What do we mean by the “commons”? The commons are spaces where we interact with other people.
(Crossposted at Social Media for Social Change (SMSC), a collaboration between the Action Mill and faculty (Jeremy Beaudry, a super-smart friend of the Action Mill) and students Ona Krass, Hunter Augeri, and Alie Thomer from the College of Media and Communication. SMSC is a design research project that investigates how networked technologies and social media may be used to create hybrid public spaces — bridging the physical and the virtual — where civil discourse and meaningful democratic participation are facilitated, organized, and nurtured at a grass-roots level.)
In our work at the Action Mill, we talk about “taking action in the commons” as an important component of social change work. But what do we mean by the “commons”? The commons are where we interact with other people. Public spaces are only commons when there are people interacting in them – people who don’t already agree with each other, or aren’t already part of a group.Read more
