When: Thursday, 27 June – Friday, 28 June
9:00 am – 8:00 pm

Where: University of London, Malet Street, London

In previous years, we’ve promoted platform co-ops in a traditional conference format. This year we’re doing things differently and will be exploring opportunities to increase decentralised collaboration in a completely open space format. We’re proud to be working on collaboration with Phoebe Tickell and Nati Lombardo from Enspiral, to convene and facilitate the event.

Who is OPEN 2019 for?

OPEN 2019 is an inter-network event for community builders, network organisers and key connecting members of organisations from a wide range of progressive communities. We welcome all cooperators, rebels, mavens, network builders, systems architects, open source developers, and anyone else who is interested in designing and building our collective future. The idea is to network the networks by creating deeper connections and relationships between some of the key connectors from a wide range of mutually aligned communities.

What will we be doing?

To kick off each day attendees will be introduced to a handful of new, distributed, cooperative, technical and social projects, through a selection of lightning talks. After that attendees will be guided to co-design the event by proposing, refining and voting on the content for the rest of the two days’ sessions. Experienced facilitators from the Enspiral network will help us create a ‘container’ for our time together. Working in small groups we will discuss, debate and feedback ideas to the wider group, to ensure everyone has a chance to have their say and that the collective wisdom of the group is captured and shared.

With an informal evening dinner and drinks and more networking opportunities, there will be plenty of time for building deeper understanding and relationships too.

What will you get out of it?

Recognising that effective collaboration, at any scale, can be hard to define and even harder to achieve OPEN 2019 does not aim to build immediate collaboration between attendees. Having studied the key ingredients of collaboration we know that the first step towards effective collaboration is building deeper connections and trusted relationships, and that is what OPEN 2019 aims to deliver.

By introducing more connectors to each other, getting to know one another, and working together over two days we aim to strengthen our relationships, deepen our understanding and to cross-pollinate and fertilise the pre-existing projects and evolving ideas within our networks.

We will explore opportunities to coordinate our existing organisations better, to keep each other better informed about what we are working on and to potentially cooperate if we can find opportunities to do so. Ultimately, as a result of the networking, we aim to pave the way for any collaborative opportunities which might arise as things evolve…

When and where is it?

The OPEN 2019 Community Gathering will take place on the 27th and 28th of June at the University of London in Holborn, London.

What should I do if I want to come?

Spaces are limited to 150 attendees in order to keep the group small enough to be effective so, if are interested in being involved, please order your tickets below asap. If this event becomes over-subscribed we will explore the possibility of running additional events. If you have a project you would like to present at a lightning talk we’d love to hear from you (please email a short description of your project) but please note – all attendees, including presenters, will be required to buy a ticket.

Please join us to discuss, explore, connect and decide how we can deliver systemic change, together.

For more information and tickets click here!

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Join us for this intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and Synergia Institute. This course offers participants a practical guide on how we can shift our economy to put people and planet first This programme brings together international scholars and experts who will explore all key areas of society; food, democracy, housing, social care, the commons and social finance. This course is useful for people involved in developing social enterprises and co-operative organisations, students, activists and academics.

An intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and the Synergia Institute

What is the ethical economy and how does it work?

• Comprehensive exploration of economic democracy and sustainability as viable bases for system change at local, regional and international scales.
• Unique combination of history, theory, and practice.
• Strong focus on personal & professional experience & participation as key elements of the course.

The Synergia Programme will include

The Problematic with John Restakis
How might we frame the historic moment in which we find ourselves from a political economy perspective? This session presents both a historic retrospective on the movement for economic democracy and how the current configuration of global capitalism demands new perspectives, models, and action strategies for change makers world-wide.

The Partner State with John Restakis
The current crisis of the welfare state is the culmination of a process of de legitimation that has been in the making for more than a generation. For many, the very notion of the state as a force for the good is untenable. But is there a way to reclaim and re conceptualize the state as an institution in service to the common good? This session introduces the concept of the Partner State as an extension of the principles that characterize co-operative economic democracy as a political, economic, and social ideal.

Labour and the Precariat with Cilla Ross
With the emergence of revolutionary digital and informatics technologies, traditional forms of labour are rapidly being replaced with the rise of a new class of precarious and atomised work that threatens not only the livelihoods millions but also the very meaning of work itself. This session examines the implications of this revolutionary shift in the forms of labour, what this entails for the well-being of workers, local communities, and society, and how co-operative and human-centred models of work can challenge the dominant paradigm.

