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Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

the commons

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April 27, 2023

Foster & Iaione Probe Commoning in the City

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How might the commons paradigm be applied to cities in a more focused, effective way?  To find some answers, I recently interviewed two leading thinkers and advocates for urban commons, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione.

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August 29, 2022

How to Design the Commons

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A crash course in the work of political economist Elinor Ostrom, who championed the commons and communal governance as practical frameworks.

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August 4, 2022

More Than Ownership

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Much of the discussion on open source's relevance to cooperatives has focused on open, permissive licenses that represent a 'digital commons' (possibly at risk of appropriation). But debate over licensing misses an essential and unique quality of open source: its democratic toolset which is much more sophisticated than resolutions and Annual General Meetings.

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July 14, 2022

Commoning and Changemaking

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It is now abundantly clear that the world we have inherited is no longer working, And yet there are many hopeful signs of people imagining and building a different type of future.

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April 4, 2022

Building Better Knowledge Commons

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This interview digs into the oligopoly control of academic publishing, the high prices of academic journals and books, the lack of choices among many scientists and scholars, the limited leadership of university administrations, and some open-access innovations now being developed.

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July 22, 2021

The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom

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In the 1970s, the accepted environmental thinking was that overpopulation was destroying the earth. Prominent economists and environmentalists agreed that the only way to stem the tide was to impose restrictions on how we used resources, such as land, water, and fish, from either the free market or the government. This notion was upended by Elinor Ostrom, whose work to show that regular people could sustainably manage their community resources eventually won her the Nobel Prize. Ostrom’s revolutionary proposition fundamentally changed the way we think about environmental governance.

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June 28, 2021

Tactics for a Cooperative Digital Commons

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We discuss how software is a commons, what the cooperative movement can learn from Silicon Valley, and how cooperative tech projects can scale up.

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May 24, 2021

What the History of Commoning Reveals

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Peter Linebaugh on the history of the commons.

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the commons
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April 15, 2021

Cities Beyond Bureaucracy

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Urban researcher Nikos Vrantsis interviews Yavor Tarinski, author of Common Futures: Social Transformation and Political Ecology, on the current bureaucratic state of cities and the democratic perspectives offered by autonomous urban movements. 

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January 25, 2021

Saving Farmland, Supporting Farmers

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Agrarian Trust has started ten Agrarian Commons in the US, in an attempt to make community-supported, collectively stewarded farmland available to younger farmers