Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Commons.fi
Jukka Peltokoski

Incubator.coop: an Incubator for Platform Cooperatives | P2P Foundation - 0 views

  • 1. Conventional Incubators are not viable in themselves.  Instead they act as a business development tool for “side-car” investors trying to pick winners.  We think you need an incubator that exists to serve its incubatees.2. Conventional Incubators look for a 1-in-1000 unicorn to repay their many wrong bets.  We think you need an incubator that creates businesses of value that go the distance.3. Conventional Incubators looks for exceptional talent.  We think you need an incubator for collective endeavours4. Conventional Incubators function with a top-down approach.  We think you need an incubator that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.5. Conventional Incubators promote returns for the 1%.  We think you need an incubator where 1 Member = 1 Vote6. Conventional Incubators run for 6-months.  We think you need an incubator that supports the whole period of development from formation through to operation.
  • We help any type of Cooperative to ‘Form, Organise, Fund and Operate‘.  The exciting areas of new CoOp formation include:– Community Owned Enterprises – anything from a pub to a post-office, school to satellite, house to hospital– Platform or Online CoOperatives – these are being created by online communities in place of Venture Capital backed 2-sided marketplaces
  • Collaborative ventures employ a variety of tools (web apps, social media, wikis etc.) and strategies (regular group meetings, webinars etc.) to make working as a group functional.There are some challenges with working as a group that aren’t solved by todays technology and they include1. Reaching a timely and productive consensus that in turn creates “collaboration paralysis“.  2. Groups try to be decentralised, but often most have a bottleneck around finance related decisions.3. Collectives need a way to track and incentivise efforts with non-financial and / or financial rewards and4. Groups need a way to create agreement contingent on future outcomes on the blockchain to improve trust within commerce
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The extent of the tools we can offer comes down to the success of this crowdfunding campaign.If we get the money to develop the technology, then projects going through incubation can offer supporters black chain agreements and in turn offer payment contingent of future events.  This is a big deal.
Jukka Peltokoski

Fearless Cities: the new urban movements | Red Pepper - 0 views

  • ‘Fearless Cities’, a gathering of over 700 people, representing dozens of experiments in taking power at city level, to empower citizens’ movements worldwide. More than a coming together of a series of local experiments, it marked the ‘coming out’ party for a new global social movement.
  • A wave of new municipalist movements has been experimenting with how to take – and transform – power in cities large and small.
  • it became necessary to change who the movement made demands of.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital
  • citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too
  • From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.
  • it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.
  • internationalist
  • the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.
  • there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share
  • The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’
  • The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.
  • the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.
  • the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change
  • This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.
  • This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post-capitalist politics that can win.
  • Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements
  • The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’.
  • open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture
  • The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives.
  • the Commons Lab
  • Department of the Commons
  • These are not occupied but liberated spaces.
  • social centres
  • ‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self-managed common use.
  • The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership.
  • There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.
  • Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.
  • A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals.
  • Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-to-day decision making of their cities.
  • it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government.
  • participatory budgeting
  • These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally haunted the left.
  • The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.
  • The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power.
  • We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.
Jukka Peltokoski

Book of the Day: Funding an Economy of Civic Spaces in the Cooperative City through Com... - 0 views

  • Funding the Cooperative City focuses on the post-welfare transition of today’s European societies: with austerity measures and the financialisation of real estate stocks and urban services, the gradual withdrawal of the state and municipal administrations from providing certain facilities and maintaining certain spaces have prompted citizen initiatives and professional groups to organise their own services and venues.
  • The self-organisation of new spaces of work, culture and social welfare was made possible by various socio-economic circumstances: unemployment, solidarity networks, changing real estate prices and ownership patters created opportunities for stepping out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development.
  • cooperative ownership
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • new types of investors, operating along principles of ethics or sustainability, or working on moving properties off the market.
  • inventing new ways to enable, finance and govern community-run spaces.
  • European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways.
  • The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years.
  • crowdfunded urban infrastructures.
  • in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure:
  • This collection brings together protagonists from various cities to help shaping a new European culture of urban development based on community-driven initiatives, civic economic models and cooperative ownership
  • participatory budgeting,
  • crowdfunding
  • community organisations
  • invest
  • pre-financed
  • some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems
  • priority neighbourhoods
  • The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year.
  • the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector
  • n some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets
  • Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors.
  • Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods.
  • complementary currencies
  • The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 128 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page