I frequently encounter a notion, among those drawn to cooperatives, that a cooperative should be an amorphous, faceless collective in which old-world skills and norms of leadership can be discarded. How does this work out for them? Not well.

Usually one of two entirely predictable things happens as a result — and generally both. One is a tyranny of structurelessness in which there are leaders who claim not to be leaders and therefore can’t be held accountable. Another is that nobody takes serious responsibility for anything, because there is no incentive or recognition for doing so; as soon as the most par-for-the-course challenge arises, everyone throws up their hands and walks away.

I won’t name names, but we know who we are. I’ve been guilty of practicing both of these myself.

One of the things that I gradually have come to realize, especially while writing Everything for Everyone, is that the co-op tradition is full of amazing leaders. Their stories are too little-known, even among cooperators, perhaps because of the story we tell ourselves that leaders aren’t needed here. But you can’t get far in the history without encountering remarkable examples.

Founders must be leaders. Consider people like Mary and Lloyd Anderson, who founded REI, or Alfonse Desjardins, who built Quebec’s co-op banking system, or Michael Shadid, the Lebanese doctor who founded a pioneering cooperative hospital in Oklahoma, or Albert McKnight, a pan-Africanist Catholic priest who helped build infrastructure for Black-owned co-ops in the South, or Murray Lincoln, an architect of Nationwide Mutual and parts of the electric co-op system, or many more people you may have never heard of in the US Cooperative Hall of Fame. And of course I had the chance to meet many more leaders in our midst today, like Brianna Wettlaufer of Stocksy, Enric Duran of the Catalan Integral Cooperative and FairCoop, Felipe Witchger of Community Purchasing Alliance, and Irene Aguilar, a doctor and state senator who fought for a co-op health system in my home state of Colorado. There are so many more.

Creating anything new in the world, especially something that runs against the grain, requires courageous and visionary individuals, tied to resourceful communities. These people are frequently stubborn, demanding of those around them, and adept in conflict. We should not expect anything less, yet somehow cooperators too often assume that co-ops can transcend this basic reality of social life.

The necessity of strong leadership in new co-ops is a principal assumption behind Start.coop, the new equity accelerator for co-ops on whose inaugural board I serve. We’re very aware that unless we support the founders above all, their co-ops will never get founded.

Members must be leaders. Just as new co-ops often try to be leaderless, legacy co-op members can forget the leadership of their founding and neglect their own responsibility to support leaders among them. Not only do we need co-op members who know they are members and who can recite the cooperative principles, we need members with the vision and tenacity to challenge their co-ops to be ever better. Here, the stories are even harder to come by, but they are happening all the time — in cases like the transformation of Pedernales Electric Cooperative in Texas or the ongoing struggle for economic and racial justice in Mississippi’s co-op utilities.

Another organization whose board I have recently joined is We Own It, which supports co-op members across the United States who are organizing to revive the democracy in their co-ops. Here, again, the strategy is leadership development; our flagship program is a fellowship for members poised to be leaders in changing their co-ops for the better.

Leaders must be accountable. There are, of course, differences between leadership in co-ops and that in other kinds of organizations. Leaders in investor-owned firms must be chiefly accountable upward, to wealthy investors. Co-op leaders should have accountability that points downward, or horizontally, to members. Co-op leaders should recognize accountability as a strength; leaders depend on their communities in everything they do, just as Wall Street CEOs depend on the support of their profit-seeking backers. Being accountable is a way of being in solidarity and of making leadership work.

Accountability, however, cannot overwhelm leadership. When members recognize the need to have and support leaders among them, they also grant those leaders the space to lead — even to make mistakes. They choose leaders intentionally, rather than relying on the vagaries of charismatic authority and background privilege to choose for them, and they honor the responsibility those leaders have taken on. They root for their leaders, whoever they are. Then, they identify specific mechanisms of oversight and recall through which real accountability can happen.

Don’t reinvent too many wheels at once. I am drawn, like many cooperators today, to the ideal of a world in which we are all equally leaders of our own lives, interacting through ever more radically direct forms of democracy. I still row in that direction through my research and activism. But when I’m advising co-op founders struggling for a foothold in an economy slanted steeply against them, I find myself more and more leaning toward conservatism — toward the examples of remarkable, accountable, not-necessarily-radical leaders of cooperatives past.

