The new site features four types of materials suited different levels of interest: short Q&A-style articles with illustrations; longer, in-depth articles for the more serious reader; a library of downloaded PDF versions of research publications by the P2P Foundation; and a collection of videos, audio interviews and links to other content.

The website does a great service in introducing topics that are sometimes elusive or abstract, giving them a solid explanation and lots of working examples. Go check it out!

Start with a series of Short Articles that addresses such questions as “What is a commons transition?” and “What is distributed manufacturing?” Then browse the Longer Articles section and read “10 ways to accelerate the Peer to Peer and Commons Economy,” a visionary piece on the movement to design global and manufacture locally.

The Library contains a number of major reports on how to embark upon a commons transition. The organizational study of Catalan Integral Cooperative as a post-capitalist model is fascinating. Check out the new conceptualizations of value in a commons economy, and the two-part report on the impact of peer production on energy use, thermodynamics, and the natural world.

There is also a wonderful overview of some leading commons, especially tech-oriented ones, in a collection of fifteen case studies. These explore such projects as Wikihouse, Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysan, Mutual Aid Networks, Spain’s Municipalist Coalitions, and the Ghent’s urban commons (in Belgium).

Elena Martinez Vicente has produced a number of fantastic infographics that really help demystify some abstract ideas (the new ecosystem of value creation, patterns of open coops, cosmo-local production). Mercè Moreno Tarrés did the dazzling original art for the site, which helps make the material so engaging.

The Commons Transition Primer was produced by the Peer to Peer Foundation and P2P Labs with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Kudos to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for conceptualizing the project and preparing much of the material, and to Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis for their contributions to the text.

The post The Commons Transition Primer Demystifies and Delights appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Today’s show features music interludes composed, recorded, and performed by our guest, Stacco Troncoso. Overlaid are excerpts from a talk Stacco gave at Prix Ars in 2016. The page header illustration is from the Commons Transition Primer website, by Mercè Moreno Tarrés. Our opening song is Foreman’s Dog by Fugazi.

Opening today’s episode, Rushkoff looks at the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. In his “by any means necessary” moment, why does Trump even bother to deny collusion with Russians? And is media’s obsession with the Russia story distracting us from Trump’s dangerous policies and appointments?

If you enjoyed this episode, dig deeper:

• How can I take part in the Commons Transition
• Commons in the Time Of Monsters: How P2P politics can change the world, one city at a time.
• ​​Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
• ​​Long: In-depth, longer articles
• ​​Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
• ​​More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links
• http://www.guerrillatranslation.org/

This and all Team Human shows are made possible by listeners like you. You can help support the show by subscribing via Patreon.

Please review Team Human on iTunes. Your review helps us reach more listeners.

The post Team Human: Stacco Troncoso “The Commons is the Glue” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our intention with this site is to make the ideas of the Commons and P2P accessible and attractive to commoners and communities worldwide. The site is organized into several sections:

1. Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
2. Long: In-depth, longer articles
3. Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
4. More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links

We’ve built some other useful features into this site, too. In the Short articles, Key Concept pop-ups offer definitions of specialized terminology. Case Studies outline the practices of existing commons communities, often adapted from our own research publications. Infographics and illustrations have sections of their own, for easy sharing. To keep things light, we’ve added a tab with a “TLDR” summary (internet slang for “too long/didn’t read”, if you didn’t already know), plus a tab for Resources which links to source and reference materials for the specific article.

This website was produced with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and is an outgrowth of our previous Commons Transition and P2P Primer in print form, which was co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis and produced in cooperation with the Transnational Institute (TNI). It will be followed in 2018 by a publication from Westminster Press titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto and written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis. We’d like to thank Heike Loeschmann, Joanna Barelkowska and Joerg Haas of the Böll Foundation for their consistent support and feedback during the process.

The Commons Transition Primer website project was coordinated, edited and/or co-written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel (except where other authorship is noted). Elena Martínez Vicente led the design and UX, Mercè Moreno Tarrés provided the illustrations while Javier Arturo Rodriguez took care of the technical details and backend. Thanks are due to David Bollier, Vasilis Kostakis and Rajesh Makwana for reviewing the texts in the “Shorts” section. Special thanks are also due for the technical expertise and last-minute interventions of our colleague, Lisha Sterling.

We offer thanks to the growing, worldwide P2P Foundation community for continuing to enthusiastically share, research, promote and experiment with the ideas and tools of the Commons and P2P. We hope you enjoy this site (and your feedback is welcome!)

The post Commons Transition, Illustrated – Our New Web Primer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Commons include not only the gifts of nature,like water and land, but also shared assets or creative work, such as cultural and knowledge artifacts. Commons are a shared resource, co-governed by its user community, according to the norms of that community. Considering the historical depths of the Commons, it’s difficult to agree on one definition that encompasses its full potential for social, economic, cultural and political change. The Commons is not the resource, the community that gathers around it, or the rules of how is is managed, it’s the evolving interaction between all these things. Why is the Commons steadily gathering attention as a concept and practice? And what happens next?

