Greek political parties for a Commons-oriented society

With the chance of the oncoming Greek elections EEL/LAK, an Athens-based NGO focused on the promotion of FLOSS and the Commons, has recently asked the political parties about their agenda in relation to Open Governance and the Commons. In total, four political parties replied -according to the polls three of them will succeed in electing MPs- proving that there has been a growing interest over the Commons discourse in Greece.

According to the report, Syriza and the Greek Pirate Party have developed a thorough political agenda with Commons-oriented policies for supporting the direct social value creation. It might be of interest that Syriza, the left-wing party that is likely to win the elections, explicitly states its intention to further develop Commons-based reciprocal licenses for open hardware, in the vein of the P2P Foundation’s proposals. Moreover, the creation of networks of distributed micro-factories (fablabs/makerspaces) is considered as another key point of a Commons-oriented political agenda. In addition, both Syriza and the Pirates have clearly defined policies for reforming certain laws and adopting Partner State Approach  practices concerning education, governance and R&D. For example, to mention a few: i) opening the public data; ii) opening every realm of knowledge produced with tax-payers’ money; iii) creating a collaborative environment for small-scale entrepreneurs and co-operatives while favoring initiatives based on open source technologies and practices; iv) developing certain participatory processes (and strengthen the existing ones)  for citizen-engagement in policy-making; v) adopting open standards and patterns for public administration and education.

Further, Pasok, participant in the previous government under the neoliberal party of New Democracy, has a more conservative position about open source, highlighting, however, the importance of open government processes. Moreover, Potami, a party of the “radical center” according to its founders, has a more business-oriented and for-profit understanding of open source.

It might be true that from program to implementation requires extra steps, however the first step seems to have been made: several mainstream political parties are aware of the emerging discourse of the Commons.

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