Christian continues his report from the Peer Economy workshop:
“”Free design is an important building block for spreading peer production, but it is not enough. A second topic discussed in Hiddinghausen was therefore how to facilitate and encourage the sharing and the shared production of physical goods and of services in all areas of life. My proposal here is called the *Commons Network.*
The Commons Network is inspired by the practices of free software and free content projects, where people do things they like to do (such as writing software or texts) and, by doing so, produce goods that are useful for others; but also by the approach of wireless community networks where the participants jointly build a free network, allowing everyone to transfer data through the free network or to access the Internet through it. Community networks are interesting because they organize the free sharing of limited resources that cannot just be copied freely (bandwidth and Internet access). And some community networks are interesting in that they’re self-organizing and self-healing: whenever nodes (participating computers) join or leave such a _mesh network_, it reconfigures itself to ensure that all data still finds the best route through the network.
The idea of the Commons Network is to build a loose network of people and projects that is based on *commons* (goods which are jointly used, managed or owned) and that allows the free sharing and the shared production of goods and resources among everybody who wants to get involved. Ideally, the network should also become a self-organizing and self-healing “mesh,” where production processes spontaneously adapt to the needs and wishes of the people involved and where anybody can join or leave the network without causing disruption.”