Peer2Politics

Today, the fight begins for a more prosperous, fairer economy for everyone.

The Social Innovation Summit is a private, invitation-only forum that explores “What’s Next?” in the world of Social Innovation.  Taking place at the United Nations and Silicon Valley, the summit connects and inspires a global network of leaders to discuss the key strategies and business innovations creating  social transformation across the corporate, investment, government, and non-profit sectors.  Participants include hundreds of top Fortune 500 Corporate Executives, Venture Capitalists, Government Leaders, Foundation Heads and Social Entrepreneurs eager to discuss global challenges, analyze innovative approaches for problem-solving, and build lasting partnerships that enable them and their organizations to maximize social impact. 

  

The commons are as varied as life itself, and yet everyone involved with them shares common convictions. If we wish to understand these convictions, we must realize what commons mean in a practical sense, what their function is and always has been. That in turn includes that we concern ourselves with people. After all, commons or common goods are precisely not merely “goods,” but a social practice that generates, uses and preserves common resources and products. In other words, it is about the practice of commons, or commoning, and therefore also about us. The debate about the commons is also a debate about images of humanity. So let us take a step back and begin with the general question about living conditions.

Jennifer Sertl (US) is a thought leader in the emerging field of corporate consciousness, where she uses the convergence of Neuroscience and Existential Philosophy fostering inspiration and subsequently creating strategic advantage and enhancing value. She is an internationally respected author, keynote speaker and the president and founder of Agility3R an organizational effectiveness company which primarily focuses upon the optimization of customer value by aligning corporate objectives with the individuals responsible for delivering results. 

Architect Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses?

Many things were already said about how Internet makes distribution faster and cheaper and how this is putting under the question rationale for intellectual property rights. But Internet through facilitation of crowdfunding is changing also the money flow around the production itself, changing the nature of the investment which arguably has to have a protection of exclusivity to return on the investment. Crowdfunding is changing this because it allows creators to skip the investment-return cycle and directly fund the creation from its users. As such, intellectual property rights are obsolete.

“15M – whether seen as a signal, a movement, a state of being or a set of human interactions – has built its prototypes, and they’re many: legal, urban, cultural, economical, technological, communicative, political, affective”. In the first part of Spain’s Micro-Utopias, I started sketching this personal inventory of 15M’s prototypes by talking about processes and innovative actions that are happening on the ground right now. Collective achievements, high-impact but lower-case stories, practically invisible to the great majority. I wrote about the method micro-utopia, urban micro-utopia, communications micro-utopia, micro-utopia in feminine, and collective culture micro-utopia, all born of the expansion of 15M’s initial surge.

 

“A few words about a French project named Open Source Energy. This project is intended to enable the design of open hardware solutions to capture the different kinds of energies available all around us (from the environment or from human activities). A first module to transform and to store electricity from renewable sources is being designed: the ENERCAN (opensourceenergy.wordpress.com/lenercan-v1). This first brick is the starting point of a large scale design process toward the creation of new solutions inspired by old or forgotten ones and improved by the use of high-tech devices. The project is not about large and costly devices but about simple, open and cheap modules that can be replicated to capture every stream of available and lost energies, even the smallest one.

 

“The commons are bigger, broader, more significant, and more complex than people generally realize. Yet, the commons also remain largely ignored. Their/its presence and importance get buried under today’s aging politicized preferences for rhetoric about public vs. private or government vs. market approaches. Ways should be found to use the term “commons” more often, and to elevate recognition of it/them. I’ll close this post with a proposal for doing so.

 

In 1775, Americans were extremely frustrated by their political system that simply did not work. To fix it, many called for reforms to the existing system, like demanding Americans have representatives in the English Parliament. Others called for revolution that would rebuild the new governing system from scratch. We all know how that, thankfully, turned out.

 

Supported by transform! europe, Transnational Institute, Networked Politics and IGOPNet, an international seminar on Networked Labour was held in Amsterdam from 7 to 9 May.

Jennifer Sertl (US) is a thought leader in the emerging field of corporate consciousness, where she uses the convergence of Neuroscience and Existential Philosophy fostering inspiration and subsequently creating strategic advantage and enhancing value. She is an internationally respected author, keynote speaker and the president and founder of Agility3R an organizational effectiveness company which primarily focuses upon the optimization of customer value by aligning corporate objectives with the individuals responsible for delivering results. 

Jennifer Sertl (US) is a thought leader in the emerging field of corporate consciousness, where she uses the convergence of Neuroscience and Existential Philosophy fostering inspiration and subsequently creating strategic advantage and enhancing value. She is an internationally respected author, keynote speaker and the president and founder of Agility3R an organizational effectiveness company which primarily focuses upon the optimization of customer value by aligning corporate objectives with the individuals responsible for delivering results. 

Evgeny Morozov explains why the world's problems may not be solved by technology alone

“After 30 years of the right depoliticising the local – of which ‘localism’ is the latest variant – the key issue is to understand and open up political debate and choices about the future of this diffuse and productive creativity. And we must work at a much deeper seam than that of ‘demands on the state’.”

Sensors have changed. Years ago they evoked the industrial and the military-industrial; like the bristling menace of the cruise missile nose cone seeking out it's point of detonation.  

Michel Bauwens: “My short definition of Economies of Scope is very simple and should be understandable I think: “doing more with less”; and this is mainly achieved by mutualizing infrastructures, both immaterial (open source knowledge, code, design) and material (co-working, fablabs, carsharing, idle-sourcing …); for contemporary implementations we should add: using distributed machinery in distributed workplace to allow local production in microfactories, through the process of manufacturing on demand, while achieving scope through the global immaterial cooperation on both the design of the products, the design of the machinery to produce them, and even the processes through which to make both the previous aspects (ex. the xtreme manufacturing methodology of OSE/WikiSpeed).”