[Wikimedia-l] Basic income & Wikimedians

[Jonathan Deamer]

Interesting! As a member of the Green Party this is something I've read a little bit about, but it's mostly spoken of in the context of its effects on the welfare state.

The idea that it might increase the level of cognitive surplus available to open source and collaborative projects, and so these projects might have a political interest in encouraging a basic income, is quite novel to me.

FWIW, I think this Financial Times piece by economist Tim Harford offers a nicely readable summary of some of the thinking on the subject 

http://timharford.com/2013/11/a-universal-income-is-not-such-a-silly-idea/

On 9 Jan 2014, at 09:59, Seb35 <seb35wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I would like to speak on this list about the basic income.
> 
> For a TL;DR about the concept, the idea of an (unconditionnal) basic
> income is to give each citizen of a country a sum of money in order to
> fullfill their basic needs: lodging, eat, be healthy. To give an idea of
> the amount, one hears often 800-1000 € in France and I heard 2500 CHF in
> Switzerland. If people want to earn more, their work income will be in
> addition of this basic income. You can read more on the Wikipedia articles
> ([1] and other languages). Be aware, this idea is as strange as Wikipedia
> when one discovers it.
> 
> As a Wikipmedian, I dream of such a basic income: it would empower the
> people to edit the Wikimedia projects by giving them libre time (libre as
> free speech). I don’t think Wikimedia itself should support this to avoid
> being involved in politics, but probably many Wikipmedians could be
> interested in this idea.
> 
> For the European citizens, there is currently an official call (an ECI
> [2]) to support this idea at the European level, see [3] ; this call ends
> in one week (yes, the 200,000 signatures is a bit far of the million
> signatures needed). In Switzerland, a popular legislative initiative
> collected more than the 100,000 needed signatures in September 2013, and
> this will lead to a nationwide referendum about the basic income there.
> 
> Any thoughts about that?
> 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens'_Initiative
> [3] http://sign.basicincome2013.eu/
> 
> ~ Seb35 [^_^]
> 
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