A great article by Yochai Benkler, originally published at Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences: “If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in… Continue reading
Martin Kirk is Co-founder and Strategy Director for The Rules. They work on challenging root causes of global poverty and inequality and climate change, but specifically through a narrative lens. They look a lot at psychology, cognitive linguistics, network theory, that sort of thing, to try and get into the deep narratives and deep logics and assumptions… Continue reading
If you’re coming to the commons for the first time, it can be difficult to grok the idea because there are so many different ways to understand the commons. That’s because the commons is not so much a fixed, universal thing as a general concept describing durable, dynamic sets of social relationships for managing resources… Continue reading
Mix Irving: Protozoa is a tech coop, and we write open source code. This is a little bit about what that means, and how open source is the foundation on which we’re building an aspirational future. I recently published a new feature for Patchbay — an open source project I maintain. It allows you to easily @-mention… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Dirk Holemans: When Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, started his research for the development of a “Commons Transition Plan” for the Flemish city of Ghent, he was overwhelmed by the sheer number of commons-oriented programs. In three months time, he discovered 500 initiatives. A remarkable figure, related to recent research indicating a… Continue reading
One of the key differences between private platforms (platform capitalism) and cooperative platforms (platform cooperatives) lies in how they are designed, by whom, and for whom. Indeed, technology and design, and all the invisible architectures that govern our lives and influence our choices and behaviour, are ‘value sensitive’. This point is very well argued and… Continue reading
Successes and failures in the use of digital tools in Catalonia’s rebellion The battle presently being fought in the streets and polling stations in towns and cities throughout Catalonia before, during and after October 1, in which a diverse civil society has come together in huge numbers, putting their bodies and knowledge in the service… Continue reading
About the Festival: Festival of the Commons will take place on 6-7-8 October 2017, at the Athens School of Fine Arts. The Festival of the Commons unites the efforts of the Festival for Solidarity and Cooperative Economy and the CommonsFest. Our desire is for the Festival of the Commons to be a celebratory meeting point… Continue reading
“How did we get to accept that food, one of the three essentials for life, along with air and water, can be produced, distributed, appropriated and even destroyed on the basis of pure economic considerations?” From the Introduction Tomaso Ferrando and Jose Luis Vivero-Pol: Over the last ten years, Watch readers have become familiar with… Continue reading
Ana Manzanedo and Alícia Trepat Pont: “Everything that can become a platform will become a platform”. The potential of platforms “ is simply too compelling to deny: exponential scaling, exponential learning, and very low cost innovation and localization”. 1 The future of work will be defined by platforms, or so it seems with the “success” stories… Continue reading
Reposted from CICOPA’s Website. Brussels, 25 September 2017 – CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives, published today its second global report on “Cooperatives and Employment” [PDF]. . For Bruno Roelants, Secretary General of CICOPA: “Employment is one of the most important contributions made by cooperatives throughout the world. This report shows that people involved… Continue reading
Writing recently in Medium, Salvatore Iaconesi — a designer, engineer and founder of Art is Open Source and Human Ecosystems — offers an extremely important critique of the blockchain and other data-driven network technologies. While recognizing that these systems have enormous potential for “radical innovation and transformation,” he astutely warns against their dangerous psychological and… Continue reading
Cities are disproportionately entangled in the critical challenges that we collectively face. Cities consume disproportionate amounts of energy and produce disproportionate amounts of waste while contributing significantly to economic and racial inequality. If cities continue pursuing contemporary development strategies, things are bound to get worse as the share of global population living in cities is projected… Continue reading
So, what about politics? (#SWAP) is a fully packed symposium presenting mainly very concrete projects that deal with new forms of political action and governance in the contemporary network society. With examples from liquid democracy, e-governance, civic intelligence, platform cooperativism and autonomous self-organisation. From the event website: So, what about politics? looks at initiatives that could be… Continue reading
This work by Pablo Iglesias, leader of insurgent Spanish party Podemos, is now subtitled ‘Podemos and the future of a Democratic Europe’. It wouldn’t have been so originally, because Podemos did not exist when the book was first written. This makes the book of historical interest, though the addition of appendices in this 2015 edition… Continue reading
The emergence of a New Story — the transformational narrative which has the power of changing society and culture, along with economics — is being contentiously fought today. But the fog of this battle seems to reveal only a miasma of viewpoints, which is distracting society to the point of utter confusion. In the US,… Continue reading