Original Content
Two announcements this week:
1) I’ve joined the staff of the National Guestworkers Alliance—more on that here.
2) In the crush of the pre-holiday week, you may have missed that we launched a Slack team for HtU in December. If you’re interested in talking more regularly to other HtU readers—be they organizers, technologists, legal/policy folks or researchers—let me know what email to use to invite you!
Robot of the Week
How robots could revolutionize rehab.
Reputation, reputation, reputation
MIT wants to make it possible for you to sell or share your data on your terms.
Organizing Theory
Folks from Stir to Action made this printable infographic of how to set up a freelancers cooperative.
On fundraising in the age of Facebook (as seen through the lens of Humans of New York).
From Partners
The P2P foundation needs your help to build a wiki of open platforms that are designed for sustainable production & living.
Great piece from Greenpeace’s Mobilization Lab about how digital tools are powering worker organizing.
Geeking Out
Are robot mules louder than animal mules? I guess they must be.
I don’t usually pimp things that are hard to sign up for, but this app, Blind, looks like a super-interesting way for workers in global corporations (or just big ones) to talk to each other, anonymously, about what’s going on at work, and how to change it.
What’s Going on in the Workforce
Precursor to Uber & Lyft ridesharing app Sidecar announced they were shutting down at the end of last year. And Uber, btw, just filed a patent that makes it look like they’re getting into the travel business more broadly.
“…the industrial economy appears to have been programmed to remove human beings from the value chain.” Douglas Rushkoff, on how we need to intentionally reprogram our economy, if we want a different result for people.
As we move to real-world RoboCop, make sure you ask, “who’s programming them, and with what biases?”