Local Currencies
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September 24, 2006
Community Networks
Worker Owned and Managed
Rainbow Grocery, San Francisco, CA
Gleaning
Open Culture
Community Networks
Ever rely on friends or family in times of need?
Without our friends, neighbors, and/or families it would be hard to get along in this world. From sharing a cup of sugar to checking in on a sick neighbor, we are constantly exchanging goods and services without expectation for material reward.
Although it goes unmeasured, each day more wealth may be shared through these community networks than is traded on the stock market floor.
Gleaning
Ever feel like there is an abundance of goods just going to waste in our society? 1st mentioned in the Old Testament, gleaning originally meant collecting leftover crops from fields. Today it has come to mean collecting things that others have thrown away. You can see this practiced everyday; from cardboard recyclers, to that great furniture find sitting out on the sidewalk, to those who feed the hungry by collecting surplus food from restaurants and groceries.
Find out more through these great working examples: Food Not Bombs www.foodnotbombs.net and freecycle.org
Gift Economies
The Wikipedia entry on gift economies is extensive with excellent links.
Creative Commons
According to their website,http://creativecommons.org/ purpose is "Enabling the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works."
You can download and use materials from the site and you can upload and share your own. Each user decides and designates the terms of re-use.
Prelinger Library!
The Prelinger Library is a physical space in San Francisco. Their website describes it as:
"An access-oriented, image-rich experimental research library of books, printed ephemera, and over 600 periodical titles. Serving readers, artists, scholars and other iconoclastic thinkers. Centered on histories of U.S. regions, culture, industry, landscape, natural history, media, and politics (and other things). Open to the public."
The Prelinger Library is appropriation friendly.
To visit, check on their site for open hours Prelinger Library.
ARCHIVE.ORG!
Archive.org's tag line is "Universal access to human knowledge." It is a website that allows users to download movies, documents, and audio materials for research and upload their own materials to share with others. It is an awesome resource that helps perpetuate a more open culture.
Inkworks: A Worker Owned Print Shop
Inkworks Press in Berkeley, California is one of the many Bay Area worker owned and managed businesses. The Samaras Project is happy to have our cards printed with them.