In the following interview, Cahn explains the basic principles behind timebanks: For more documentation, go to the Shareable article.
The contradictions of privacy in an age of netarchical capitalism
Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care… Continue reading
Jurgen Habermas on the post-secular age
It is also in connection with this widespread push toward reflection that we have to view the progressive disintegration of traditional, popular piety. Two specifically modern forms of religious consciousness emerged from this: on the one hand, a fundamentalism that either withdraws from the modern world or turns aggressively toward it; on the other, a… Continue reading
Critiques of Crowdsourcing
First, Chris Grams of Shareable gives two reasons why he objects to crowdsourcing as a concept. This is followed by a collage of similarly critical citations: “1. “Crowdsourcing” imposes a manufacturing mindset rather than a community or social mindset. Often when I hear companies talking about how they are going to “crowdsource” a product, I… Continue reading
How the Falun Gong’s anti-censorship software helped the Iranian protestors
Excerpts from an interesting story in the New Republic, by Eli Lake: “To most metropolitan Americans, the Falun Gong are the yellow-shirt-wearing adherents of a Chinese religious sect who hand out flyers on street corners. Those flyers describe the group’s struggle against the Chinese government, which has banned the Falun Gong and subjected its members… Continue reading
Defending Greece against failed neoliberal policies through the creation of sovereign debt for the productive economy
Below is a first excerpt from a very important, crucial editorial by Costas Douzinas in the Guardian, which calls for resistance against EU/IMF imposed policies which have already a record of destroying many economies. But resistance is not enough, alternatives are needed. The second excerpt is from Ellen Brown, who has a set of concrete… Continue reading
Please support the CubeSpawn project
An appeal from James Jones: “I am currently developing an Open Source hardware project, called “CubeSpawn” to build small, light duty manufacturing equipment to help individuals make things locally. To get the project funded I have applied to a Pepsi sponsored Grant program. All you need to do to support the idea, is vote for… Continue reading
Open Green Tech and open business models for climate-change oriented technology transfer
E5 has written a interesting report on open green tech transfer, and its financing models: * Climate Justice as Business Case: Innovative Business Models for the Transfers of Climate-Friendly Technologies. By Hans Schuhmacher, with support from Julio Lambing et al. European Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Preliminary English version. 06 December 2009 Please note: This… Continue reading
Economics and its failure to recognize the social externalities that create value in the first place
Modern economics is a theory about how individuals exchange goods and services, but it has no explanation of how these goods come into being in the first place; that is, it has no coherent production function. Exchange theories deal merely with the change of ownership of already existing goods among freely contracting individuals; it can… Continue reading
Under the radar, a new internet movement politics is emerging
Will Straw reports about developments in the UK, and how they challenge the old party structures: “While the digital world that we live in has its downsides, it has provided an exciting new arena for exchange of information between the government and the governed, or between one activist and another. Since it launched in May,… Continue reading
Designing for resource sharing
The absolutely essential understanding to be absorbed here is that commons management is not primarily a technical problem but a social one and that the key ingredient in the solution is information transparency. Paul Hartzog (with Sam Rose and Richard C. Adler) just published an interesting little primer on resource sharing and commons-based management principles,… Continue reading
The crisis camp model and p2p emergency aid
David Bollier reports on the Crisis Commons initiative: “Another great new commons website, recently launched, is the Crisis Commons “an international volunteer network of professionals who create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world.” The site is a common space in which people with diverse sorts… Continue reading
The revival of the coop movement in the UK
Ed Mayo, secretary general of Co-operatives UK, published this in an editorial in The Guardian: “Cabinet Office minister Tessa Jowell has called for public services to be delivered by new co-operatives, in which users and staff will have a say. And last month she announced an independent commission on ownership to develop new proposals on… Continue reading
The case against iPad and Apple as a temporary fluke
Via the Rationalitate blog: “Tim Lee has an interesting analysis of the shortcomings of Apple’s iPad, but at the end he makes what I believe is a very prescient, more general point about the future of intellectual property and digital media: “This is of a piece with the rest of Apple’s media strategy. Apple seems… Continue reading
The role of capital in a worker co-operative
John McNamara continues his examination of the Mondragon cooperative principles, paying attention here to the subordinate role of capital: The role of capital in a worker co-operative should be two-fold: 1) ensure the on-going operations of the co-operative 2) allow the co-operative to maintain the highest level of safety and quality of work-life. Thus, this… Continue reading
Open Lab tackles neglected diseases
GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical industries, announced a new corporate strategy to foster open innovation. This program is built around three main projects. The Open Lab, a new part of one of the company’s research centres, will give 60 scientists the opportunity to work on tropical neglected diseases and freely share knowledge. GSK… Continue reading