Peer2Politics

This international symposium seeks to draw a cognitive map of our present in order to grasp the changing contours of our everyday lives, towards a paradigmatic shift lived by a generation born in the 1980s and after.

From September 23rd to 28th, as a parallel program of the International Meeting on Culture and New Technologies, the SESC Vila Mariana will hosts the Human Ecosystems project, by the Italian artists Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico (Art is Open Source).

With your help, the world will receive clear instructionals on how to do this. We aim to make our CEB building technique so streamlined that it’s truly replicable by many people. The modules we are building are relevant to tiny homes of 144 square feet in area - and to larger ones - like the current one - at 750 square feet. This existing structure will become work space and office space.

REScoop 20-20-20 in cooperation with Co-power and the European Union organises a conference on legislation and finance for people’s ownership of community renewable energy across Europe.

This is an uncomplete collection of commons-related events at the 4th. international degrowth conference in Leipzig, which will start on September 2. There will be an enourmous number of parallel events, sessions and workshops during the 3 main conference days. So, if you want to find commons-related events, the following might be useful for you. We gathered information in English and German for panels and workshops prepared by commoners or where commoners participate. Moreover, You are also invited to one (or two?) network meetings of commoners.

Can technology also help degrowth objectives, giving humankind a lighter touch on the planet ? A debate with two colleauges at Degrowth 2014.

On the evening of the 16th July 2014 in a small bar of SingerStraße in Berlin a group of Open Knowledge Festival attendees came together for a meeting, to discuss whether cooperatives offered the potential to create formalised structures for the creation and sharing of common data assets, and whether this would enable the creation of value for their stakeholders. This discussion is sets the framework for an event that will take place in Manchester UK on the 20th October 2014

The Internet has provided the infrastructure for a variety of new approaches for collective intelligence. We believe, in fact, that the new communication infrastructure provides the potential for radical changes in the ways that human beings communicate and work together to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and equitable future. At the same time, we acknowledge that collective intelligence is not a recent invention. It has existed for eons before the Internet came into being. While the expression “collective intelligence” is generally not used in this regard, the idea of democratic processes – especially when used to to help govern societies via collective problem solving – is a common material manifestation of that concept. Aristotle, writing in the Politics, states that people are political by nature. In the article on the common good in the Encyclopedia Britannica, this notion is expanded in ways that are relevant today.

This blog is the second in a series of five, each digesting and reflecting on a day at theDegrowth conference in Leipzig, 2nd – 6thSeptember. You can read about Day 1 here, and below is a summary of my experiences of Day 2 – Wednesday 2nd September – Facing the current crises: critique and resistance.

By „degrowth“ we understand a downscaling of production and consumption in the industrialized states that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. We want a society in which humans live within their ecological limits, with open, connected and localized economies. A society in which resources are more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions. Such societies will no longer have to “grow or die”. Material accumulation will no longer hold a prime position in the population’s cultural imaginary. The primacy of efficiency will be substituted by a focus on sufficiency. Innovation will no longer focus on technology for technology’s sake but will concentrate on new social and technical arrangements that will enable convivial ways of life. Degrowth does not only challenge the centrality of the Gross Domestic Product as an overarching policy objective, but proposes ways for a radical change of our economic system, to create more space for human cooperation and resilient ecosystems.

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.

“At the heart of our economies, a diversification and increasing importance of collaborative practices can be observed. By proposing alternative paths of value creation and sharing, these practices open new perspectives in terms of consumption, production and innovation models.”