The Commons with Michel Bauwens
Over the last decade, the idea of the commons has emerged as a powerful antidote to the prevailing private property and free market notion of how economies, markets, and social relations might be organized. In particular, the rise of digital platforms and the restructuring of online work through the operation of peer-to-peer networks has offered a revolutionary re think of how co-operative and commons-based principles are redefining both economic and societal relations in service to the common good. This session examines what the idea of the commons means for re visioning models of political economy as alternatives to the status quo.

For more information and registration, visit the Shumacher College site

The post The Synergia Programme – Transition To Co-operative Commonwealth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A cooperative cloud would also provide a clear stepping stone towards the open source, collaborative working environment we have described as PLANET and could help form the basis of an entire open source suite of apps for the cooperative economy.

This Internet of Ownership ‘Clouds directory‘ explores and documents efforts to form free, open source alternatives to corporate cloud infrastructures, especially through cooperative business models and is a very useful resource for anyone thinking about building something similar.

As ever, at The Open Co-op we are keen to encourage as much cooperation and collaboration in this area as possible because it seems crazy for new initiatives to re-invent the wheel and greater gains, and network effects, will be easier to achieve if more effort is focused on one larger collaborative effort than many disparate initiatives.

The post below is the latest update from the CommonsCloud project from the Free Knowledge Institute which helpfully details a lot of their technical decisions and subsequent setup.

Members of the CommonsCloud project will be speaking at OPEN 2018 in London in July – come along and say “Hi” if you are interested in collaborating on a common solution.

Photo by neXtplanaut

The post The Making of the Cooperative Cloud appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Mairead McCormack: .Join us at the Imagine Festival of Ideas and Politics 2018 in Belfast for a series of conversational gatherings hosted and facilitated by Voluntary Arts Ireland in partnership with the International Futures Forum, Perspectivity and others.

Together we are exploring the prospects for cultural transformation related to economics, politics, and ways of living and making a living.

‘We live in an era when the consequences and effects of dominant economic, social and political paradigms are pressing upon people, damaging democracy and fomenting feelings of frustration, helplessness and despair. It is now when creating together, wisely and hopefully, matters most.’

Humanising the Economy – The role of cooperatives in making shift happen

Tuesday 13th March
8.30 to 10.30am (with buffet breakfast)
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

The role of cooperatives in making shift happen with John Restakis, Executive Director of Vancouver based Community Evolution Foundation and author of Humanizing the Economy. In this session, John will speak about the ways in which cooperatives are challenging the mainstream economy and are pointing towards a political economy that’s good for people and planet.  John will also examine challenges being faced by the cooperative movement in our turbulent times.  There will be opportunity for participants to engage in conversation about the issues and insights in John’s presentation.

Registration (Free)

Cultural Commoning – What it is and why it matters

Tuesday 13th March
1.30pm to 4pm (with light lunch)
Performance Room, Linen Hall Library, Belfast

Cultural commoning is of its time. In a world where it is becoming clear that the everyday creative things we do have a value to us, to the social fabric and wellbeing of our communities and to the health of our democracies it offers an alternative approach to sustaining our creative lives.

With Michel Bauwens, co-founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation – a cross-national, not-for-profit organization, Nat O’Connor, Lecturer in Public Policy & Administration at Ulster University, Peter Doran, School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast and Karin Eyben from of Garvagh People’s Forest. This seminar will focus on cultural commons/commoning – what it means and why it is important for personal and civic living – drawing from contributions made by cultural thinkers and doers from various parts of the world. There will be opportunity to meet and talk with some of these ‘citizen commoners’ as part of an open and informal civic conversation.

Hosted by Denis Stewart and Kevin Murphy of Voluntary Arts Ireland

Registration (Free)

Being SMart about Freelancing – The changing nature of ‘work’

Tuesday 13th March
5-7pm
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre

A shift is happening in our ways of thinking about and doing ‘work’. Increasingly people, especially young adults, are free-lancing, becoming self-employed, to ‘make a living’ – sometimes through choice, often by dint of circumstances. In the midst of their seeking and making good with opportunities, these increasingly numerous ‘working people’ face considerable challenges, for example, in maintaining sufficient monetarily valued work, in making provision for times of illness and unfitness for work, and in ‘laying up’ financial resource against their later, post-professional years.
This workshop will provide opportunity for participants to think together about ‘work’ in the round, and about the changing nature of remunerated work in particular. Colleagues from the Belgium-based SMart organisation will be playing leading roles in informing and inspiring the conversation.