For our co-ops to survive and transform communities, we don’t need to reinvent every single wheel of organizational life at once. It’s powerful enough if you can flip a few critical levers — like who owns a company and how its most high-level policies are decided. When you do that, some of those old, widespread habits of old-fashioned organizational life can take on new meaning. Leadership, for instance. When people exhibit vision, talent, and tenacity for building the next generation of democratic enterprise, we should support them with all we have, rather than pretend we can do without them.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website.

Photo credit: Striking Photography by Bo Insogna on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

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London Renters Union is starting up with the aim of transforming the housing system in London. In particular it wants to make life less terrible for those who have to rent privately in one of the most absurd and brutal housing markets in the world. The renters union is a way of saying ‘no’ to rents that damage our quality of life, to evictions at the drop of a hat, to abusive landlords, to slum conditions in one of the richest cities in the world. We are stating that people should have more control over their housing than this, and we are willing to fight for it.

The birth of the union

It began with the coming together of organisations. After decades of absurd and damaging economic and housing policies creating a ‘housing crisis’, many organisations had sprang up across London to fight for better housing. Some of the people involved in existing housing struggles began to see a need for a new organisation, one focused on the private rented sector, designed from scratch to be a mass-membership London-wide organisation with a stomach for a fight.

An initial steering group for the project was made up of representatives from existing organisations, all experienced activists. After some initial groundwork the group opened out to other people. It attracted first other experienced activists, then more and more people new to political organising. The need for a renters union in London is so clear that recruitment among the politically aware is almost effortless. But in order to expand, and in order to create a truly broad and diverse membership base, we had to go out and begin talking to those outside of our usual circles.

First though, we had a lot of planning to do. Starting a truly mass-based democratic membership organisation is, it turns out, tricky. One of the difficulties is that not many people in the UK have done such a thing recently. There isn’t a long history or extensive experience to draw upon. Instead we had to refer to, for example, the co-operative sector, in order to come up with a formal constitution. For the organising we wanted to do we had to draw on the few groups in London that have really tried organising from scratch and at scale. As for how to run large membership organisations, we had to learn about organising in other countries, primarily the US and Spain. Such a large project always has ancestry, and London Renters Union has international roots.

Then there were the meetings. You cannot set up a small organisation without meetings. You cannot set up a big organisation without a lot of meetings, or not if you want to be democratic. The way we organised together was important to us: we do not want to organise on behalf of other people, we want to organise together with each other. This requires, besides people’s time, space to meet in a city where nearly every inch is exploited to the max. We have drawn on nearly every radical organising space in London at some point in our formation. Resources put together when the renters union was not yet dreamt of were happy to accommodate us. The level of understanding extended to us by other organisations has been a joy to experience.

A union needs people

Not only space has been made available: advice and expertise has poured in from so many organisations that it would be difficult to list them all. When we have felt stretched to the limit people with experience in other organisations have joined us. We have recruited amazing paid staff with years of experience in other political projects. The impossibility of the London housing market draws people in, and so does the ambition of the renters union. It sometimes feels as though there is a collective wish among organisations and individuals to create a new grassroots force against the London housing market. It needn’t necessarily be a force called the London Renters Union, but many people see in us a chance to create something big and powerful in opposition to the rule of landlords and investors.

Having built the framework of an organisation, we went out and began meeting individuals on the doorstep and on the street, starting in the borough of Newham. We confronted people with a request to join an organisation of mutual aid, different even to the unions they might join at work, more democratic, more led by the members. The novelty of the request often surprises people, but there is also widespread agreement that the situation of private renters in London should be improved.

One of the big factors that determines whether or not people join the union is whether they believe that action they can take is able to improve the situation. Part of the renters union’s task, it turns out, is to create a collective self-belief, to challenge the depression and lassitude into which many people have fallen, beaten down by the market and the authorities. It is heartening to watch people move from conviction that nothing can change to conviction that they can make change. Hope is one of the most beautiful things the union can offer, but it also sets up a strong expectation – as does asking for membership fees. It feels like there is no choice now, having drawn so many people into a commitment and a promise. We have to make it work.

