The book showcases the wealth of transformative ideas that the international commons movement has to offer. With contributions by Kate Raworth, David Bollier, George Monbiot and many others, Our Commons is a political call to arms to all Europeans to embrace the commons and build a new Europe.

Commons Network’s very own Sophie Bloemen and Thomas de Groot worked on this book for almost two years, doing research and interviews, working with academics, policy makers, authors and activists to paint a colourful picture of the commons as the blueprint for a new future, one that is inclusive, ecologically sustainable, equitable, democratic, collaborative, creative and resilient.

Our Commons features reflections on the enclosure of knowledge and the monopolisation of the digital sphere, stories about renewable energy cooperatives and community foodwaste initiatives and urgent pleas to see the city as a commons and to treat health as a common good. Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, the book is first released online as an e-book, free for all to download and share and as a printable PDF. The book will also be available on a wide variety of print-on-demand platforms.

In the next few months, Commons Network will organise a number of official events around the book. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you are interested in hosting a book-launch with the editors and possibly with some of the contributors of the book. Off- and online media that are interested in publishing texts from the book or interviews with the editors and/or contributors are encouraged to reach out to [email protected].

Download the ePub or the print-PDF here and make sure to share this page with as many people as possible, using the hashtag #OurCommonsBook

For all further questions, press inquiries or event bookings, possible citations or cross-posting, or requests for hard-copy printed books, please do not hesitate to reach out to the editors, Thomas de Groot and Sophie Bloemen.

([email protected])

([email protected])

Reprinted from commonsnetwork, you can see the original post here.

The post New Book Out Now: Political Ideas for a New Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Elena Martínez Vicente is a product designer, specialized in designing better processes and more understandable products for humans. She was a designer with the P2PValue project and has extensive experience collaborating with commons, communities and P2P projects, including an ongoing collaboration with the P2P Foundation on our publications and the Commons Transition Primer.

Silvia and Elena are team members in  P2P Models, a research project examining the infrastructure, governance and economy of decentralized, democratic organizations, with a particular focus on value allocation and distribution.

We asked them to tell us about their experiences working in the commons, in academia,  and in the broader world.

Elena, Silvia, tell us a bit about your backgrounds, interests and how you came to be involved in the P2P Models project.

Elena: Since 2006, I have worked as an Interaction Designer in the private sector, also working for NGOs and cooperation projects in general, whenever I had a chance. From my days as a student, and intermittently, I have been in and out of activist groups, feminist and commons communities. It is not until 2016 that I could finally dedicate my entire time at work to “designing for the good ones”. Since then, I have been trying to translate difficult concepts for the common(s) people through infographics, post, illustrations and simple designs. I also try to bring some sanity to free software, since often in large projects, very good intentions are left on the wayside because it is “a pain in the ass” to use them as these projects do not give the right importance to design and user experience.

Silvia: Really, I was never in touch with these themes before, in fact, I think I always avoided using technology in general (I’m now more concerned about how important and powerful this kind of knowledge is). I was always very confused about what to study. I have a lot of diverse interests: dancing, carpentry, philosophy…and although now I find it positive, at that time I felt pressure to “find my speciality”. What I knew, was I liked to write and I was interested in social issues and this led me to Anthropology. Partly because of diverse life experiences, years later I started a master’s degree in Gender Studies and Development Cooperation in Madrid, which offered an internship in Colombia. This experience reinforced my liking for research. When I was back in Madrid, a friend told me about this job opportunity and I did not hesitate to try it.

Can you describe what P2P Models is about? Who else is on the team, and what stage is the project in right now?

Silvia: I am still understanding what this project is about…hahaha. I’m lucky enough to have some master classes with Samer, our principal investigator, to know more about the tech part. I have a much clearer image about the social side of the project. We want to better understand how the governance and the distribution of value work happens in the CBPP (Commons Based Peer Production Communities), in order to know how blockchain could be useful for them. Fortunately, we have a sociologist-computer scientist in our team, David Rozas, who can be the link between the social and the tech part. We are 7 people in total, with different backgrounds and education but with activism in common. Also, we have a lot of collaborators and advisors who help us. We are at the beginning of the project, still taking off, maybe in the most challenging stage or where we should take more important decisions.