The session will be hosted by Voluntary Arts Ireland and facilitated by Michael Donnelly of Perspectivity.

Registration (Free)

Commoning Our Democracy – A Civic Conversation on democratic revival

Wednesday 14th March
11am to 1pm
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

The nation-state and its democracy is in crisis and hardly able to contain the forces of disruption that are transnational in scale. But even before the re-emergence of an era of crises, democratic citizens hardly experienced autonomy and co-governance in the important spheres of production and education.

In recent years however, we have seen a re-emergence and fast growth of the commons, particularly in the fields of shared knowledge, but also in the mutualization of provisioning systems through urban commons. Can the new forms of co-governance and mutualized property that are characteristic of commoning also have an effect on the renewal of our democratic institutions?

Based on his experiences in projects for the government in Ecuador and the crafting of a Commons Transition Plan for the city of Ghent, Michel Bauwens will offer answers to this question. And all those participating in the seminar will be invited to engage in co-creative, civic conversation about the prospects for ‘commoning our democracy’ as part of the ecological and social transformations that are needed for humanity to survive.

Registration (Free)

This event is part of Democracy Day organised by the Building Change Trust. To find out more about Democracy Day and register for other events please click here.

Universal Basic Income – What currency could it have?

Friday 16th March
1pm to 3pm
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

Interest in the idea of an unconditional ‘basic income’ for everyone has been growing in recent years, with considerable deliberation and some experimentation. This session will offer opportunity to engage in civic conversation about universal basic income – what it means, in principle and practice, and its potential benefits and challenges. During the session, Anne Ryan, from Basic Income Ireland, and Nat O’Connor, from Ulster University, will share their perspectives on basic income to help inform and inspire the conversation.

The seminar will be co-hosted by the International Futures Forum and Slugger O’Toole, and facilitated by Karin Eyben, of Garvagh People’s Forest, and Denis Stewart, from the IFF.

Registration (Free)

Download The Common Interchange of Ordinary Intelligence poster

Photo by Eskling

The post Common Interchange of Ordinary Intelligence: Join the Imagine Festival of Ideas and Politics appeared first on P2P Foundation.

John Restakis

John Restakis: Historically, cooperatives have been primarily focused around providing support and service to the members. Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op. That has been the traditional form of cooperatives for a long time now. Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members. That has changed over the last 15 years or so, particularly in the field of the provision of social care.

Social co-ops emerged in the late 70s in Italy as a response to a market failure within public services in Italy. Groups of families or users of social services, primarily originally from within a community of people with disabilities, decided to organize cooperatives as a better way of designing and providing services to themselves. This is a very different model from the state-delivered services to these people. What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community. And so, they were communitarian, community service organizations that had a membership base of primary users of that service, whether it was healthcare, or help for people with drug addictions, or whatever.

These social co-ops have now exploded in Italy. I think they have taken over, in a sense, the provision of social care services in many communities under contracts to local municipalities. In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops. These are democratically run organizations, which is a very different model, much more participatory, and a much more engaged model of designing social care than the traditional state delivered services. The idea of co-ops as being primarily of interest in serving their own immediate membership has been expanded to include a mandate for the provision of service to the community as a whole.

This is an expansion of this notion of cooperatives into a more commons-based kind of mission, which overlaps with the philosophy and values of commons movement. The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates. And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services. One of the real strengths of the cooperative form is that it not only provides a democratic structure for the enterprise – be it a commercial or social enterprise – but it also has a legal form that allows it to enter into contract and negotiate legal agreements with the state for the provision of public services. This model of co-op for social care has been growing in Europe. In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops, and they are generating an increasing portion of market share for the provision of services like home care and healthcare, and it’s also growing in Europe.

So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services. This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services. This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response? Social co-ops have been part of this tide of reaction and reinvention, in terms of civic solutions to what were previously state-designed and delivered public goods and services. So I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but it’s just an indicator of the very interesting ways in which the co-op form is being reimagined and reinvented to respond to this crisis of public services and the changing role of the state.

