For years, I’ve been looking beyond the technical and economic limits which we’ve developed during our fast few decades of personal computing and digital networking.  I’ve looked at co-creative potentials envisioned by Internet pioneers, and added ideas on the basic nature of communication and community.  This book reflects all of that research– but in most ways, it’s just a beginning.

Co- creating tech and culture

We can rebuild communications technologies (tools, techniques and systems) to foster the emergence of communities and inter-communities of autonomous peers. It’s an immense challenge, however, because we must displace corporations which marry communities to software platforms based on financially extractive models.

We can foster just and effective dialogue between tech and culture with these open tech goals:

1. All globally valuable communications software should be, or become, freely available to diverse digital networks.

2. Network participants should be able to use any software which meets systemic specifications for protocols or APIs.

Humanity first

I believe that p2p networking technology is crucial to a sustainable future.  However, it won’t get anyone out of the creative and social work we need to do together.

Communication and collaboration are deeply human. People must share ideas and activities to discover common interests, to plan and work fairly together, and to develop true community.

Putting humanity first, we won’t predetermine social tools and techniques according to currently usable software, including our evolving programming languages.  However, we’ll always need to refine tools and techniques through shared experiences with usable software.

Software applications and functions

Many processes described in Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking could be integrated into a small set of signaling and storage applications. However, they’ll probably be explored in various networks before they’re fully realized anywhere. Also, complex projects require coordinating functions which my book doesn’t yet mention. For instance, I’m developing a fractal process management system for objectives with unlimited levels of complexity.

I’m drafting a new paper on the open ecosystem of tools and techniques we need to support p2p organizing, including essential systems such as notifications, scheduling and calendars.  Designers can directly integrate such systems with this book’s networking models.

Coordinated Goals

I’ll openly develop Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking based on feedback, and I’ll use Agreement-Based Organization to help build co-authored versions of its networking models.  Ideally, participation will be open to all sincerely interested people, via distributive network management principles.

Agreement-Based Organization will always be separately available, and both documents will always be licensed for sharing and adaptation.  However, I believe that some form of agreement-based organization will receive increased attention as a component within a co-authored p2p networking model.

I’ll coordinate my goals with harmonious efforts in existing projects and communities such as Value Flows. We’ll only need a small fraction of our co-creative resources to develop open technologies for all people.

How you can help

I want and need feedback on Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking.  I’d especially appreciate if feedback reflects these framing questions:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

Maybe you have ideas I haven’t encountered before!  Feel free to comment directly on the document or email me, and share your thoughts on how we can emerge into an Information Age.

The post Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking: How the Internet Should Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the prize citation, the jury wrote:

“The P2P Foundation is a new generation of communities that help to build communities.  It is dedicated to advocacy and research of peer to peer dynamics in society. Established ten years ago, it evolved into one of the main drivers of the ‘commons transition’.

“As a decentralized and self-organized non-profit organization, the P2P Foundation analyzes, documents and promotes peer-to-peer strategies that seem to be well-suited to facing the challenges and problems of our times in ways that display great future promise. The focus is on three key traits: sustainability, openness and solidarity. Since its inception, the community of the P2P Foundation has input over 30,000 entries that document the history and development of the peer-to-peer movement. The P2P Foundation Wiki has been accessed more than 27 million times, and is thus the platform that has assembled the world’s most massive collection of knowledge about P2P.”

A shout-out to the P2P Foundation core team, consisting of James Burke, Bill Niaros, Vasilis Kostakis, Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso, and of course, Michel – my dear friend and colleague on the Commons Strategies Group.  Michel, it is so heartening to see your years of toil, tenacity and leadership in building this global community receive this recognition.

What exactly is the P2P Foundation, the uninitiated may ask?  I consider it an invaluable resource of archived information about the history of peer production and related topics.  It is a robust forum for debate about frontier issues affecting digital spaces, and a frontline news/blogging source that rapidly shares new developments and knowledge. It is a relentless instigator of new collaborations, conversations and actions ultimately directed at system-change.

The site has made visible and helped explain the work of many communities and movements engaged in the co-creation of culture and knowledge. These include the free and open source software world, free culture and open design and hardware, the sharing economy, and co-workers in hacker/makerspaces and Fab Labs. What these movements share is a desire to develop new kinds of democratic and economic participation and to build a more ecologically mindful, egalitarian future.

Here is the P2P Foundation’s official self-description:

The P2P Foundation was conceived ten years ago to help people, organizations and governments transition towards commons-based approaches to society through co-creating an open knowledge commons and a resilient, sustainable human network. Between the paradigms of the network and the organization, theP2P Foundation exists as an “organized network” which can facilitate the creation of networks, yet without directing them. The P2P Foundation consists of a foundation registered in the Netherlands with three operational hubs dedicated to organizing, advocacy, research and creating a knowledge commons; a network of activists and researchers working at different levels of engagement, a small core team for strategy and sustainability, and countless members engaging with and contributing to our information commons. The P2P Foundation work was begun and to a large extent is still led by founder Michel Bauwens through outreach, lecturing, writing, publishing and online documentation. The P2P Foundation is the umbrella organization under which Commons Transition and the P2P Laboperate interdependently.

The P2P Foundation is a digital community creating an information-commons ecosystem for the growing P2P/Commons movement. This movement is concerned with the digital and the tangible, material, human worlds, including questions of their freedoms and restrictions, scarcities and abundances. Our community is a decentralized, self-organized movement whose interests include the political environment surrounding the networked society; the material, social and cultural realities of the sharing and collaborative economies and of alternative and crypto currencies; sustainability and “pro-sumer” practices countering planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity; and reclaiming democracy. In short the “peer to peer” world unites people in a cultural shift towards a more humane, fair, sustainable future.