Elena: P2PModels is a research project full of difficult tech concepts so it is a beautiful challenge for me. Basically, we can summarize it in a question: Could we advance to a Commons Transition with blockchain?

The project has three main branches to build decentralized, democratic and distributed organizations. We intend to collaborate with international communities to learn from them and to think about technologies that could help to improve the lives of the people who work in these communities.

The people involved are Samer Hassan, principal investigator, David Rozas and Silvia in the sociological part right now, Sem and Antonio as tech advisors and Geno, our word-translator for humans. And, we are hiring tech unicorns and project managers too.

What are some of the projects being studied?

Elena: Right now, we are centered in designing better processes within the team, building the basis as a group and rethinking our team culture. A very important (and invisible) task. In terms of productive work, we almost have the pilot communities, for the ethnographic research. Secondly we are working on the brand, the new website and the communication strategy. We are just a few people doing a lot of stuff!

Silvia: That is one of the important decisions we should take and we are still thinking about it. We have drawn up the criteria to choose which projects could be interesting to study, and it seems like in the next months we can start some provisional social research but as I said, this is also under construction! We are full of verve, and we want to take on a lot of case studies but we have to be aware of our capabilities, in terms of time etcetera.

Blockchain-enabled projects are meant to be about decentralizing power, but treat this in a technical way. How do you see this project addressing other issues about decentralizing power, taking into account gender, race, class…?

Silvia: Thank you for asking this question. We strongly believe that the decentralization of power is possible beyond the technical part. Because of that we are giving the same value to both the tech and social sides of the project. Personally­, I’m really focussed on bringing a gender perspective to the project, of course an intersectional one. We are going to put all our efforts into this in order to carry out gender-mainstreaming in the project, starting first within our team and our own culture. We believe strongly that “the personal technical is political”.

Elena: Decentralizing power is the foundation, in your own dynamics and in your relationships as a working group. And it is true, I can see a lot of white men people talking and talking about decentralizing power in both blockchain and the commons. What they do not ask about is their own race, class or gender privileges of being there, maybe they have some women people behind doing the invisible work? Are their personal relationships unequal? Great speeches, theories and papers are useless without considering this.

Communities involved in contributory accounting have different concepts of value and value tracking. Can we avoid the mindset that says that the only value worth tracking is exchange value?

Elena: We have to try it!! It is a partial way, inherited from capitalism and therefore a patriarchal way to see value. People contribute in different ways to the group. What about emotional value? I always work better with people who take care of me and who I love. I do not know if this type of value can be tracked, but we all know that it is there, we cannot ignore it and try to measure and track all the facts.

Silvia: Yes, I think we can. Feminist economy has been doing this, challenging the heterodox economy, for many years. It is a matter of having the will and developing a broader outlook. It is not easy, I have never worked before in tech and I am still struggling with how to apply my knowledge in this field. I assume it is going to be a very creative process.

What about invisible or affective work? Can these be tracked and measured?

Elena: Affective and invisible work is the base of all groups and society. I am not interested in measuring them, but maybe we could try to train in empathy, listening and learning a little more. In Spain, for example, assemblies, work meetings… are often held at 8 p.m. This is absolutely incompatible with the caring done outside of work, and nobody seems to mind. This makes people that have to care disappear from decision making and groups. In my opinion, it is a capitalist heritage that we need to rethink.

Silvia: I don’t know if it is a matter of measuring. The feminists working in development cooperation, for example, have done a really good job with time, using surveys or calculating the contributions of domestic and affective work to the GDP. On the other hand, I think a very important first step is to consolidate the idea of invisible and affective work as the base of life, and understanding how without it, there is nothing else. This kind of work must not be in the periphery, waiting to be measured or recognized; we have to put it in the center, as Amaia Pérez Orozco explains so well.

