Thursday, 4 April 2019
​La Tricoterie, Brussels, Belgium

This conference is not a regular one. It’s the launching event of a 2-year experimental project involving cultural and creative spaces and policymakers. Brought together by a consortium of ten forward-looking organisations, dozens of stakeholders across Europe will explore how participatory governance and commoning practices can devise a more sustainable future for Europe.

Culture has the power to impact people’s lives

Participatory governance is a people-centred approach to deepen citizen engagement in governmental decision-making. Participatory processes facilitate communication and relations between public institutions and civil society, resulting in a better quality of democracy. Participatory governance is one of the top priorities in the EU’s cultural agenda for the upcoming years.

Participatory governance empowers people to decide their future

Commoning processes attempt to activate the power of social cooperation to make things happen. In this project, we think of commoning as a variety of collective actions enabling interaction between actors in the cultural sector. Their joint efforts intent to shape new institutional arrangements safeguarding the sustainability of creative work.

At this full-day conference, you will have the occasion to learn how both civil society and the European Commission are addressing these topics. You will also contribute your knowledge and experience to the development of the Urban Labs we are organising in seven European cities this year.

Join us to:

• Understand better how culture contributes to sustainable social and economic development.
• Be inspired by real examples of how culture improves people’s lives.
• Contribute to the debate about how public administration and the cultural and creative sectors can increase their cooperation.
• Learn about the new EU Work Plan for Culture and how it addresses the increasing shift to digital technologies, globalisation and growing societal diversity.
• Discover and get involved in the project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities.
• Meet like-minded professionals that are making an impact in Europe.

This conference is for:

Anyone working at the intersection between culture, creativity, innovation, urbanism and social impact. In particular:

• Professionals working in cultural and creative spaces
• Policymakers at local, regional, national and international level
• Public servants

See website for preliminary program and registration details

Contact:

Event Coordinator
Asma Mansour – [email protected]

Marketing Communications
Jose Rodriguez – [email protected]

Organisers: Region of Skåne, Sweden, and Trans Europe Halles

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• Bring together hundreds of people and organisations interested in moving beyond the current unjust and unsustainable economic system that currently dominates Australian society
• Enable people to share, learn, listen, play, and work together to co-create a strong, vibrant economic system that’s fair for all Australians and cares for our precious natural environment
• Launch a New Economy Network/Coalition for Australia
• Launch powerful new collective strategies for creating positive social and economic change, to achieve long term, liveable economies that fit within the productive capacity of a healthy environment

We invite all prospective participants to be creative with your proposals. The program will be an exciting mix of sessions, crafted to focus on the conference’s guiding theme: how do we inspire and build a new economy in Australian society?

TOPICS FOR PROPOSALS – can include, but are not limited to:

• Indigenous economics – First Nations Peoples initiatives and projects
• Ecological economics – sustainability, degrowth, ecological limits and the steady state
• Ecologically focussed local economic initiatives including restoration, rehabilitation and eco-tourism
• Population issues in the New Economy
• Consumption, production, sharing, ‘making’, remaking and repairs
• Distributed manufacturing – re-localised production to support community economies
• Platform cooperatives, blockchain and community asset sharing
• Feminism and the new economy
• Food and food systems in the new economy
• Law in the new economy – regulation, governance, legal services for the New Economy
• Diverse forms of ownership – including the commons, cooperatives and community ownership
• The future of work – labour, unions, work-life balance
• Money, finance and alternative currencies
• Energy – community energy, renewable energy, distributed systems
• Post-extractivism – economics beyond large scale mining and resource extraction
• Communication about new economies
• Advocacy, organising and creating social change to build the new economy
• Subjective experience and the role of our inner life in building a sustainable economy
• Mapping tools for the new economy
• Research methods and projects that support the new economy
• International perspectives and initiatives

 PARTICIPATION OPTIONS

• Academic papers (PhD students and Early Career Researchers are encouraged) – 15 minute presentations
• Practitioner papers – 15 minute presentations
• Panel discussions and facilitated workshops – 20 to 50 minutes
• Problem solving clinics, training, professional development – up to 50 minutes
• New Economy Lab – propose an experiment to conduct with willing participants (e.g. it could be about currencies / sharing systems, etc.), before, during, or after the conference, and use a 50 min conference session to review it or start it
• New Economy Change Projects – 50 minute sessions for those who want to propose specific social change projects and who intend to continue these projects after the conference (and stay connected to the New Economy Network)
• Discussion groups, arts projects, debates, working group meetings – 50 minutes
• Facilitated games – 30 to 50 minutes
• Short performances, creative interludes or interventions – 5 to 10 minutes
• Posters

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL FOR PARTICIPATION

• CLICK HERE to download the Proposal Template
• EMAIL YOUR COMPLETED PROPOSAL by 12th June 2017  – email: neweconomy@earthlaws.org.au“

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“The local organizers of the global XVIth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons welcome abstracts (500 words max.) for papers, panels, and posters to be presented at this global conference, to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from 10 to 14 July 2017. The meeting will be held in the wonderful historic city center of Utrecht, a major university town in the middle of the Netherlands and will be hosted by the Institutions for Collective Action-research team and the Strategic Theme Institutions for Open Societies of Utrecht University.

