The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
We can see the power of distributed, crowd-sourced business models every day — witness Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb. But veteran online activist Jeremy Heimans argues these businesses are vested in a "new power" model, which he explains as, “The deployment of mass participation and peer coordination to create change and shift outcomes. The distinguishing factors are “mass participation” and “peer co-ordination”. This is what makes "new...
Mass person-to-person collaboration has the potential to upend the fundamental power structure of the world as we know it. Not just hyperbole, but a process already taking place across the UK and the world. "Us Now" follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and managed by 30,000 of its online fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the CEO, and CouchSurfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers. The founding principles of these...
David Bollier -
In 2013, the government of Ecuador launched a major strategic research project to “fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador” based on the principles of open networks, peer production and commoning. Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation would be leading the research team for the next ten months, and seeking to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge.”
The announcement of the project...
Fazila Farouk -
Inequality is hard to avoid here in the most unequal country in the world, yet South Africa’s chattering classes have for a very long time done exactly that. Admittedly there are many titillating distractions, from our polygamous president engulfed in corruption scandals to the vulgar display of wealth by our black economic empowerment beneficiaries, there is much to keep the chins of the more established sections of South African society wagging in gloomy disapproval.
However, as...
Economists never in their wildest imagination anticipated a technology revolution whose productivity was so extreme that it is bringing marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services essentially free, abundant and beyond profit in the exchange capitalist economy. That's what's beginning to happen, argues Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends. We saw the zero marginal cost phenomenon sweep through the information goods industry when, facilitated by the...