Although commons based peer production is an emancipating way of pooling our productive capacities, these communities are often dominated by male, white, economically privileged individuals. What is the role of “peer to peer” in confronting these disparities?  

Silvia: We cannot be so innocent in thinking that in “peer to peer” production there are no power relationships. These commons based initiatives have a lot of potential, challenging capitalism and exploring new ways to build economy, but of course they have to implement a lot of mechanisms to avoid reproducing patriarchy, racism, and other structures of domination. It is still necessary to make the struggle against knowledge- or power-inequality a priority in these communities.

Elena: P2P communities have made important advances in decentralizing power but, like Silvia said, we cannot think that everything is already done, because in most cases, we’re all white, first world people. We have to make an effort to introduce measures that help us to re-think and re-design real peer to peer values. I am not an expert, but I can still see, typically, a white, upper-class man doing free software or exchanging p2p value.

Silvia, how does your background in feminism and anthropology fit into the project? How do these affect Commons and P2P practices, in academia and “in the real world”?

Silvia: Well, the entire group has expressed from the beginning how important the social branch of the project was for them. They have helped me to overcome this “imposter syndrome” I had (I know the theory, however, I am still in the empowerment process…). Well, I think a new person on a team always enriches it. Because of my background, maybe I can give some different perspectives to achieve this non-techno-determinism view that the project wants to maintain. This maybe goes more for the academic part. On the other hand, I think my inexperience in tech makes me a good translator and mediator with the “real world”.

Elena, you have done design work on a number of P2P-related projects. Are there specific challenges you try to address in communicating this field? How can ideas like P2P and the Commons be represented visually, and especially to non-academics?

Elena: I am always thinking that we should be capable of talking about commons with the mainstream, and one way to make this possible is with design and communication.

Academic people have the ability to make a simple concept complicated. In this way, we need journalists and designers who translate these complicated minds, papers and concepts to the people. People can easily understand the value of urban gardens in their neighborhood, or the way energy cooperatives are an advantage for the environment and your pocket, but books or essays about p2p communities are very complicated and full of difficult concepts. In that sense, the Commons Transition Primer we did last year is an excellent advance. In the last few years, feminism has done this with excellent results, so, we should try, shouldn’t we?

We talk about a Commons Transition. Do the two of you see this taking place? If so, how?

Silvia: Well, to be fair, I would not say that this would be a transition, but a return to the past. Women have being doing Commons and alternative initiatives for centuries, the novelty now is the inclusion of some technologies like blockchain. I do not dare to make predictions… Deep down, what I would like is that this happens in a coherent way with the bases of the Commons, that is with equity, solidarity and an awareness of interdependence.

Elena: Step by step, I can see little advances in people’s mentalities, or in local politics. For example, recently the Madrid council has received a UN Public Service prize for a collaborative free software platform called Decide Madrid. It is an excellent sign and means that our work and efforts working in the commons are important and can provoke social change.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Silvia: I would like to give special thanks to my colleague Elena. From the beginning I’ve felt her sorority, and it is really a pleasure to share my workspace with such an experienced person and woman. It is great to have her support and knowledge in this uncertain and masculinized sector.

Elena:

 Elena Martínez Vicente studied Fine Arts in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she spent her final two years enjoying a grant in Venice, Italy.

Silvia Díaz Molina studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After two years living in Vienna (Austria), participating in different volunteer work and activism, she joined the Gender Studies and Development Cooperation Master’s Degree at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, because of which she had the opportunity to do an internship in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), where she wrote her thesis about “Afro-descendant women from the Colombian Caribbean, sexual violence and the construction of memories about the armed conflict”. In April 2018, she became part of the P2PModels project as a researcher, developing the social side of the project.

