Finance, Austerity and Commonfare

Abstract

The links between the crisis of subprime mortgages and the so-called crisis of European sovereign debt are sometimes concealed, so as to create a veritable sense of shared guilt meant to sanction the legitimacy of the austerity policies that have been imposed by virtuous Northern European countries on the undeserving countries of Southern Europe. We will analyse three main aspects of the current crisis: (1) we will interpret the austerity policies that today characterize the eurozone as the result of financialization; (2) we will define the state of permanent crisis as an instrument of governance characterized by specific economic policies; (3) we will show how all this unfolds at a stage of capitalist development wherein a new constituent process begins to take shape in a fragmented but nonetheless significant manner, and how this process is reclaimed by the very subjectivities upon which the accumulation of cognitive and relational skills depends in order to reproduce itself: the Welfare of the Common.

Co-designing for common values: creating hybrid spaces to nurture autonomous cooperation

“…The valorization of social cooperation as common good is at the heart of Commonfare, a project aiming to tackle important societal challenges such as precariousness, low income and unemployment. Its ultimate goal is to foster and facilitate the Commonfare, a new form of welfare based on rewarding social cooperation as practiced by grassroots initiatives and local communities committed to re-appropriating common goods (Fumagalli and Lucarelli 2015). The project falls within the politically-engaged tradition of PD, to create methods, tools and techniques in both research and design practices that value bottom-up cooperation (Robertson and Simonsen 2013).…”

Supporting Social Innovation through Visualisations of Community Interactions

“…The platform seeks to promote and facilitate commonfare, an alternative approach to social welfare [15]. A commonfare approach is grounded in the recognition that social and economic spheres are not separate, but instead are inextricably and intricately connected.…”

Fostering Commonfare. Infrastructuring Autonomous Social Collaboration

“…Commonfare, as a novel model for welfare distribution of wealth, is indeed based on the three points raised by Ekbia and Nardi, a guaranteed income, access to education and healthcare, to which it adds free access to knowledge and the management of shared resources as commons (for the concept of commons, see Ostrom [33]). In fact, Ekbia and Nardi points to commons-based practices, like making, but they do not connect it to commons as alternative institutions, something argued for by scholars in social informatics [20], in HCI [46], and by the economists proposing "commonfare" as an alternative form of welfare provision [19]. Following this suggestion to contribute to the shaping of new institutions, we should stress how a focus on institutions goes hand-in-hand with the participatory design of digital technologies, in what has been called "institutioning" [23].…”

“…The "design team", roughly the part of the Consortium connected to WP4, continued working, incorporating feedback from the low fidelity mockups, which then became the basis for a high fidelity iteration (19). These high fidelity mockups, with additional feedback from the consortium, provided the basis for the development which resulted in the first release (20).…”