Seeds, Not Free Beer”: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture. Keith Aoki. UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper Series ; Research Paper No. 167, April 2009 Summary: “This essay has examined the relevance of user-innovation in the context of participatory plant breeding. This essay first looked… Continue reading
Video: Alastair Parvin on the Wikihouse Open Source Construction Set
Via OuiShareTV: “Around a year and a half ago, a collaborative team began working on WikiHouse, an open source construction set. Its aim is to make it possible for anyone to design, share, download, adapt and ‘print’ out low-cost, high-performance, houses which are suited to their needs, and can be assembled quickly and without traditional… Continue reading
Spains Rising Citizens Network ‘Partido X’
We are a group of Spanish activists and citizens involved in a new political initiative called ‘Red Ciudadana Partido X’ (Citizen Network – X Party). You might have read some of the articles published about us in English-speaking media [1] [2] [3] or some of the references appeared in academic or activist sites [4] [5]…. Continue reading
The betrayal of community ethics by the venture-capital financed ‘sharing’ companies
To be successful, the venture-capital-funded “sharing economy” will be forced to lose all those aspects of informal sharing that makes “sharing” attractive, and to keep those aspects that erode neighbourhoods, erode employment rights, and remove basic standards. And if they succeed, they will have used the language of sharing to bring about an unregulated, free-market,… Continue reading
Democratic and Participatory Production and Governance in the Zapastista Areas of Chiapas
Excerpted from a text, THE ZAPATISTAS STILL EXIST, received by email from FRANÇOIS HOUTART: “Up until now we have concentrated on the general context of the development of the Zapatista movement, but what about its internal practices? As we saw, Chiapas is one of the poorest regions of Mexico, where the land tenure system had… Continue reading