BEK video from BEK kolektiv on Vimeo

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40 years ago a group of skilled engineers at Lucas Aerospace UK, when threatened with redundancy, responded with an ambitious plan to make better use of their talents – designing what they called socially useful and environmentally sustainable alternatives to the military products their company made.

THE PLAN asks why we’re not more aware of their remarkable story, which flew in the face of recession and the free market philosophy rising up at that time. It shows how the Lucas workers developed their plan – including wind turbines, a hybrid car, heat pumps and energy efficient housing – and reveals its broader social, environmental and political implications.

It’s a story that fills the void of 40 years lost to the idea of society being subordinate to so-called free markets. A story in need of knowing and celebrating, that still offers much to our time.

Back the crowdfund here:

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The book will be reflective of quite a few people’s thinking – a real community effort, coordinated by a strong core team.

It will be mixture of short essays, personal reflections, collective thinking and really practical guides. It’s being written to be relevant for both entrepreneurs, founders and freelancers as well leaders and cultural influencers in larger organisations.

We’re aiming for this project to share our learnings, inspire action and help grow the global movement of people putting purpose at the heart of their work – so we hope has a wide appeal.

We would love your support.

Our crowdfunding campaign is live and you can be part of the special first edition release of the book here.

You can support our campaign here and pre-order your copy of the book here – and we would love all the help we could get to share the word as well!

Thanks so much!

betterworktogether.co

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 To help transform our economy over the last few years, Stir to Action has organised national workshop programmes to support communities. Now, we are now planning to launch a year-long programme of practical workshops, 3-day residentials, mentoring, and live crowdfunding to build a new economy that works for everyone.

For this to be successful — and with your support — we are hoping to raise the £12,500 we need to cover programme costs. Pledges on our campaign over the next five weeks will support subsidised workshop places, local workshop venues, programme design, our mentoring network, and provide the resources to engage new communities with these ideas. This is our first programme at this scale, but we aim for it to be an annual programme!

We’re continuing to build our inspiring mentoring network during the campaign — would you like to join?!
Get in touch via [email protected]

Click here to support our crowdfund

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The crowd funding campaign for the startup of platform cooperative Incubator.coop has now been launched – you can learn more and support it here.

There’s problems with traditional incubators that no-one in “startup land” wants to admit. The problem is simple: incubators serve investors, not incubatee’s. That’s why we created incubator.coop – it addresses a real-world economic failure. Incubators can’t find enough fee’s from a target market that by definition is cash and resource poor. So incubators serve their investors as a deal-flow mechanism. They do not serve startups. In Australia, Pollenizer, the first startup incubator shuttered after just 9-years of business and after several pivots. The rest will follow if they don’t serve up good deal flow.

The quest for a better incubator leads to a better form of business

The future – according to those that hang out in the Co-Op sector – belongs to collective endeavours. It belongs to Platform CoOps not Venture-Backed 2-sided marketplaces.

The future is not a new AGL powered by wind and solar. The future belongs to hundreds if not thousands of community-level energy co-ops.

Introducing incubator.coop at the New Economy Conference

Short-fallings of Conventional Incubators

1. Conventional Incubators are not viable in themselves. Instead they act as a business development tool for “side-car” investors trying to pick winners. We think you need an incubator that exists to serve its incubatees.
2. Conventional Incubators look for a 1-in-1000 unicorn to repay their many wrong bets. We think you need an incubator that creates businesses of value that go the distance.
3. Conventional Incubators looks for exceptional talent. We think you need an incubator for collective endeavours.
4. Conventional Incubators function with a top-down approach. We think you need an incubator that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.
5. Conventional Incubators promote returns for the 1%. We think you need an incubator where 1 Member = 1 Vote.
6. Conventional Incubators run for 6-months. We think you need an incubator that supports the whole period of development from formation through to operation.

Crowd Is Key

In the future, every business will continue to live and die by its service to the group of stakeholders a company may refer to as ‘shareholders, customers, employees and community’. But, in the future we’ll call these stakeholders the “crowd”.

The strength of the “crowd” will determine success more than historically as transparency, block-chain and social-media mean traditional market barriers become obsolete.

