Oscoin: Principles & Motivation

When we started Oscoin, our motivation was guided by the observation that crypto-currencies could enable a new form of community-owned and operated network. The invention of digital scarcity¹ made it possible to economically incentivize and remunerate network participants for their service in a simple,transparent way, without mediation by a third-party.

It was only natural for us to imagine a community of open-source developers,incentivized by a native currency distributed to the projects most valued by the community, and traded between collaborators, users and maintainers of these projects. This ecosystem, we thought, could provide a solution to the problem of open-source sustainability², while also freeing the community from centralization risks associated with platforms such as GitHub and GitLab.

 Well aware of the fraud and confusion around decentralization, we saw potential in crypto-currencies to address socio-economic problems which would allow contributors to be rewarded in a currency that also confers ownership of the network. By consolidating equity with currency, we create a fairer distribution mechanism for long term network sustainability. In such an economy, there are no second class citizens³, everyone is aligned around a single token,everyone wins and loses together.

An uncomfortable truth about our society is that apparent convenience is chosen over everything else. Centralized platforms offer this convenience seemingly for “free”, but since the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s we can observe how this pans out: critical social infrastructure is taken over by corporate interests as communities move from one centralized platform to another. Our belief is that logical centralization⁴ is necessary for communities to exist, but economic centralization is not.

Read more

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Abstract

Blockchain technologies have generated excitement, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterised by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organisation; and critical accounts of such discourses which, whilst contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralised institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. Therefore the question arises, can we build perspectives of blockchain-based governance that go beyond markets and states? In this article we draw on the Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualisation of affordances that this technology may provide to communities. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focussed on blockchain-based commons governance. By carrying out this analysis, we aim to expand the debate from one dominated by a culture of competition to one that promotes a culture of cooperation.

Introduction

In November 2008 a paper published anonymously presented Bitcoin: the first cryptocurrency based purely on a peer-to-peer system (Nakamoto, 2008). For the first time, no third parties were necessary to solve problems such as double-spending. The solution was achieved through the introduction of a data structure known as a blockchain. In simple terms, a blockchain can be understood as a distributed and append-only ledger. Data, such as the history of transactions generated by using cryptocurrencies, can be stored in a blockchain without the need to trust a third party, such as a bank server. From a technical perspective, blockchain enables the implementation of novel properties at an infrastructural level in a fully decentralised manner.

The properties most cited by blockchain enthusiasts at this infrastructural level include immutability, transparency, persistency, resilience and openness (Underwood 2016; Wright & De Filippi 2015), among others. Certainly, some technical infrastructures could previously provide these properties, e.g. the immutability and openness provided by content repositories like Github or Arxiv.org, or the persistence and resilience provided by large web services such as Amazon or Facebook. However, the implementation of these solutions relied on a trusted third party. There have been other decentralised technical infrastructures with varying degrees of success which also reflect some of these properties, e.g. the Web has been traditionally shown as an example of openness, although with uneven persistence (Koehler 1999), or BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing networks are considered open, resilient and partially transparent (Cohen 2003). However, none of the existing decentralised technologies have enabled all these properties (and others) at once in a robust manner, while maintaining a high degree of decentralisation. It is precisely the possibility of developing technological artefacts which rely on a fully distributed infrastructure that is generating enthusiasm, or “hype” according to some authors (Reber & Feuerstein, 2014), with regards to the potential applications of blockchain.

In this article we focus on some of these potential applications of blockchain. More precisely, we reflect on the relationship between blockchain properties and the generation of potentialities which could facilitate governance processes. Particularly, we focus on the governance of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) communities. The term, originally coined by Benkler (2002), refers to an emergent model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other to produce shared resources without a traditional hierarchical organisation (Benkler, 2006). There are multiple well-known examples of this phenomenon, such as Wikipedia, a project to collaboratively write a free encyclopedia; OpenStreetMap, a project to create free/libre maps of the World collaboratively; or Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects such as the operating system GNU/Linux or the browser Firefox. Research carried out drawing on crowdsourcing techniques (Fuster Morell et al., 2016a) found examples of the broad diversity of areas in which the collaborative work on commons is present. This includes open science, urban commons, peer funding and open design, to name but a few. Three main characteristics of this mode of production are salient in the literature on CBPP (Arvidsson et al., 2017). Firstly, CBPP is marked by decentralisation, since authority resides in individual agents rather than a central organiser. Secondly, it is commons-based because CBPP communities make frequent use of common resources, i.e. shared resources which are openly accessible and whose ownership is collectivised. These resources can be immaterial, such as source code in free software, or material, such as 3D printers shared in small-scale workshops known as Fab Labs. Thirdly, there is a prevalence of non-monetary motivations. These motivations are, however, commonly intertwined with extrinsic motivations. As a result, a wide spectrum of motivations and multiple forms of value operate in CBPP communities (Cheshire & Antin 2008), beyond monetary value, e.g. use value, reputational and ecosystemic value (Fuster Morell et al., 2016b).

The three aforementioned characteristics of peer production are in fact aligned with blockchain features. First, both CBPP and blockchain strongly rely on decentralised processes, thus, the possibility of using blockchain infrastructure to support CBPP processes arises. Secondly, the shared commons in CBPP corresponds to the shared ledger present in blockchain infrastructure, where data and rules are transparent, open, collectively owned, and in practice managed as a commons. This leads to the question if such blockchain commons could host or support commons resources, or “commonify” other features of CBPP communities, such as their rules of governance. Thirdly, CBPP relies on multi-dimensional forms of value and motivations, and blockchain enables the emergence of multiple types of non-monetary interactions (sharing, voting, reputation). This brings about the question of the new potentials for channelling CBPP community governance.

Overall, we strongly believe that the combination of CBPP and blockchain provides an exciting field for exploration, in which the use of blockchain technologies is used to support the coordination efforts of these communities. This leads us to the research question: what affordances are generated by blockchain technologies which could facilitate the governance of CBPP communities?

Read the full paper here.

Photo by mikerastiello

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Can FOSS stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge?

Gabriel Ash: Acting against the grain of current economic and political structures and offering both valuable access and inspiring ideas about collaboration, the sharing of ‘the commons,’ and the future of work, these FOSS-modelled schemes are unlikely to be the last of their kind. But if they are to realize their full potential, it is essential that both the lessons of the history of FOSS, and differences in context between IT and agriculture, as well as the impact of the quarter century that separates the two moments in time, become subjects of reflection.

