At university, back in the 80s, we were taught about ‘the Tragedy of the Commons’ – an essay by Garrett Hardin, about how common resources are always abused, because humans are basically selfish. It seemed plausible at the time, but has since been shown to be false. Read more

Dave Darby interviews Micky Metts of Agaric, based in Boston, Massachusetts, who is active in both the co-operative and free/open source movements. Read more

We meet Pat Conaty, senior research fellow at NEF and Co-operatives UK and co-author of the Resilience Imperative, to discuss ‘the commons’. Read more

This describes how my kids and I built an arcade machine, based on a Raspberry Pi. So, the first question many of you will be asking is…. Read more

In this post Sophie Paterson of Lowimpact.org explores the power of sharing in a growing movement including The Library of Things, Streetbank, Share Shops and more. Read more

In response to the pervasive reach of the global agro-industrial complex, growing numbers of farmers across the world are coming together as co-operative organisations to promote and protect small-scale organic food production and environmental stewardship. We take a look below at some of the groups promoting open source agriculture with farmer driven technologies, spearheaded by the… Continue reading Farm Hack : growing innovative open-source agriculture Read more

In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU free software project, on which many people could collaborate, and in 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation, to promote and assist the development of free software. Here is a page from his website Read more

I’ve found that learning about how to change to open source software can be difficult for non-techies. Yes, you can easily find the websites that contain the information you need, but it’s almost never written in a style that non-techies can understand. Read more

There are lots of ideas for changing the world – from voting to demonstrations, petitions, lifestyle change, incremental change, revolutionary change, or more of the same, only harder. The problem with many of them is that they are either ineffective or not implementable. Read more

Monsanto, one of three companies that control 53% of the world’s commercial seed market, has sued hundreds of small farmers in the United States in recent years to protect its patents on genetically-engineered seeds. Read more