Skip to main content

Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

the commons

Image
August 15, 2024

Lessons of Desert Oases for Eco-Resilient Transformation

Authors
Summary

Safouan Azouzi, a Tunisian scholar of the commons and participatory social design, discusses how cultural traditions in desert oases hold important socio-ecological lessons for the world.

Image
November 16, 2023

Seeing Beyond the Map

Authors
Summary

In the second comic from Future Natures, created by Tim Zocco with Amber Huff, we explore maps, models and abstraction that can warp how we perceive and understand space, human nature, power and crisis and shape contestations over knowledge and struggles against enclosure.

Topics
the commons
Image
June 26, 2023

People Power Battery Collective

Authors
Summary

The People Power Battery Collective in the Bay Area launched a program to provide backup power during emergencies and increase the general understanding of energy access, consumption, and needs.

Image
June 5, 2023

The Commonsverse as a Parallel Polis

Summary

Public evening in English as part of the international conference "Beyond Liberalism: Commons, Constitutionalism, and the Common Good."

Topics
the commons
Image
April 27, 2023

Foster & Iaione Probe Commoning in the City

Authors
Summary

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.

Image
August 29, 2022

How to Design the Commons

Authors
Summary

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

Image
August 4, 2022

More Than Ownership

Authors
Summary

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.

Image
July 14, 2022

Commoning and Changemaking

Authors
Summary

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.

Image
April 4, 2022

Building Better Knowledge Commons

Authors
Summary

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.

Image
July 22, 2021

The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom

Authors
Summary

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.