Four ways cities can help protect democratic values

Cities can provide a place for citizens to assert their democratic values.

AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone." There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable --- some can be said to rank among humanity's greatest achievements --- the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known "tragedy of the commons," but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600--1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via "slop spam"). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.

Decision-making software for groups and organizations

Make important decisions together without endless meetings. Loomio keeps discussion, voting, outcomes, and the reasoning behind them in one clear place.

Hylo — Where people get organized, stay connected, and grow together.

Hylo is the prosocial coordination platform for purpose-driven groups.

Attainability Index - Best for Britain

The 'Attainability Index' takes wage data from the past 20 years, together with the varying costs of goods and services, and determines how many hours a person would have to work to afford them.

Funny Games

All the games in the Funny Games collection are the kind of games you play for fun, just for fun.

The Art of the Pause: LS Punctuation (!) — Liberating Structures

Learn why the spaces in between matter and how six of the most reliable LS Punctuation marks help groups move from mere participation into a true flow state.

Why sunlight is vital to our physical and mental health | Psyche Notes to Self

The new book ‘In Defense of Sunlight’ argues that our concerns about the sun’s risks lead us to overlook its benefits

Messy, risky outdoor play is important for children, but adults can stop them enjoying it

Are adults unintentionally limiting children’s risk-taking outdoors?

Changemakers, Then and Now: Celebrating Ten Years of Invisible Cities - The Cockburn Association

By Rowan Brown, Director, The Cockburn Association Our namesake, Lord Henry Cockburn, and his allies, were changemakers. Compelled by what we might term today social justice principles, they rallied against the abject poverty, dangerous housing and poor health they experienced in nineteenth-century Edinburgh. A gregarious and accomplished individual, Lord Cockburn was a circuit judge, whose consequential tours across the length ...

Before the Storm Toolkit

Adaptation as a catalyst for social change - MACC Hub

Explore how transformational adaptation can address climate risk, inequality and austerity by investing in people, wellbeing and more resilient societies.