Read the full trialogue here

Photo by OiMax

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Overview

The country of one’s dreams must be a country one can imagine being constructed, over the course of time, by human hands.”
-Richard Rorty

Among capitalism’s many critics, it is standard procedure to state that neoliberalism has failed and that unless our societies construct a new paradigm for how economies work, human societies will collapse under the weight of an unsustainable and environmentally catastrophic capitalist system.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the most powerful purveyor of neoliberal ideas over the last forty years, has now admitted that perhaps its signature ideology has been oversold, and that the costs of free market ideology may have outweighed the touted benefits. When this happens, we may be sure something has reached a breaking point. Whether this signals a fundamental shift in thinking, or a tactical maneuver to preserve the status quo, is a matter of political perspective. (My money is on the latter.)

In fact, neoliberalism has not failed. From the vantage point of its ultimate purpose—maximizing wealth to the owners of capital—it is succeeding admirably.  As a doctrine, it is true to its principles. The problem is that these principles are not just unsustainable—they are pathological. The deification and normalization of greed and the hoarding of wealth by an ever-shrinking and increasingly predatory minority has brought us to the brink of economic and social collapse.¹ What is more, the dominance of neoliberal ideas in our culture has literally deprived people of the capacity to imagine any alternative. This is the ultimate triumph of ideology. If ever there was a time when alternative visions of how economies might work were urgently needed, it is now. The absence of alternatives from public debate is one clear symptom of the crisis we are in.

If ever there was a time when alternative visions of how economies might work were urgently needed, it is now.

The election of Donald Trump in the US, the success of Brexit in the UK, and the rise of neo-fascist parties across the face of Europe only highlight the continuing failure of leftist movements to present such a vision and to address the massive discontent that is now driving political developments. But it is also true that the direction this discontent can take is still up for grabs. Despite recent disheartening events, the election of Syriza in Greece, the popularity of the Sanders campaign in the US, the rise of Podemos and Barcelona en Comú in Spain, and the success of the Pirate Party in Iceland show that the triumph of right wing reaction is not guaranteed. But the failure of Syriza to challenge the status quo in Europe and the rise of Trump in the US also indicate that a change of political direction is not tenable within the parameters of our present institutions. We have entered an age where it is entirely likely that change—in whatever form—will come not as a result of conscious political effort on the part of social movements, but rather from the collapse of the current system.

What is entirely unknown is what form this change will take. Already, the absence of an alternative to capitalism has given rise to forms of reaction not witnessed since the fascist era of the 1930s. Even more frightening is that the pathology of fascist ideas has taken hold in what were once the strongholds of liberal democracy. In the US, the first weeks of a Trump administration has revealed the face of an Orwellian dystopia in the making. It seems clear that the urgency of our present moment is now primarily political. The consequences of global warming, growing inequality, disappearing civil liberties, and the consolidation of the surveillance state all point to the necessity of political mobilization on a scale not seen since the uprisings of the mid 1800s. It is also clear that any such mobilization must be propelled by a vision and a plan that concretely and radically challenge and transform the underpinnings of our current system.

It means the recovery of economic and political sovereignty by nations, the radical curtailment and redistribution of wealth, the social control of capital, the democratization of technology, the protection of social, cultural, and environmental values, and the use of state and civil institutions to promote economic democracy in all its forms. Above all, it means the evolution of new forms of governance that deliver decision-making power to citizens in an era of global power dynamics. A tall order. But if the grievances that are polarizing societies across the globe are not channeled in ways that offer people constructive pathways to reform, positive visions of society that they can believe in, ways of life that have meaning beyond self-aggrandizement and the worship of money, what comes next will be a nightmare, fueled by rage and resentment. In the US, we are seeing this unfolding before our eyes.

Thankfully, the elements of a new imaginary are all around us.

