Creating Living Economies

This is a big topic, but here are some highlights:

• The Internet is a great way to publish and discover information.
• Though, software needs hardware, and Computer Hardware strongly impacts the planet. Hardware is also often built on the opposite end of the living economy spectrum - leveraging the flawed "some winners, and mostly losers" one-size-fits-all global economic system. A healthy global economy is one that supports a diversity of living economies that depend on fair trade, democratic sovereignty, competition as well as cooperation, and a recognition of triple-bottom-line ("people, planet, profits") as a requirement to doing business sustainably.
• Availability of diverse software depends on factors such as competition, access to markets, access to economic resources, and legal systems. Software developed with Open Source methods has many parallels with trying to build a living economy - it supports diversity of products and production methods, doesn't necessarily require large corporations, and can give many advantages to smaller organizations and economies. What is Open Source Software?

So your choice of software, whose products/services you buy and support, and hardware decisions (for example, the goal of selling you software upgrades often drives the treadmill of throwing out perfectly good equipment), etc - all directly impacts the planet as well as our choices in the future.