The reality of FOSS is significantly more complicated that the simple distinction between open and proprietary. In many products—the Android phone, for example—‘open’ and ‘closed’ elements co-exist, and tiered commercial projects with an Open Source base and proprietary additions are common. Furthermore, ‘open’ itself is a continuum, with various licensing schemes offering a range of different degrees of control. If FOSS models become widespread, forms of accommodation between open and proprietary technologies are likely to emerge in agriculture as well, which could further advance the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers. It matters therefore how and to what ends FOSS schemes engage and mobilize users and producers.

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

The history of the evolution of agricultural knowledge is also more complicated than a simple binary between proprietary and public. The Green Revolution replaced the informal, tacit knowledge of farmers with formal, scientific knowledge that was nevertheless organized as public knowledge, primary through institutions of research and higher learning. This phase of development elicited resistance and criticism for both the damage to farmers and ecosystems, primarily in the Third World, and for the denigration of centuries of accumulated local knowledge. This conflict was instrumental in the emergence of agroecology as a discipline[1] as well as in a range of efforts to foster better interactions between scientists and farmers.[2]

A second process that began shifting funding, control, and eventually the ownership of knowledge from the public to the private sector occurred later. In contrast to agriculture, software development never had the equivalent of farmers, and FOSS emerged purely out of resistance to the second process. This difference implies that FOSS-inspired schemes in agriculture could be more complex and resilient, and potentially more effective alternatives. But it also opens more room for misaligned interests and internal conflicts.

The ideas of unfettered collaboration and democratic creativity that FOSS schemes invoke are not external to the development of the privatized knowledge economy and its attendant intensification of intellectual property rights. Workforce creativity, technological innovation, intellectual property rights, and economic growth are widely perceived today by policy makers as linked.[3] By advancing ideas of knowledge as common and knowledge production as free, FOSS-inspired schemes expose some of the internal contradictions of a model of economic growth premised on profiting from immaterial labour and the control and selling of knowledge. But they will not buck the trend towards privatized hi-tech agriculture alone.

Agriculture, however, may offer unique opportunities for linking FOSS-inspired schemes with other forms of engagement and mobilization on issues such as environmentalism and farmers’ and peasants’ rights, and the different ways each of the latter raises the question of the commons. Let these projects be the early shoots of a wide wave of reflection, experimentation, and mobilization around these questions.

Read part 1 of this series here.

[1] Gliessman S.R. (2015) Agroecology: the ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd Ed., CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, New York, USA, p. 28.

[2] World Bank (2006) Global – International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Project. Washington, DC: World Bank http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/753791468314375364/Global-International-Assessment-of-Agricultural-Science-and-Technology-for-Development-IAASTD-Project , pp. 65-68.

[3] See Barry (2008), pp. 42-43.

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Gabriel Ash: Recently, a number of initiatives defending free access to agricultural knowledge have emerged. FarmHack, Atelier Paysan, The Open Seeds Initiative, and Open Source Seeds advance alternatives to the proprietary knowledge model of industrial farming based on ideas drawn from Free/Open Source Software. These initiatives respond to current trends in agricultural development and raise questions about its direction; they express an emergent concern for the commons against the drive to privatize knowledge. But why now? What is Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)? How is the FOSS model applied to agriculture? Finally, what are the opportunities and pitfalls such schemes present?[1]

Why now?

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, blockchain, cryptocurrencies—these are today’s ‘hot’ investment trends. The hi-tech ventures that seek to deploy these technologies receive the bulk of new investment in start-ups as well as media attention. The dominance of Information Technologies affects agriculture in two ways: First, an investment gold rush is building up in ‘Agritech,’ around buzzwords such as ‘smart farming’ or ‘precision agriculture,’ and a crop of companies that seek to make agriculture more efficient and profitable with information technologies such as drone and satellite imagery analysis, cloud based data collection, digital exchanges, etc. One gets a sense of the magnitude of the forces unleashed from browsing the offerings of start-up accelerators such as EIT.  Second, businesses, regulators, politicians, NGOs, and the media adopt vocabulary, goals, expectations, and ‘common sense’ derived from Information Technology, which are then applied to agriculture.[2]

The dominance of Information Technology and its tendency to shape other industries as well as law and regulation is not simply the outcome of “market forces.” Both the US and the EU have long promoted the dissemination of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the adoption of new intellectual property rights to support it. Thus, “the 2005 Spring European Council called knowledge and innovation the engines of sustainable growth…it is essential to build a fully inclusive information society, based on the widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in public services, SMEs and households.” According to António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, “we want to ensure that big data will bring the big impact that so many people need.” It is taken for granted by policy makers that innovation and growth depend on commodified, proprietary knowledge, which in turn require reforming and unifying intellectual property rights.[3]

With the growing visibility of ICT, the policy drive for hi-tech innovation, and the push to commodify and privatise knowledge, alternative practices that first emerged within ICT—notably Free/Open Source Software—have also migrated into the mainstream, inspiring projects such the Creative Commons and Free Culture. They are also gaining a presence in agriculture.

What is Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)?

FOSS emerged in the 1980s among computer scientists and engineers who resented the way commercial constraints interfered with the norms of unfettered collaboration and exchange of information that prevail in science. In 1985, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which launched the GNU project of free software tools. Breaking with the habits of commercial development, the software was written by volunteers in open collaboration over the internet and gave users full access to the source code as well as the right to freely share, tinker with and modify the program.

The FSF introduced a new relation between software producers and users, the General Public License (GPL), which effectively “hacks” copyright law to create the very opposite of a property right, a resource that obliges its users to place the fruits of their own labour in a shared common domain. By mandating that all derivative works must be distributed with the same license, this property of the GPL, called ‘copyleft’, prevents the appropriation and integration of free software in a proprietary product and guarantees that the code will remain free and open to users.

Although inspired initially by ideals of openness and freedom, FOSS did not evolve as a radical challenge to proprietary software. Companies large and small soon began investing important sums in open source development, creating new business models around it. In 1998, the shift toward as a more business-friendly model was formalized with the establishment of Open Source Initiative. Today the trend for new projects is towards licenses that eschew copyleft.

There is a perception that FOSS is US-centric. This is true insofar as the powerful US tech industry has shaped its major trends, but with important qualifications. Not only are there numerous European organizations promoting FOSS, but European countries, especially France and Germany, provide a surprisingly large number of participants. Furthermore, a number of Third World countries and public institutions have embraced it for political reasons.

