Our New Organizational Structure

We’re pleased to announce that the P2P Foundation’s structure has recently been reorganized around three distinct operational hubs. Given the nature of our work, the distinction between them may be porous. These three entities are as follows:

The P2P Foundation commons itself, which observes, interconnects, stimulates and theorizes on knowledge production around the emergence of a commons economy and society. This work is led by Michel Bauwens through outreach, lecturing, writing, publishing and online documentation. The P2P Foundation is the umbrella organization under which Commons Transition and the P2P Lab (and other projects) operate interdependently. The following individuals operate as stewards in key areas: James Burke as operations and finance steward, Vasilis Niaros as the sustainability steward, Stacco Troncoso as the strategic direction steward, and Ann Marie Utratel as communications steward.

Commons Transition is now the main communication and advocacy hub of the P2P Foundation. Through the leadership of Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, CT continues producing accessible documentation to effectively spread our commons-based and -oriented ideas and experiences, appealing to civil society actors and policy makers. CT is also building a new transnational activist network identified with the Commons to broaden these ideas into mainstream awareness.

The P2P Lab is now the research hub of the P2P Foundation. The P2P Lab operates as a concrete lab in northern Greece and as a global research network. They also track academic peer-reviewed publications around p2p and the commons (including the works of our core collaborators), and obtain grants for research. The work is led by Vasilis Kostakis and Vasilis Niaros with the collaboration of commons-oriented researchers, such as Penny Travlou and Rachel O’Dwyer.

Below are some of the achievements of these 3 hubs:

Michel Bauwens talks about the P2P Foundation at OuishareFest 2015

P2P Foundation

2015 was an extremely busy year for in-person outreach, through seven months of travelling on three continents for Michel Bauwens with the personal assistance of Kevin Flanagan. Notable highlights include two weeks in Madison, Wisconsin (USA) working with the Real Utopias project of Eric Olin Wright; one month in Cassis, France at the Fondation Camargo, working on the outreach of a French book on P2P; one month in Catalonia, Spain (see the CIC project below); participating on commons outreach in the Edge Funders network in Baltimore, Maryland (USA); and two weeks in South Africa with our colleague Irma Wilson of Futuresharp.

We worked on urban transitions, collaborating with Christian Iaione of LabGov, visiting and supporting the Bologna project and the City as a Commons conference of the IASC. We have also fostered relationships with individuals in Podemos and the citizen-led government coalitions in Barcelona and Madrid, and with the XES solidarity economy network. These relationships will be nurtured in 2016. We participated in the European Cultural Foundation’s Idea Camp in Stockholm, and at OuishareFest 2015 in Paris.

L-R: Kevin Flanagan, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel and Jaime Arredondo at OuishareFest 2015

This year we have also diversified our public presentations by adding new voices to share the P2P Foundation’s core message. Kevin Flanagan represented the Foundation at the International summit on domestic affairs, the World Social Forum in Tunisia and the Reinforcing Local Participation for a Democratic Europe conference. Stacco Troncoso delivered keynote presentations on the need for a Commons Transition at the Economy, People and Planet conference in Copenhagen and the Degrowth Public Policies conference in Portugal, and attended events such as Smart CSOs: Re-imagining Activism in Berlin, joined by other members of the Commons Transition Network.

Our proposals to create an independent political and social voice for commoners gained traction in 2015. Chambers of the Commons and similar were created in Chicago (USA) and several cities in France, and a local Commons Transition Coalition in Australia was formed, all following Michel’s visits. We met with: the Green Party parliamentary group (Belgium); the chairman of the Flemish Christian-democratic party; the chairman of the Flemish socialist party; and local officials (including mayors, ministers) in New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland, indicating an emerging interest in our approach. Reports of our work appeared in major articles in leading newspapers and magazines in several countries.

In the educational sphere, the team including Kevin Flanagan and John Restakis worked on several efforts. We spent a week of teaching on commons economics at Schumacher College in April. We also organized the very first P2P Foundation Summer School, on ‘the art of commoning’, at Cloughjordan Ecovillage in August.

The P2P Foundation also continued to diligently curate and nurture the knowledge commons through its two traditional outlets: The P2P Foundation Wiki and the P2P Foundation blog. Noted contributors to the blog have included: David Bollier, Carmen Lozano Bright, Kevin Carson, Kevin Flanagan, Sepp Hasslberger, Øyvind Holmstad, Guy James, Vasilis Kostakis, Rajesh Makwana, Nathan Schneider, Penny Travlou, and the team from las Indias, among a great many others.

