This is a contribution from Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement, on the concept and practice of resilience. It appeared in the anthology, The Wealth of the Commons. (this is a version without notes) Resilience: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially… Continue reading
Strategizing for the commons: Beyond the Local, the State, and the Global
“After 30 years of the right depoliticising the local – of which ‘localism’ is the latest variant – the key issue is to understand and open up political debate and choices about the future of this diffuse and productive creativity. And we must work at a much deeper seam than that of ‘demands on the… Continue reading
The Structural Communality of the Commons
A contribution from Stefan Meretz, published in the anthology, The Wealth of the Commons: The commons are as varied as life itself, and yet everyone involved with them shares common convictions. If we wish to understand these convictions, we must realize what commons mean in a practical sense, what their function is and always has… Continue reading
Peer-to-peer trade systems rediscovered?
The Circular Multilateral Barter (CMB) project was started in 2009 by Evgeni Pandurski and Catherine Woodgold. The goal was to write server-side software for creating and trading self-issued currencies in peer-to-peer networks. In a recent email exchange, Evgeni tried to explain more about his project: Imagine you are a passionate community organizer. Luckily, your wonderful… Continue reading
Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes (Part 2)
Image: Voces con Futura Bernardo Gutiérrez Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratil – Guerrilla Translation! Original article at 20minutos.es. This is a two-part article. The first part can be found here. “15M – whether seen as a signal, a movement, a state of being or a set of human interactions – has… Continue reading
Open sensor networks need critical citizen science input!
From a workshop, storified by Dan Mcquillan: [View the story “open sensor networks & critical citizen science” on Storify]
Building a dictionary for an economics of the commons
This is a proposal in response to “Help us build a dictionary on commons economics!”, an article recently posted at The Economics of the Commons Conference (ECC 2013) Communications Platform website (commonsandeconomics.org) I. First, the list of commons economic terms in the original article has a very notable omission: cooperative I suggest that we avoid… Continue reading
A status report on the Open Source Energy project in France
A contribution from Geoffroy Levy from Nantes: “A few words about a French project named Open Source Energy. This project is intended to enable the design of open hardware solutions to capture the different kinds of energies available all around us (from the environment or from human activities). A first module to transform and to… Continue reading
Online Banners for Social Movements
This is genius. The idea of smart, live banner-widgets (I would suggest adding live badges also) is totally awesome! I love this method for automatically creating a central database of resources (people, web sites, etc … ). This is exactly the kind of thing we need to help overcome the fragmentation of effort and visibility… Continue reading
The convergence Social Banking and The Commons
Let’s Come Together for the Social Banking & The Commons Summer School 2013! This year the Summer School will take place in Filzbach, Switzerland. Jointly presented with Date: 14th – 19th July 2013 Venue: Seminarhotel Lihn At our 2013 Summer School we will meet in the Swiss mountains to explore together how Social Banking can… Continue reading