FOSS is undoubtedly a success story. Its products, including heavyweights such as the operating system Linux and the ubiquitous PHP, MySQL, and Apache, power much of the web, and major ITC companies rely on it. It is also a realm of empowerment and meaning for the skilled programmers who contribute to it, one that implicitly invokes new forms of collective creativity, unfettered by the structures of intellectual property that support the expansion of the ‘information society’ and its attendant commodification of knowledge. Yet FOSS has not delivered on the utopian aspirations that are often invested in it. It has not subverted the dominant proprietary industrial structures, nor has it ushered a society of empowered technology users/creators. In David Barry’s words, FOSS remains “precariously balanced between the need for a common public form in which innovation and creativity can blossom and the reliance, to a large extent, on private corporations…” that push forward the commodification and enclosure of knowledge.[4]

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

FOSS-inspired initiatives in Agriculture

Mechanized farm equipment manufacturers such as John Deer progressively moved toward digitized, software-controlled components that require authorized software access to repair, as well as restrictive contracts that forbid repairs and modifications. This inspired hackers, first in Eastern Europe, then in the US, to develop and share hacked versions of the control software, circumventing the manufacturers’ protections. In the US, farmers who used those hacked versions joined a larger movement demanding legislation to protect ‘the right to repair.’[5]

Addressing similar concerns from a different direction, FarmHack, established in 2010 and describing itself as “a worldwide community of farmers that build and modify our own tools,” draws inspiration from the hacking culture of FOSS to promote low-cost, open farm technology. Participants share designs for farm tools and license them under ‘copyleft’ licenses. FarmHack seeks to “light the spark for a collaborative, self-governing community that builds its own capacity and content, rather than following a traditional cycle of raising money to fund top-down knowledge generation.”

In France, Atelier Paysan was set up in 2011 with a similar basic concept, offering “an on-line platform for collaboratively developing methods and practices to reclaim farming skills and achieve self-sufficiency in relation to the tools and machinery used in organic farming.” Unlike FarmHack, whose off-line presence is limited to meetups, Atelier Paysan is organized as a cooperative that owns a certain amount of equipment and provides workshops to farmers. Atelier Paysan publishes its collaborators’ design under the same creative commons ‘copyleft’ license.

The enclosure and commodification of plant genome through patenting, licensing, and hybridization have spurred similar efforts. The Open Source Seed Initiative, a US organization created in 2012, describes itself as “inspired by the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software,” with the goal “to free the seed – to make sure that the genes in at least some seed can never be locked away from use by intellectual property rights.” After initially trying and failing to devise a legally enforceable license, OSSI opted for a short pledge that is printed on all seed packages: “…you have the freedom to use these OSSI- Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this Pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.” As of today, OSSI’s list of pledged seeds numbers over 400 varieties.

Last year, a second open seeds initiative was unveiled in Germany, Open Source Seeds, which has its institutional roots in ecological agricultural development in the Third World. Unlike FOSS copyright-based licenses, OSS license was devised under German civil contract law. The license, which is copyleft and includes derivatives, aims at combating market concentration. As one can expect for an organization that operates for less than a year, only five open source varieties are listed so far, all tomatoes.

Part 2 will question whether FOSS can stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge. 

Gabriel Ash is a translator, software developer, writer, activist, and filmmaker. He lives now in Geneva, Switzerland

[1] The account of FOSS below is highly indebted to David Berry’s excellent analysis in Berry, D. (2008) Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, Pluto Press, London.

[2] See the European Conference on Precision Agriculture Sponsors, the European Parliament report on Precision Agriculture and the Future of Farming in Europe, the European Commission’s Communication on Future of Food and Farming .

[3] See European Commission (2005), p.4.

[4] Berry (2008), p. 144;

[5] See The Repair Association  and Nebraska’s Fair Repair Bill

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Current EU Copyright Review threatens Free and Open Source Software. Take action now to preserve the ability to collaboratively build software online!

The P2P Foundation supports the SAVE, CODE, SHARE campaign to defend our Internet sovereignty and digital collaborative spaces. Click here to sign as an individual or organization. The letter below, along with the signatures signatures, will be delivered
the Members of the European Parliament and the EU Council. The following is taken from SaveCodeShare.eu:

Open Letter to Secure Free and Open Source Software Ecosystem in the EU Copyright Review

Your mobile device, your car, your wifi router at home, your television, the airplanes in which you travel all contain Free and Open Source Software. This widespread reuse is possible because Free and Open Source Software can be shared openly, studied and customised to meet any need.

The EU is getting ready to vote a “Copyright Reform” package which fundamentally undermines the foundations upon which Free and Open Source Software is built. The proposed Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive targets every online service that allows its users to upload and share content with each other, including code hosting platforms.

Under this proposal code hosting platforms will be compelled to prevent any possible copyright infringement by developing fundamentally flawed filtering technologies. These filtering algorithms will ultimately decide what material software developers should be allowed to share.

As a result of this ongoing copyright review, every user of a code sharing platform, be they an individual, a business or a public administration, is to be treated as a potential copyright infringer: their content, including entire code repositories, will be monitored and blocked from being shared online at any time. This restricts the freedom of developers to use specific software components and tools that in return leads to less competition and less innovation. Ultimately this can result in software that is less reliable and a less resilient software infrastructure for everybody.

We, individuals, developers, organisations and companies that develop or rely on the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem call upon European decision makers to protect open, collaborative software ecosystems. We call upon European policy makers to fundamentally rethink or delete Article 13 of the EU Copyright Reform in order to avoid the threat it poses for Free and Open Source Software.

Save Europe’s digital future, by making sure that there is a re-think or deletion of Article 13 in the EU Copyright Reform.

Please Save Code Share!

Take Action Now

About the initiative

#SaveCodeShare is an initiative launched by the FSFE and OpenForum Europe in September 2017. It aims to bring awareness about the unintended impact of Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive on software sharing platforms. Through the research presented in our White Paper, the initiative shows that better awareness is needed to understand where and how innovation takes place in the current market. This is a first step in order to create a proper regulatory framework. And this is what this initiative aims to achieve.

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Julia Reda: Free software development as we know it is under threat by the EU copyright reform plans.

The battle on the EU copyright reform proposal continues, centering on the plan to introduce upload filters. In short, online platforms would be required to monitor their users’ uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering. As most communication online consists of uploads onto different platforms, such “censorship machines” have broad consequences, including for free and open source software (FOSS) repositories.

On these platforms, developers from across the world collaborate on software projects that anyone can freely use and adapt. Automated filters would be guaranteed to throw up many false positives. Automatic deletion means uploaders are presumed guilty until proven innocent: Legitimate contributions would be blocked.

The recent outcry about this in the FOSS community is showing some results: Our concerns are getting lawmakers’ attention. Unfortunately, though, most are misunderstanding the issue and drawing the wrong conclusions. Now that we know how powerful the community’s voice is, it is all the more important to keep speaking up!

Why is this happening?