L-R Kevin Flanagan, Michel Bauwens, Vivian Paulissen at IdeaCamp 2015. Image by Julio Albarrán

Commons Transition

The Commons Transition project was initially conceived as a wiki to house modified policy proposals from the FLOK society project, adapted to be more generally useful (non-nation specific). The Commons Transition team rethought the project and developed a broader set of tools with an eye towards expansion in both communications and advocacy. Commons Transition has become an umbrella project and “brand”, with an outreach effort and nascent set of forward-thinking partnerships in addition to a group of social media-friendly websites showcasing the commons in action. The key elements are listed below.

Web Presence: The main Commons Transition website contains introductory and policy materials, a free e-book download, FAQ, etc. Commons Transition Stories is a web magazine section with inspiring content for commoners worldwide. Its various subsections include: News and Articles, Commoners in Transition and The 100 Women of P2P (both feature exclusive interviews with changemakers), and Video. The Special Reports section is indexed with links and augmented with diagrams and footnotes. Each report has a corresponding version in the Commons Transition Wiki, and PDF downloads. We expand our Wiki with sector-specific solutions and policy ideas, and feature a dedicated portal for Law for the Commons Wiki. We also created a policy-engagement platform, Commons Transition Consulting, for administrations seeking to learn more about Commons Transition. Our communications ecosystem is growing: The Commons Transition Facebook page has over 1,800 followers, and more than 80,000 visits. We are also present on Twitter, G+, and Minds, and have started a Commons Transition Loomio group for public discussion.

Images from Commons Transition Stories

Commons Transition Networking and Projects: We’re developing alliances under the banner of the Commons Transition Network. Partners to date include the Center for Planetary Culture, Platform Cooperativism, the Rules and Share the World’s Resources. We are planning joint actions to build a new transnational activist network identified with the Commons to broaden into mainstream awareness.

We also continue working with communities wishing to adapt the Commons Transition approach to their prefigurative systems, including the Catalan Integral Coop (CIC). The P2PF spent a week with the CIC, studying their projects, giving lectures on P2P and building relationships. This sub-project was also awarded one of the first Robin Hood Coop collective grants, and our colleague George Dafermos will visit Catalonia in 2016 to continue our collaborative work developing their bio-regional, civil society-led Commons Transition plan. In Spain, we will be working more closely with our contacts in Podemos and the citizen-led government coalitions in Madrid and Barcelona in the coming year.

The P2P Lab

The P2P Lab, along with its network of fellows and collaborators from all over the world, has been mostly active in a theoretical basis in 2015, focusing primarily on transitional scenarios in various academic research fields as well as imagining visions for a commons-oriented economy and society.

Our full output for 2015 as well as other information, like our open call for new collaborators, may be found in the Lab’s webspace. In a nutshell, this past year the Lab has produced pieces of academic work that look into subjects like smart cities; open source technologies (such as 3d printing) in education; digital economies; the relationship between law and technological advancement; and most importantly the advent of a new production model called “design global – manufacture local”.

At the same time, we have designed large scale research projects and mapped out their materialization by securing research partners and exploring funding opportunities.

Summary: the 3 Strategic Priorities for the Peer to Peer Commons

Stream 1: Alternative Eco-system for Open and Cooperative Peer Production.

For Stream 1 we continued outreach on Open Cooperativism and presented our findings in numerous cooperative meetings, including the Platform Cooperativism conference in NYC. We also co-organized the Commons Strategy Group report on the subject. A highlight of this stream was our 10-day visit to New Zealand organized by Enspiral to study ethical enterprise coalitions. We examined finance for commons production with the CSG, and connected with RIPESS on a open solidarity economy. Progress on the Copyfair license has been limited, but the proposition was clarified through workshops in the Francophone sphere.

Stream 2: Cultural, political and policy transitions for a commons-centric society.

For Stream 2, Commons Transition continued to provide comprehensive, accessible overviews of the P2P/Commons movement through its various websites (see above). We also traveled extensively to discuss aspects of the Commons Transition with prefigurative communities and commons-oriented policymakers.

Stream 3: Sustainability Manufacturing and an Open Source Circular Economy.

For Stream 3, we functioned as an ambassador and mentor to the POC21.cc project on a sustainable circular economy and, with the P2P Lab, published two theoretical papers establishing the case for the thermodynamic efficiencies of the open source circular economy. (See “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model” and “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”).

