In These Times reported on the resurgent squatters movement in the U.S. Jake Thomas: “Take Back the Land, based in Miami, finds empty foreclosed homes and illegally moves homeless families into them. So far his organization has moved nine families into “liberated” houses and has at least four more occupations planned. Squatting has a long… Continue reading
The deepening meltdown must be matched by increased resilience
The “slow burn” is my term for a centrally managed economy in which a small group of insiders covertly subsidize themselves at the expense of the outsiders through (i) monetary policy, (ii) manipulation of government resources, regulation and enforcement and (iii) manipulation of financial markets and data. If you’d ask me which people are really… Continue reading
Great Use of Data Part 3: RewiredState.org | Be Vocal
From Be Vocal A site about social media for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful. Great Use of Data Part 3: RewiredState.org This is part of our ‘Great use of Data’ series in which we explore projects and applications that use data in new and existing… Continue reading
Building ecologies of collaboration
Developing community requires ongoing investments in intangible assets over extensive periods of time. Mushin has a five part series about the construction of integral collaboration ecologies. In the first excerpt, from part 2, he makes the very important point that contemporary complexity precludes full individual understanding, so that the effort needs to shift towards the… Continue reading
“The Pirate Party is a real net community”
Amelia Andersdotter recently presented the Swedish Pirate Party in Citilab at the invitation of the Virtual European Parliament. On her first visit to Spain Amelia, who will become the second Euro MP for the Swedish Pirate Party if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified by the Irish, began the informal debate by explaining the rise… Continue reading
From free trade, via fair trade, to scalar trade?
Free Trade is based on the assumption that markets will self-correct, but in a world where the rich companies actively block true costs of production showing up on price tags and balance sheets, the markets are a political construct, as artificial as Second Life or Disneyland. Free trade is a game rigged so that global… Continue reading
The struggle for the Water Commons
Daniel Moss reports in On the Commons (excerpt): “Across Latin America and Africa, consumer, human rights, and environmental organizations have campaigned successfully for constitutional amendments and laws enshrining water as a human right. At the recent World Water Forum in Instanbul, 25 countries signed a declaration affirming that same right (the official declaration weakly suggested… Continue reading
The Spirituality of Twitter
Extended meditation by Steven Vedro, the author of Digital Dharma: A Users Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Age of the Infosphere. (review) Steven Vedro: “Our new IP-based communications systems and forms – the Internet, digital media, pervasive wireless networks and embedded communicating microprocessors – are not only changing our ways of seeing the world,… Continue reading
Yes!, to the burgeoning new economy
The excellent Yes magazine has a really good special Summer 2009 issue dedicated to the New Economy, which covers the many topics familiar to the P2P Foundation, but offers many concrete examples emerging in the various regions of the U.S. From the introduction: “This downturn marks the end of an unsustainable economy. Rather than trying… Continue reading
The Promise of Open Media
Video reportage on the Open Video conference: The Promise of Open Media from thoughtcast on Vimeo. Produced by Jenny Attiyeh of ThoughtCast: “At the first ever Open Video Conference, held at New York University in Manhattan, participants pondered the significance of the open media movement, at a time when its tools are being put to… Continue reading
The plausible promise of open hardware
In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. Cory Doctorow, in the science fiction magazine Locus. Excerpt: “Invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. Bruce Sterling’s new Imaginary Inventions project is seeking to… Continue reading
Updating our insights on the deepening meltdown
I haven’t covered meltdown related issues for a while. Here are a few must-read items, followed by a summary of John Hagel’s new report outlining some of the underlying changing fundamentals in the form that capitalism is taking. The first must-read is Matt Taibbi’s essay which appeared in Rolling Stone, about the pernicious role that… Continue reading
The Switch to Local Manufacturing
Good summary by John Robb: (of course, I fundamentally disagree with the first premise, that people will by designs, rather, I believe they will share the designs and pay only for the adaptation and for the finished product, as is now the case with open source software and hardware) John Robb: “It is likely that… Continue reading
Open source hardware and entrepreneurship
David A. Mellis, co-founder of the Arduino open source hardware circuit boards, wrote the following in 2008, but it is still of interest. David Mellis: “Open-source hardware requires money. This fundamentally distinguishes the nature of its participants from those of open-source software. In open-source software, the fundamental contributor is the developer, many of whom collaborate… Continue reading
Coming food crises and falling states
As many of my readers already know, I now teach in a Thai business university in Bangkok, i.e. Dhurakij_Pundit_University, where I work with and for Richard Hames at the Asian Foresight Institute. Richard recently forwarded a disquieting article in his Plaxo blog, from Lester Brown, one that you cannot afford not to read. Lester Brown:… Continue reading
Reporting on the Crottorf Consultations on the Global Commons
Two weeks ago, I participated in a great four-day long conversation on the Future of the Commons. One of the participants, Andreas Exner, reports on the content, but most of all the ‘commoning’ magic, of this encounter in the German mountains and the wonderful historic castle of Crottorf. (version with internal links at the original… Continue reading