Launch of The Interdependence and .idt

The Interdependence

During the second week of the online Liviana conference The Interdependence was launched to an international audience.

The Interdependence is a multi-local alliance between community economies initiatives that identify as being part of the alliance by using the identifier .idt, an alternative to more familiar identifiers such as .ltd or Inc.

The Interdependence exists to make visible and to support people and organisations who perceive themselves as interdependent with others, and part of a larger movement to create economies that have the well-being of people and the planet at their core.

At the launch, Bianca Elzenbaumer from the Community Economies Institute and Brave New Alps described how The Interdependence was a 10-year journey involving artists, practitioners and academics engaging the community economies research and practice, with the idea being formalised in the last two years through a series of workshops, including the Redrawing the Economy workshops held in Columbia, Finland, South Korea and the UK.

Elzenbaumer said “The Interdependence is a practical demonstration of the community economies commitment to proliferation and ubiquity as a way of scaling community economies and responding to the naysayers who are often too-quick to say that community economies initiatives are nice but not scalable; we say ‘Ubiquity is our scale! We are many! We are together! We are already here! Join us!’”

In her remarks, Katherine Gibson highlighted how the creativity of artists has played a crucial role in shaping new ways of thinking about community economies and generating an efflorescence of connections, a sentiment echoed by Katharine McKinnon, the Chair of the Community Economies Institute, in her comments.

The .idt logo for The Interdependence was introduced by the designers, Renata Šifrar from Mainly Afternoon and Gaja Mežnarič-Osole from Trajna Collective, who explained how they aimed to create a simple logo that could applied in different settings, including in community and more official channels, and that had an organic feel, captured in the seed-like shape and the soil-like colour.

Kathrin Böhm, from Company Drinks, invited people to register their community economy initiative on The Interdependence website so they could access the open source logo and start using it to help make .idt a ubiquitous global phenomenon.

The launch also included presentations from some of the early adaptors of .idt who are listed on The Interdependence website:

 

For more information see, The Interdependence.

 

Jenny Cameron

Photo by Jennifer Balcombe