With the theme of the conference, “Practicing the Commons: Self-Governance, Cooperation, and Institutional Change”, we intend to bring together the fast growing body of scientific knowledge on the commons as an alternative governance model from all over the world. The increasing popularity of commons as a governance model is visible across the Netherlands, as well as elsewhere around the world. Citizens increasingly form new collectives to provide energy, care, food, etc, and work together on the basis of self-governance and reciprocity.

During the conference there will be plenty of opportunities to connect academic research to practitioners’ experience and vice versa. Underneath you find an overview of the main themes to be addressed, including a list of potential research questions that might be the topic of paper presentations. Soon, a call for contributions to practitioners’ labs will also be issued.”

Keynote speakers

• Prof. dr. Saskia Sassen (Columbia University, US)
• Prof. dr. Juan Camilo Cárdenas Campo (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)
• Prof. dr. Jane Humphries (All Souls College Oxford University, UK)

Conference tracks, including examples of possible research questions that can be addressed in submitted panels, papers, and posters

1. Recipes for resilient cooperation

• How did the management and use of commons evolve over time?
• Does the longevity of an institution for collective action have a positive effect on continuation? What is the role of path dependency in long?enduring commons?
• Which factors influence(d) the emergence and continuation of commons?
• In what way does management of common pool resources depend on the type of resource?
• …

2. Issues of exclusion and control in the formation, defense and governance of commons

• Who sets the boundaries to commons?
• Do commons with strict boundaries/access rules suffer less from freeriding than those with vague, open boundaries? Does openness always affect resilience negatively?
• Can technology help to make commons more inclusive?
• What are the moral implications of limiting access to common pool resources?
• Which instruments for monitoring, controlling and sanctioning behavior can be found in in self?governing institutions and how do these evolve over time?
• What is the impact of group size and composition on the commons’ functioning?
• How does inclusion and exclusion work in digital resources governed as commons?
• …

3. The impact of the commons

• What role can commons play in enhancing food security?
• Do commons have a positive effect on livelihoods, well?being, social justice, inequality?
• How can knowledge on commons be used to secure the future of global resources?
• How can (knowledge on) local resource governance contribute to mitigating climate change?
• What is the impact of technological change on self?governance and resource appropriation?
• In what way does management of common pool resources depend on the type of resource?
• …

4. Methods and models to study the commons

• How can institutional change on the commons be studied (methodology, coding of case studies, individual cases)?
• How can micro?/macro?relations be modelled to understand our functioning of commons?
• How can our current knowledge on natural resource commons be used to improve our understanding of collective action in digital environments, genetics, etc., and vice versa?
• …

5. Polycentric governance of global resources

• How can polycentric governance contribute to governing global resources?
• Which are the legal constraints to polycentric governance?
• What can be the impact of local change on the future of global resources?
• How and in which ways is leadership important in polycentric governance?
• …

6. Crisis on the commons?

• How do commoners overcome periods of extreme stress and crisis?
• Are commons as governance regimes more resilient to shocks and crisis, compared to e.g. state or market-governed resources?
• How well can commoners mediate conflicts both within their own group and with other groups within society?
• How to study failure instead of success of commons?
• …

7. Commons and the city

• For which urban spaces and resources can commons be a viable alternative governance model?
• Which specific opportunities and challenges does the urban environment offer to commons’ initiatives?
• How to establish durable collaboration between commons and local governments?
• …

8. Corporations, governments and commons

• What impact do businesses and private investment have on the commons?
• What role can commons play in the struggle for land rights, of in particular indigenous communities?
• Which role can local and national governments play in the development of new commons?
• …

On this conference website, you can learn about the conference timeline, keynote speakers, policy sessions, and opportunities to organize your own project meetings. You can also find out about the city of Utrecht, the conference venues, planned excursions, and much more.

The post Practicing the Commons: Self-Governance, Cooperation, and Institutional Change (Open call) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Deadline for abstracts: 21 October 2016
Submissions via website: http://www.ilpc.org.uk

Digital Transformations of Work: Labouring in the Digital Economy

“Digital technologies have provided the links for multinational companies (MNCs) and global production networks (GPNs) to shift production across organisational and national boundaries, creating new global divisions of labour and removing work from nationally-constituted regulatory frameworks. Increasingly, online labour markets such as Upwork or PeoplePerHour, offer the platform infrastructure for the outsourcing of work and the managerialisation of freelancing and independent work at a distance, questioning notions of working time, value and control.