L-R: Ann Marie Utratel, Stacco Troncoso, Michel Bauwens and James Burke. Image by Kevin Flanagan

Looking ahead to 2016

2016 will see a strong push in P2P Foundation publishing, mainly in general-reader level materials including synthetic summaries of our work and accumulated understandings, as a consolidation of our efforts of the last decade. Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation team will undertake a full schedule of intensive travel and speaking engagements, including a two-week intensive lecture tour in Belgium and the Netherlands on the occasion of the new second edition of the p2p book, “De Wereld Redden”. Other trips planned include an European trip in September, and an Australian tour in October.

Michel has also been invited by Erik Olin Wright to spend four months at the Havens Center at the University of Wisconsin, to write a ‘anchor essay’ for the Real Utopias series, (likely to be published by Verso along with commentary essays), which will be a rewrite of the 2005 P2P Manifesto.

Other publishing projects include a book on urban transitions (co-edited with Christian Iaione), and a mass-market book for the English-speaking market composed of interviews between Jean Lievens and Michel Bauwens, following the model of the French and Flemish best-sellers.

The P2PLab and the Blaqswans collective (Xavier Rizos, et al.), we will continue our progress on the sustainable manufacturing front through the study of the thermo-dynamic efficiencies of peer production (calculating them with added engineering and financial expertise). We will also collaborate in two Deep Dives with our colleagues at the Commons Strategies Group, one on ‘The Commons and the State’ and the other on ‘Value in a Commons Economy”, in the spring and fall of 2016.

Regarding Commons Transition, we will intensify our networking and outreach strategy by working to popularize the Commons as a unifying context for changemakers, and create an impact in popular culture. A key priority is the renewal of the P2P Foundation blog and landing page, plus project proposals regarding Open Cooperativism and new Commons Transition plans for policymakers, expanding our commons-oriented services portfolio.

The P2P Foundation’s role in the EU-funded P2Pvalue project will intensify in this final year, with additional research work planned in collaboration with the other project teams, outreach support for the open-source software created as part of the project, and a final event to close the project in September 2016.

Finally, the P2P Lab will attempt to further empirically explore and expand the theoretical work that has been produced in 2015. Through the various research projects, we will look into subjects like the aforementioned model of “design global – manufacture local”; open value networks; patents and technological development. More information may be found here. Further, as ever, the lab will be open to collaborate on projects that fit within the scope of our research interests and ethics, and we will gladly provide freely our assistance in work whose output is a commons.

In summary, the activities of the P2P Lab and Commons Transition will be melded into the P2P Foundation, establishing a common work output that functions in two interrelated levels. First, the research-oriented output of the Lab, influenced by the socio-political pursuits of Commons Transition; and second, the outreach efforts of Commons Transition that are informed and supported by the Lab’s work.

This review was collaboratively written by Michel Bauwens, Ann Marie Utratel, Vasilis Niaros, Vasilis Kostakis and Stacco Troncoso.

Lead image by Benh LIEU SONG.

The post What the P2P Foundation did in 2015 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We live in a contradictory world, just as it is undoubtedly true that problems are worsening in the dominant system — including ecological destruction, increased social inequality, and increased state repression — just as true is the fact that there is an exponential rise in the creation of non-state, non-corporate initiatives in which citizens the world over are taking matters into their own hands. Many of the below trends were identified last year — we only mention them again here if they significantly matured.

Perhaps the main negative development in the field of p2p, and the commons, was the abandoning of the transformative change program by Syriza, which highlights the failure of the traditional Left to believe in its own promise for transition. This points to a strong need for a renewal of politics around a Commons Transition program. It is therefore particularly heartening to see the simultaneous creation this year of several local commons groups, such as Assemblies and Chambers of the Commons.

There is much to rejoice in the list below. There is now a palette of p2p-based solutions that can be used by those that are serious about reconstructing our world with distributed infrastructures, shared resources and commons, and livelihoods around such engagements.

We’re particularly happy this year to see the strengthening of post-corporate business eco-systems such as Enspiral that are co-creating commons. As we confront climate change, the capacity to drastically reduce consumption while supporting decent lives point to the need to use peer production to dramatically augment the “thermo-dynamic efficiencies” of our current production system. While we are in the early stages of a transition from the failing old system to a new one, the good news is that the transition has started nearly everywhere — civil society is responding to the combined market and state failures.

