We hear about patents everywhere. They are commonly included in indexes of progress and innovation, used for the purpose of rating research institutions, universities and companies. The proponents of the patent system believe that patents are helping to stimulate innovation, by making the knowledge publicly available and by granting the inventor the right for exclusive commercial exploitation.
Civic and community initiatives are working to vitalize our urban, rural, scientific and digital commons, and promoting a future guided by democratic participation, social equity and environmental sustainability. At the heart of these acts of “commoning” are satisfying, joyful social relationships that regenerate our interpersonal and physical surroundings. We reject the idea that we are merely self-interested individual consumers or competitors in a fierce market jungle. Instead, we also consider ourselves active and cooperative citizen caretakers working for healthy and fair neighbourhoods, cities and societies. Continue reading Announcing: A European Commons Assembly
Sarantaporo area, situated at the North of Greece, is an agricultural and husbandry region, also hit by the crisis. But even prior to the crisis, state’s attention to the area was poor. Youths were migrating to big cities or abroad. There was no Internet connection, and locals were isolated and deprived of basic services, e.g. medical aid.
At 2010 a group of people forms a community wireless network aiming to connect the villages among them and with the rest of the world. In time, and as the project matures, Sarantaporo.gr community aims even further. They want to be the catalyst so that the locals (re)organize cooperatives based on the wireless network, (re)enliven their economy, make it sustainable, more extrovert and independent of state and corporative control.
In doing so, they produce knowledge and build bridges between the hi-tech of a wireless network community and the real-life challenges of a rural community.
What are these challenges? How can a community be born and how are the existing ones transformed or affected during this course? What are the real-life stories of the people involved, one way or another, into this process? How can an effort in a small rural population in a remote part of crisis-ridden Greece relate to an ICT project in Catalonia University and -in a broader context- to the efforts to construct a new common ground for peoples in Europe?These are some of the inquiries we explore in the documentary.
In October 2015, the media arts collective Personal Cinema which produced the documentary, in collaboration with the Sarantaporo.gr team, launched a crowdfunding campaign at the Spanish crowdfunding platform goteo.org and succeeded to collect an amount of money that facilitated the realization of the documentary.
The documentary music score can be downloaded free or with a contribution to the artist here.
Credit list of the documentary and crowdfunding campaign contributors here.
Related texts to the documentary, the campaign and the Sarantaporo.gr Community, here.
The Personal Cinema collective is calling on the commoners community to help finance their new documentary on the development of free community wireless networks in Greece (which will be released under a CC license) through its crowdfunding campaign on goteo.
You can watch the trailer here.
The third year of our presence in Heraklion we chose to organize a two day event with title “Developing collaborative structures for the Commons”. For this we invited members from two internationally renowned projects, the FLOK society project and the Cooperativa Integral Catalana.
