Kate Beecroft's session explored speculative futures, economic alternatives, and the politics of hope through visual storytelling and radical imagination. A voice speaks over scenes of a Martian desert, glacial landscapes struck by lightning, and an isolated island, weaving a narrative of crisis and division—continents sinking, resources extracted from the periphery to serve the center, utopian dreams dismissed, and despair looming over the future. Yet, amidst this, there is a call for hope and …

This session explored the ways commons and commoning shape our relationships with each other and the environments we inhabit. To engage in commoning is to affect and be affected, entangled in shifting landscapes of crisis and uncertainty.We find ourselves in a world that feels increasingly strange—unsettling, disjointed, accelerating toward the unknown. In response to this strangeness, a call was made: an open invitation for essays, art, interventions, poems, and reflections that grapple with th…

Session Summary: Fractal Democracy – Marta Crowd Intelligence: Designing new institutions for the digital era by harnessing collective knowledge through digital tools and blended environments. Defining Politics: Encouraging reflection on personal and collective understandings of politics. Case Studies: Haiti (2010): Diasporic Haitians used satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap to update digital maps post-earthquake. Libyan Crisis Map: Created for the UN, leveraging verified social media sources to aid …

The session on Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy explored strategies for responding to the complexities of climate and social crises, guided by Jem Bendell’s framework of the Four Rs: Resilience, Reconciliation, Restoration, and Relinquishment. Despite critiques of Bendell’s work as overly pessimistic, the discussion highlighted how these principles could be applied to digital commons and networks of care to foster sustainable and inclusive practices.Resilience focuses on pre…

David Bollier reflects on a three-year journey of fostering the Commons through a convergence space for commoners to exchange insights, share ideas, and support one another. This initiative has led to strategic and co-learning deep dives, involving participants from multiple countries to make sense of Commons-related developments, primarily through virtual collaboration.He emphasizes the need for cross-fertilization of ideas and creating spaces for personal and political engagement. At its core,…