Lead image by Gaelx, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0; text image by Janita Top, Unsplash

The post Elena Martinez and Silvia Díaz of P2P Models on Blockchain, Feminism and Affective P2P appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Birgit Daiber: After years of commoning in conferences, cooperation projects, networking, discussions on the diversity of experiences and designing strategies how broaden them – I think it’s time to discuss how to implement them on a political level: Commons as one dimension of initiatives to reclaim a social, ecological and democratic Europe connected with the reconstruction and democratization of public services.

Different from some of the commons networks in Europe which try to stay outside direct political debates, claiming commons as a fundamental new way of economic and social practice that is not assignable to one or the other political direction, I think commons are potentially an essentially left issue. Why? Very simple: The question of property is basic for all left politics from its (organised) beginning in the 19th century – until today. In his theory of value, Karl Marx revealed the contradiction between exchange value and use value. And this too is still relevant today. Within these two dimensions of left thinking we find the global movements of the commons. Francois Houtart says in his basic manifesto from 2011 that commons initiatives focus on use value, democratic participation and autonomy, being part of a new post-capitalist paradigm and in a short note from 2014 he is pointing out:

“Concretely, it means to transform the four ”fundamentals” of any society: relations with nature; production of the material base of all life, physical, cultural, spiritual; collective social and political organization and culture. For the first one, the transformation means to pass from the exploitation of nature as a natural resource merchandize to the respect of nature as the source of life. For the second one: to privilege use value rather than exchange value, with all the consequences with regard to the concept of property. The third one implies the generalization of democratic practices in all social relations and all institutions and finally interculturality means to put an end to the hegemony of Western culture in the reading of the reality and the construction of social ethics. Elements of this new paradigm, post-capitalist, are already present all over the world, in many social movements and popular initiatives. Theoretical developments are also produced. So, it is not a “utopian vision” in the pejorative sense of the word. But a clear aim and definition is necessary to organize the convergences of action. It is a long-term process which will demand the adoption of transitions, facing the strength of an economic system ready to destroy the world before disappearing. It means also that the structural concept of class struggle is not antiquated (fiscal heavens and bank secrecy are some of its instruments). Social protests, resistances, building of new experiences are sources of real hope.”

We are just in time, as left parties in Europe are preparing their national campaigns and their European performance for the next European elections in 2019. Election-campaigns always give the opportunity to discuss programmes and projects more intensely in public debates, and so the Common Good could become one of the core-issue for the Left. Practical initiatives and debates are already well developed on different levels in some countries – as e.g. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and France and Belgium and there are hundreds of examples of successful initiatives on municipal, national and international levels. Just to give some few examples:

The municipal level: most of commons initiatives are local activities, in cities as well as in rural areas. Urban Commons are prominent and well documented. Cities as Seoul (KOR), Barcelona (ES), Naples (IT), Ghent (BE) and Frome (GB) show how to realise urban commons and how municipalities can work together with commoners. There are legal competences too supporting commons initiatives. The Berlin Senate for example has the right to confiscate abandoned property (but they don’t use it yet and there is no obligation for social use).

National level: The movement for Water as a commons in Italy initiated a referendum with the result that 51% of Italian citizens voted for it. The government must act and the Parliament has to discuss new laws – a still on-going struggle. The water-movement is putting the question of Commons in the context of re-thinking the role of the public in the management of goods and services related to the universal human rights.

The “old” left idea, that the State per se would guarantee public services, failed with processes of privatization – and even when the State is still holding the ownership, goods and services are often given to private companies. It is crucial to suspend market activities from public services to ensure that profits in this sector are re-invested for public use. At the same time, public services must be democratized and there has to be public control with the participation of workers and citizens (only?) to guarantee correct functioning of the common good.

On national levels, the laws on social and common use of property and the laws on cooperatives are decisive. An interesting example is the legal structure of SCOPs in France (“Societé cooperative et participative” or “société coopérative ouvrière de production“). In 2016 there were 2680 SCOPs with 45 000 active members – and they are still on the rise.

