The new book by Hans Widmer (aka P.M., author of bolo'bolo) is now published. "Auf den Boden kommen" (flyer in german), meaning "down to earth", a title inspired by Bruno Latour's work. The book builds on previous collective work curated and edited by Hans Widmer (Die Andere Stadt and Nach Hause Kommen) focusing this time at the neighbourhood scale (20000 inhabitants), the 2nd out of 5 "glomos". One of the book's proposals for living within ecological boundaries without sacrifice is the "terrestrial" Internet, an adaptation of the concept of the organic Internet by Panayotis Antoniadis (through C4R partner NetHood). The initial text has been written in English and is published also as a separate booklet, available to download here. The terrestrial Internet will be then the topic of the next event of the 7at7 series, on Monday February 7 at 7pm CET, with the CIRCE group as a special guest. You can join at https://7at7.digital.

Created thanks to several workshops gathering users, associations, and local representatives at R-Urban Bagneux, the interactive map "shared neighborhoods" identifies sharing and solidarity activities in Bagneux and in the surrounding cities. This map presents the domains of sharing (ecology, culture, sport, solidarity...) but also what is shared (knowledge, material goods, services...) and with which participants. Discover here the result of these collective mapping sessions and learn more about the sharing network of Bagneux and its surroundings.

What enables a community to operate with minimal reliance on money? The Rojava Film Commune works for the production, distribution, and reception of films depicting and documenting the stateless society of Rojava, Kurdish and Arab culture, and the region’s continuing military and ideological struggles. The Rojava Film Commune is a collective of filmmakers founded in Rojava in 2015, it was created with the purpose of bringing cinema to the people of Rojava and further developing its democratic revolution. Rojava is more than a region located in the Northern and Eastern Syria. It is an autonomous government established in 2014 while surviving what’s often referred as the Syrian war ridden with geopolitical complication. It’s based on the radical democratic principle whereby key values such as cooperativism, diversity, women, ecology rule. The film commune is one of many communes that form the basis of Rojava governance. SOURCES: Roza The Country Of Two Rivers, a Documentary of Rojava Revolution by Rojava Film Commune: Rojava Film Festival CHANNELS You can watch a selection of the collective's works on their youtube channel here. You can follow Rojava Film Commune's communication channels here and here.

What shape can the infrastructure for the solidarity economy take? The Open Collective is working to build legal, financial, and technical tools which are open source and transparent – enabling connections between financial institutions, cooperatives, mutual aid groups and non-profit organizations. Open Collective Foundation (OCF) is creating a legal, financial, and technical commons for the solidarity economy. Community is about trust and sharing. Open Collective lets you manage your finances so everyone can see where money comes from and where it goes. Collect and spend money transparently. OCF has a unique role to play as steward of a legal, financial, and technical commons—a piece of shared infrastructure—that is resonating deeply with the solidarity economy movement. We can build bridges between 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship, the open source community (where we have deep roots), mutual aid groups (100+ are hosted by OCF today), and the movement at large. A new clarity has emerged for Open Collective Foundation: Solidarity will be our guiding principle. Source: https://blog.opencollective.com/solidarity-as-our-guiding-principle/ RESOURCES You can find the Solidarity as Guiding Principle tool by the Open Collective Foundation here. Watch a brief presentation of the OCF:

How can artists organize against the increasing inequality amplified by the pandemic conditions globally? Art for Universal Basic Income – a campaign initiated by artists – is converging energies with movements across the world challenging the market’s current modes of exploitation. Art for Universal Basic Income by the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI). While the art market confirms his status as a safe-haven assets provider for the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would then represent a solution and indeed an urgent measure to implement. But UBI is not “only” a response to poverty, it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care. If artists are already creating new collective economy models and alter-institutions, these small scale experiments will be much more valuable when connected with those growing social movements around the world fighting for a Universal Basic Income. The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a think-tank consisting of curators, artists, and scholars, whose aim is to develop various forms of research intervention for the transition into post-capitalism. Together we want to explore and develop new practices and knowledge that contribute to the formation of new forms of life and its meanings as the practices of struggle for the commons. IRI is located at the threshold between Europe and the Mediterranean. The School of Mutation is IRI's pedagogical outlet, focused on the need to learn anew and re-make the world of culture in the unfolding of the biopolitical emergency brought on by Covid-19. Art For UBI is a campaign initiated in the framework of the School of Mutation. ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO) 1/ Universal and Unconditional Basic Income is the best measure for the arts and cultural sector. Art workers claim a basic income, not for themselves, but for everyone. 2/ Do not call UBI any measures that do not equal a living wage: UBI has to be above the poverty threshold. To eliminate poverty, UBI must correspond to a region’s minimum wage. 3/ UBI frees up time, liberating us from the blackmail of precarious labor and from exploitative working conditions. 4/ UBI is given unconditionally and without caveats, regardless of social status, job performance, or ability. It goes against the meritocratic falsehoods that cover for class privilege. 5/ UBI is not a social safety net, nor is it welfare unemployment reform. It is the minimal recognition of the invisible labor that is essential to the reproduction of life, largely unacknowledged but essential, as society’s growing need for care proves. 6/ UBI states that waged labor is no longer the sole means for wealth redistribution. Time and time again, this model proves unsustainable.Wage is just another name for exploitation of workers, who always earn less than they give. 7/ Trans-feminist and decolonizing perspectives teach us to say NO to all the invisible and extractive modes of exploitation, especially within the precarious working conditions created by the art market. 8/ UBI affirms the right to intermittence, privacy and autonomy, the right to stay off-line and not to be available 24/7. 9/ UBI rejects the pyramid scheme of grants and of the nonprofit industrial complex, redistributing wealth equally and without unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. Bureaucracy is the vampire of art workers’ energies and time turning them into managers of themselves. 10/ By demanding UBI, art workers do not defend a guild or a category and depreciate the role that class and privilege play in current perceptions of art. UBI is universal because it is for everyone and makes creative agency available to everyone. 11/ Art’s health is directly connected to a healthy social fabric. To claim for UBI, being grounded in the ethics of mutual care, is art workers’ most powerful gesture of care towards society. 12/ Because UBI disrupts the logic of overproduction, it frees us from the current modes of capital production that are exploiting the planet. UBI is a cosmogenetic technique and a means to achieve climate justice. 13/ Where to find the money for the UBI? In and of itself UBI questions the actual tax systems in Europe and elsewhere. UBI empowers us to reimagine financial transactions, the extractivism of digital platforms, liquidity, and debt. No public service should be cut in order to finance UBI. 14/ UBI inspires many art collectives and communities to test various tools for more equal redistribution of resources and wealth. From self-managed mutual aid systems based on collettivising incomes, to solutions temporarily freeing cognitive workers from public and private constraints. We aim to join them. Source: https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/the-school-of-mutation-2020/som-iterations/art-for-ubi/ ART FOR UBI RESOURCES: * ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO) | launching campaign * ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #1 | Open online Assembly * ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #2 | Open online Assembly * The paradoxes of gift economy and how basic income could save, change, abolish art making. A conversation with Dmitry Vilensky and Oxana Timofeeva

