A few weeks ago, Nadia El Imam addressed an open letter to me that was a response to the closing keynote at the OuishareFest in May 2013, where I presented a four-quadrant interpretation of the emerging collaborative economy, with four different value-laden models vying for supremacy but also already co-existing in the present. Nadia’s editorial… Continue reading
Alastair Parvin on Wikihouse’s Open Source Architecture
Via TEDTalks: “Architect Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? The concept is at the heart of Wikihouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build… Continue reading
Atmospherics from the OuiShare Fest 2013
Be sure to be there in the next edition:
Mumbai’s Homegrown Cities Project: upgrade the slums, don’t destroy them!
Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava URBZ/Urbanology, Mumbai Bhandup is a hill-side neighborhood. In the distance we can see the presence of high-rise buildings. Some of them are up-market others are cheaply built “slum rehabilitation schemes”. Like John F.C. Turner, the British born architect who in the 1970s and 1980s influenced some of the World Bank’s… Continue reading
Is Ripple a corporate scam?
Excerpted from the viewpoint of Ripplescam.org: “Hi there! I’ve being using Ripple since the closed beta, and I feel that the OpenCoin Inc (the for-profit company behind Ripple) scam and fraud attempt needs to be disclosed. Ripple is an inherently flawed experiment at best, and a con operation at worst. Let’s get started. CENTRALIZED, PROPRIETARY… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Contextualizing Boycotts and Buycotts
* Article: Contextualizing Boycotts and Buycotts: The Impure Politics of Consumer-Based Advocacy in an Age of Global Ecological Crises. by Phaedra Pezzullo. From the abstract: “”This essay shows how, more than mere economic objects that can be bought and sold in a free market of capitalism, commodities can serve as contingent nodal points circulating through… Continue reading
Terje Bongard’s Democratic Ingroup Model as specific form of p2p democracy?
The description comes from an appeal for collaboration related to a Norwegian research project, and looks very promising: Terje Bongard: “Analyzing and testing a sustainable ingroup democracy, including the money value analysis, and how a change to such a democracy may come by. Our hypothesis is that the democracy model represents a political system that… Continue reading
Should we rely on Technology Fixes or the Intelligence of Nature?
None of our fixes can control the pain, grief and rage we feel as we gaze out upon what we have wrought. Environmentalists and concerned citizens are increasingly beginning to recognize the delusion of the ‘technological fix’ – the use of technology to remedy problems caused by previous technology. Republished from Charles Eistenstein, who proposes… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: For a Democratic Cosmopolitan Movement
How should we define the difference between the current world and previous worlds? – How should we define the political format that will facilitate world governance? – How should we define the movement that would provide a democratic check on world governance? * Essay: For a Democratic Cosmopolitarian Movement. Jean Rossiaud. World Governance.org, 2013 From… Continue reading
The struggle round Gezi Park and the urban commons as central theme of current conflicts
Excerpted from an extensive and interesting article by MUSTAFA DIKEÇ: “This is a revolt against state-led property development by those who are enraged by the rebuilding of cities for profit maximization with little or no democratic possibility of contestation, and definitely no consultation. This is a revolt against state-led Islamisation by those who are enraged… Continue reading