Thankfully, the elements of a new imaginary are all around us. The outlines of a new political economy that is both humane and in which the fulfillment of the person is conjoined to the well-being of one’s community are already visible in the innumerable examples of cooperative and social enterprises that are showing daily that social values can be the basis for a form of economics in which the common good prevails. Ethics can be a basis for a new economic order. In this essay, I will not dwell on what has gone wrong with late stage capitalism. The seemingly permanent state of economic, social, and environmental crisis that it has engendered is evidence that our economic system is both unjust and unsustainable. Nor can I address all aspects of what a Next System entails. What I will do is describe elements of political economy that I think are indispensable for paradigm change; including, the forms by which such an economy might function; the roles of citizens and the state; the role of technology; and, examples of how these ideas may be realized in strategic areas. These include the provision of social care, the creation of money and social investment, the creation of social markets, and the containment of corporate power. It is true that the rapid regressions that we are now witnessing daily clearly require urgent and immediate action to resist very specific threats that affect real lives and cannot wait for what may come next. These range from the erasure of civil liberties, to the rollback of environmental protections, to the racist discrimination against minorities that is now public policy. But if these regressions are in fact symptomatic of a political order in crisis, as I argue in this paper, thinking about what comes next can ensure that the urgency of our actions in the here and now reflect a vision for the long term that gives meaning and coherence to what we do today.

George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – The Ideology at the Root of all Our Problems,” The Guardian,
April 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot.

This paper by John Restakis, published alongside three others, is one of many proposals for a systemic alternative we have published or will be publishing here at the Next System Project. We have commissioned these papers in order to facilitate an informed and comprehensive discussion of “new systems,” and as part of this effort, we have also created a comparative framework which provides a basis for evaluating system proposals according to a common set of criteria.

Continue reading, download the PDF here.

The post Cooperative Commonwealth & the Partner State appeared first on P2P Foundation.

DESCRIPTION

This course presents inspiring local, regional, and international solutions in community energy, local food, social care, land tenure, and cooperative finance that address current concerns for environmental and social well-being. It introduces the knowledge and practice of co-operation, economic democracy, and the commons and invites your participation in an intensive program of exploration, instruction, dialogue, and practical training in systems change and transition.

OBJECTIVES

• Outline and explain the problematic, and transformative vision.
• Discuss emerging food system alternatives and strategies for transitioning to just, sustainable food systems.
• Recognize the role of public policy and bottom-up innovation in renewable community energy.
• Outline the philosophy, rationale, and organizational forms of user-controlled models of health and social care.
• Discuss enclosure, and the alternatives of commons and land trusts.
• Describe community development finance and co-operative capital raising and their potential to secure democratic and socially directed investment for the common good.
• Synthesize key ideas and practices that define systemic transition.

Target Audience: We imagine that if you were attracted to this course, you will be someone who shares our general world view and vision, and wants to broaden and deepen it and join us and others to develop it. That is its principal purpose, but a secondary purpose is to link people and projects that share these views in practical ways. In this first presentation, you are likely to be people who are already engaged in social change work in three crucial movements – co-operation, commons, and sustainability. Most are already actively working to make this world view a reality. You may be active in the environmental movement, human or animal rights, social equality and development, the solidarity economy, co-operative finance and alternative currencies; the Transition Movement, permaculture, local food, eco-villages, the digital commons, peer-to-peer and open educational resources, community energy or many others.

Course is offered by Athabasca University in collaboration with Synergia.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Reposted from Canvas.net

The post Towards the next system: Transition to co-operative commonwealth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this talk, John focuses on the concept of the partner state and what can be learned from previous experiences, such as those in Italy.

Very clear sound, and worth listening to.

Watch the video here:

Photo by micurs

The post John Restakis on the Cooperative Experience in Emilia-Romagna and What It Means Today for Transformational Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The … strategic approach I want to suggest for building a new polity supportive of the commons is through an ongoing convergence and alignment of diverse system-critical social movements.

The failures of neoliberal capitalism are coming at the very time that promising new modes of production, governance and social practice are exploding, especially through decentralized, selforganized initiatives on open networks that can often out-perform both the market and state. The people developing these new systems are essentially creating a new parallel economy – sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, as in Greece and Spain. The innovators are not politicians, CEOs or credentialed experts, but ordinary people acting as householders, makers, hackers, permaculturists, citizen-scientists, cooperativists, community foresters, subsistence collectives, social mutualists and commoners: a vast grassroots cohort whose generative activities are not really conveyed by the term “citizen” or “consumer.”