NetHood in collaboration with CIRCE started a series of event capturing all the details of the process of installing your own server. The case study is real: L200 wishes to install its own server in the basement and Panos Antoniadis from NetHood bought one, named Lennon. In the first episode, Panos interviewed Lennon, with the voice of Karlo from CIRCE, in the context of the 7at7 series. Recordings from the interview and next detailed steps from the installation process will be made available here, soon. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HERE IS A METHOD FOR VALUING THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL ASPECTS OF URBAN COMMONS. This method draws from and contributes to a broader conception of social or community returns on investment, using the case and data of a vibrant project, strategy, and model of ecological resilience, R-Urban, on the outskirts of Paris. R-Urban is based on networks of urban commons and collective hubs supporting civic resilience practices. We use data from 2015, the year before one of the hubs was evicted from its site by a municipal administration that could not see the value of an “urban farm” compared to a parking lot. We combine estimates of the direct revenues generated for a host of activities that took place in R-Urban, including an urban farm, community recycling centre, a greenhouse, community kitchen, compost school, café, a teaching space, and a mini-market. We then estimate the market value of volunteer labour put into running the sites, in addition to the value of training and education conducted through formal and informal channels, and the new jobs and earnings that were generated due to R-Urban activity. Finally, we estimate the monetary value of the savings made by an environmentally conscious design that focused on water recycling, soil and biodiversity improvement, and social and health benefits, breaking them down by savings to the organization, participants and households involved in R-Urban itself, as well as savings to the state and the planet. Although our article is built on specific quantities from a concrete project, the method has wide applicability to urban commons of many types seeking to demonstrate the worth and value of all their many facets and activities. Click here to access the details on this project

Micro-devices and prototypes. R-Urban has prototyped a series of ecological Micro Devices for the Recyclab and Agrocite Units. These micro-devices for power generation and food, water management and organic waste are realized from local materials and with simple technology. They are supposed to promote innovation within the reach of citizens. You can find the entire document with detailed models here Typical example, the lombric farm:

MaziZone is a hybrid space, whose digital infrastructure is located inside the corresponding physical location, owned and managed by those involved. As a rule thumb, a digital infrastructure could be considered as part of a MaziZone if people interacting through it know where the server is located in the corresponding physical location/area (from a specific spot in the city, like a community space or a garden, to a neighbourhood or district, or a well defined wider urban area). And ideally, if they know who manages the infrastructure and can participate in discussions and/or decisions regarding its overall design and management. The MAZI project in a period of three years (2016-2018) managed to develop a full fledged toolkit, the MAZI Toolkit for transforming a Raspberry Pi to a powerful local WiFi networking hosting a wide varity of free and open source applications, with a very simple installation procedure. Like Wordpress the MAZI toolkit enables any person with basic technical skills to create their own web page on the Internet, the MAZI toolkit enables anyone to create a local web platform with many different web applications including Wordpress (see demo of the default "user view"), through a very simple administrator interface (see a demo of the admin panel). Unfortunately no follow-up funding was secured and the development process had to stop (for now). But it still works perfectly for Raspberry Pi 3 B and 3 B+ (not the latest version). It is part of the objectives of the C4R project to revive this work, and extend it to include a wider variety of hardware and software tools to build MaziZones. Up to date information on the current status of the MAZI toolkit and related tools is available here: https://mazizone.net And this is a page maintained by NetHood with examples of MaziZones deployed with the use of the MAZI toolkit: https://nethood.org/mazi/