A new platform for dialogue on the commons: Earth Commons Rising
George Por recently launched a new conversation place for commons-related developments, which has become lively in a very short time.
The invitation to Earth Commons Rising reads:
“This forum is dedicated to facilitate the emergence of self-organizing, collective intelligence and consciousness of the international commons movement and serve as a virtual “stem cell” for its collective sensing and meaning-making organs.
We want to contribute to spreading the “commons” meme as a viable alternative to market fundamentalism, and to serve as a platform for those who who want to articulate and share their commons-related experience. Doing that work, we are standing in a unitary awareness, presuming the inherent unity of all of Earthkind.”
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Here is his framework for augmenting the collective intelligence of the ecosystem of commons-based initiatives:
“Commons are sustained by “communities working together in self-governing ways in order to protect resources from enclosure or to build new openly-shared resources.” (Charlotte Hess) Self-governance needs shared knowledge. The scalability of commons-based production and distribution depend on the capacity of the communities to augment their collective intelligence.
My motivation is 4-fold:
• Present a framework for making visible and augmenting the collective intelligence of commons-based initiatives and social systems.
• Provide for increasing connectivity in and among commons, by identifying and strengthening generative principles and practices in their knowledge ecosystem.
• Increase the appreciation of how important is to evolve collective sensing and meaning-making organs to the growth and evolution of the commons themselves.
• Illuminate the need for a new research agenda on the Commons and Collective Intelligence; seed conversations for convening a research community focusing on it; and identify key questions to guide future research.
The paper will outline a typology of collective intelligence as a conceptual scaffold to pursue those aims, as presented below.
The price of not supporting the emerging forms of collective action with a framework that can serve as shared reference would be an enclosure on the commons’ invisible collective intelligence, by depriving its users from its full benefits.”
