An open and self-organized gathering, this event is structured into 3 modules:

COMMONS, MUNICIPALISM and RIGHTS TO THE CITY and MAPS and SYNERGY meetings, both dedicated to making digital tools for the commoners. The CommonsCamp will end with a workshop dedicated to identify possible follow-ups or next steps. Two exhibitions will be held during the event : “Les communs” (Commons) and “Les voies de la démocratie” (Ways of democracy).

This CommonsCamp will be focussing on actionable knowledge and skills in the field of urban commons. It intends to stimulate the emergence and the realisation of concrete projects and collaboration between the commoners.

For more information, have a look at the program:

Program in FRENCH
Program in ENGLISH

And to the list of contributors/participants

All the information (program, preparation, contributors, actions, budget already online) is accessible here.

There will be interpreting in FR and EN during the plenary meetings. For the other activities, the organisers and facilitator will make sure that everybody will be able to participate (ex.: through whispering interpreting).

Documentation (note taking, photos, audio/video) will be a collective endeavour, everybody being invited to contribute to our collective pool of knowledge. A group of volunteers will assist the harvest and publishing of the content on the web, on a daily basis.

You can already start to contribute by sending messages by editing a pad or by sending requests or materials to:
Mélanie Pinet:  pinet.melanie75 (at) gmail (dot) com   or

FrédéricSultan: fredericsultan (at) gmail (dot) com

Flyer CommonsCamp VF.1-1 shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by THEfunkyman

The post CommonsCamp: Grenoble, France August 22 – 26 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A big thanks to Remix the Commons and Commons Spaces – two groups in Montreal, and to Alain Ambrosi, Frédéric Sultan and Stépanie Lessard-Bérubé — for pulling together this wonderful snapshot of the commons world.  The overview video is no introduction to the commons, but a wonderfully insightful set of advanced commentaries about the political and strategic promise of the commons paradigm today.

The overview video (“Les communs dans l’espace politique,” with English subtitles as needed) is striking in its focus on frontier developments: the emerging political alliances of commoners with conventional movements, ideas about how commons should interact with state power, and ways in which commons thinking is entering policy debate and the general culture.

The video features commentary by people like Frédéric Sultan, Gaelle Krikorian, Alain Ambrosi, Ianik Marcil, Matthew Rhéaume, Silke Helfrich, Chantal Delmas, Pablo Solon, Christian Iaione, and Jason Nardi, among others.

The individual interviews with each of these people are quite absorbing. (See the full listing of videos here.) Six of these interviews are in English, nine are in French, and three are in Spanish.  They range in length from ten minutes to twenty-seven minutes.

To give you a sense of the interviews, here is a sampling:

Christian Iaione, an Italian law scholar and commoner, heads the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons in Italy. The project, established five years ago, is attempting to change the governance of commons in Italian cities such as Rome, Bologna, Milan and Messina. More recently, it began a collaboration with Fordham University headed by Professor Sheila Foster, and  experiments in Amsterdam and New York City.

In his interview, “Urban Commons Charters in Italy,” Iaione warns that the Bologna Charter for the Care and Regeneration of Urban commons is not a cut-and-paste tool for bringing about commons; it requires diverse and localized experimentation. “There must be a project architecture working to change city governance and commons-enabling institutions,” said Iaione. “Regulation can’t be simply copied in south of Italy, such as Naples, because they don’t have the same civic institutions and public ethics as other parts of Italy….. You need different tools,” which must be co-designed by people in those cities, he said.

Jason Nardi, in his interview, “The Rise of the Commons in Italy” (27 minutes), credits the commons paradigm with providing “a renewed paradigm useful to unite and aggregate many different movements emerging today,” such as degrowth, cooperatives, the solidarity economy, ecologists, NGOs, development movements, and various rights movements. He credited the World Social Forum for helping to unite diverse factions to fight the privatization of everything by the big financial powers.

Charles Lenchner of Democrats.com spoke about “The Commons in the USA” (11 minutes), citing the important movement in NYC to converted community gardens into urban commons.  He also cited the rise of participatory budgeting movement in New York City today, in which a majority of city council districts use that process.  The City of New York is also encouraging greater investment in co-operatives, in part as a way to deal with precarity and income disparities.