Crowdsource Instead of Top-Down

A crowd needs a place to develop ideas of mutual interest. This harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.

Given a bit of guidance and time crowd-sweat can bring ideas to the stage of maturity, where a crowd-fund campaign can test “product-market fit” whilst qualifying future customers and investors.

The best ideas will attract a crowd and develop. The ones without a crowd won’t develop. This is somewhat Darwinian on purpose. We think it’s better to put startup ideas through a ‘natural selection’ process than a ‘VC selection’ process.

Crowdfunding

We believe crowdfunding is an essential role in new venture development. So we are running our own through this soft launch phase until November 1, 2017.

Photo by Thad Zajdowicz

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The founder of this Revolutionary Initiative, Ferial Puren, puts it this way “The world as we know it has progressively adopted a Consumerist, Capitalistic, Individualistic worldview that has impacted the entire ecosystem by creating a social, environmental and spiritual divide. Our society, you, me and our governments at large recognize and feel the repercussions of these divides. This feeling is reflected in the fact that 9 out of every 10 people on this planet agree that our world is not an ideal world and 80% of us don’t like what we do and how we express ourselves in this world, which makes us unhappy, unfulfilled and dissatisfied.”

Ignite TV will adopt the STOP, RESET, GO concept throughout it’s reporting to inspire an awakening and re-connect us to each other and our eco-system so that we can find solutions to our greatest challenges and co-create the world we want.

About STOP, RESET & GO Collective…

Visit:https://stopresetgo.org/

Stop Reset Go is a growing collective of change agents who seek your support to co-create an open, digital framework for the commons, enabling citizens, entrepreneurs, activists, communities and distributed initiatives around the world to come out of their silos, converge and effectively share resources to build the future of humanity.

About Ignite life…

Visit: http://ignitelife.info/

Ignite life aims to inspire an awakening within human beings to a greater consciousness to recognize the impact of these 3 major societal divides.  We do this in an effort to play our role well in addressing the root causes of our challenges and being part of creating a circular economy that supports and nurtures happy, successful life.

How to get involved?

To achieve their collective goals, a crowdfunding campaign has been organized to bring together the collaborators and co-creators from around the world to support this movement of Conscious Awakening, and together help build the tools for a better society.

So, for as little as $1 you could get in on the action, and or by sharing this initiative with your friends, family and other change makers. The Ignite TV crew is also giving you some very creative rewards for your solidarity, such as cool STOP RESET GO Merch, On-Screen Credits, TV face time, a democratic vote on any major decisions about the Channel – no matter how much or little you contribute, a chance to be in the centre of the action at the launch event in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2017 but most importantly a rare opportunity to join your fellow humans in co-creating the future.

So, if you wish to be part of inspiring change, head over to the Ignite TV Campaign Page and show your support: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/co-create-worlds-first-viewer-owned-tv-channel

And OR help spread the word by pledging your support on: https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/60417-bring-ignite-tv-to-the-world

Video Link: http://player.vimeo.com/video/229091539

Contact Information

Ferial Puren

skype: Ferial Puren

http://ignitelife.info

http://ignitelifeshop.info

www.stopresetgo.org

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Errekaleor Bizirik

Errekaleor Bizirik is a project based in Gasteiz that is founded on the ideals of self-determination and communal life. It is a neighborhood that we have reclaimed from gentrification and real estate speculation and is now called home by over 150 people.

We organize ourselves using an assembly process, which allows us to build the overarching ideas of the project and to coordinate the many activities that are taking place in the neighborhood. Our project is based on the fundamental principles of self-management (autogestion), food sovereignty, feminism, Basque cultural reinvigoration, horizontal organization, and emancipatory culture. We regularly have concerts, movies, workshops and lectures, art expositions, and much more in order to encourage and create space for free cultural expression in Gasteiz.. All these events take place in the spaces we have built together in the neighborhood, such as a concert hall, theatre, social center, and more.