The union is relationships

What does it mean to make the union work? We are just at the beginning and will launch a London-wide membership drive this summer, so this is still an open question. Of course we want to make renting in London less awful, we want to see changes in law, changes in culture, changes in political attitudes, we want to question even the notion of renting. But it has become clear that this starts somewhere more basic: with the way people relate to each other. As the union has grown I have met people I do not normally meet, I have started to develop relationships of solidarity with those beyond my circles of friends. This can be difficult and demanding. Where are the boundaries when a tenant you are organising with calls you up on a holiday to ask you to solve a problem in which you have no expertise? I won’t say I always feel relaxed about these new relationships, but I’m happy to be exploring them; it is part of the work we want to do against the atomising housing market.

To build a union then is to draw on all the resources that other people and organisations offer up, but it is also to build new bonds, to replace relationships of commerce or convention with relationships that bind us together in order to increase our own power. The housing system is the obvious battleground, but the other battle is against alienation and resignation in a city so difficult and lonely for so many. We all live in London; in order to take control of the housing system we are pooling our knowledge and our resources and learning to live in London together.

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Unlike conventional approaches to local economic development, which centre on economic growth and are led from the top down, community economic development (CED) is a process that is led by local residents and focuses on generating wealth and jobs that stay local.

This two year programme, led by Co-operatives UK, supported 71 communities across England to develop and implement plans to shape their local economy.

The report finds that CED is a way to give people real power in the local area and interest in the approach is growing in the context of calls for more ‘control’ in local areas and the reduction in inequality. It also highlights that the most effective approaches to CED focus the community’s energies on taking control of a particular asset or building on existing local plans to transform processes not previously working for the local community.

However, it also concludes with three challenges that need to be addressed to make CED more effective on implementation.

• CED plans do not always align with conventional measures of economic development.  For them to cut- through a shift is needed in what is measured, from single growth measures to wider well-being and local wealth.
• CED plans can be overlooked. They should be embedded within wider policy processes like Neighbourhood Planning and LEP planning, and could be given a statutory footing, to ensure it has legitimacy with stakeholders who held power or mandate.
• CED plans take time. It is important that there is sufficient time and resources in place to develop and implement CED plans

The community economic development programme was funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, and delivered in partnership with Locality, New Economics Foundation, CLES and Responsible Finance.

Reposted from Co-operatives’s UK website.

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Why systems are failing

What is visibly failing is management of large scale societies, management of us, by those who seldom fully understand our problems, management regimes too big to adapt as needed. It is not stated often enough that we live in a heavily managed society. Yet people instantly understand what is meant by this: they have experience of being managed. Sometimes we are managed well, sometimes badly, but at some point in a large system, the former state will always give way to the latter. Eventually a sense of lost control comes over us all. We must take back control, we feel. It is hard to know how, hard to know who to target, for no leaders or parties seem to return power to us.

Many see that capital has become a dominant force in these large systems, re-shaping our cities, our very lives, flinging aside humans as detritus of the development process. As a solution we are constantly offered better management. We can keep casting around for better managers, but as the ‘Accidental Anarchist’ Carne Ross has been arguing, we live in complex systems that cannot successfully be controlled from the top down. The point is not to simply be angry with the managers for doing the wrong things, or for being the wrong managers, or for not advantaging us rather than others in these huge dynamic networks around us. Intention anyway becomes lost in such large systems. It’s true that some managers do transfer wealth from poor to rich, and others attempt to do the opposite. But each of the managers fails at some point, often fatally undermining any good work they have done. Perhaps it’s time to start entertaining a new line of thought: perhaps we should stop asking to be managed.

Escaping management

This requires a deep shift in thinking and a new set of institutions. Almost all previous political claims, from both left and right, assumed that people must be managed. Elections every four or five years do not undo management: elections are a method by which we find the correct managers, not a form of self-rule. Those who think that a single decision every four or five years means we are in control are invited to reflect on the absurdity of the proposition: mere ownership of your house or car involves dozens, even hundreds of decisions in a year. How then can ownership of your government require fewer decisions?

Why have I begun talking about ownership? It isn’t the usual language of making democracies work, except in that vague and dishonest usage where we are encouraged to ‘feel ownership’ of decisions made by others. Socialism and communism did once talk about ownership, but created a dichotomy between private ownership and central state ownership. Neo-liberalism bought into the same dichotomy and propagandised private ownership, or sometimes mixed forms of the two in unwieldy pseudo-free markets. It feels like we have not had a thorough, open-minded discussion about ownership for a long time. Doing so might begin to reveal how new institutions can move us beyond the current system failures.