Refugee Action protest, Melbourne. Image by Takver

1. Poor-to-Poor, Peer-to-Peer: The year of self-organized mass migration and “trans-migrants”

This was the year in which mass migrations of millions of war refugees [1] were organized by social media (specifically through secret Facebook groups) and in which scores of citizens organized themselves through peer-to-peer networks to assist them. This is also the year of publication of a major book on transmigration, i.e. the movements of people who come to the West not to stay, but in rotational organization, often organized as ethnic and religious phyles, as documented in the book by Alain Tarrius, entitled, Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer [2] (Editions de l’Aube, 2015). The P2P in the subtitle is justified by the absolutely essential role that the Internet plays in all stages of these circuits — for example, from taking orders for Chinese electronics to warning at which market at which time they will be delivered. One example many Europeans may be familiar with are the indigenous people from Otavallo, Ecuador — with their pan-flute music and sale of Alpacca wool in many European cities with over 40,000 people — who are responsible for one third of the local GDP; and also the Sufi brotherhoods from Senegal, selling not-so-authentic luxury goods on the continent’s beaches. Tarius has uncovered many such circuits, linking the poor of the Global South, to the immigrant neighborhoods of Western countries.

From the ethnic and religious phyles described here — i.e. business ecosystems at the service of communities and their commons — we move to our next trend, which sees similar ecosystems now evolving for affinity-based peer production communities.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our P2P Solidarity Section

From left: Sophie Jerram (Letting Space), Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation) and Alanna Krause (Enspiral Foundation).

2. Inspired by Enspiral: The further maturation of post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions

The ethnic and religious phyles cited above are mirrored by the strengthening of affinity-based commons-oriented business eco-systems.

We mentioned their emergence as one of the great trends of 2014, and they have mostly continued to grow and mature. Beyond the corporation, there are now budding seed forms of post-corporate business eco-systems that are creating livelihoods for productive communities and their commons, such as Enspiral with Loomio and the open hardware designs of Sensorica.

This year, I visited Enspiral in their heartland of New Zealand, seeing them up close and I very much liked what I saw.

Here’s a good description from Josef Davies-Coates:

Enspiral is made up of three parts: The Enspiral Foundation, Enspiral Services, and Startup Ventures. I’d say they’re the best current example of an Open Co-op, but how they actually describe themselves is as “a virtual and physical network of companies and professionals working together to create a thriving society” and as an “experiment to create a collaborative network that helps people do meaningful work.” A core part of their strategy is to open source their model. In short, not only are they doing almost exactly what United Diversity wants to do, they’re also building the open source tools actually needed to do it!

The Enspiral Foundation is the charitable company at the heart of the Enspiral network. It’s the legal custodian of assets held collectively by the network, and the entity with which companies and individuals have a formal relationship. Decisions are made using Loomio and budgets are set using Cobudget.

A network of professionals work together in teams to offer Enspiral Services, a range of business services under one roof. By default, members pool 20 percent of their invoices into a collective bucket, 25 percent of which goes to the Foundation. Loomio and Cobudget are then used to decide how to spend the rest. For Startup Ventures, Enspiral works with social entrepreneurs to launch startups who then support the work of the Foundation and Enspiral, as a whole, through flexible revenue share agreements: ventures choose their own contribution rate, usually around 5 percent of revenue.

Check our wiki descriptions of Enspiral, Las Indias, Sensorica, Ethos, and Fora do Eixo.

Ouishare and other partners organized a seminar to examine these new practices this December, here is their video presentation reflecting the emergences of these practices.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on the new open corporate formats, see Open Company Formats and specifically on the post-corporate ethical entrepreneurial coalitions, see here.

Tarragona Concurs Castells taken by calafellvalo, on Flickr.

3. The Collaborative Technology Alliance, digital synergy, and the blockchain: making the alternative P2P infrastructure interoperable

While it is too early to predict how successful this effort will be, I consider the meeting and the launch of this alliance, which brings together post-corporate alliances like Enspiral and a dozen others, to be a pivot. The aim is not to compete with hacker alternatives to Facebook, but simply to make already used technology — like Loomio and Cobudget for Enspiral — interoperable with each other. This is definitely the most realistic strategy to arrive at a interconnection of ethical and non-netarchical technologies.

A similar initiative is growing in France and the francophone world, under the name Synergie Numerique.