We have a 5-acre community farm and a bakery where we grow produce and bake sourdough bread, both for ourselves and for individuals who live in other parts of Gasteiz who want to know the true quality of their food. We also have free Basque language classes in our social center and a sports center where anyone can come to play pelota (a traditional Basque sport), participate in our boxing classes, or try out acrobatics. To build ties with other cooperative organizations, we have a printing shop where we create various types of pamphlets and books in collaboration with other organizations in the region.We have built a recording studio for local bands, where they can record for free and not tie themselves to labels or contracts. In Errekaleor Bizirik we have created these spaces, and many more, in order to continue to bring life into an abandoned neighborhood, creating a neighborhood full of life for all.

Energy Sovereignty

We are immersed in a system that requires a constant consumption of energy in order to propel constant economic growth. In an era where we have proven ourselves incapable as a society of rejecting fossil fuels, we have also reached the limits of our possible oil production. Peak oil will arrive in the coming decades, and we expect the same for uranium. As climate change effects clearly show, we are nearing the physical and biological limits of the planet, destroying the global ecosystem. The symptoms of this crisis go by many names: the energy crisis, the social crisis, the ecological crisis. But these are just symptoms, and the disease remains the same: capitalism.

In Errekaleor we work towards a different way of living. In a world where things are meant to be thrown away, we have spent four years turning rubble into homes, weed-filled land into gardens, and empty streets into a community. We have done this under the broad banner of self-determination and self-management. Now the time has come for energy sovereignty. Luckily, in Errekaleor the sun always shines! To accomplish this new task, we want to install around 550 solar panels in order to cover the energy needs of our 150 inhabitants, a process that will be accompanied by a large decrease in our consumption of energy overall and the use of alternative systems of refrigeration and water heating. We will do this in our communal way, which is to say that these solar panels will be accessible equally to all residents of Errekaleor Bizirik, and will be accompanied individual and DIY projects such as our new solar showers and bicycle machines that generate extra electricity for our communal living spaces.

This plan is organized to centralize the solar panels in the space that has the most sun, and to equally provide energy to all residents. With this, we will create the largest energy self-sufficient and off-the-grid space in both Basque Country and Europe. We want a renewable and ecologically-friendly neighborhood. We believe in creating a new model for energy independence. Will you help us accomplish our dreams?

Click here to support this crowdfund

Want to know more?

Webpage: www.errekaleorbizirik.org

Facebook: Errekaleor Bizirik

Twitter: @Errekaleor – Errekaleor Bizirik

Youtube: Canal Errekaleor Bizirik

Email: [email protected]

The post Errekaleor Bizirik Crowdfund: A Little Light In The Darkness appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The plan is to translate my book into Spanish and then use small-scale printing and distribution to publish the book in Spain and throughout Latin America. — initially Peru, Argentina and Mexico, to be followed later in other locations.  The Spanish edition of my book will be entitled Pensar desde los comunes: una breve introducción.

It is difficult for a project this innovative to obtain financing, so the organizers have launched a crowdfunding campaign this week through the Spain-based Goteo website.  I’m thrilled to have my book be the focus of this pathbreaking translation/publishing experiment.  I’m also excited about having my short introduction to the commons accessible to the Spanish-speaking world!

The “claymation” video by Espacio Abierto of Peru, explaining the project, is particularly wonderful, especially the animated clay rendition of me!  If you go to the Goteo website for the campaign, you can watch the video, learn more about the project and contribute to it.  It’s off to a strong start, but it needs to minimally raise 8.042 euros — 10,602 euros is optimum.

The organizers of the project are Guerrilla Translation and Traficantes de Sueños in Madrid, Spain; Sursiendo in Chiapas, México; La Libre de Barranco in Lima, Peru; Tinta Limón in Buenos Aires, Argentina – with support from Goteo in Madrid. A special thanks to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for their hard work in making this project happen.

The team explains its plans in this way:

We want to pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. This model makes the best use of the digital knowledge commons by freely offering the translated text online while printing and distributing hard-copy books at the local level through nodes in various locations. In this way we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping….[The project] will help build bridges across languages and cultures, and enable concrete, material commoning practices. For this reason, we urge our English-speaking and indeed all multi-lingual friends to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort.

Let’s help this new effort in international commoning and publishing.  It would be great to bypass the costs, inefficiencies and commercial limitations of conventional publishing (something I discuss at greater length here).  Let’s think global, print local!

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