The starting point for this legislation was a fight between big corporations, the music industry and YouTube, over money. The music industry complained that they receive less each time one of their music videos is played on a video platform like YouTube than they do when their tracks are listened to on subscription services like Spotify, calling the difference the “value gap”. They started a successful lobbying effort: The upload filter law is primarily intended to give them a bargaining chip to demand more money from Google in negotiations. Meanwhile, all other platforms are caught in the middle of that fight, including code sharing communities.

The lobbying has engrained in many legislators’ minds the false idea that platforms which host uploads for profit are necessarily exploiting creators.

Code sharing

There are, however, many examples where there is a symbiotic relationship between platform and creators. Developers use and upload to software repositories voluntarily, because the platforms add value. While Github is a for-profit company, it supports not-for-profit projects – it finances its free hosting of open source projects by charging for the commercial use of the site’s services. Thus open source activities will be affected by a law designed to regulate a fight between giant corporations.

In a recent blog post, Github sounded the alarm, citing three reasons why upload filters are a terrible fit for software projects:

1. Code needs to be filtered under this law because it is copyrightable – but many developers intend for their code to be shared under an open source license.
2. The risk for false positives is very high because different parts of a software project may be covered under different license terms, which is very hard for automated technology to adequately handle.
3. Automatically having to remove code suspected of infringing copyright may have devastating consequences for software developers who have built on common resources that they may find suddenly vanishing.

Concerns are being heard

In their latest draft, the Council of the European Union seeks to exclude “non-for profit open source software developing platforms” from the obligation to filter uploads. This amendment is a direct result of the FOSS community’s outcry. However, this exception would not cover for-profit platforms like Github and many others, even if only a branch of their operations is for-profit.

Rather than questioning the basic principle of the law, politicians are trying to quell criticism by proposing more and more specific exceptions for those who can credibly demonstrate that the law would adversely affect them. Creating such a list of exceptions is a Sisyphean task sure to remain incomplete. Rather, upload filters should be rejected as a whole as a disproportional measure that endangers the fundamental right to free expression online.

We can do it!

To achieve this, we need your help. The FOSS community can’t just solve problems with code: It has political clout, strength in numbers and allies in the Parliament. We have already started to effect change. Here’s how you can take action right now:

1. Sign the open letter at SaveCodeshare.
2. Use Mozilla’s free tool to call MEPs.
3. Tweet at the key players in the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee via FixCopyright.

Technical Sidenote:

• Fundamentally, three players are involved in the legislative process. The Commission drafted an initial legal proposal, which the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union can propose changes to. Within the Parliament, this legislation is first discussed in the Legal Affairs Committee, with each political group nominating a negotiator. Once the Committee has voted to approve the compromise established by the negotiators, it will be put to vote in the plenary of the Parliament, before negotiations begin with the other institutions. The exact legislative path so far can be found here.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

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The year is 2017 AD. The whole web is occupied by centralized services. Well… Not entirely. One small village of indomitable free software lovers still holds out against the invaders…

This is how the French association Framasoft presents itself. They have achieved something remarkable in the last two and a half years: Framasoft offers anyone free, libre and open-source alternatives to services like Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, Slack, Facebook Groups, Doodle. For free. Framasoft is hosting roundabout 30 services ranging from Etherpad, Nextcloud, Jitsi, Mattermost, Loomio and Studs used by hundreds of thousands of users every month (here is an quick overview of all services Framasoft offers right now). They did spend 400.000 Euros in the last two and half years on building this – most of the money came from donations.

There is much to learn from Framasoft on how to make free, libre and open-source software popular and accessible. There are many great alternatives – but you need to help people to use, understand and love them. To make it as easy as possible to use libre alternatives (here is a great talk on this at Fosdem).

The Framasoft team shares their insights in the interview below – answered collaboratively in an etherpad by six persons (the illustration above was done by Simon « Gee » Giraudot, I recut it, it is freely reusable under Creative Commons By–SA 4.0).

Why do you offer free services for anyone based on free software?

From its early age, Framasoft’s approach was– and still is – very pragmatic: we do not intend to convert people to the Libre as to a theoretical cause. We provide tools and services that you can use in your everyday environment – even on a proprietary OS! And from there on, we hope we can help people think by themselves, about their privacy, about their data, about the control they are entitled to claim on their digital lives.

Framasoft started 15 years ago, with teachers who created a directory website for free libre open source software (FLOSS), so that they could share the software with their friends and colleagues. And we kept on going along this path and proposing practical projects to bring more free libre software (DVDs, USB-Keys and so on) and culture (Blog, translations, publishing house…) to Mr-Mrs Everyone. Because we are (or were) Mr-Mrs Everyone: we still have a minority of tech-savvy hardcore developers among our midst, and we try to act as a “missing link” between this world and the widespread audience.

A turn point was 2011, when we started hosting our first Etherpad instance (the former branch). It was really powerful: as soon as we showed people how to collaborate on writing a text in real-time, online and without opening an account, they were amazed. We went on with hosting an Ethercalc instance (collaborative spreadsheets) and a now-homebrewed Doodle alternative named Framadate.

Nowadays, our association gathers people from all over France who seldom meet in the same physical space. So we have been the first to use our collaborative online services. As a matter of fact, we often started hosting them for our own private needs before making them publicly available.

But it’s only in October, 2014 that we launched our “Let’s De-Google-ify the Internet” program and made the bet that over the next three years we would host more than 30 Free-Libre and ethical alternatives to big-data services.

What do you offer that is unique compared to other web services or hosting providers?

It can all be summarized in one word: trust. We try to offer the best conditions for users to trust us with their data, thus giving them the questions everyone should ask themselves when using a hosted solution. To us the conditions of this trust stand on a few non-negotiable points:

1. Exclusive use of Free Software (as in free speech), for both the services we provide and our system administration. Their source code being open, everyone can audit them and therefore have trust in them. It also induces the use of open formats, which is key for interoperability and importing/exporting one’s data.
2. A transparent and data-friendly economic model. We chose to finance our services on user’s donations, allowing us to claim that we don’t have any financial incentive in collecting data and digital lives. Note that other economics models can also be data-friendly, but our model fit’s our goals. We aim to be as transparent as we can: our Terms of Services are user friendly.  We edited a “tl;dr”-version which only takes five minutes to acknowledge and is legally binding. Our charter describes the values we defend, we publish our administrative, technical and financial information and are always present to discuss and explain further all these information.
3. Net and social neutrality: We respect and try to protect net neutrality. Moreover, our economic model allows us to offer free services (as in free beer), so there are no differences in the services you get based on your income. Last, as we don’t need to know who you are. We don’t want nor need to get a “user profile” or a “social graph” from you. We don’t (and can’t, and won’t) discriminate the service you get based on your (non-)gender, skin color, origin, orientations, political preferences and the like.
4. Solidarity and education: We try to facilitate as much as we can the use of our services by providing startpages, quick-start guides, documentation, self-hosting tutorials, support (both individual and through our Frequently Asked Questions page), users forums. We both provide and ask for contributions on the software we use and their documentation, so our users community can also become a contributors community.
5. Decentralization: Our services are offered as a kind of proof of concept. They demonstrate that FLOSS can be an alternative to Big Data’s services, and that it is possible for the users to keep the control over their digital lives. Users can try different software and use it as much as they need, and (if and when they are ready) leave our services for even more digital independence, because they are able to host the software they need themselves. We often provide guidance for those who wants to cooperatively or self-host these services and migrate from our services to their own servers.

