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In his recent paper, Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm, author, activist and commons scholar David Bollier argues that the commons, which he describes as “at once a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices,” holds great promise in transcending the conundrum of imagining and building a “radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change.”
Are you curious about the sharing movement but not sure where to begin? Or, are you a sharing maven and want to inspire your friends and family to integrate sharing into their lives? Either way, we have the perfect resource for you to experience how sharing, in both big and small ways, can turn your life around.
Fashion is a $1.2 trillion global industry, with more than $250 billion spent annually in the United States. Behind these big numbers is a big negative social and environment impact.
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REVERSING THE MISSISSIPPI is a documentary about a genius technologist and a rebel educator, two pioneers from opposite spectrums with one goal in common: Build…
Hitting zero waste on a college campus is a big undertaking, but one organization wants to make it easier. The Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN), based at the University of New Hampshire, was created to “help build student-led, self-sustaining waste-reduction programs at universities nationwide.” They’re now crowdfunding a platform to make sharing zero waste resources easier.
In a new report, Mike Lewis and Pat Conaty, authors of the book The Resilience Imperative: Co-operative Transitions to a Steady-state Economy, explore the connection between community land trusts and the Commons.
OuiShare Fest is an international gathering in Paris of sharing economy pioneers, enthusiasts and organizers. This year’s fest, which ran May 20-22, featured panels, presentations and discussions that explored numerous aspects of the sharing economy, collaboration, technological developments, and human connectedness. Here are 10 of the top presentations, as chosen by our friends at OuiShare. 1. Nick Grossman: Bringing Collaborative Platforms to Market
To kick off last week’s Global Coworking Unconference Conference in Berkeley, Ca., Tony Bacigalupo, co-founder of New Work City, posed a question: Who thinks coworking means dividing up office space to sell at a profit? Not a hand went up. He then asked those who think coworking is something more than that to raise their hand. Nearly every hand in the room shot up, accompanied by cheers, shouts, and hollers of approval.
What began as a childcare coop in Seoul, South Korea has grown into a cooperative, urban village and sparked a national movement of urban villages.
A bike kitchen is a place for people to repair their bikes, learn safe cycling, make bicycling more accessible, build community, and support sustainable transportation by getting more people on bikes. Most bike kitchens have tools, parts, mechanics, and a community of knowledgeable cyclists.
Portland, Oregon, a city known for having a strong D.I.Y. ethos, is no stranger to collaborative, D.I.T. (do it together) culture either. Case in point: the recent PDX Skillshare. Supported in part with a grant from Shareable, the event brought people together to exchange skills and information about martial arts, screen printing, meal planning and preparation, beekeeping, business networking, clawhammer banjo playing, and much more.
What would happen if communities took higher education into their own hands? What if education meant pursuing our passions and growing at our edges, immersed in a culture of creativity, accountability, integrity and action? What if instead of using degrees to measure our success, we were credited by the direct impact our work has on the world? We could transform our communities and build resilient new systems that will carry us through the next century.
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Sunset in Greenville, South Carolina. Photo: Call me Lee via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA.
The Archive is home to deeply touching personal works, including this autobiography written on a bedsheet. Photo: Samuel Webster
Need a great image for your blog post? How about some original music for your slideshow? Or a free textbook? Or access to historical photos or public data? Look no further than Creative Commons. A “simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice,” Creative Commons licenses are now used on a whopping one billion works.
Last week, the White House strengthened its support for Open Educational Resources (OER) and committed to expanding access to them through open licenses and technology.
After days of fragrant, sun-filled skies, the weather did an about-face and turned stormy on my fourth morning walk through Trastevere in Rome. The black marble square tiles that make up the street paving in this ancient section of the city became slippery with the rain. I wrapped myself in my wool shawl and made a break for the door, trying to avoid slipping and being soaked through and through.
Transition Streets is a toolkit for neighborhood transformation—a catalyst for action, dialogue, and community building. A project of Transition US, Transition Streets is as simple as neighbors coming together for seven meetings to explore carbon-saving and resilience-building actions in the areas of food, water, waste, energy, transportation, all the while building relationships with each other and a stronger sense of community.
On November 6-7 in Bologna, Italy, leading scholars, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and social innovators will gather to further the discussion and movement around the urban commons.
“The care of human life and happiness…is the only legitimate object of good government,”—Thomas Jefferson, 1809.
This new phenomenon represents an opportunity to revolutionize the current state of play of the society, economy, institutions and law. This new social, economic, institutional and legal paradigm is going to characterize the 21st century as the “CO-century,” the century of COmmons, COllaboration, COoperation, COmmunity, COmmunication, CO-design, CO-production, CO-management, COexistence, CO-living. For all these reasons, it is urgent to design the rules and institutions of this new century. LabGov.it is working on this frontier and is doing it together with experts, organizations, and individuals that represent what we think is a newly rising social class, a class of economic and institutional innovators.
Neil Thapar first encountered seed issues in law school when he worked with the Center for Food Safety against genetically-modified food. But it was a season spent working on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California when he began to understand, first-hand, the importance of seeds as a foundation of our agricultural system. He explains, “When I came off the farm I said, ‘If I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be a lawyer doing things that I think are making a positive difference.’”
Shareable connected with Sam Smith and Laura Scher, directors of the project, to discuss the importance of giving ideas a place to grow, how our education system has made us passive observers rather than proactive doers, and how being held accountable to your vision is incredibly empowering. Their responses are collaborative.
With a median household income of just over $37,000, Mississippi is the poorest state in the United States. A powerhouse organization promoting economic justice, Cooperation Jackson was born of a need to transform the state, in particular its capital and largest city, Jackson.
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