Many people and organizations in the cooperative and solidarity economy movements make use of Creative Commons (CC) licenses for their intellectual property. While CC licenses come in many different flavors, depending on how permissive the licensor wants to be with their content, Steve Herrick argues that one of them stands out as the superior choice for solidarity economy activists.Â
And we're excited to announce that GEO will be hosting an evening of poetry reading on the 4th of May. While that's pretty far from our usual fare, we've found the practice of reading poems to each other to be immensely enjoyable and wanted to share it with more people. So grab a poem to share, and join us for a night of linguistic flare! Â
The Best Creative Commons License for the Solidarity Economy
by Steve Herrick
A knowledge commons is not geographic, but is still defined by the behaviors of those who contribute to it and benefit from it. Creative Commons licenses coordinate these behaviors in ways that are well understood. Or at least, that’s the idea. The fact that there are seven different CC licenses (not counting the ones that have been retired, like the ones that don’t include Attribution) does not help people to understand them.Â
Get Ready for a Grassroots Poetry Slam
by Josh Davis
We are bombarded by the bad and the ugly with every morning’s headlines; sometimes you need to force your gaze onto the beautiful, the sublime, the poetic. Not to distract yourself from the horrors of the human condition, but to remind yourself of the radiance of the human soul and why it is worth struggling to empower.
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From Public Experiments to Field Formation: Lessons from Chicago Co-ops
Center for Community Wealth (Eventbrite) — Across the country, communities are testing new ways to take back control of the places they call home. Community ownership of real estate is a powerful and increasingly popular approach to keeping land and property affordable, preventing displacement, and building wealth that stays local. It’s also a pathway to advancing racial and health equity while deepening local democracy. In short, community ownership prioritizes collective opportunity, voice, and well-being over private profit....
Cooperatives, labour processes and the mobilization of the precarious
Academia.edu — This paper uses two different examples of cooperatives to reflect on what might drive and what might maintain worker cooperatives. The first example is an older cooperative project (Nova Amafrutas – NAF) for the supply of fruit from the Brazilian Amazon, the form it took and challenges it faced in developing and maintaining structures and worker commitment for a new enterprise (but one tied to global production). The second is the VIOME workers mobilization in Greece and the challenges workers faced to reestablish hands-on management and organizational commitment to a family run national firm/cluster (Philkeram) within the context of sector uncertainty...
Theorising the vulnerability of online mutual aid communities
Taylor & Francis — This study addresses that gap by examining how solidarity is enacted, contested, and framed through the interactions among users and the platform. It asks: How do the multifaceted interactions within an online mutual aid community – among givers, requesters, moderators, and the digital platform – affect its ability to sustain the ethos of solidarity it was founded upon?...
South Korean Law on Social Solidarity Economy Moves Forward
Maeli Business Newspaper — The Basic Law on Social Solidarity Economy, which includes the legal foundation for the activities of social solidarity economic organizations such as social enterprises and cooperatives and the establishment of a government-level support system, passed the bill review subcommittee of the National Assembly's Public Administration and Security Committee on the 24th.
How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Cooperative
Worker ownership can sound deceptively simple: employees become owners (check!), decisions are shared (check!), wealth stays local (check!). But the reality is, successful worker cooperatives don’t emerge from paperwork or ritual alone. They are intentionally designed — shaped through hard governance choices, financial insecurity, and assumed shared expectations...
Why refusing AI is a fight for the soul
Rest of the World — From medieval monks who banned tools to weavers burning looms in the 17th century, people have long resisted technologies that they thought would take their jobs or otherwise hurt them. More recently, there has been a wave of resignations at frontier artificial intelligence companies, and opposition to data centers. What do past resistances have in common with current movements?
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