The Next Edge

Five ways to drive large-scale social change by working cooperatively.

Our proposal is that the users of the commons should be commons-friendly enterprise structures and not profit-maximising companies. These ethical companies, whose members are the commoners/contributors themselves, would be organised as global open design companies. These would be linked to networks of small factories that produce on the basis of shared values and could more easily adopt open-book management, open recruiting and open supply lines, ensuring transparency to the whole network, in order to create maximum mutual alignment between participants. This is simply an extension of the existing organisational practices of ‘immaterial commons production’, which combines full transparency of all actions with negotiated coordination. (...)

It requires distributed access to physical places for collaboration – co-working centres – as well as the widespread possibility for peer learning. Distributed access to financial capital is a further condition, notably crowd-funding, social lending and distributed, decentralised currencies such as cryptography-based digital money Bitcoin. The spread of these peer to peer forms of funding has already attracted the attention of the Bank of England executive director, Andrew Haldane, who has suggested that peer to peer finance models could sweep away the inefficient retail banks before too long.

Inspired in part by the open source movement, public spaces are emerging where people congregate to share ideas, make cool projects, teach, and brainstorm with collaborators on everything from coding to cooking. With no leaders, they have one rule: "Be excellent to each other."

 ht Jenny Ryan

@tunabananas

Snippet: 

"Always on a quest for untapped sources of used books, Xavier soon made a discovery that changed the business model – and the environment – in a major way. Every year thousands of libraries had millions of excess books as they made room for new editions. Some books sat in storage, and others were given away. But some were simply thrown out. Tossed. Abandoned to the landfills for all eternity.

Convinced that something could be done to rescue these discarded books and help the planet a bit in the process, the founders set about partnering with librarians all across the country. Not only could they rescue books from landfills, they could also sell those books and raise money for the libraries themselves. Environmental and social impact all in the same story."

shared by @DavidHodgson