Winning The Next Climate Fight

The Commons is an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, organising, advocacy and justice.

Guide to the Ronald F. Lee Papers (U.S. National Park Service)

Guide to the Ronald F. Lee Papers

Garden and the Stream - thoughts

Revisiting a prescient 2015 keynote called The Garden and the Stream and analyzing where the AT protocol fits in the web

Ivan Illich and Silence as a Commons | David Bollier

Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, calls it the “corporate takeover of nature and the Disneyfication of the wild.” He’s referring the American Recreation Coalition, an industry trade association, and its new “Scenic Byways” website that proposes inserting “tonal patterns” into roadways as a new form of “innovative communication” (i.e., advertising). Kym Murphy, the former v.p. for environmental policy at the Walt Disney Company, explains:

The Uncensored Library – Reporters without borders

I support The Uncensored Library and the fight for press freedom. #TruthFindsAWay

The East Bay out : a personal guide to the East Bay regional parks : Margolin, Malcolm

Search the history of more than 1 trillion web pages.

Support Erin Kissane in making "A Cloud Atlas" | Offprint

We are supporting Erin's work in interviewing Atmosphere builders to make an ecosystem map, joined by Bluesky and Cosmik Network as initial supporters

Jay Graber Remarks Video, ATmosphereConf Seattle 2025 - ATProto Community

Everything is Miscellaneous

I’m at a Hubweek event called “Libraries: The Next Generation.” It’s a panel hosted by the Berkman Center with Dan Cohen, the executive director of the DPLA; Andromeda Yelton, a developer who has done work with libraries; and Jeffrey Schnapp of metaLab

Conference Takeaways

I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I’m processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways.  The…

What Libraries Actually Do – Libraries as Epistemic Institutions

One of the biggest challenges for libraries telling their story is that the library means something different depending on who’s in the room. For a student, it’s a place to study and a staff full of people who want them to succeed. For a faculty member, it might be the invisible infrastructure that delivers electronic articles or the subject liaison who visits their class each year. For a graduate student, it’s often something more: a research partner, a data collaborator, a guide through the methodological expectations of a discipline. And that’s before accounting for the larger information environment that those users are already swimming in, where disciplines publish at high rates; trade publications and newsletters and Substacks produce sense-making content daily; and social media, messaging apps, and community channels add still more. The information environment is a flood around us, and the library is one stream of that flow.