The hollowing out of the welfare state has resulted in an increased mistrust in political parties and representative democracy in many parts of the world. On one extreme, the void is being filled by far-right narratives that satisfy the disillusioned by offering over-simplified analyses and demonisation of the “other”, the most vulnerable and least privileged among us, often refugees and marginalized peoples. In contrast, a barely reinvigorated left has seen many of its potential solutions proven unworkable, whether through bureaucratic excess, institutional blockages, or a simple lack of popular commitment.

Meanwhile, the institutional crises of our time persist. Our current world system also suffers from a deeply counterproductive logic. This system, based on infinite growth within the confines of finite resources, was enabled by the false concept of abundance in the limited material world. A second false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world gave rise to legal and technical restrictions on social innovation through the use of copyrights, patents, etc. Overturning these false principles will be key priorities for a sustainable civilization. To this end, we must recognize that our natural resources are indeed limited, and base our physical economy in this recognition to achieve a sustainable, steady-state economy, and at the same time facilitate free, creative cooperation by reforming copyright and other restrictive regimes.

The livelihoods of roughly two billion people worldwide depend on some form of commons, yet many of these commons remain unprotected and vulnerable, in danger of privatization or sale. Similarly, it is not unconceivable to expect that an analogous number of individuals are co-creating shared resources online. These potentially massive affinity networks lack a common identifier or unifying vision, yet we recognise the logic of commoning as a shared thread.

We use the phrase “Commons transition” to describe a process of facilitating open, participatory input across society, prioritizing the needs of those people and environments affected by policy decisions over market or bureaucratic needs. The protection and empowering of existing commons, along with the creation of new ones, are keystones. A Commons transition will also require the creation of a commons-centric economy within the existing capitalist system, but seeking to transcend it with commoners at the helm. This implies uniting the forces which support the commons, generative and ethical markets, and the development of an enabling and empowering state which enables the social production of value, ie: “commoning”. It also means discovering synergies among the prefigurative forces that create the new economy, finding political expressions for them, and enabling them to act at the political level along with other emancipatory social and political forces.

A broad societal transition, different from the classic left narratives of previous centuries, is possible through the integrative strategy of a Commons transition. Why would this strategy be effective?

History shows that political revolutions do not precede deep reconfigurations of power, but rather complete them. New movements or classes and their practices precede the social revolutions that make their power and modalities dominant. How does that relate the idea of a Commons transition? There is ample data to support the kind of prefigurative existence of a growing number of commoners who could form the basis of a historical subject at the forefront of this phase transition — a very strong start.

Factor in the changing cultural expectations of millennial and post-millennial generations, and their requirements for meaningful engagements and work, which are hardly met by the current regime. The increasing vulnerability of work under neoliberalism drives the search for alternatives, and the cultural force of P2P self-organizing and corresponding mentalities fuels the growth of commons-oriented networks and communities.

Also, commons-based peer production is a model that could create a context of truly sustainable production. It is almost impossible to imagine a shift to sustainable circular economy practices under the current intellectual property driven, privatizing regime. The thermodynamic efficiencies needed for sustainable production may be found in the systematic applications of the principles inherent in the commons-centric economy. The watchwords are free, fair and sustainable, the three interrelated elements needed for a shift to more reasonable economy, polity and, ultimately, culture.

Finally, the crisis of the left itself, now relegated to the management of the crisis of neoliberalism itself, points to the vital need of renewing the strategic thinking of the forces that aim for human emancipation and a sustainable life-world. All of the above form a strategy for a multi-modal commons-centric transition, offering a positive way out of the current crisis and a way to respond to the new demands of the commons-influenced generations. The Commons and the prefigurative forms of a new value regime already exist. The commoners are already here, and they’re already commoning; in other words, the Commons transition has begun.

This article is based on A Commons Transition and P2P Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature.

Written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel for the P2P Foundation. The P2P Foundation (officially, The Foundation for P2P Alternatives) is a non-profit organization and global network dedicated to advocacy and research of commons oriented peer to peer (P2P) dynamics in society.

Photo by Paul-Vincent Roll on Unsplash

The post When does the Commons transition begin? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Click on the image to download

Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer

This short primer, co-published with the Transnational Institute explains the Commons and P2P, how they interrelate, their movements and trends, and how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental. Drawing from our ten year + history researching and advocating for P2P/Commons Alternatives, the Primer is structured in a Q&A format, providing answers to questions such as “What are the Commons, what is P2P and how do they relate together?” “What are P2P Economics?” “What are P2P Politics?” and, more important, how these different factors can combine together at higher levels of complexity to form a viable transition strategy to  solid post-capitalist system that is respectful of people and planet.

