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  • Cooperation Rules Competition

    To be human is to be cooperative. I’m not sure you can prove it, but it’s actually a more proven human trait than being competitive. This is the research Alfie Kohn reveals in his 1986 book No Contest. It’s gotten me thinking about cooperation vs competition. Alfie Kohn’s exploration of competition is fascinating. I’ve just… Read more

  • Building Website Simplicity and a Democratic Solution

    You’re a small organization, and you need to set up a reliable website. If you want a robust site, Drupal can provide endless solutions. Drupal is free, and can be a very powerful content management system (CMS) for your site. But the tech side can stop you from getting it started, and from maintaining the… Read more

  • Know Your Food, Know Your Food Producer

    What I learned at the People’s Food System Summit, June 2017, hosted by the Equal Exchange Action Forum. Meeting a food producer improves your life. Countries producing your food are REALLY suffering from global warming. Tea production is brutal for people that pick leaves by hand. Bananas require incredible logistics to reach you. Cheap bananas… Read more

  • Withholding Shareholders and Retaining Wealth for Members

    I just received a ballot in the mail from my life insurance company, SBLI. They are actually letting me vote for increased membership rights. SBLI is a national insurance company based in Massachusetts with customers in all 50 states except New York. The Board of Trustees has unanimously decided to vote on becoming a mutual… Read more

  • The Twitter Vote May 22, and the Radical Co-op Challenge

    The movement is underway. #buytwitter, #buythisplatform, and buytwitter.org are among the efforts pushing to rethink Twitter ownership. Twitter votes May 22 on a petition to explore a co-op option for Twitter. And a recent discussion co-hosted by Shareable, has some insightful thought on the topic: #PlatformCoop Round Table: Scaling Community Control & User Democracy. The… Read more

  • Building the Commons and Freedom with Software

    Free software can be difficult to appreciate. (It’s free stuff, what’s the significance?) But there’s a fight for  freedom with software. Free software is a movement and a philosophy, but most importantly it’s a legal structure that provides freedom. Users of software have rights, and free software licenses, ideally as copyleft licenses, maintain user control… Read more

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