Dr Laura James's writings

Earlier in September I was in Stroud, for the first Festival of Commoning . It was a lovely event, full of people working on commons projects in different ways. What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders.  (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier and others - "a pervasive, generative, and neglected social lifeform... complex, adaptive living processes that generate wealth (both tengible and intangible) through which people address their shared needs with minimal or no reliance on markets or states.") Diana Finch set out differences between co-ops and commons. Coops are businesses, in the market, based on trade or exchange, mediated by money, democratic in operation, and benefit their members. Commons are not businesses, and are based on sharing, with no money required; they are collaborative, and benefit both

In August I wrote that I was looking for work . I shared my blog post on a variety of social media, without doing any reminders or reposts. It was surprisingly popular, and the blog post got nearly 7000 views. Thank you to everyone who shared it or shared job ideas with me. It wasn't an easy post to write, possibly because I had to figure out how to explain what I can do, and what I'd like to do, as I went along. I was very pleased to find that people found the end result was both clear and interesting. In response, 30 people got in touch with me with different opportunities. Thirteen of them were people I knew reasonably well; 3 I didn't know at all; 2 were recruiters. I got 4 introductions to people who might be hiring for roles that might be suitable for me. I've had a lot of fascinating conversations and learned about businesses and organisations I hadn't met before. (I did read job listings in newsletters, on websites, and on Linkedin and so on, but there was