The Primer features explanations for some of the key concepts we handle, as well as various case studies and infographics. It was co-written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel and designed by Elena Martínez, from the P2P Foundation.

The Commons Transition Primer is a year-long multimedia project/campaign aimed at making the world of the Commons and P2P more comprehensible and attractive to commoners worldwide. This publication will be followed up by a website, video material and events. In 2018 we will culminate the process with a full-length publication on the Commons Transition co-authored by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis.

Click here to download Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer

BIOS:

Michel Bauwens, co-founder and core team member of the P2P Foundation, is a Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist. An active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subjects of technology, culture and business innovation, he is the Vision Coordinator for the P2P Foundation.

Vasilis Kostakis is the founder and coordinator of the interdisciplinary research hub P2P Lab that investigates the socio-economic and political impact of free and open-source technologies. He was the Research Coordinator and is now a core team member of the P2P Foundation.

Stacco Troncoso is a core team member and Advocacy Coordinator for the P2P Foundation. A co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, his work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners worldwide.

Ann Marie Utratel is a core team member of the P2P Foundation working in advocacy and infrastructure. She is also a co-founder of Guerrilla Translation and contributes narrative storytelling and collaborates in strategic alliance building for the larger P2P/Commons ecosystem.

The post Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following 10 ideas for action are the result of 10 years of research at the P2P Foundation on the emerging practices of new productive communities and those ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that can create livelihoods on top of shared resources. Together, they emphasize the emerging practices that can bolster the resilience of a new ethical economy. Our goal is to encourage the creation of new entities that overstep the traditional corporate form and its extractive profit-maximizing practices. What we need, instead of extractive forms of capital, is generative ideas that co-create value with and for commoners.

These 10 ideas already exist in some form, but need to be used more widely and integrated. We present them below in three sections addressing each concern (free, fair and sustainable). Each recommendation is followed by links to related resources.

I. OPEN AND FREE

1. Practice open business models based on shared knowledge.

Traditional closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. In contrast, open business models are market strategies based on both the recognition of natural abundance and the refusal to generate income and profits by making it artificially scarce.

Knowledge is a non- or anti-rival good which gains in use value the more it is shared. Although it can be shared easily and, when in digital form, at very low marginal cost, many extractive firms still use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digitized knowledge.

Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so that extra profits can be generated. This is particularly grievous for life-saving or planet-regenerating technological knowledge.

The first action is, therefore, an ethical one, with three elements: share what can be shared; only create market value from resources that are scarce; create added value on top or alongside of these commons.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open Business models see the sections on Business Models, Open Company Formats, Open Knowledge, and post-corporate enterprises.

• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Content, Open Models, Copyright/IP, and P2P Business Models

II. FAIR

2. Practice Open Cooperativism

Many new ethical, generative forms are being created that are better aligned with the contributory commons. The key is to choose post-corporate forms that can generate livelihoods for contributing commoners. Cooperatives are one of the potential forms that commons-friendly market entities could take.

Open cooperatives are cooperatives with the following characteristics:

1) Mission-oriented, with a social goal related to creating shared resources.

2) Multi-stakeholder governed, including those affected by or contributing to the particular activity.

3) Constitutionally committed by their own rules to co-creating commons with the productive communities.

4) Along with other cooperatives, global in organisational scope, in order to create counter-power to extractive multinational corporations.

We see the emergence of more open forms, including “neo-tribes” (eg. the Ouishare community), or more tightly organized “neo-builds” (eg., Enspiral.org, Las Indias or the Ethos Foundation).

Even more open is the network form chosen by the open scientific hardware community Sensorica, which allows all micro-task contributions to be accounted in the reward system through open value or contributory accounting (more below), thus more tightly coupling those contributions with generated income.

• 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 and Open Company Formats
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Cooperativism and Sustainable Livelihoods

3. Practice open value or contributory accounting

Peer production is based on an open, community-driven, collaborative infrastructure, with freely contributed, distributed tasks.

The most appropriate way to reward those contributing to such a process may not be the traditional salary, and so open value accounting (or contributory accounting) have emerged.

Sensorica, mentioned above, practices this in the following way. Any contributor may add their contributions (tasks performed) into the system, logged by project number. The contributor is then assigned “karma points” after a peer evaluation. Income is then flowed to these contributions which have been accounted-for and weighted (valued), so every contributor is fairly rewarded.

Contributory accounting and similar solutions avoid situations where only a few contributors — those more closely related to the market — capture the value co-created by the much larger community. Open book accounting also insures that the (re)distribution of value is transparent for all contributors.