Silke Helfrich, a German commons activist, discussed “Commons as a new political subject” (27 minutes).  She said that “it’s impossible today to know what’s going on about the commons because so many things are popping up or converging that it’s hard to keep up with them all.”  She said that there are three distinct ways of approaching the commons:  the commons as pools of shared resources to be managed collectively; the commons as social processes that bring commoning into being; and the commons as an attitude and way of thinking about a broader paradigm shift going on.

Kevin Flanagan gave an interview, “Transition according to P2P” (19 minutes), in which he speaks of the “growing political maturity within the commons world, particularly within digital commons, peer production and collaborative economy.”  Flanagan said that there has always been a politics to the commons, but that politics is moving from being a cultural politics towards a broader politics that is engaging hacker culture, maker spaces, and open design and hardware movements.   Commoners are also beginning to work with more traditional political movements such as the cooperative and the Social and Solidarity Economy movements.

Lots of nutritious food for thought in this well-produced collection of videos!

The post New Videos Explore the Political Potential of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Remix The Commons:
An Evolving Intercultural Space
for Commoning

A well-known Canadian environmental expert told us at a commons conference in Berlin in 2010, “Commons are an attitude.” A year later, a Senegalese participant of the World Social Forum in Dakar stated, “Commons are what we all share,” and yet another said, “They are something I feel committed to.”

In May of the same year, one of 15,000 demonstrators on Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona used the image “a soccer team (that plays well!).” At a 2012 Earth Day rally in Montreal, Canada, one participant responded, “Commons are what belongs to everybody,” and the next one added, “commons are what belong to nobody.” During the Rio+20 Conference in Brazil, an Ecuadorian government minister talked with us about commons and buen vivir.² 

At a commons festival in Helsinki in 2014, we had to reformulate the question so that we could pose it to a Lithuanian dancer: “How would you dance commons?” Her spontaneous response: “But that’s impossible alone!” Then she invited the interviewer to participate in a “moving” commons definition.

By August 2014, our collection had grown to more than 100 brief definitions in thirty-five languages from about forty countries. Naturally, we also included definitions that are more precise and elaborate and that reflect the long practical experience of commoners and the research findings of commons theorists.

All of these substantial and diverse answers to our simple question illustrate both the universal character of commons and the difficulties arising when one tries to both delineate such a definition while keeping it open and dynamic. And they made clear to us that an intercultural perspective is indispensible.

Remix The Commons considers itself a place of intercultural encounters, sharing, and joint production of video and audio documents, short films, and media and cultural projects about commons. The initiative is supported by an international collective of people and organizations convinced that collecting, exchanging, and remixing stories and images about commons is an active, sociable way to get to know the concept and make it one’s own.

Remix The Commons itself works like a commons. The work is organized around an open and collaborative platform which is a website that enables storage, exchange, cataloguing, remixing, and dissemination of multimedia documents. We also always find places and opportunities that make it easier to jointly develop concepts for media productions and to design and breathe life into them. In other words, an intercultural, free and collaborative catalog of multimedia documents on the commons is available to commons practitioners, academics, educators and cultural activists. They can use it and enrich it with contributions of their own.

The history of the project is closely linked to the emergence of the commons in the current societal debate and in the proposals put forward by social movements since the crisis of 2008. An initial draft was presented at the International Commons Conference (ICC)³ in November 2010. It was based on the video documentary of the interdisciplinary meeting on “Science and Democracy” that had kicked off the World Social Forum in Belém in Amazonia in January 2009. The commons had a place at the final session of this World Social Forum, and the manifesto “Reclaim the Commons”⁴ was published in several languages on this occasion. That same year, the academic community saw Elinor Ostrom awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the commons, and the documentary “RIP: A Remix Manifesto,⁵ which pays tribute to humanity’s creativity as the outcome of collaborative creation in space and time, circulated in the independent cultural scene.