Ownership, stripped back to its real meaning, is about control, and control is what we lack. The point of owning something is that we can do as we wish with it. To be made to feel ownership is a con, but to have ownership is to have control. The logical conclusion is that we should have ownership of as much of the world we inhabit as possible, and since we do not inhabit the world alone, we must own together with others. Others have reached this conclusion before: digging at the practicalities of Lefebvre and Harvey’s ‘right to the city’, which sounds a little ambiguous in its meaning, it emerges as something like a ‘right to own the city’. We should have control, says Harvey, not just of public space, but of our housing, our energy sources, our data infrastructure, our food supplies and of course our workplaces.

A culture of owning together

This sounds difficult, and it is. Owning our world would share some of the problems of managing it: our world is so big, there is too much of it and too many of us. Yet what an ownership framework offers that management does not is that it works at multiple scales rather than being always top down and so concerned with controlling entire systems. Where an overview is required – owning our atmosphere for example – we can construct decision-making systems that allow all to take part, but where detail is required we can conceive of much more localised forms of ownership, in which those most affected have the most say. This leaves plenty of room too for those things we should own individually: those things that mostly effect ourselves can be ours entirely.

One starting point is to look at digital commons which have arisen out of both the collaboration that the internet enables and the almost zero marginal cost of replication online. What the genuine digital commons distribute is control; what they have in common is mechanisms in place to de-centre individual or corporate ownership. The Wikimedia foundation opens up editing control as well as literal ownership rights; that it does both is key to understanding why it works, and why we can justly talk of a Wikipedia community. This can offer us clues about how future institutions might look.

Another starting point is the very common-sense idea that if it affects your life, you should be able to have a say in it. This isn’t a particularly radical idea – even private ownership of property in our current capitalist system is compromised by the imposition of planning laws. ‘Compromise’ sounds like a bad word, but here it is a recognition that what people do to their properties has a public impact, so there should be some level of public control over this most private of ownership forms. Where the planning rules fall down in the UK, and in most countries, is that local authorities and the planning systems are astonishingly undemocratic. Yet the underlying principle is established: in this most capitalist of societies we already recognise that we need some sort of collective, democratic control of our environment, and that it can take mixed individual/democratic forms. Ownership and democracy are closely overlapping ideas. What owning together means is that we decide. What democracy means is that where we must make decisions together, there is a process in place for that to happen. A call to own everything is a call for a democratic society.

To address the complex ownership claims, we must develop ideas of blended ownership, different types of ownership, overlapping ownership rights for different scale collectivities, all imagined beyond the private-state dichotomy. The recent UK Labour Party-commissioned paper Alternative Models of Ownership proposed three forms of ownership: worker co-ops, municipal and community ownership, and forms of state ownership with increased democratic accountability, but the commons of old that are inspiring many to establish new commons today often had very complex ownership and usage structures that endured over centuries. We should aim to construct what we might call full spectrum ownership, that is to say, an infinite variety of ownership types and overlapping ownership forms designed to give us control over our own lives.

The link to new digital commons is not merely an inspirational one. Emerging technologies are making it easier for more people to be involved in discussion and decision-making. Taiwan and radical Spanish cities are currently experimenting with intense public participation in creating legislation, and it’s only a matter of time until other countries follow suit. The ability to rapidly process data may also turn out to be key to working out who should have a say in what, and keeping ownership clusters up to date, so that we know who is actually affected by a particular issue.

Towards owning everything

I will return to housing for a practical example of how the right to own the city (and everything else) could work. We could escape from the dichotomy of privately owned homes versus publicly owned homes, and instead establish systems in which the individual would have ownership rights, yet the surrounding community would also have rights, perhaps to regulate the re-sale price or rents, as though the entire city or country were a network of community land trusts. In order to prevent islands of privilege developing, regional and national ownership bodies would also exercise some rights within a neighbourhood. Again, this isn’t a million miles from how the planning system works now, but this would need deeply democratic bodies at every level, starting from the street or neighbourhood up, to regulate the system, rather than a central government prodding bureaucratic local authorities to try to get the results they want.

I’m under no illusions that creating a culture of owning together is an easy thing to do, for we must all learn how to work with each other, undoing what we have been taught at school and at work. This requires a shift not just in institutions but in our own thinking and acting. But think of the prize: to own together is to live together, to undo the atomised society that management has given us, to create a more caring and less isolating society. A more convivial world could be seen as a by-product of taking back control, but it could be seen as potentially the best outcome of a culture of owning together.

