Peer2Politics

The P2P Lab is an independent media lab interested in interdisciplinary research on free/open source technologies and practices.

Our mission is to:

• strive for integrative insights on the open technologies and the peer-to-peer practices.
• provide consultancy support to organisations and institutions regarding open technologies and relevant socio-economic trends.
• produce innovative, global techno-economic solutions to local problems.
• write, edit and publish articles, reports and books in the diverse range of topics we investigate.
• organise open events for reflection and action as well as to educate people about critical and creative tools for society-changing.

We are constantly on the look-out for co-operation on interesting projects.

Join us at one of the events below to hear how not-for-profit enterprise may be the heart of the global economy by 2050. This U.K. speaking tour is a pre-cursor to the forthcoming book How on Earth, co-authored by Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton.

The major challenge for the current generation of mankind is to develop a shared vision of a future that is both desirable to the vast majority of humanity and ecologically sustainable. Creating a Sustainable and Desirable Future offers a broad, critical discussion on what such a future should or can be, with global perspectives written by some of the world's leading thinkers, including: Wendell Berry, Van Jones, Frances Moore Lappe, Peggy Liu, Hunter Lovins, Gus Speth, Bill McKibben, and many more.

Selling investors on a radically new approach to waste disposal, one that serves impoverished regions where garbage heaps are common, is no easy feat. It’s a messy business, rife with health and environmental risks. Obtaining the necessary resources to transform waste disposal, then, requires the utmost resourcefulness. The currencies of reputation, social outcomes, and credit trading can become partial substitutes for capital, creating a basis for relationships and transactions that launch the new model.

Launch of textbook by Fritjof Capra, collecting 40 years of writings with additions by coauthor Pier Luigi Luisi.  The lecture shows precise language about the science of systems, with clear references tying together research strands.  Mature systems thinkers will be reminded of concepts that they know but may not be immediately salient to their current endeavours.  Novice systems thinkers may appreciate the easy pace of the speech, with linkages to other concepts and figures in the systems community.

* Book: Robert Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski. Creating a Sustainable and Desirable Future: Insights from 45 Global Thought Leaders. World Scientific, 2014

Former OTC senior fellow David Bollier and University of Iowa law professor Burns H. Weston recently published Green Governance (Cambridge University Press) a groundbreaking book on merging environmental rights and commons thinking could create a new paradigm of governance for the 21st Century. Gus Speth, professor at the Vermont Law School and former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, declares, “We must take these ideas very seriously, indeed.”