What are the benefits of doing this as an association instead of a cooperative for example?

Not dealing with clients :p!  OK, behind that poor-tasted-joke lies some kind of truth: we want to empower people in their digital lives, and we feel we won’t be able to do so if we place them in a passive customer role.

On a general point of view, our activities are non-commercial and we intend to keep them on a small scale and to maintain a democratic balance between the employees and the volunteers in the association. By doing so, our relationship won’t become anonymous and everyone is involved in the global project. Like in a cooperative, 1 person = 1 voice

Since we don’t sell our services (nor won’t we one day propose “premium fees” and such), we are dealing with users. It changes everything: people are more understanding, less demanding. They know we do our best (we would settle for nothing less) and they can accept when our best isn’t enough, when there is some downtime, for example.

We don’t aim to host and concentrate as many people (and people’s data) as possible. Our goal is to demonstrate that the Free-Libre world has already worked on alternatives to GAFAM’s services (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). We want people to come and try services with us. That’s why we contribute through user & self-hosting documentation, translations into French, presentation and a (tiny bit of) design, some code. But our final goal is that users leave our services because they liked to use them and were so convinced that they started self-hosting them. Or that they have at least found a local ethical Free-Libre service provider – decentralization of data is important and forgotten too often.

Those purposes make us not compatible with a model based on profit. Being a non-profit looking only for self-sustenance allows us to explore, to take time to educate people and to experiment – and with experiments come failures, which are great lessons.

Last, being an association, under the French status of “Association de loi 1901” allows our organization to be officially recognized of general interest. This benefits directly to our more than 2,000 donators who can get a tax relief of a third of the amount they gave us. Thus it’s an incentive for them to keep on supporting us. And donations are 95% of our revenue stream and the basis to pay for our 6 employees, our servers, and such.

How much of the collective work of framasoft goes into the free services?

Nowadays: most of it!

Before the “Let’s De-Google-ify the Internet” project, we had some balance between free software projects (the directory, USB keys, DVDs, etc.), free culture projects (blog, translations, publishing free-libre novels, comics and handbooks, etc.), free-libre services (pad, calc and doodle-like), and the life of the association.

Now, our translation group and our publishing house are still very active, our free software directory has been completely re-modeled, but half to three-quarters of our energy are focused on the 30+ services we are hosting, and the few alternatives left we intend to complete.

What we didn’t realise before starting this project, is how much support and communication (public relations) we would have to provide. And it’s important, as we both want to help people adopt free-libre services and to care about the stakes of data silos such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (the infamous “GAFAM”).

Even though, we still take and find time to share our experience so it can be reproduced and adapted, mainly through a network of local ethical free-libre services hoster we initiated: CHATONS (French for “Kittens”).

How do you measure the performance of framasoft – what are your goal, what are your key performance indicators?

When we started the “Let’s De-Goole-ify the Internet” project, in October 2014, it almost seemed like a fools’ errand, an impossible bet we took on ourselves. So, at first we didn’t set any other goals than trying to do our best to achieve what we had announced: To inform the audience of the stakes of data-concentration, to show that FLOSS can provide ethical alternatives, and to help those who could to achieve digital independence.

Two and a half year later, many people trusted us and gave us the means to achieve what at the time could have looked as a moonshot project. Now, our main goal is to share this experience so other hosters can reproduce, adapt and use it. We have initiated a network of French-speaking ethical sevice hosters (named CHATONS), and now we are trying to see if such a network can be expanded or reproduced in other languages and countries.

As for the measurements, we have of course some quantitative indicators: for instance, we get more than 2 million visits per month on our network of websites and services, which means that hundreds of thousands of people are at least trying to change their digital habits every month.

Since we don’t want to collect detailed users’ data, we don’t have qualitative performance indicators. So, right now, we can only share some quite informal feedback.

Until now, we mainly get feedback by interacting with people, online via social networks, comments, e-mails and so on, and in real life because we take part to roundabout 100 events every year. And it is a great pleasure to get thanked by people we helped get rid of the services of Google and the other big players of the Internet. It allows us to think that what we do is useful and that we are doing it in the right way.

Of course, a key indicator is the volume of donations, our main resource. It has been significantly growing with our current “De-google-ify” campaign, which allowed us to hire and to grow from 2 to 6 employees in the last three years. If we weren’t responding to a need, people would stop giving, wouldn’t they? And if they weren’t satisfied, they would give less.

This De-google-ify campaign has brought more light to our little association: Now French journalists come to us from time to time and ask for our opinion. Some media have mentioned our services, not only the specialized and tech press, but also national newspapers. We sometimes are invited to talk on the radio or on television. Meanwhile, known figures from the free software movement are supporting our methods, which is an important recognition because this is where our services are rooted. We didn’t want to respond to a few invitations by politicians (for instance by a political group at the Assemblée nationale) and explained that our association’s goals were not political and that we were addressing people from the civil society, regardless of their political position.

When we met for our general annual meeting last January, we were thinking that at this point, we needed to know better our users and their expectations. So we decided that we should launch a survey to find out: “Who are you, Framasoft services users?”. It could help us improve our services to better fit the people who actually use them and we expect to have a better and more reliable insight next year (barring unforeseen circumstances,)

How did you key performance indicators develop over the last years?

Great as our project thrived and users adopted more and more our services.

In 2014, we participated in around 30 events, and our support team got about 10 messages a day. In 2016, we attended more than 100 events (conferences, workshops, debates and so on) and our support team processed more than 100 tickets a day.
We can’t compare visitors numbers, since we changed this tool during this time, settling on a self-hosted Piwik instance to analyze visits on our website.

