 Your new post is loading...
As Black communities emerge from the shadows of criminalization, hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter have jumped off the computer screen and into the street. Beyond sparking a long-awaited new civil rights movement, they are also catalyzing an amazing 21st century model for civil rights activism.
Five years ago Ruhul Bhashani and his friends posted a ‘flash mob iftar’ on Facebook. It invited homeless people located around Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London to share a meal with Muslims during Ramadan (the iftar is the sunset meal which breaks the fast). Since then such flash mobs have been replicated in sixteen cities across the United Kingdom.
Sign the global call for sharing and add your voice to the growing demand for a fairer sharing of wealth, power and resources within and between countries.
The EU soon intends to sign two far-reaching trade agreements: one with Canada (CETA = Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) and one with the USA (TTIP = Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). The official line is that this will create jobs and increase economic growth. However, the beneficiaries of these agreements are not in fact citizens, but big corporations:
“This book is our reckoning. Some of us have long experience in the world of finance, having worked in banks or hedge funds. Others of us are teachers, lawyers, students, or Teamsters who started out with a limited understanding of “securitization” or “credit default swaps” but have taught ourselves about these instruments because we recognize their importance within our current economy. We have found that you do not need a PhD in economics to understand what is happening. Contrary to what the 1% would have us believe, the way things are is not the way they have to be, and most importantly — not the way they should be.”
The text below is taken from the European Freelancers movement’s campaign website, which is built on the book written by Joel Dullroy and Anna Cahsman: Independents Unite! If you are a peer producer, self-employed or part of a phyle collective, go read their manifesto and lend a hand to an emerging movement with your signature to the open petition.
While everyone is talking about renewable energy, power generation from small wind turbines is not thriving. The issues that are usually raised have to do with quality, reliability, and the cost of installation. However, self-constructed wind turbine projects are one sector of wind energy that is thriving.
Background: For more than 2 years I have been working on an ecosystem that will help the highly talented yet marginalized rural artisans to a.) help connect to marketplaces in a completely transparent and sustainable way. b.) Gather and provide market intelligence and customer feedback. c.) Assist in setting, prioritizing and fulfilling their own developmental goals.
Help bring light to a new film about the man who gave the world light. The man who invented the 20th Century, Nikola Tesla.
First we had the furore over the so-called ‘Facebook Experiment’ – the revelation that Facebook had undertaken an exercise in ‘emotional contagion’, effectively trying to manipulate the emotions of nearly 700,000 of its users without their consent, knowledge or understanding. There were many issues surrounding it (some of which I’ve written about here) starting with the ethics of the study itself, but the most important thing to understand is that the experiment succeeded, albeit not very dramatically. That is, by manipulating people’s news feeds, Facebook found that they were able to manipulate peoples emotions. However you look at the ethics of this, that’s a significant amount of power.
The Open Food Network is a free, open source project aimed at supporting diverse food enterprises and easy access to local and sustainable food.They’re not only addressing one of the critical issues of our time (and future), they’re also “…proudly open source and not for profit”, working under P2P protocols. Please support their current crowdfunding campaign. Watch the video, read the campaign description below, and spread the word about this most inspiring initiative. We hope to see many Open Food Networks around the world; we believe that this campaign is a critical step towards the attainment of that goal.
|
This report demonstrates how a call for sharing underpins many existing initiatives for social justice, environmental stewardship, true democracy and global peace. On this basis, STWR argues that sharing should be more widely promoted as a common cause that can help connect civil society organisations and social movements under a united call for change.
“Today, DIY—do-it-yourself—describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways (as in Egypt’s “Twitter revolution” of 2011) and to repurpose corporate content (or create new user-generated content) in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens.
The Occupy movement has emerged in a historical crisis of global capitalism. It struggles for the reappropriation of the commodified commons. Communications are part of the commons of society. Yet contemporary social media are ridden by an antagonism between private corporate control (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and self-managed, commons-based activist media. In this work, Christian Fuchs analyses the contradictory dialectic of social media in the Occupy movement. Drawing on a political economy framework and interpretation of the results of the OccupyMedia! Survey, in which more than 400 Occupy activists reported on their social media use, OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism shows how activists confront the contradictions of capitalism and communication in the age of crisis and social media. The book discusses the contradiction between commercial and alternative social media and argues that the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex expressed in the PRISM system shows the urgent necessity to create social media beyond Facebook and Google.
The open access movement has historically focused on access to scholarly research, and understandably so. The knowledge commons should be shared with and used by the public, especially when the public helped create it.
Help our friends at Growstuff in their righteous campaign to build a global, open-source database to help foodgrowers around the world. Please read the campaign text posted below and head on over to their crowdfunding page to help in any way you can.
On Sunday, September 21, 2014, over 1,000 groups and individuals will come together in the streets of New York City to participate in the largest climate march in world history, the @peoplesclimatemarch. @renttotheworld is joining this exciting civilian movement with its first official campaign, Cut the Crap! RENT will be sending a team to NYC to deliver the message “Cut the Crap” to policy-makers, asking Climate Summit participants to cut the political crap and take swift action on CO2 emissions.
Michael Trout's people centred foundups, businesses with a social purpose and attention to environmental concerns are 'social startups'.
Some say that the collapse of our ecological and societal systems is already inevitable. But many people and projects have already started to build the future we need. Open State will be a piece that is missing until now – a catalyst to help those shining lights break through into mainstream.
We’ve recently featured Coopfunding, an Open-Sourced crowdfunding platform designed to “…promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.” Today we present a guest article by Enric Duran, one of the developers behind Coopfunding and its parent-project, the Catalan Integral Cooperative, explaining the reasons that led to the creation of Coopfunding. This article was originally published inRadi.MS
The P2P Foundation is a full supporting partner of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, or CIC. We feel that they’re doing essential work in prototyping pre-figurative models of peer production, governance and property. You can find a lot of information about them, their ethics, and long term plans in their excellent English website, or in our own wiki entry on the CIC. We plan to report regularly on the CIC’s activities and our involvement with the group. Today, we want to highlight just one of their most inspiring initiatives: beyond specific target and time based crowdfunding, there is “Coop-funding“. Coopfunding’s own literature describes its platform in the following way. It is:
We call on the Secretary of State Sajid Javid to intervene to halt the decimation of the British public library service, on the day our fight to Save Lincolnshire Libraries reaches the High Court in London. Under the Public Libraries Act 1964 the Secretary of State is the ONLY person who has the power to intervene in a county council’s cuts to library services. Remind him with this Thunderclap how much our British public libraries matter. Ask him to act NOW before it is too late.
Rebuild the water and energy systems with renewable technologies and designate them a public commons for all. End all evictions.
|
Scoop.it!
