Jerome Roos: In January 2017, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the infamous Doomsday Clock featured on the cover of its journal to 2.5 minutes before the hour — the second-closest to midnight it has been since its inception in 1947. “This year’s deliberations felt more urgent than usual,” the Board noted,… Continue reading
Republished from Motherboard’s Soundcloud: The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Stephanie Rearick and Leander Bindewald: If it wasn’t crystal clear just weeks ago, it is now: The economy as it stands is currently positioned in direct opposition to social and environmental objectives. For the sake of the wellbeing of our communities, our children, and our planet, it is imperative we change the… Continue reading
Our study “Tricky Business” shows how the mechanisms of expropriation work. About the Study Resource and energy demand has increased over the last few decades, with more extraction and land use happening in more countries than ever before. The rising resource demand from the industrialized countries and emerging economies depends on the resources located in… Continue reading
Small, community-owned ISPs are spreading – and could help to protect open internet access Sammi-Jo Lee, writing for Coop News, gives us the lowdown on the P2P alternative to ISP big players. Sammi-Jo Lee: In 2011, brand new fibre-optic cables lit up for the first time across the forested terrain of the Ozarks and up… Continue reading
David Bollier, Lara Mallien & Santiago Hoerth Moura: . Community building turns out to be a great way to bypass the formidable costs of conventional markets and to bring authors and readers together in highly efficient ways. Below, we profile some noteworthy pioneers of commons-based publishing – for academic journals, books and magazines. These examples… Continue reading
Originally published in French by calimaq At the end of October, I wrote an article entitled “Evgeny Morozov and personal data as public domain” . I got a lot of feedback, including from people who had never heard about these kinds of theories, trying to break with the individualistic or “personalist” approach based on the… Continue reading
Brilliant reflections from Tara Vancil, originally published a few months ago. Towards a more democratic Web In the aftermath of the recent Harvey Weinstein revelations, Rose McGowan was suspended from Twitter for breaching its Terms of Service. Twitter made an unusual move by commenting on the status of a specific user’s account, which it normally publicly declares… Continue reading
This excellent analysis of the work in Ghent was written by Dirk Holemans and originally published in the Green European Journal and Commons Transition. The Belgian city of Ghent plays host to a broad range of projects and initiatives around the commons. But it has yet to adopt a model which really places a commons-focused… Continue reading
Loomio has been collaborating with academic researchers Shiv Ganesh at Massey University in New Zealand and Cynthia Stohl at the University of California, to do the first large-scale survey of Loomio users. The survey is still open, but we are already getting some really fascinating information on who we are as Loomio users, how we… Continue reading
The following article was written by Konrad Lischka and originally published on his website. The year is 2017 AD. The whole web is occupied by centralized services. Well… Not entirely. One small village of indomitable free software lovers still holds out against the invaders… This is how the French association Framasoft presents itself. They have achieved… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Cities have been caught in the middle of a clash: They are stuck competing for business investments while, simultaneously, seeking to meet the needs of their inhabitants through access to public goods and social services. For this reason, there is no surprise in seeing two opposite trends growing globally: On the one… Continue reading
Fantastic video made for the Visions and Pathways 2040 project pointing out the differences between capitalist “green growth” and our own Commons Transition framework. If you’re not familiar with the Commons Transition, check out our new Commons Transition Primer website for a colourful and educational introduction to all things Commons/P2P. To read the full Vision and… Continue reading
In the past years, civic crowdfunding has become an increasingly used tool by communities to help finance their urban infrastructure projects. However, while some legal contexts encourage experiments around community finance, other national regulations categorically exclude the possibility of peer-to-peer lending or crowdinvesting, thus limiting the impact crowdfunding can have in the built environment. Jan… Continue reading
Over the last few years, the P2P Foundation has been focusing on the design of the cooperation between commons and market entities as well as public-commons cooperation models. But what are the underlying conditions for such a shift? One is of course environmental, i.e the need to have an economy that functions within the limits… Continue reading
by Alain Ambrosi and Nancy Thede, Barcelona, April 20, 2017. Update on the political context in Catalunya (November2017) Since this interview took place last April shortly after the founding of Catalunya en Comu, events in Catalunya have considerably transformed the political landscape there and have projected this new organisation into the electoral fray much sooner… Continue reading