Everyone can check https://framastats.org to get some metrics (but unfortunately it’s only in French for now)

What are your aspirations, what are your promises to users in regard to availability, security, service for framasoft free services? Or asked differently: Would you recommend an association or local volunteer groups to use your services for organizing themselves and getting work done?

In our charter, we pledge to give our best efforts, but not to get the best results (at least, not at any cost).
Practically, it translates into doing everything we can for the best uptime. We hired a full-time system administrator, help by other tech-savvy employees and volunteers. 100% uptime isn’t a sensible goal for a non-profit like us, the cost would be overwhelming. When our services fail (need to reboot), it’s usually for less than 15 minutes. If there is a bigger issue, we inform our users (through social networks and a dedicated website), taking this chance to educate them about what it means to host a service and administrate a system. We only had one major incident in January 2015, when our ethercalc instance became unstable after an update. It was closed for a fortnight, but when we re-opened it, all the user data were there and safe.

We take every security step we can for our users, with multiple backups of data at different geographical places.
Service is very important to us: our support team respond to each and everyone, as it is the occasion to know our users and to try and help them on their way to digital independence. Of course we provide a Frequently Asked Question page, but you will never get a reply like “read the fucking manual” (RTFM) from us ;).

Any association and local group is welcome to use our services, we know how they can be a very important vector of digital education, awareness and empowerment. That being said, we would advise them to consider our services as a “first step”: use it, try anything you think would help your self-organization, and when you know the tools you need, try to take the second step and host them for your group. We’ll be here to provide help and share our knowledge!

Do you have plans and activities to educate interested users in the configuration and usage of tools like Mattermost and the like? The learning curve is steep for people who never worked with other tools besides E-Mail and Office. How can this change?

Our approach is a progressive step by step enticement to change. We consider it to be one successful step if people adopt LibreOffice instead of MS office and Firefox instead of Chrome. We don’t invite people to jump immediately into the full-fledged Libre world. We believe in suggesting alternatives that fit the needs of users. Rather simple tools like Framapad and Framadate are good examples: They have huge success because they need almost no initiation. The success proves that this one possible way to change usage. We provide two kinds of documentation for our alternative services: One for the mainstream user and one for more tech-savvy people that can install services themselves. It is crucial to swarm/spread.

Pouhiou, the PR person at Framasoft, had never used Slack (or something similar) before Luc (our sys-admin) proposed a Mattermost instance. He obviously proposed it as a side-feature of our Gitlab instance, aimed mainly for developers. But when I tried it, I claimed in surprise “Wow! This can be THE alternative to Facebook Groups!” And we all realized the potential of this tool, aimed to developers, but easy to apprehend by most.

Lots of people already know FB Groups, that can be public, confidential or private, where you have to join with your account, where you can talk both in real time or with delay, where you can share pictures and links… Well, Mattermost is quite the same (just better with its search and text-formatting features).

That is how we decided to aim and present it to the widespread audience: a Facebook Groups alternative. We translated user-documentation into French, created a detailed example for our blog presentation to show the power of this tool.

We really think that being a mixed crowd with software developers and enthusiasts help us to reach the everyday person. Because, for most of us, we are this person (or used to be not so long ago).

Whom are you building the free services on framasoft for?

We are working for two categories of persons:

1.  A clear majority of users who we call the Dupuis-Morizeau, the average French family with zero to some knowledge about computers and the Internet. We consider it is our main mission to bring them step by step a little more freedom in their digital usage. They are the people we wish to take advantage of our degooglisons campaign in term of awareness, new habits, discovering free software, the importance of privacy, etc.
2. A more limited group of tech-savvy people pertaining to the FLOSS community that can bring knowledge and technical tools to the population. They can install applications and services on their own servers. That is why each service we offer to the public is released with an installation tutorial to spread alternative tools.
   CHATONS is the name of our other recent initiative for decentralization.
   The name itself is a play on words (it means Kittens in French), It is an acronym for Collective of Hosters which are alternative, transparent, open, neutral and solidaric. The project aims to bring together players who offer free, ethical, decentralized and solidarity-based online services in order to enable users to find – quickly – alternatives to Google products (among others) but respectful of their data and privacy. Since Oct ’16 the first wave of “CHATONS” is 20 hosters strong, and more are coming. The validation of wannabe CHATONS is made via the collective itself on the basis of a manifesto and charter that were elaborated collectively.

What are framasofts sources of revenue and what are spending on?

Note that 2016’s books are being revised by an independent account commissary (a legal obligation for us that we love, as it enforces transparency), so we’ll talk based on 2015’s… but it will roughly be the same shares.
90% of our income in 2015 (~178,000 €) came from donations from our 2,000+ supporters. The rest comes from state employment aid (5%) and selling things (such as books and goodies – 5%).

We mostly spend it on paying our six employees (70%), because we cannot depend on volunteer’s’ energy if we want to provide reliable services and user support. Then we spent it on conventions, conferences and meeting fees (10%) as “evangelization” is a big part of our work. Then comes technical fees (only 6%!), operating costs (6%, too) and the rest is divided between printed communication, supplies and bank fees.

What never cease to amaze us, is that with ~400,000€ over the last two and a half years, we’ve been able to host and maintain roundabout 30 services (along with our ~20 other projects), and change the digital customs of hundreds of thousands of users each month! It’s about the price of 50 meters of a highway!

If people like your work: How can they ensure that Framasoft flourishes?

We accept donations which are almost our unique source of money – donations are welcome here. But we are also glad when code contributors join us because our tech team is only 3 people strong. The same with language and translation contributors, as we wish to spread our experience and services to other languages.

Are you planning to offer localized versions of Framasoft’s free services in Germany?

Well, they are already offered over the Internet to everyone, but only a few services are already internationalized enough to be translated into various languages. We need some effort and contributors and an English version first since English is the lingua franca nowadays. All of our services are on a Git repo. When there are “locale” files to be translated, the German-speaking community is welcome to do it!

Note that the majority of our services are based on well-established free software which already is available in English and German. It’s mainly our design modifications and the quick-start guides that are not translated. In case German people are interested in having an English version of a page/tutorial/service/interface which is currently French-only, please tell us and we will do our best to facilitate the transition to a German-speaking resource.

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Microsoft used every trick in the book to lock users into a dependency on its software. One technique, for example, deliberately underdocumented the technical specifications for software, which made it impossible for non-Microsoft programs to interoperate perfectly with Microsoft Office. Because such performance is unacceptable to many industries and users, Microsoft in effect made its software noncompatible with other systems as a way to protect its market dominance and reap enormous profits.