Remix The Commons is maintaining its close connections with the international meetings of social movements, and this colors the development and realization of our concrete projects. We participated in the discussions and documentation of the commons at the World Social Forums in Dakar in 2011 and in Tunis in 2013, at the Summit of the Peoples at Rio+20 in Rio de Janeiro, and at the Afropixel Festival in Senegal in 2012. We were part of international meetings on social and solidarity-based economic activity as well as open festivals à la Villes en Biens Communs 2013 in the French-speaking countries and Pixelache in Finland in May 2014. We are now concentrating on events that bring out the art of commoning⁶ and contribute to the development of an international network of commons schools.

Our roughly 300 videos have been viewed more than 15,000 times and are constantly reproduced, disseminated and used for many purposes. The videos consist of interviews, case studies, reports about concrete projects and activities, reflections upon them, and theoretical and political statements on commons. The videos also consist of a large collection of individual commons definitions in the respondents’ native languages, as mentioned at the beginning of this piece. That collection is currently being mapped on an online map that locates each speaker and his or her statement on a world map, which is very helpful for workshops and educational events about discovering the diversity of commons. Such workshops – for example, “commons breakfasts” or “commons summer schools” – illustrate how collaborative knowledge production works in open networks.

As the commons have grown in visibility on the international stage of culture and politics, Remix The Commons is constantly adapting to the rapid shifts in sociopolitical contexts. This is evidence of the agenda-setting power of a movement that is still very heterogeneous, but is increasingly influencing socioeconomic and political agendas. Amidst this veritable cultural revolution, Remix The Commons is committed to using the Internet to shape new cultural interest in commoning and to develop new methods of communicating these trends.

This requires that we meet numerous challenges, for example, countering “commons-washing,” which seeks to trivialize the innovative and revolutionary character of commons. We must also confront incessant enclosures of information and natural resources, and devise joint strategies, collaborations and means of communication for commoners in the cultural arts and trades, education, and communication in order to share knowledge. In George Pór’s words, “We have to raise our culture of communication to the level of commoning” – and make it as intercultural, user-friendly, participatory and inviting as possible.

Alain Ambrosi (Canada) is a designer and producer of intercultural projects, independent researcher, author, videographer and producer of the Remix The Commons Project. His long involvement in improbable international collaborations has led him to aspire to the status of utopian’s apprentice.

Frédéric Sultan (France) is a French commons activist. He co-facilitates the Francophone Network for the Commons, launched in 2012, and helps people create or claim commons in their communities through cultural and educational actions. 

The post Patterns of Commoning: Remix The Commons as an Evolving Intercultural Space for Commoning appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Frédéric Sultan: On September 23, 2016, a gathering will be held in Paris to exchange thoughts on new forms of local and thematic networking for the commons, and to discuss the Assemblies of the Commons.

After the “Temps de commons” festival held last October in multiple Francophone cities and countries worldwide (250+ events in total), new forms of organization are emerging in Francophone areas and the world in general, inspired by the idea of “Assemblies of the Commons” as promoted by Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation. A variety of actors involved in these initiatives have offered to meet for a day of discussion.

This will be an opportunity for actors involved in these processes to share their experiences, to present and document different practices, and to better understand the reality of the phenomenon. An analysis of the practices presented by participants will be put into perspective in the French institutional context. Questions are open to discussion, including the nature of these initiatives; their names; potential connections with already existing initiatives (as yet unnamed Assemblies of the Commons); and their geographic and thematic dimensions, as examples.

We will also have the opportunity to explore what these initiatives provide as strategic perspectives for the commons: how do they contribute to mobilizing commoners and involving inhabitants in the transition?

This event is organized with the support of the P2P Foundation, the Association VECAM and the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation (FPH).

Event Info

The event will be held at Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer
38 rue Saint Sabin 75011 Paris
Métro Chemin Vert ou Bréguet-Sabin

Please contact Frédéric Sultan for more details:
Frédéric Sultan
Email: fredericsultanATgmail.com,
Phone number: +33 67932547

For French language updates, please follow the P2P Foundation’s French Blog.

Photography by Sylvia Frédriksson

The post Assemblies of the Commons and New Forms of Organization: A Gathering in Paris, September 23 appeared first on P2P Foundation.