• Doing more together, together: seeding a Collaborative Technology Alliance
• For P2P Foundation documentation on technological peer to peer infrastructures, see here our P2P Infrastructure Section

The City as a Commons Conference, Bologna, Italy

4. From Urban Commons to The City as a Commons: political commons transitions at the city level

This year the IASC, the venerable scholarly association which continues the work of Elinor Ostrom, held a memorable conference that sealed the evolution from paying attention to commons in the city to actually seeing the whole city as a commons. The work of Christian Iaione and his team at LabGov, co-responsible already for the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, is exemplary for this trend, which is expanding in a number of other Italian cities (co-mantova, co-palermo, co-battaglia…). This evolution parallels the historic wins of the commons-oriented municipal coalitions in a number of Spanish cities, such as the En Comu coalition in Barcelona. In Saillans, France, and in Frome, UK — with their Flatpack Democracy Toolkit — civic coalitions displaced the political parties, and the big win of a progressive coalition in Grenoble, was also a vindication of citizen-centric attitudes by the political parties in this coalition.

• Commons Transition: Stories on Urban Commons. Urban Commons entry in the Law for the Commons Wiki. See also Urbanism and Municipalism in the Commons Transition Wiki.
• For P2P Foundation documentation on commons-centric urbanism, see our Urbanism Section

Poster from Le Temps des Communs Festival

5. The launch of independent, commons-centric civic organisations

I called for this about three years ago, but they are finally emerging.

A proto-Assembly of the Commons has been operating in Ghent, Belgium, and on the occasion of a big francophone city festival on the commons (Villes en Commun), Toulouse and a few other French cities launched Assemblies of the Commons. A Europe-wide Assembly meeting is planned at the EU-level. In Chicago, a Chamber of the Commons was launched and, just this month, a Commons Transition Coalition for Melbourne and other places in Australia. This means that commoners will increasingly learn to have a political and social voice.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on P2P and commons movements, see our section on P2P Movements

POC21 Trailer: “The World We Need” from POC21 cc on Vimeo.

6. The Poc 21, OSCE Days and the blockchain-based open supply chains as important steps toward an Open Source Circular Economy

Poc21.cc was a great project by Ouishare and Open State that brought together a dozen sustainable open hardware projects in an attempt to interconnect them as a miniature circular economy, a proof of concept to be given to the COP21 organizers who failed once more to offer a real solution to climate change (though the imperfect agreement is, at least, a first positive step in the light of previous failures to even come to an agreement). Watch the video of the experience here.

The OSCE Days organized by Lars Zimmerman, et al, were also a great set of experiences that spread the message about the crucial necessity for open sourcing productive supply chains. The Provenance group has written an essential report outlining how the blockchain may play a vital role in this.

How the blockchain could function in this mutual coordination economy — particularly in the context of open source participatory and open value chains that operate as eco-systems — is the object of a White Paper by the Provenance group [3].

Also check the work of Bob Haugen, Lynn Foster, and others at Sensorica on Radically Distributed Supply Chain Systems and Network Resource Planning, in particular, the software projects around the open value flow projectsuch as Mikorizal, and converging projects like Wezer by the Valeureux group in France.

At the P2P Foundation, we theorized for the first time, the overall thermodynamic efficiencies that will come out of the open source stack and, with the help of the Blaqswans Collective, will be calculating the effects more seriously in the coming year.

Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

1. Article [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text
2. Article [2015] “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”. text

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sustainable_Manufacturing. See also the Open Source Circular Economy.
• Commons Transition Stories on the blockchain.

Platform Cooperativism Conference, NYC. Image by Trebor Scholz.

7. Platform Cooperativism, Commonfare, and the new mutuals for precarious labor

Last year, we made a call for the convergence of the cooperative/solidarity economy models with the open commons model, i.e. for Open Cooperativism, and the Commons Strategies Group published a very good report on it, Toward an Open Cooperativism. This year, the realisation that the sharing economy is becoming dominated by huge monopolistic and extractive groups like Uber and Airbnb (the theme of the OuishareFest 2015 was “Lost in Transition” and referred to this) has created a first important reaction, i.e. a push for Platform Cooperativism, with thousands of attendees invited to New York City by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.