Recent studies have attempted to theorise a political economy that considers these digital transformations in contemporary work (e.g. Huw’s, 2014; Dyer-Witheford, 2015). From this perspective, the discussion of labour in terms of the digital economy has both re-materialised concepts such as immaterial labour and the knowledge economy, in the face of the impoverishment, precarity and crisis experienced by those labouring in digital economies – and, on the other, uncovered new challenges for the study of work and workers’ organisation and resistance, for example, the use of data storing and processing and communications technologies as forms of productivity measurements in the workplace (Moore and Robinson, 2015).

This stream will question the implications of this evolution from a labour process perspective. This stream will be the point of contact between scholars researching digital transformations of work in management, organisation studies and the sociology of work with the potential to involve others from cultural studies, critical media theory and the sociology of media.

We welcome contributions that examine:

• New employment relations in the gig or platform economy (e.g. Uber; Deliveroo);
• Crowdsourcing and new forms of labour;
• “Gamification” and the distinction between work, labour and play;
• The integration of data, digital metrics and algorithms into work processes;
• Control and data-related managerialisation;
• Digitisation and the ability to measure previously intangible aspects of work;
• Digital technologies, workplace flexibility and the intensification and extensification of labour;
• The commodification of digital labour and the role of free and unpaid labour in online regimes of accumulation;
• New jobs, new professional identities;
• Resistance and trade union organisation;
• Policy and regulation of digitally-mediated work;
• Methodological challenges and how to study digital work.

Potential contributions may include:

• empirical research that looks at processes of digitisation on work;
• empirical research that studies new forms of labour brought about by digitization/digital technologies;
• theoretical papers that consider how we might conceptualise digital labour, or the digitisation of labour from a labour process perspective;
• theoretical papers on the political economy of platforms;
• methodological papers on how to address the study of labour in the digital transformation;
• comparative labour process analyses of in digital contexts”

More details can be found here.

Photo by Joan-Marie E

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Today’s economy is built on the foundations of a global industrial and financial system with immense productive capacity, but the extractive nature of which has created extreme income disparity and social injustice and wrought devastation on the natural world. There is an increasingly spirited debate about the need for a ‘new economy’, which has fertile and important implications for the legal and philosophical foundations of the current system. What are different visions of the ‘new economy’ and how achievable are they? What possibilities exist at their intersection?

How can we reimagine work, exchange, money, care, law and our relationship with the natural world through the prism of a new economy?

Our two day conference will bring together community activists, social entrepreneurs, economists, academics, lawyers and regulators, to discuss, showcase and weave together the explosion of experiments that are bubbling up around peer-to-peer initiatives, commoning, maker movements, sharing, buen vivir, collaborative economies, solidarity economies, localisation and cooperative movements. The conference will include an interactive plenary session on Day 2, which will enable interested participants to co-design a Charter for a New Economy Coalition in Australia.

The conference will be held 16 & 17 August 2016 — Glebe Town Hall, in Sydney, Australia.

For more information:

Website: http://www.neweconomy.law.unsw.edu.au/conference

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neweconomy2016/?fref=ts

Email: [email protected]

The post Conference Alert: “Building the new economy – activism, enterprise and social change” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The Transform! European Left Foundation organised on March 11 and 12, 2016 a debate on “production and commons” in Rome. In his introduction to the workshop Roberto Morea said Commons could become a method/to create an alternative model to confront capitalism.

Dario Azzellini presented a new view on self-managed and companies recuperated by workers(WRCs): They break with the individualisation and commodification of labour power by the capitalist mode of production. Dario says “To manage labour as a commons entails a shift away from the perception of labour as an individual commodity, towards a new notion of labour as a collectively and sustainably managed resource, as the human capacity to create, which is put to use for the benefit of society as a whole.” (see the attached short conclusion by D.A.) In my reception this is an essential step forward including WRCs in the diversity of commons initiatives. Furthermore it could become the starting point of a closer connection between classical workers movements and the commons movement.

Underlining this Yannis Barkas and his friends from the Viome WRC and Ilektra Bethmouli from the autonomous clinic, both in Thessaloniki reported on the development of WRCs and social projects in Greece, where self-organisation is a simple necessity under the threat of the EU/IMF-Regime. Andres Ruggeri from the “Programa de Extensiòn Faculta Abierta” at the University of Buenos Aires presented the developing sector of WRCs in Argentina, which started during the crisis in Argentina in 2001 and are practised actually of about 16 000 people. In these presentations the specific contribution of WRCs to the diversity of Commons get visible: first of all they respond to the existential needs of workers not to loose their jobs and to organise work but they engage in related fields as well b.e.. in education and they create projects especially in cultural fields.

