By Guy Dauncey, The Practical Utopian
Who are we? And where are we going on this tiny planet of ours, this bright sparkle of life in a Universe so ridiculously vast? It’s a question worth exploring, if you have five minutes in your busy COVID day.
By SoFA Coop Circle, Staff, Grassroots Economic Organizing
Sociocracy and cooperativism stem from the premise that humans thrive as social animals. Quite possibly, cooperation acts as our most characteristic trait as living beings. We need each other. No human effort, made by a lone individual, succeeds.
By John Ringland, P2P Foundation
It is no accident that as a civilisation the sophistication of our adversarial capacities far exceeds the sophistication of our cooperative capacities. Our historical path and current situation have made it this way, but the balance is changing. There are two main generative processes underlying biological and cultural evolution and more broadly the evolution of any population of interacting adaptive agents.
By Camille Duran, Eleen Murphy, Green Exchange
The ability to cooperate brought us to where we are today, and it’s what will help us change the world. Without cooperation, the Circular Economy will not be possible. So how will this work, practically? And what are the key principles of cooperation that we can start applying everywhere we go?
By Marianne Gronemeyer, Patterns of Commoning
“Conviviality” is still a foreign word, one that triggers the question, “Well, what does it mean?”
By Kari McGregor, Generation Alpha blog
In building a movement, finding common ground is paramount. A movement can progress with the aid of constructive criticism, but it is imperative that this criticism be accompanied by genuine effort to understand and learn from one another, and recognition of each party’s value to the movement.
By Terje Bongard, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research
On behalf of us all, investors make the same mistake as King Midas did. Human behavioural ecology knows why this paradox exists. Would it help if everybody knew?
By Dmitry Orlov, ClubOrlov
Within a modern, highly financialized economy, most interactions are impersonal, based on purchase and sale within a market system. If you are the loser in any one transaction, it is your fault, because you chose to deal with people you had no particular reason to trust, and therefore it is your mistake. If the swindle is not illegal, you have no legal recourse. You can, of course, complain to a few friends, perhaps even blog or tweet about it, but then, in a market economy, more of a stigma attaches to being swindled than to swindling, and most people are reticent when it comes to telling the whole world that they let someone take advantage of them.
By Stefan Meretz, David Bollier blog
The commons are as varied as life itself, and yet everyone involved with them shares common convictions. If we wish to understand these convictions, we must realize what commons mean in a practical sense, what their function is and always has been. That in turn includes that we concern ourselves with people. After all, commons or common goods are precisely not merely “goods,” but a social practice that generates, uses and preserves common resources and products. In other words, it is about the practice of commons, or commoning, and therefore also about us. The debate about the commons is also a debate about images of humanity. So let us take a step back and begin with the general question about living conditions.
By Charlotte Du Cann, Transition Norwich Blog
Great ideas, projects and enterprises seldom originate from a single person working in isolation.