Through network-based cooperation and localized grassroots projects, millions of people around the world are managing all sorts of bottom-up, self-provisioning systems. There are also many new types of citizen-actors and mobilizations seeking system change, ranging from cultural surges such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and the Las Indignados to more durable long-term movements focused on cooperatives, degrowth, the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, relocalized economies, peer production, and the commons. These movements are developing new visions of “development” and “progress,” as seen in the buen vivir ethic in Latin America, for example, or in “go local” movements in the US and Europe, and the FabLabs and makerspaces. The new models also include alternative currencies, co-operative finance and crowd-equity investments to reclaim local control, transition and indigenous peoples’ initiatives to develop sustainable postgrowth economies, the movement to reclaim the city as a commons, and movements to integrate social justice and inclusive ethical commitments into economic life. These movements are not only pioneering new types of collective action and provisioning, but also new legal and organizational forms. The idea of “generative ownership” as a collective enterprise is being explored by leaders of co-operative finance, community land trusts, relocalized food systems and commons-based peer production. Each is attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of various commons-based ownership structures and self-governance – and then to expand the use of such models to show that there are attractive alternatives that can mature into a new economic ecosystem.

The general approach here is to change the old by building the new. The demonstration of feasible alternatives (renewable energy, cooperativism, relocalization, etc.) is a way to shift political momentum, constitute new constituencies for system change, and assert a new moral center of gravity. To work, however, the alternatives incubated outside the existing system must achieve a sufficient coherence, intelligibility, scale and functionality.

The commons can act as a shared meta-language among these highly diverse groups because the commons expresses many of the core values and priorities of many “system-change” movements. Like DNA, which is under-specified so that it can adapt to local circumstances, the commons discourse is general enough to accommodate myriad manifestations of basic values and principles. More than an intellectual framework, the commons helps make culturally legible the many social practices (“commoning”) that are often taken to be too small and inconsequential to matter – but which, taken together, constitute a different type of economy. In this fashion, the commons discourse itself has an integrative and catalytic potential to build a new type of networked polity.

Michel Bauwens, Founder of the P2P Foundation, and his colleague John Restakis argue that the state can be reinvented as a “Partner State” in support of commons and peer production:

– One the one hand, market competition will be balanced by cooperation, the invisible hand will be combined with a visible handshake. On the other hand, the state is no longer the sovereignty authority. It becomes just one participant among others in the pluralistic guidance systems and contributes its own distinctive resources to the negotiation process … official apparatuses remain at best first among equals. The state’s involvement would become less hierarchical, less centralized and less directive in character. The exchange of information and moral suasion become key sources of legitimation and the state’s influence depends as much on its role as a prime source and mediator of collective intelligence as on its command over economic resources or legitimate coercion.

The idea of the partner state is intriguing, but will require further theoretical elaboration and investigations in how it might be politically actualized. One serious attempt at this in the context of digital commons is the Commons Transition Plan prepared by Bauwens in conjunction with a research project sponsored by the Government of Ecuador in 2014.

It attempts to envision state policies that could help bring about “a society and economy that functions as common pools of shared knowledge in every domain of social activity.”Photo by Thomas Leth-Olsen

The post The Search for a Convergence of Citizen and Commons-Based System-Critical Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When and Where

Full title: Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth: Pathways to a new political economy

When: September 4-23, 2016

Place: Monte Ginezzo, Tuscany, Italy

Invitation (by John Restakis):

“Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth – Pathways to a New Political Economy, is an intensive 3-week program that links the global with the local through the diffusion of transformative ideas, models, and practices that advance game-changing solutions for progressive change in the following key areas:

• Co-operative Capital & Social Finance; Alternative Currencies
• Co-op & Commons-Based housing & Land Tenure; Community Land Trusts
• Renewable Energy; Community-owned energy systems
• Local & Sustainable food systems; Community Supported Agriculture
• User-controlled health & social care; Social & Community Service Co-ops
• Co-operative and Commons Governance
• Platform Co-operatives, Digital Commons & Peer-to-Peer productions systems
• Convergence and the New Political Economy; Principles, Propositions, and Practices

Download the Synergia program (available here) for complete details. If you like what you see, we hope that you and others in your organization or network will find an opportunity to take part.

We are now in the process of constructing the Synergia website, but information on Synergia and the Summer Institute may also be found on our Facebook page you can also follow us on Twitter. Those wishing information on registration for the course can send an email to: [email protected].

We hope this first Synergia Summer Institute inspires you and your colleagues to spread the word to others who are committed to building a new political economy for the world we want. The need for system change is clear and urgent and Synergia is promoting solutions that can make it happen.

We look forward to your joining us for this unique learning experience in Tuscany this September.”

Photo by blueskyfantasie

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