Such a culture is already beginning to form offline as well as online. Thankfully we embark on this vast project without having to start entirely from scratch. The world of cooperatives has always been the ideal training ground for those who want to run the world together. Co-ops’ radical potential is not that they eliminate the dominance of capital in themselves, but that they prepare us for a world that we control. They teach us what a liveable system might look like, tied together by ownership that relies on relationships.

Radical campaigners have also begun asserting a culture of owning together in campaigning work. I am involved with a new organising fighting for renters’ rights in London. What excites me is that we have begun to embed a culture of owning together in our campaigning in two different ways. Firstly we are ensuring that the planned renters union itself will be owned by those it aims to help. This will be guaranteed by a truly grassroots democratic structure to the union, meaning the members will be able to launch their own fights within a mutual support network. Secondly we are not shying away from the key issue of who controls property: renters, we assert, should have more control, landlords should have less. This amounts to a transfer of  ownership rights over the properties we inhabit. Thus a renters union owned by renters can be envisaged as a way to collectively achieve a re-distribution of control, a re-distribution of ownership rights.

In the same way we can try to weave owning-together into all our projects, from campaigns, to local economy work, to political party building. At the governmental level we have the example of a few radical cities, but progress towards a government we can call our own seems painfully slow. What would the world look like if we started acting as though we owned everything? What if we identified as owners-together in our workplaces, our tech projects, our food growing projects, our campaign platforms, and began to assert full spectrum ownership of our world? We could begin to challenge those who think they own everything now, and at the same time gain practice in working together. Intertwining a culture of owning together into our everyday work would mean we spend more time interacting with our neighbours, and with those who share our interests, more time learning to interact as equals rather than as bosses and subordinates. The journey towards a world we truly own is bound to be a long one, but we needn’t await arrival at the destination to begin living in a more controllable and more convivial world.

Photo by Deivuh

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When and Where

Full title: Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth: Pathways to a new political economy

When: September 4-23, 2016

Place: Monte Ginezzo, Tuscany, Italy

Invitation (by John Restakis):

“Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth – Pathways to a New Political Economy, is an intensive 3-week program that links the global with the local through the diffusion of transformative ideas, models, and practices that advance game-changing solutions for progressive change in the following key areas:

• Co-operative Capital & Social Finance; Alternative Currencies
• Co-op & Commons-Based housing & Land Tenure; Community Land Trusts
• Renewable Energy; Community-owned energy systems
• Local & Sustainable food systems; Community Supported Agriculture
• User-controlled health & social care; Social & Community Service Co-ops
• Co-operative and Commons Governance
• Platform Co-operatives, Digital Commons & Peer-to-Peer productions systems
• Convergence and the New Political Economy; Principles, Propositions, and Practices

Download the Synergia program (available here) for complete details. If you like what you see, we hope that you and others in your organization or network will find an opportunity to take part.

We are now in the process of constructing the Synergia website, but information on Synergia and the Summer Institute may also be found on our Facebook page you can also follow us on Twitter. Those wishing information on registration for the course can send an email to: [email protected].

We hope this first Synergia Summer Institute inspires you and your colleagues to spread the word to others who are committed to building a new political economy for the world we want. The need for system change is clear and urgent and Synergia is promoting solutions that can make it happen.

We look forward to your joining us for this unique learning experience in Tuscany this September.”

Photo by blueskyfantasie

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In September 2014, the Commons Strategies Group convened a three-day workshop in Meissen, Germany, of 25 policy advocates and activists from a variety of different economic and social movements.  The topic of the “deep dive”:  Can leading alt-economic and social movements find ways to work more closely together?  Can there be a greater convergence and collaboration in fighting the pathologies of neoliberalism? 

The activists hailed from movements devoted to the Social and Solidarity Economy, Degrowth, Co-operatives, Transition Towns, the Sharing and Collaborative Economy, Peer Production, environmental justice, and the commons, among others. While most came from Europe, there were also participants from Canada, the US, Brazil, Ireland and the UK. The workshop was organized by the Commons Strategies Group, which gratefully acknowledges the indispensable support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (Germany) and the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation (France and Switzerland).

