P2P Foundation

The public information belongs to the citizens. So do the forests. These are only some of the messages that the promising, ongoing Tilaphos project aims to spread over the Greek society (see the Tilaphos blog and the Tilaphos reforestation platform). Tilaphos experiments with the collective participation and social collaboration organized through the Web, trying to compensate for Greek state’s inefficiency and incompetence, regarding the provision of original data about reforestation issues. Through the Tilaphos project citizens contribute – mainly via a GPS based method – to the creation of a large database concerning the reforestation of the recently burnt areas. Tilaphos’ database is freely distributable under source reference (as the initiators of the project remark “you can freely distribute the data, having the ethical obligation that you refer to its source”) towards the realization of the need for an emancipated public data sphere. In my view this venture is something more than an effort to compensate for a governmental incompetence. Tilaphos project shows that when the means of production (i.e. knowledge, technology, data etc) are being distributed, people together achieve much more. Such a phrase may sound as a platitude, but governments and people have not still realized the economic, social and political effectiveness  and importance of the collaborative production and social sharing. Only a true, invigorated informational Commons can guarantee for the sustainability of the scarce, physical one.