In platform co-ops, whose functions is to ease exchanges amongst peers, the commons’ part is the platform itself, which is owned by the different stakeholders, or at least those that most directly produce the value together. Amongst the examples cited in New York City were Stocksy, an artist-owned stock-photography website, and Resonate, a cooperative music streaming platform. Last year, we also mentioned Commonfare developments, which denotes the new solidarity mechanisms being instituted by precarious but networked workers, with examples such as the Dutch Broodfonds, the German Solidago, and the health-sharing ministries in the U.S. like the Freelancers Union, but also more commercial variants like Friendsurance.

This year, what has come to the fore, especially in the Francophone world, are the mutuals for independent workers, such as Coopaname, which allow independent workers to ally themselves and be part of the more official social solidarity mechanisms instead of being second class citizens as ‘independents’. The Belgian think-tank Saw-B has an excellent report on their emergence and growth (see Organisations solidaires pour les travailleurs de l’economie collaborative) and pinpoints the strategies to make them evolve into real labor mutuals (“mutuelles de travail”).

Important this year has been the news on the announced basic income experiments in both the Netherlands and Finland, but the utmost caution is advisable here as there are most likely projects that aim to do away with the basic social protections of the welfare state, and not improve on it. The announced 800 Euro amount in Finland probably can’t even cover rental costs.

• Commons Transition: Open Cooperativism Definition, Stories on Open Cooperativism. See also David Bollier’s and Pat Conaty’s Open Coops report
• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open and Platform cooperativism, see our Cooperatives Section and dedicated sections on Open and Platform Cooperativism.

Video for the Mutual Aid Network’s Crowfund Campaign. Contribute here!

8. The Emergence of Meta-Economic Networks for ethical value streams

As we argue in our 20-minute introductory video to the P2P Foundation strategy for change, millions of people are already involved in solving the three systemic crises caused by the present dominant system, i.e. they are working on sustainability, solidarity, and openness. The problem being however, that the three streams are not connected to each other, but even within them, fragmentation reigns. As I was told by Jason Nardi, the community-supported agriculture movement in Italy alone probably has a dozen different ordering systems. Thus, it becomes more and more important to not just align the initiatives as organisations, but to create integrate value streams for the ethical economy.

The most advanced practical project is probably the Mutual Aid Network in Madison, Wisconsin, which is already expanding beyond the city to places as far away as South Africa (Bergnek project). Very advanced conceptually, having developed ten criteria to assess commons-centric economic players, is the Encommuns.org project in Lille, northern France. And certainly worth mentioning is the integral accounting method developed for a Common Good Economy by Christian Felber in Austria used by 300+ companies. The solidarity economy movement itself is now working on developing “solidarity districts.”

• For P2P Foundation documentation on open value accounting and streams, see our section on P2P Accounting

Wikihouse NZ at the Makertorium at Te Papa. Read more here.

9. The Cosmo-Localization of WikiHouse, and other seed forms for a new wave of open platforms for sustainable living and housing

There was a time where we could think of projects like the Tabby, RiverSimple, or Wikispeed, i.e. the open source car projects, as people wanting to simply produce their own cars. And the same could be said of WikiHouse. But visiting the latter in Christchurch, New Zealand, I had a epiphany of sorts. That is far from what they are… they are, in fact, potentially and emergently, open platforms for sustainable living and housing, integrating the world’s knowledge so that every ethical entrepreneur can start building sustainable housing. In this, they are the budding business eco-systems of tomorrow, getting ready as seed forms to replace the extractive industrial system. Watch out for the new system of production, where “what is light is global and what is heavy is local,” called Cosmo-Localization by our Melbourne-based friend José Ramos.

The Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland has a regular column visiting such innovating seed platforms.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable housing, see our section on Housing

The Law for the Commons Wiki.

10. The initiation of a legal tradition for the Commons

For several years, we have been collating the evolution of a new law of the commons on our P2P Foundation website, but David Bollier has published a synthetic overview this year that does a lot to advance our understanding of this trend. See David’s work as compiled in the Law for the Commons Wiki.

The new book by Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community [4], is another illustration of this trend, and the progressive Catholic journalist Nathan Schneider has argued that the Pope’s latest encyclical, Laudate Si, is part of that same evolution.

• Law for the Commons Wiki
• More Law for the Commons material at the Commons Strategies Group Website
• For P2P Foundation documentation on the emergence of P2P and Commons Law, see our section on P2P Law and David Bollier’s four part memorandum on Law for the Commons.

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• Article cross-posted from Shareable.com
• Image by opensource.com

The post The Top Ten P2P Trends of 2015 appeared first on P2P Foundation.