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Todd Suomela

On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides | e-flux - 0 views

  • The identification of “new enclosures” in contemporary capitalist dynamics urged us to reconsider traditional Marxist discourse on this point. What the Marxist literature failed to understand is that primitive accumulation is a continuous process of capitalist development that is also necessary for the preservation of advanced forms of capitalism for two reasons. Firstly, because capital seeks boundless expansion, and therefore always needs new spheres and dimensions of life to turn into commodities. Secondly, because social conflict is at the heart of capitalist processes—this means that people do reconstitute commons anew, and they do it all the time. These commons help to re-weave the social fabric threatened by previous phases of deep commodification and at the same time provide potential new ground for the next phase of enclosures.
  • Commons are not simply resources we share—conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the same time. First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons.
  • Stavros Stavrides: First, I would like to bring to the discussion a comparison between the concept of the commons based on the idea of a community and the concept of the public. The community refers to an entity, mainly to a homogeneous group of people, whereas the idea of the public puts an emphasis on the relation between different communities. The public realm can be considered as the actual or virtual space where strangers and different people or groups with diverging forms of life can meet. The notion of the public urges our thinking about the commons to become more complex. The possibility of encounter in the realm of the public has an effect on how we conceptualize commoning and sharing. We have to acknowledge the difficulties of sharing as well as the contests and negotiations that are necessarily connected with the prospect of sharing.
Fredric Markus

Protected classes: sexuality - 9 views

Fredric Markus wrote: > Now we are blessed - and cursed - with great change in these matters. The academic world has come around to an understanding that situational understandings of "normal" are...

Todd Suomela

Placemaking for Communities - Project for Public Spaces (PPS) - 0 views

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    Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public places that build communities.
Fredric Markus

The beauty of locality is in the eye of the beholder. - 11 views

Plunging right in to the relative merits of local production: When the City of Minneapolis was keen to clearcut everything on Nicollet Island at the end of the 1960s, we Islanders were an inventi...

started by Fredric Markus on 24 Jun 08 no follow-up yet
Todd Suomela

A 150-Year Experiment: Colleges That Serve Everyone | On the Commons - 2 views

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    "The most significant connection between land-grant institutions and commons-based organizations and movements exists in their shared interest for the public community. How their interests have been applied or expressed may differ, yet their common theme could be a catalyst for future partnership and collaboration. "
Todd Suomela

PlanetMath - 0 views

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    PlanetMath is a virtual community which aims to help make mathematical knowledge more accessible. PlanetMath's content is created collaboratively: the main feature is the mathematics encyclopedia with entries written and reviewed by members. The entries are contributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) in order to preserve the rights of both the authors and readers in a sensible way.
Todd Suomela

Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 0 views

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    Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.
Todd Suomela

LiquidFeedback: What A Genuine Democratic Process Looks Like | David Bollier - 1 views

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    "The LiquidFeedback mission statement concludes, "All the experience we have gained over the past months shows people participate if they think it makes sense and representatives at least acknowledge the will of the participants rather than arguing with silent majorities." It concludes with a ringing line from Thomas Jefferson: … every man is a sharer… and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day." "
Todd Suomela

ICEO | IEEE Committee on Earth Observation - 0 views

  • The IEEE Committee on Earth Observation (ICEO) facilitates broad-based IEEE participation in the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and its international effort to create a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) for applying Earth observation data and information for societal benefits. The focus of GEO and ICEO is helping to improve living conditions, particularly in developing countries, through the development of GEOSS, a realizable global resource for decision makers at all levels. To support this development, GEOSS requires the broad range of skills embodied in the IEEE membership from System of Systems (SoS) engineering and communication to standards and information applications.
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org - The commons as a new sector of value-creation - 0 views

  • So my first point is the importance of recognizing the commons as a distinct sector for creating value. It can be difficult to recognize this reality because we don’t have an agreed-upon language or taxonomy for talking about the value-proposition of the commons. The phenomenon is still too novel. For many people, it is difficult to accept that value can exist without the sanction of money or private property rights—that value that is intangible and unquantifiable can actually matter. Cold, hard cash is nearly always seen as more valuable than something as amorphous and non-physical as an online community
  • I call these epochal changes in economic and cultural production The Great Value Shift. In the networked environment that is becoming pervasive, we are being forced to recognize that markets—or at least, traditional hierarchical institutions such as the corporation—do not have a monopoly on the ability to generate value.
  • If you can acknowledge this fact, then it follows that we should take affirmative steps to preserve the commons and the special types of value that it produces. Let me conclude by suggesting four general strategies.
    • Todd Suomela
       
      1. protect integrity of commons 2. new models for understanding value 3. invent new hybrids 4. active government support of commns
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    Keynote by David Bollier at Economies of the Commons Conference, April 12, 2008, Amsterdam.
Todd Suomela

Viral Spiral by David Bollier - 0 views

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    book on the history of internet commons by David Bollier
Todd Suomela

OnTheCommons.org » The Household as Commons - 0 views

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    In The Household, he [Robert Ellickson] now turns his attention to the ways in which we informally manage the cooking, cleaning, finances and other tasks needed to operate a household. I like the name that Ellickson gives for this universe of norms - "homeways."
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