The irony is that software developers were technically capable of using the Internet to collaborate online to produce office suite software. But this was not widely recognized until developers came together in the 1990s, working outside of large, proprietary software companies, to create Linux and the Apache Web server software. The success of these and other open source projects began to put pressure on many proprietary vendors as consumers and developers realized that they had alternatives. Even many large companies such as IBM and Intel started to see business opportunities in contributing to the development of open source software. The code might be free to everyone, but they could make money by providing technical support and service, as well as custom adaptations of the code.

Securing freedom for end-users of software has been elusive, however. Programmers regularly predicted that the next year would become “the year of the Linux desktop,” in which open source office apps would become popular, but these visions never materialized.

One bright spot, however, was OpenOffice.org, a corporate-controlled word processing program that a corps of dedicated software developers improbably converted into an authentic software commons. The story begins when Sun Microsystems, a company that once was a pioneer of proto-open systems, began to feel competitive pressure from open systems like Linux. With grandiose aims of displacing Microsoft, Sun acquired a German company in 2000 and released an open source version of StarOffice called OpenOffice.org (OOo).

As a corporate-managed open source suite of office software, OOo was not really a commons. Still, OOo was a full-featured office suite that was generally interoperable (with lots of rough edges) with Microsoft’s suite and thus the rest of the world. OOo provided a big incentive for users of nonfree Microsoft and Apple systems to install OOo, save money and learn about open source.¹

But it was unclear from the start how Sun would work with outside developers and whether OOo could break Microsoft’s near-monopoly. Despite Sun’s relatively progressive corporate ethic, it gave itself absolute control over project governance for OOo because it wanted to produce a “shrinkwrap” product. This proved to be a big disincentive to non-Sun developers to participate in improving OOo. In response, non-Sun developers in 2002 began providing their own versions of OOo, which they included in popular distributions of Linux in preference to Sun’s version. It was as if the commoners would not be thwarted in their drive to create a software commons!

Another force driving this effort forward has been Open Document Format (ODF), a major standards effort to produce an open and fully documented set of formats for office applications. The goal has been to ensure that applications from different vendors and communities could interoperate, thereby eliminating a major source of vendor lock-in. OOo was among the first applications to support ODF in 2005.

Microsoft began its own major effort to sabotage the standards process with a competing format, OOXML. It designed its software with proprietary extensions to OOXML, effectively retaining control over its formats as a tool to prevent users from turning to competing vendors.

While Microsoft succeeded in monkey-wrenching the process (see its current profits), ODF has made both technical and policy progress that will enhance its prospects, such as an authentic interoperability among different programs and legal mandates by various public bodies that only ODF-compliant software may be purchased.

Despite Microsoft’s resistance to open formats, OOo went on to become the main alternative to Microsoft, in part through the sheer attrition of proprietary vendors. But Sun, which continued to tightly control OOo development, was by the late 2000s a troubled company with its main server business in tatters due to competition from Linux. The prospects for OOo became even more perilous when the software giant Oracle acquired Sun for its server and Java technology. The writing was on the wall: OOo would not contribute to Oracle’s profits, and would likely be abandoned.

This dismal prospect galvanized the OOo community to take steps to convert OOo from a declining corporate sideline into a robust software commons. They “forked” the project (started a different development pathway for the code) by creating LibreOffice. Nearly all developers outside Oracle and Sun joined the fork, and nearly all communities with Linux distributions made plans to ship LibreOffice (instead of OOo) to users. A German nonprofit, The Document Foundation, was set up to give the project permanent community-oriented governance. Although these events happened very quickly, they were possible only because the groundwork had been laid by nearly a decade of commoning and community that had developed around non-Sun OOo builds and ODF advocacy.

It was no surprise that Oracle then terminated OOo development. But rather than cooperating with the new LibreOffice, Oracle donated the OOo code to the Apache Software Foundation, a trusted nonprofit steward of open source projects. This resulted in unnecessary acrimony between supporters of LibreOffice and the new splinter project, Apache OpenOffice. However, as two open source projects working on largely the same code, there are strong incentives for the two to collaborate – so LibreOffice happily uses code from Apache Open Office.

LibreOffice has clearly won the hearts and minds of the free and open source community by making it as easy as possible for anyone to contribute – and impossible for any one entity to seize control the project’s governance. As a result, LibreOffice’s features, user interface and interoperability with Microsoft‘s quasi-proprietary formats have improved greatly since the fork. This has put it in a better competitive position relative to Microsoft Office than any of its predecessors enjoyed. Its popularity has also been fueled by large-scale adoptions such as the City of Munich, Germany, and other municipalities.

While these developments might normally accelerate LibreOffice’s assault on Microsoft’s near-monopoly, the shift in computing from desktop applications to the cloud and mobile devices is undercutting such gains. Google Docs, for example, has become an essential organizing tool by providing an online office suite that enables real-time collaboration on documents; it runs on Google’s servers and is accessed by individual web browsers. Google Docs does not generate the same sort of near-monopoly profits as Microsoft’s suite of office software, but it does entail a much more direct loss of user control: Google can change the software at any time, and access all files edited and stored online. Microsoft has also produced its own online version of Office, with the same properties as Google Docs – leaving commoners to once again play catch-up with proprietary vendors. LibreOffice Online has existed in prototype form since 2011, but only recently gained a dedicated development team. In 2016 LibreOffice Online should provide a robust alternative to reliance on corporate-controlled proprietary services for collaboration and organizing.

The pattern of a corporate steward of an open source project going bad, followed by a community revolt, plays out over and over. The database program once owned by Sun, MySQL, is the next best-known example. This commons-based, post-Oracle fork of code is known as MariaDB. The example of LibreOffice and ODF standards, however, point to the great potential of open governance, open development processes, and collaborative financing and marketing – and, indeed, the promise of public policy advocacy to provide legal support for commons-generated software. With motivations ranging from local skill development to national security, governments around the world are requiring the evaluation of open source options in software procurement (Italy), banning Windows 8 on government computers (China), and mandating support for open formats (UK).

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Mike Linksvayer (USA) serves on the boards of Software Freedom Conservancy, OpenHatch, and AcaWiki, and is a member of the Open Definition Advisory Council and the steering committee for Snowdrift.coop. From 2003 to 2012 he served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Creative Commons.

Photo by jcorrius

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It has been through my affection for and participation in the FLOSS movement that I came to this critique. Those who use FLOSS self-consciously are overwhelmingly those who enjoy privileges like whiteness, maleness, and affluence. Lots more people benefit from this stuff as users of Firefox, WordPress, and LAMP servers, but huge portions of the economic benefit end up with shareholders of big companies like Google and IBM. These companies also help finance and sit on the boards of major FLOSS foundations. The result is products like Android, an operating system that employs Linux to carry out perhaps the most powerful engine of corporate surveillance ever invented.