International level: Bolivia and Ecuador included Commons explicitly in their constitutions. In 2010 the UN general assembly adopted the resolution on access to clean water as basic human right. The initiative for a fundamental declaration on the Common Good of Humanity goes beyond this – well aware that a proclamation has no legally binding character but can be an instrument for social and political mobilization, creating a new consciousness and serving as a basis for the convergence of social and political movements at the international level. Clearly it is a long-term task, but it needs to be started. Not only can the coming together of social movements like the World Social Forum and political parties like the Forum of São Paulo contribute by promoting such a Declaration, but individual countries through their representatives in international organizations like Unesco and the United Nations can also push this agenda forward.

Coming to the European Level: Since some European Parliamentarians from different political groups founded an ‘Intergroup’ on Commons and Public Services in 2014, the ‘European Commons Assembly’ developed with participants from nearly all European countries. ECA initiated conferences and various activities and published a general call: “We call for the provision of resources and the necessary freedom to create, manage and sustain our commons. We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation and to prioritize the common good in all policies. This requires a shift from traditional structures of top-down governance towards a horizontal participatory process for community decision-making in the design and monitoring of all forms of commons. We call on commoners to support a European movement that will promote solidarity, collaboration, open knowledge and experience sharing as the forces to defend and strengthen the commons. Therefore, we call for and open the invitation to join an on-going participatory, inclusive process across Europe for the building and maintenance of a Commons Assembly. Together we can continue to build a vibrant web of caring, regenerative collective projects that reclaim the European Commons for people and our natural environment.

How could the common good be important for European politics? Just to remind one of the prominent battles of the Left (including Greens and Trade Unions) in the years 2000: the battle against the Bolkestein-Directive. In the end it was possible to introduce the protection of public services as “services of general social and economic interest (SSIG’s) on European level. This could be a starting point for initiatives for commons tofight for the recognition of commons initiatives in different fields as basic citizens rights in Europe.

All these examples show at least the slightly fragmented situation. The political and legal conditions differ widely and there is a need to discuss demands on all levels – and there is the need to discuss them on the European level.

Opportunities for the European Left

The general interest of European Left is to re-think the role of public for goods and services with relation to universal rights and to prohibit market-logic in public services. The aim is to suspend the market from public goods and services and to democratize public services for the recuperation of public services as Common Good. This is the first dimension. The second is to re-think social and workers rights as common goods. And the third is the recognition of citizens’ initiatives as basic rights and the promotion of commons initiatives.

So, it’s a three-fold battle and it could start from the general statement:

Commons are of general public interest, thus the general demand is the political and legal recognition of citizens’ initiatives whose aim is to create, re-construct and recuperate resources, goods and services in a social, ecological and democratic way. But there are specific demands to add. As there are (just to give some examples):

1. Cooperative use of abandoned land and houses. Social use of confiscated property.
2. Right for workers to recuperate their companies and manage them collectively – before selling them to investors or going bankrupt.>
3. Open access for all citizens to information services that are democratically organised, and free public internet.
4. Collectively and self-managed funds for citizens’ initiatives and access to public funding.
5. Democratization of digital radio and TV by reserving e.g. 30% of the slots for non-commercial, community etc. stations.
6. Participatory re-communalization/re-municipaliyation of energy and water.

And I’m sure there are others to add…

It could be the right moment to start to discuss practical political proposals – not with the illusion to change European politics immediately, but with the intention to bring the debate into the light of a greater public.

Thank you for your attention.

About the author: As Member of the European Parliament (MEP), as director of the European Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Brussels, as coordinator of transatlantic and international projects and as an expert for social urban development, Birgit Daiber has been involved for over decades in the building of Europe. She is the author and publisher of a number of books and articles on European and international issues. The common good of humanity, gender-oriented civil conflict prevention and the intercultural dialogue are in the focus of her present attention.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

The post Let’s talk politics: Conference on Social Commons, Barcelona, June 2018  appeared first on P2P Foundation.