Before this workshop, roughly a dozen of the same participants had deliberated on the topic of “open co-operativism” a few days earlier at a separate gathering in Berlin. The report synthesizing those conversations, “Toward an Open Co-operativism,” were released three weeks ago and can be found here. 

Below, the Introduction to the report, “A New Alignment of Movements?” which synthesizes the salient points of discussion from the Meissen workshop. The 39-page report, by David Bollier and Pat Conaty, can be downloaded as a pdf file here.  

Despite the deepening crisis of neoliberalism in Europe, no clear alternative critiques or philosophical approaches have emerged that could catalyze a united response or new convergence of movements. Indeed, the traditional left has not only not profited politically from the ongoing crisis, but, with a few exceptions, its popularity has actively declined. With the notable exception of the Greece, recent European elections have shown a marked move to the radical right among major segments of the European electorate.

But if the classic political expressions of resistance may be wanting, that does not mean that there have not been positive developments.  Amongst these are the “growth”of the degrowth movement and other ecological/sustainability oriented movements; the emergence of a commons orientation amongst political groups in countries like Italy; the creation of thousands of alternative solidarity mechanisms in Greece and Spain; a revival of co-operativism as an economic and social alternative; ongoing work by the Social and Solidarity Economy movement; and movements ranging from Transition Towns to “shareable cities” to local food.

Interesting political expressions include the massive mobilisations of youth around the 15M “real democracy”platform in Spain, the success of left parties with a transformative agenda such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, the emergence of parties expressing digital culture such as the Pirate Parties (in more than two dozen nations), and platform parties calling for direct democracy like the Partido X in Spain. These efforts have been accompanied by many constructive efforts by precariously employed youth to create alternatives for their livelihoods, also expressed in the emergence of the “sharing economy.”

Is it possible to imagine a convergence of movement practice and goals – blending constructive, social and political movements –in ways that advance the idea of “unity in diversity”? Is it possible to imagine the reconstruction of socially progressive majorities at the local, national and European level?

This Deep Dive workshop is an attempt to host intensive forms of exploratory dialogue and cooperation among social movements.  Participants were associated with movements dedicated to co-operatives, a Degrowth economy, Social and Solidarity Economy, peer production, Transition Towns, ecological/ sustainability, and the commons. In sharing the more salient developments in their respective movements, participants reflected on the distinct strengths and weaknesses of their movements, the broader challenge of contributing to systemic change, and strategies for fostering a collaborative convergence.

A key question posed was whether the commons paradigm could function as a shared discourse, critique and ethic to help convene the various movements around a shared agenda for change?  The argument could be that as the relative political clout of the industrial working class steadily diminishes in Europe, we are losing the political equilibrium of forces and compromises that sustained the welfare state models in the first place.  If we look at the newly emergent work culture of the precarious knowledge workers, along with the other popular sectors, we may see the emergence of a potential sociological and political coalition around “commons-oriented political transformation” – a proposition that has been vividly affirmed in Greece.

This strategic question gave rise to a second goal of the workshop – to explore the specific potential of the commons paradigm for helping to align and coordinate cross-movement collaboration and action. Are there other commonalities that could foster a convergence of social and political movements around joint goals?  To address this, a third goal of the gathering was to explore possible vehicles for exploring and harnessing cooperative action in the future.  What specific sorts of vehicles, projects, social or economic issues, institutional partners, and so forth, might play a constructive role?  Moreover, how might this work be organized and supported over time?

Finally, assuming there was agreement on the above questions, the workshop sought to arrive at some consensus regarding next steps for achieving movement convergence.  Is there some way to re-create a political and social majority for sustainability-oriented social change?  How might we expand the capacities of each of our movements, unleash new synergies and offer new, more integrative solutions to the ecological, climatic, social and economic crises facing humankind?

Contents of the Report

Introduction

I.  The General Challenge 

A.  The Co-operative Movement

B.  The Social Solidarity Economy

C.  The Degrowth Movement

D.  Peer Production

E.  The Sharing and Collaborative Economy

F.  The Commons Movement

II.  Strategies for a Convergence of Movements 

Do These Movements Overlap – or Not?

Notable Exploratory Projects

Strategies for Alliance Building

Suggested Action points for Moving Forward

Conclusion

Appendix A:  Workshop Participants

Appendix B:  Roadmap – 2015 Events that Offer Opportunities for Convergence

Originally published in Bollier.org

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