15 Comments

great work, thank you! gonna pass to my students.

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Thanks for this. I just wrote something similar in my newsletter -- albeit a bit more pessimistic. I think your point about multiple commons and public spaces is spot on!

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This is a really helpful lineage for me to read. It leads me wondering, what are other ways of languaging "the commons" and other frameworks? I noticed that every one of the experts cited, as far as I can tell is, White. No doubt there are plenty of POC who also have done work on "the commons" (please include some of them next time?!), but also, what if we talk about community instead of commons? Or ecosystem? Or common good? I'm curious what we gain or lose from focusing on the "commons," as our starting point.

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Great article! Just a quick note - the link to Signals research has a typo https://newpublic.or/signals instead of https://newpublic.org/signals

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I understand the importance of digital town squares, but frankly I think much more attention needs to be paid to the digital town library. Here is an article on this: https://bridgitnow.medium.com/the-digital-town-square-needs-a-library-ad7ac15f3e14?postPublishedType=repub

I have said this on the comments here several time, the best place for decentralized public space is above the webpage. The is unlimited space above the webpage - the Metaweb I call it - that we should claim as public space. If there are any readers who want to help shape the governance of the space above the webpage, we're building and would love your input.

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