Just as psychiatrists have ‘enclosed’ mental illness as their domain of specialist practice, counsellors have done the same for human relations, argues Denis Postle.
One of the most important things you can do for yourself and your community/ your commons this spring is to take yourself and a friend to a Democracy School. Democracy Schools are hosted by local grassroots groups and taught by staff and friends of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). They challenge just about everything we think we know about our U.S. Constitution and the efficacy of our governmental system.
"The Swiss are known for their highly secretive banking services for the super-wealthy. Who would have guessed that they would inaugurate a Summer School on Social Banking and the Commons?"
The title of the seminars series led by James Quilligan in London in May 2012 was The Emergence ofa Commons-Based Economy. In October 2012, and with the 5 more Commons seminars facilitated by James, we laid foundations for better understanding the potential of the Commons and commoning to usher in large-scale social renewal.
While we, at the School of Commoning, were working on co-organizing, hosting, and documenting those evens, unbeknown to us, a group of Commons scholars inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s work, at Indiana University, conducted a fascinating research in a Working Group on Managing the Health Commons.
I think the commons is a very important concept and it seems to me that we have to treat it as a political concept. It is about how we develop a common purpose. It is not simply about common usage, it is about developing a common purpose.
In our increasingly complex urban age where the rate of change and innovation is rapidly increasing, the rigidity of outdated linear and analytic Cartesian design methods are being exposed as insufficient to meet the needs of the environment and the people.
Excerpted from a draft of an article by Hilary Wainwright, via Michel Bauwens:
Another implication for our own organisations, political and economic, is the importance of building into them the nurturing and development of this commons. We need to do this in both a prefigurative sense and as an immediate means of strengthening their transformative capacity.
These are the notes for a talk I gave in the New Putney Debate organized by Occupy London 23-Nov-2012
The other day I heard a beautiful English folk song from 1750. Interestingly, it is getting very popular on the Internet nowadays. You probably don’t want to hear me singing it :-) so I brought to you its lyrics.