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

4. Insure fair distribution and benefit-sharing through CopyFair licensing

Copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the knowledge commons they require, on the condition that changes and improvements are added back to that commons. This is a great advance, but should not be abstracted from the need for fairness.

In physical production, which involves finding resources, raw materials and payments to contributors, extractive models benefit from the unfettered commercial exploitation of these commons.

Therefore, while knowledge sharing should always be maintained we should also demand reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of the commons. This would create a level playing field for the ethical economic entities that presently internalize social and environmental costs.

CopyFair licenses, which allow knowledge sharing while requesting reciprocity in exchange for the right of commercialization, would facilitate achieving this.

• Commons Transition: An introduction to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses
• For P2P Foundation documentation on licenses see Licensing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on CopyFair licenses.

5. Practice solidarity and mitigate the risks of work and life through “commonfare” practices

The power of nation-states has gradually weakened as one result of financial and neoliberal globalization. We are seeing a strong, integrated effort to dismantle the vital solidarity mechanisms that were once embedded in the welfare state models.

While we may yet not have the power to prevent this destruction, it is imperative that we reconstruct distributed solidarity mechanisms, a practice which we call commonfare.

Examples all over the world, such as the Broodfonds (NL), Friendsurance (Germany), and the health sharing ministries (U.S.), or cooperative entities such Coopaname in France, demonstrate new forms of distributed solidarity which can be developed to allay risks to life and work. We are particularly happy about the emergence of labour mutuals like the European cooperative SMart-eu, which represents the missing link between the precariat and salaried workers by offering a mutual guarantee fund and “virtual salariat” (i.e. insertion into social protections) for autonomous workers.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our P2P Solidarity Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Healthcare

III. SUSTAINABLE

6. Use open and sustainable designs for an open source circular economy

The practice of planned obsolescence — a feature, not a bug, for profit-maximizing corporations — is alien to people operating in a context of shared, abundant resources. Open productive communities insure maximum participation through modularity and granularity.

Using open and sustainable designs for producing sustainable good and services is highly recommended for ethical-entrepreneurial entities.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our Design Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on the Open Source Circular Economy

7. Move toward mutual coordination of production through open supply chains and open book accounting

What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the market, mutual coordination is for the commons.

In a circular economy, the output of one production process is used as an input for another. Closed value chains won’t help us achieve a sustainable circular economy; neither will non-transparent negotiations for any form of cooperation.

But through open supply chains, entrepreneurial coalitions that are interdependent with a collaborative commons can create ecosystems of collaboration. Here, production processes become transparent, and every participant can adapt his or her behaviour based on the knowledge openly available in the network.

There is no need for overproduction when the network’s actual production realities become common knowledge.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Mutual Coordination

8. Practice cosmo-localization

“What is light is global, and what is heavy is local.” This is the new principle animating commons-based peer production, in which knowledge is globally shared and production can take place on demand — based on real needs — through a network of distributed coworking spaces and microfactories.

Studies have shown that up to two-thirds of matter and energy goes not to production, but to transport. Clearly, this is unsustainable. A return to localized production is sine qua non for the transition towards sustainable production.

• More information: Cosmo-localism and the futures of material production
• Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

1. Article 1 [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text
2. Article 2 [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.

9. Mutualize physical infrastructures

The misnamed sharing economy, from AirBnB to Uber, has shown the potential of matching idle, under- or unused resources, but in the right context of co-ownership and co-governance, a real sharing economy can achieve dramatic advances in reducing resource use.

Our means of production, including machines, can be mutualized and self-owned by all those that create value. Platform cooperatives, data cooperatives and “fairshares” forms of distributed ownership are tools to help us co-own our infrastructures of production.

Co-working, skills-sharing, ridesharing are just a few examples of the many ways we can re-use and share resources to dramatically augment the thermo-dynamic efficiencies of our consumption.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sharing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Sharing

10. Mutualize generative capital

The 38 percent financial tax owed on all goods and services should be abolished; we must transform our monetary system, and substantively augment the use of mutual credit systems. Generative forms of capital cannot rely on an extractive money supply based on compound interest payable to extractive banks.

• Commons Transition: See features on Capital for the Commons and the Commons Strategies Group report of the same name.
• For P2P Foundation documentation on generative capital see Peerfunding and the Democratic Money Initiative
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Money

In conclusion: What the world, humanity and the environment that sustains us needs is an economic system driven by free, fair and sustainable practices. It is our belief that the holistic adoption of the recommendations and practices above will accelerate this change. We can’t afford to wait any longer, so let’s get to work!

• Cross-posted from Shareable
• Lead image by Josef Stuefer, “Open” image by Open Knowledge, “Fair” image by OpenSource.com, “Sustainable” image by USAID Nepal

The post 10 Ways to Accelerate the Peer-to-Peer and Commons Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.