What we have seen these days in the movement 15M in the Spanish cities (and extensible to the Arab revolutions), has been a similar scenario to what we have lived all these years in ourproject.org, but condensed in a few days. When a person or collective needs to have a space in internet: Either they depend on economic resources to hire the creation and management of these spaces... If they don't have such resources, this option is not feasible. Either they have technical volunteers to perform these tasks. In this case, the people without Internet technical knowledge ...

After several years of work, we can finally introduce the first release of Kune. Kune is a free software (AGPLv3) that focuses on building free/libre contents collaboratively, focused on organization work and web content publishing. You can check out a summary about Kune features below, and afterwards we encourage you to play with a demo. We have recently decided to try to mix all our initiatives, integrating several of them into Kune: Move Commons in Kune so groups can define themselves. Troco as a barter system allowing Kune users to show and exchange certain service/goods they share... Massmob (and other Wave extensions) allowing to organize ...

Comunes launched a while ago its Trainings as a way of allowing students and contributors to get introduced in free open source software & leading technologies while contributing in real projects... which are pretty interesting, actually ;) Nowadays we have: Six students of Computer Science from the American University of Science & Technology (Beirut, Lebanon) Six students of the Master of Free/Libre Software of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain) On the other hand, Comunes has been establishing collaborations with different groups and institutions: GRASIA research group of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid is providing some hardware resources, and soon will begin ...

In times of crisis, the Commons cannot be forgotten. In fact, they become more essential than ever. In the recent uprising in Egypt, protesters have taken over Cairo and other cities. The brutal state police, overwhelmed by the situation, is not anymore trying to "maintain order" and for several days has simply left. In fact, most usual services are not working. In this difficult context, Egyptian protesters have been working hard for protecting their Commons, specially in Tahrir (Liberation) Square, where most are concentrated. Cleaning the streets, moving away the trash, sharing food, giving medical care, community patrols, removing ...

Clay Shirky: "Cognitive surplus (...) represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects (...) The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. (...) Now, that free time existed in the 20th century, but we didn't get Ushahidi in the 20th century. (...) The media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume. (...) But now that we've been given media tools the Internet, mobile phones -- that let us do more than consume. (...) We still like ...