FLOSS was the result of an ingenious series of legal hacks, engineered in most cases by well-meaning commoners seeking only to enable commons-based peer production. They have successfully protected their commons from the most direct forms of corporate enclosure. They’ve developed remarkable forms of democratic self-governance, like the Debian Constitution. But this arrangement has also produced valuable, low-cost raw material for corporations that are designed to produce wealth for investors, not livelihoods for commoners.

These corporations (reinforcing tendencies of hacker cultures) have little interest in seeing FLOSS become accessible to non-hacker users. As a result, it has been very rare that, for all my enthusiasm, I succeed in persuading friends to use such tools. And since the economic rewards for FLOSS use and contributions are usually indirect (i.e., social capital that aids in securing a lucrative tech job), people with less free time (disproportionately women) or extra income (disproportionately people of color) face barriers to participation. FLOSS has wonderful potential for nourishing truly liberating commons, but so far this promise has been pretty effectively hindered.

The platform co-op movement has close affinities with FLOSS. Lots of tech co-ops develop exclusively open products; through FLOSS, platform co-ops like Fairmondo find ways to spread and grow through federation rather than globalization; there have been eloquent calls for “open co-ops.” FLOSS principles like transparency and open participation resonate beautifully with cooperative principles. But what we seek to add is democratic control and equitable enjoyment of the benefits. We call for solidarity with workers at all levels of the platform economy and data sovereignty for user-contributors. It’s an economic-justice layer atop—or, better, at the root of—the FLOSS stack. Without that, I’m not going to scold my busy friends if they don’t run Linux (though if they want to, I’ll gleefully help).

Finally we are beginning to hack corporate ownership design with the same gusto and imagination with which the progenitors of FLOSS hacked intellectual property. We’re coming up with democratic financing, open companies, and diverse, multi-stakeholder co-ops. And we’re also rethinking the rules of the digital commons. The “copyfarleft” licenses of Dmytri Kleiner and the P2P Foundation, for instance, are designed to protect commons from exploitation by extractive companies while allowing their use by democratic and non-commercial enterprises. Some platform co-ops deem it necessary to use full copyright. There is disagreement about intellectual property in the platform co-op community, and I view this as a good thing; robust debate is needed to address the challenge of cultivating the commons while also doing business democratically.

In capitalism, commons that don’t challenge capital will end up serving capital. Our digital commons are doing little to aid low-wage workers who lack control over their platform labor markets, or precarious consumers targeted for scams due to corporate surveillance of their online habits. We need commons that serve commoners.

At least since the Charter of the Forest, commoners have had to protect their commons from the greedy hands of the lords. We can pull the levers of corporate ownership law to do this by cooperativizing our networks and platforms. But I hope that ownership restrictions are not our chief objective; these are a strategy for cultivating a commons-based society whose abundance we can share on equitable terms.

Photo by opensourceway

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We are witnessing today a steady growth in the impact of user-generated content and peer-production on the so-called sharing or collaborative economy. These emergent practices are an indicator of radical changes in the mode of production in an age of ‘prosumerism’, characterized by two main trends. On the one hand, corporations such as Google, Uber or Facebook are capturing the value created by the actors contributing to the collaborative economy, in a way that has been described by some scholars as an exploitation of free labour. On the other hand, projects such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux are emblematic of a new model of production that relies on the contribution of many individuals collaborating to a collective project that is not owned by any given entity but rather by the community as a whole (Commons-Based Peer Production or CBPP). These individuals organise themselves without relying on traditional hierarchical and mercantile organisational structures, to produce a set of commons resources which are made freely available to the public for use and reuse. In the last few years, CBPP has expanded beyond the field of software and encyclopedias to also cover the realms of information (OpenStreetMap, Wikihow), hardware (FabLabs, Open Source Ecology), accommodation (Couchsurfing, BeWelcome) and currency (Bitcoin, Altcoins).

The concept of decentralisation is a key requisite for the protection of these commons — from their governance system, including the allocation of power and functions in the organisation of labour; to the characteristics of the socio-technical means of collaboration, in terms of both the underlying technical infrastructure and the ownership structure of such infrastructure. Despite the original design of the Internet as a decentralized network, with the advent of the Web 2.0, centralized (and often proprietary) platforms — typically driven by corporate interests — have progressively taken over the web. These centralized choke-points can be used by governments to increase surveillance (as disclosed by the Snowden revelations), to blackout the Internet (e.g. Egypt, Syria, or San Francisco’s BART), or to restrict the activities of activist organizations (such as Wikileaks). It has now become clear that it is not enough to develop free/libre/open source (FLOSS) alternatives, if we do not as well endeavor to re-decentralize the Internet. New decentralized software tools may ultimately be useful to support the operation and the long-term sustainability of CBPP communities.

In view of this, we organised the second FLOSS4P2P workshop (@Fablab London, supported by P2Pvalue), gathering a wide spectrum of people working on decentralized FLOSS projects that could help or support the activities of peer production communities. Given the success of the workshop, we would like to prepare a book in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (on the model of the former MoneyLab Reader) to explore the topic of decentralisation in the commons sector.

We welcome proposals from academics, activists, researchers and practitioners interested in exploring the topic from a wide set of perspectives, ranging from computer science, engineering, sociology, philosophy, organisational theory, cultural studies, digital studies, etc. Contributions can cover a variety of topics, including tools for grassroots communities, commons-based peer production, both online and offline wikis, maker culture, activism, hacktivism, free culture, citizen science and hospitality exchange. Contributions can take a variety of formats, e.g. a story, a sci-fi tale, a comicstrip, a manifesto, a critical essay, an interview, a study, a poem, a conversation, a debate, a combination of the former… we would like you to experiment and surprise us!

We invite you to submit an initial abstract (max. 750w; count each image as 200w, if any) explaining your idea by January 30, 2016. Examples of possible topics are:

• Dynamics of (de)centralization in CBPP communities
• Decentralized software applications for online/offline communities
• Decentralized solutions to tackle specific communities concerns
• Guidelines for developers and/or researchers
• Comparison of centralized/decentralized processes in CBPP (e.g. decision-making, infrastructure ownership, value generation, value distribution)
• Practical experiences around centralized/decentralized structures (in the form of stories, research, interview, etc.)

The more compelling ideas will be selected to be included in the book.
Please upload your contribution using the following Easychair link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=floss4p2p

If you have further questions about the expected content, format, etc. do not hesitate to let us know. We look forward to hearing about your ideas!

• Primavera De Filippi
• Samer Hassan
• David Rozas

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