Cities have personalities – they’re often described as we would people. They can be dry, manic, laid-back, iconic. Barcelona is what you might call a tonic. Always known as a vivid and creative city, Barcelona is taking the lead as an exemplary change agent on the European stage. Its DIY vigor and urgent form of… Continue reading
What great news – the P2P Foundation has been awarded the 2016 Golden Nica for Digital Communities from Prix Ars Electronica! It’s such a pleasure to share this news with our community – and because “digital community” was the category that we chose for our application, I’d also like to share the video and text… Continue reading
In short: Guerrilla Translation is changing the license for our translation of the book Think Like a Commoner by David Bollier. For this translation we will use the Peer Production License (PPL), a copyFARleft license which allows cooperatives and solidarity-based collectives, but not corporations, to monetize cultural works. This license opens the possibility to print,… Continue reading
Once in a while, we are confronted by initiatives which elicit contrary feelings, especially if they come from what you consider as ‘your own side’. An example of this would be my perplexity towards encountering CodeSolid and their proposal for Employee-Owned Source Code, originating as it does from a cooperative, which Nathan Schneider considers to… Continue reading
At the end of 2013, three governmental institutions asked a team of researchers to draw up a participatory process in order to craft a transition strategy for a society based on ‘free, libre and open knowledge. The project was of course rooted in particular local i.e. ‘national’ concerns, but also transcended this local situation. The… Continue reading
Reposted from our sister-site Commons Transition. The title of this post is an homage to Primavera de Filippi’s and Miguel Said de Viera’s excellent essay on the subject. Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (CBRLs or “CopyFair” licenses) are specifically designed to find a middle ground between the full-sharing Copyleft licenses, such as the GPL, the Non-Commercial… Continue reading
This essay by Dmytri Kleiner explores how the ideologies of hacker culture limits its capacity to affect social change. Source – http://www.dmytri.info/hackers-cant-solve-surveillance/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders, is an organization that saves lives in war-torn and underdeveloped regions, providing health care and training in over 70 different countries. MSF saves… Continue reading
We continue today with our review of 2014. The P2P Foundation is a global network of activists and researchers so we have invited members of our community and friends from Brazil, Greece, Spain and the UK to share with you some of the wonderful work they have been doing throughout the year. Yesterday we published… Continue reading
Towards a second wave of world-changing hacks In recent years, the collaborative economy has been growing exponentially , reaching a stage of co-dependency with the emerging new forms of the for-profit economy, which we have described in our recent book, ‘Network Society and Four Scenarios for the Collaborative Economy‘. The new ‘netarchical’ (= net-archy, the… Continue reading
Work on developing Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or CBRLs, for short) continues apace here at the P2P Foundation. When speaking of these types of licenses, we often find it hard to explain how they fill a niche in the alt. license spectrum, falling somewhere between the straight up copyleft and the popular Creative Commons Non-Commercial License…. Continue reading
Bitcoin’s innovation in terms of creating a networked form of commodity money is not useful in creating networked forms of public money, and as a result it does not create a way for networked public forms to replace the current State forms. Republished from Dmytri Kleiner: “I want to write a bit about the public… Continue reading
Neither free software, nor crowd funding will save us from capitalism. We can’t overthrow capitalism by undertaking work merely for the Lulz, we need to create new value circuits that allow is to build new means of survival for the planet, and only then can we do away with capitalism. Excerpted from Dmytri Kleiner: “Free… Continue reading
“Yes coops are more democratic than their capitalist counterparts based on wage-dependency and internal hierarchy. But cooperatives that work in the capitalist marketplace tend to gradually take over competitive mentalities, and even if they would not, they work for their own members, not the common good…” The cooperative movement and cooperative enterprises are in the… Continue reading
Continuing our coverage of FLOK Society’s recent “Buen Conocer” summit, we’re glad to present this special long-form conversation between Open Access chronicler Richard Poynder and Michel Bauwens, held just before the summit took place. The interview is specially noteworthy for being a very honest across-the-board examination of FLOK as a process, including both its virtues… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens: The labor/p2p/commons movements today are faced with a paradox. On the one hand we have a re-emergence of the cooperative movement and worked-owned enterprises, but they suffer from structural weaknesses. Cooperative entities work for their own members, are reluctant to accept new cooperators that would share existing profits and benefits, and are practitioners… Continue reading
“The real question to me is not whether private banks should be allowed to create money through the lending process, but whether – and to what extent – there should be private banking at all. Nationalized banking, at least the nationalization of big banking, should be considered, in my opinion.” A few days ago, we… Continue reading