Gianni Rinaldini from the Italian metal-workers-trade-union FIOM was talking about the history of the cooperative movement in Italy and it’s enormous relevance for the left affine socio-cultural environment in Italy – but today finds itself in a defensive position – even in some cases under accusation of corruption. Gianni wants to promote the idea of a radical cooperative movement – but first of all he said there is a lesson to learn from the traps the old cooperative movements fell in. In the actual situation of pushing down traditional public services governments following neo-liberal strategies could use cooperative movements and commons making the loss of public services passable to the people – this, he said, is a threat to be opposed.

Marina Sirin referred to the development of commons in North America and the aspects of “affective politics” in commons movements, especially the experience how strong we relate in others and the appearance of care, trust and love.

Elisabetta Cangelosi explained her approach to the definition of commons and Francine Mestrum widened the view on production with regard to social reproduction. Social commons as democratic, participative and rights-based version of social protection are to be included into the diversity of commons perspectives she pointed out.

Massimo de Angelis referred to the difference between social revolution and political revolution Marx made in “Das Kapital” and defined commons as solidarity work within a process of social revolution – not yet (but perhaps in future) becoming part of a political revolution.

Roberto Musacchio gave a short report on Scuola Altramente in Rome, where they organise voluntary work in schools with children and families often of migrant backgrounds to help them to integrate as an example for the cooperation between a commons oriented project and public schools.

The two days of discussion took place in “Officine Zero – Roma non si vende”, an occupied former railway control centre, were cultural events are organised by young commoners. Alessandro from Officine Zero reflected on the IT-development as a world were a free resource became privatised in a completely new way, initially without exploiting labour and no input of great capital. One of the effects of this “post-labour”-world in his regard is the continuous devaluation of labour. He sees Officine Zero as a place of commemoration to the old world of labour on the one hand and as protest against privatisation – another starting point of new thinking beyond the traditional patterns.

Yes, these were two outstanding interesting days of intense discussion. Chantal Delmas and Roberto Morea, both in charge of the Transform!-Commons-Network, intend to organise the next seminar in the later spring in Brussels.”

Photo by APESTONE

Photo by APESTONE

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The aim of the conference is to explore citizen-centered design approaches for the smart city. Central theme is the role of design(ers) to create opportunities and practices for citizens, (social) entrepreneurs and policy makers towards more liveable, sustainable and sociable urban futures. How can citizens meaningfully be engaged in the process of city making? What new social processes and business models do we need for the future of city making? And in what way changes the role of the professional in the process of city making, and which new design methodologies, approaches and roles they have taken on towards the creation of a sociable smart city.

Lab of Labs – Tuesday April 19th and Wednesday April 20th

Explore methodologies for design research in the two-days Lab of Labs programme. Five leading labs will share their design approaches and methodologies with the participants and work with them towards the design of a conceptual prototype. Taking place on April 19 and 20, around 50 professionals, designers and students will be able to join in for this event. Participating Labs are Kitchen Budapest, Fields of View, Ideal lab, Waag Society and the Design Informatics group of Edinburgh College of Art. The Lab of Labs will close off with a public presentation of the outcomes and a discussion on methodologies for design research on Wednesday night April 20th. This presentation is open to the public. Tickets are free and will become available on March 20th via http://designandthecity.eu

Conference Design & The City – Thursday April 21st

With the addition of Dan Hill as the closing speaker, the programme for the main conference on April 21st is complete. International experts will discuss the implications of the rise of social media, big data and other new media technologies for the practice of urban design during the Design & The City conference. How can citizens meaningfully be engaged in the process of city-making? What new modes of social organization and business models do we need for the future of city-making? And what is the role of professional designers in the era of smart citizens? Find the programme here.

Workshops – Friday April 22nd

On Friday April 22nd, a broad variety of design offices, research groups and cultural organizations will host fourteen workshops related to the themes of Design & The City. Themes range from finding a solution for the bicycle parking in Amsterdam and the design of more walkable cities to participatory sensing and critical investigations of the concept of the smart city. Programme and registration (before April 1st) here.

Parallel events

Besides the Lab of Labs, workshops and conference, there is a full calendar of interesting events. One of them is a shadow EU-summit organized by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences which invites students and young professionals to discuss the future of European cities, and their main challenges and solutions for them. Also highly recommended ‘Sense in the City’ about active and healthy living in the city (April 18th) and ‘Smart city projects’ about the lessons which can be learned from the experiences so far (April 20th).

More information about the event can be found here.

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