Our primary aim is to be an incubator and catalyst for the emerging ecosystem, focusing on the “missing pieces,” and the interconnectedness that can lead to a wider movement. P2P, in practice, is often invisible to those involved, for a variety of cultural reasons. We want to reveal its presence in discrete movements in order to unite them in their common ethos. To do this, a common initiative is required which gathers information, connects and mutually informs people, strives for integrative insights contributed by many sub-fields, organizes events for reflection and action, and educates people about critical and creative tools for “world-making.”

To my noble, resourceful friends and colleagues at the P2P Foundation:  You do this, and much more besides!

Cross-posted from Bollier.org

The post P2P Foundation Wins Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Thanks to the P2P Foundation core team: James Burke, Bill Niaros, Vasilis Kostakis and Stacco Troncoso and our founder, Michel Bauwens. Thanks again to Stacco and to George Dafermos for the video work, and all the interviewees in the video: Loretta Anania, Dmytri Kleiner, Enric Senabre, Rachel O’Dwyer, Hilary Wainwright, Primavera De Filippi, Derek Razo, Sybille Saint Girons, Nuria Del Rio Paracolls, and Danielle Boursier. And special thanks to our entire P2P Foundation community, a global-digital-human community built on the understanding that a better world is possible if we work, think and share together.

Here is the text that accompanied our video submission, seen above.

On the morning of Sunday, March 13, 2016, I was at home in Madrid, Spain. At the same time, northeast of here in Barcelona, many of my colleagues in the P2Pvalue project – of which the P2P Foundation is a project partner – were attending an event called “Procomuns – Commons Collaborative Economies”.

The event was chiefly organized by the project partner based in Barcelona, but all partners had a hand in making the event an extraordinary success. Here’s the thing – I wasn’t able to attend (family reasons), but my husband was there. His name is Stacco Troncoso and he’s the strategic director of the P2P Foundation. I’m Ann Marie Utratel, handling communications for the Foundation – and this video is a result of the way we live and work, online and offline.

Enric Senabre, P2Pvalue/Dimmons Research, and Samer Hassan, P2Pvalue/UCM at the Commons Collaborative Economies event

Our principal duty in the P2Pvalue project is dissemination through our vast digital community network. So, Sunday morning, I sat at my laptop with my Telegram chats and Slack channels open, Tweetdeck set up so I could retweet interesting things on any of the 7 Twitter accounts we manage, and the livestream videos of the event running. Stacco and other friends and colleagues were sending me photos via Telegram, and I was managing social media, uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons, and having an experience I’d never had before – total digital immersion in a live event where I was not physically present. Talk about remote participation.

.@P2Pvalue follows a fully Open approach: publications open access, Taylor Swift, open licensed software #Teem #procomunsbcn @procomuns

— OpenDataTaylorSwift (@t_s_institute) March 13, 2016

Because of the livestream, I could see and hear a lot of familiar cues and ambience that are lost in still photos and staged videos. But there were many things I was missing: the conversations that happen when people get tired of speeches and workshops; the sound of the street outside when stepping out for air; the feeling of anticipation or concentration when some especially interesting speaker is on stage, or talking in the open spaces.

Francisco Jurado Gilabert, legal researcher and author, delivering a “lightning talk”

This event had a particular focus:

“Commons Collaborative Economies: Policies, Technologies and City for the People is an encounter which aims to highlight the relevance of the commons-oriented approach of peer production and collaborative economy, while proposing public policies and providing technical guidelines to build software platforms for collaborative communities”.

The local city administration was present, as the interest in Commons/P2P methods and policy proposals has been rising with the current political changes happening in Spain, along with the attention drawn by the so-called “sharing” economy, and its counterbalancing force lately called the “collaborative economy”. The event’s aim was:

“…to discuss the potential and the challenges of the collaborative economy, but also to define public policies that could help to promote the ‘Commons side’ of the collaborative economy. During the event we will be working together on a series of proposals and policy recommendations for governments, ending in a joint statement of public policies for the collaborative economy. In particular, we will address them to the Barcelona City Council and to the European Commission. In terms of Barcelona, the goal is to submit specific measures to the Municipal Action Plan of the city, alongside joining the participation process that has been enabled online.” (complete online text here, including European level policy proposals).

Friends and colleagues gathered for lunchtime – where the good conversations happen

Let me get to the best part – the people. In attendance were roughly 400 people from 4 continents, and about 40% were women. The participants page on the site showed that we’d succeeded in avoiding the dreaded “all–male panel” awards. There were families with little kids. This event was just about ideal in terms of showing that it’s possible to bring a wide range of people who normally interact online into “the real world”, and accommodate some of their expectations of balanced representation, and even a few of their often overlooked real-world needs – like childcare.

But I wasn’t there! I was missing the vibe, the spirit of those introductions to people I’d always wanted to meet, the surprises of finding out “who we have in common”, all of the serendipity that comes alive at a conference. To try and capture some of that magic, I asked Stacco (via chat) if he and P2P Foundation researcher George Dafermos (on camera as an interviewer in the video) could catch a few people on the fly and ask them two questions that would get them talking about the digital and “real world” communities: whether there’s a difference between these, and how events and online activities interrelate.

The result is this video from a dozen short smartphone recorded interviews sent to me, which I edited and captioned into a neat 30-minute short of conversations. I love the way the feeling of the event comes through, and how everyone seems to agree – the digital community is very human, and these events are like special occasions to enjoy for the gift of finally meeting online friends for the first time, or reuniting with colleagues you haven’t seen in ages. In this very unique case, the online interactions were incorporated into the fiber of the event, with participants being able to contribute to a landmark occasion in co-created policy recommendations towards a better society.

The post P2P Foundation wins 2016 Golden Nica for Digital Communities (Prix Ars Electronica) appeared first on P2P Foundation.