In his presentation, Stacco defines P2P, the Commons, and how they interrelate, while distinguishing generative, commons-based Peer to Peer interactions from those which only intensify our present problems. The full panel presentation, including Q&A’s, can be found here.

Featured image by Opensource.com

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He died on Tuesday, September 6, 2016, and his funeral was held in Ostend, Belgium, on Friday the 16th. Jean had been having health problems for about a year, but was unaware of a more serious condition until his last 10 days.

I’d like to offer some of my memories of our work together as well as reflections about continuing his legacy. I write this in both a personal capacity and as a co-member of the P2P Foundation network.

The Memories

I got to know Jean the second year of our studies at the Free University of Brussels (V.UB.), probably in 1978. Jean was first a student in the business school Solvay, while I was doing Political Sciences. We met in the student movement Aktief Linkse Studenten (Active Left Students), were members of the Flemish Socialist Party’s youth wing, and both believed in Trotsky’s analysis of the permanent revolution. I would leave just a few years after my time as a student, as I could not square living through the Thatcher/Reagan counter-revolution with the ever-optimistic predictions of the political tendency we belonged to. Jean would leave much later (in his mid-thirties I believe), after having been a full-time organizer and editor-in-chief of the radical magazine Vonk. What was striking about Jean was his generosity to his friends and his reliability as a co-worker and comrade. Jean also had some personal issues to deal with. He came out as gay, and for this he was not accepted by his parents. It would take decades before acceptance came, but he went on to become friends with his father and accompanied him in his final years.

When Jean quit the radical movement he belonged to and gave his life’s energy to for many years, he was also at a loss. Without savings due to very low wages, and with no prospect of a sufficient pension, he had to re-arrange his life. He was lucky to find a cheap apartment in Brussels which he bought and transformed into a jewel of wonderful, if eccentric, taste, and started working as a copywriter for corporate magazines. Given this context, the writing was always excellent and informative about societal trends. We briefly met again in the mid-nineties, after having lost touch for many years. This career worked well for Jean until 2008, when the crisis of capitalism led to a dwindling of his client base, due to cutbacks in corporations. This is when Jean decided to get a job in the city of Brussels, in the department that manages the housing stock. Although he liked the social mission and respected his colleagues, Jean thoroughly disliked the bureaucratic procedures, and it made him feel depressed for several years.

It was then that we met once again, and I could share my enthusiasm about my own work for the emerging peer-to-peer and commons movement. Like Jean, I had composed with the dominant society for many years, and struggled with the anti-social and anti-ecological nature of contemporary capitalism. After experiencing personal burnout and deep crises in 1996, I decided to reconnect with the engagement for social change of my youth. While investigating which approach was appropriate for our times, I decided that P2P dynamics would give social movements the leverage for self-organisation and change. It took Jean nearly 3 years to go through the literature and understand my analysis, but when he emerged from his own study, it gave him a new positive outlook on life. He combined his full-time job with enthusiastic participation in the P2P project in the evenings. He exhibited tremendous energy.

It is thanks to him, as co-author, that I could produce the Flemish book, De Wereld Redden, and its French translation and counterpart, Sauver Le Monde, both of which made a definite impact. Since about 2005, I would be a regular guest during my lecture tours, in his amazing apartment at the Stalingradlaan in Brussels. We talked and thought into the wee hours of the night, and Jean became a much-sought after lecturer in Flanders, while also writing various Dutch-language articles for the more thoughtful magazines such as De Wereld Morgen.

It is difficult to express what a good friend he was, how supportive, and how spoiled he made me feel. Jean was purchasing many of the books I wanted to read, was a master chef of wholesome food. My family also had the opportunity to stay on occasion in his home. My wife became a great admirer of Jean; she considered him like a saint. Jean in return came to visit us in Thailand and had plans to come back in February 2017.

Jean began having health issues about a year before his passing, first expressed as a knee problem, but later as digestive issues that prefigured the disease that would fell him. Despite this, he was still giving plenty of lectures and made many plans. One was to found P2P Foundation Belgium as a separate legal entity; another was to co-author an English conversation book with me (the rough version is finished, awaiting further work to complete it). He was wondering how he could once again make his activist life a primary focus, but had not yet found a satisfactory solution. He also had a warm and active family life with his parents, sisters, nieces, and especially his godson, Sam Kestens.

Jean is leaving a big hole in our hearts, as our fond memories can’t compensate for the warm support he gave us, but we are very committed to honouring his engagements and legacy. Frank Theys and I are finalizing a funding round for a documentary that will be dedicated to his memory. At the recent Prix Ars Electronica awards ceremony, Stacco Troncoso dedicated to Jean the Golden Nica award that we received as the P2P Foundation collective. We will finish the English-language book we started with him, and I am seriously considering naming a new commons-oriented policy institute after him.

Jean left us far too early and far too fast, but his legacy and his gifts will live on in our hearts and our own practice for many years to come.

Michel Bauwens, for the P2P Foundation

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The P2P Foundation’s message resonated at this lively festival with many people who were interested in learning more about our work. Ars Electronica did a great job reflecting our ongoing mission in researching and advocating for a P2P/Commons phase transition. In short, they are aware of the problems we face and care about the solutions we offer. Here’s a video of two of the judges (Marleen Stikker and Hans Reitz) exploring their criteria for choosing the awardees for Digital Communities:

I’d like to quickly mention two of the other prize winning projects: Refugee Phrasebook, a prime example of a solidarity-based knowledge commons, and Can you Hear Me? , who we covered in Commons Transition earlier this year as a great, cheeky and deadly serious way to highlight the surveillance increasingly pervading our networked society.

We will soon feature the video of my presentation on Digital Communities and P2P. For now, we’d like to extend a big thank you to the larger P2P Foundation community and everyone who has contributed over the last ten years to achieve this milestone moment. It’s crucial for our movement to achieve this level of recognition and begin interacting with other movements, changemakers and, yes, “Radical Atoms” — to quote the festival theme — beyond the P2P/Commons community as we presently understand it.

Lead image by Florian Voggeneder. Group image by Tom Mesic. See the full album from the Gala here.

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“Who has access to knowledge and information online? Who controls this exchange and who can profit from it? These issues of decisive importance to our digital future are the P2P Foundation’s bread and butter. In recognition of their committed work, the non-profit organization is this year’s recipient of the Golden Nica in the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category.

Credit: Stefano Borghi

The term P2P is actually stands for peer-to-peer—i.e. communication among equals in a network. But in the case of the P2P Foundation, it isn’t defined strictly in a technical sense; P2P is meant more in the sense of jointly achieving objectives, collaboration, person to person and people to people. Since it was founded 10 years ago by Michel Bauwens, the P2P Foundation has put into place key building blocks for a new mode of communication—digital exchange of knowledge that’s self-organized on the internet and gets along completely without hierarchical structures.

There are many examples of P2P platforms—for instance, 3-D printable prostheses for people in war zones, open-source cars that can be assembled in no time, and Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation’s internet browser that was developed by a network including not only professional programmers but also volunteer experts from all over the world. The P2P idea has gone into every one of these projects.

The P2P Foundation‘s mission is to analyze and document these peer-to-peer strategies and to make them available for other uses to anyone interested in doing so. Its go-to source is the P2P Foundation Wiki, the world’s largest platform that bundles and shares info about P2P. The non-profit organization is this year’s recipient of the Golden Nica in the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category. In this interview, Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation’s staff talk about their understanding of P2P and its advantages.

P2P and Utopia from P2P Lab on Vimeo.

Some of us first experienced the advantages of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network while downloading files from P2P sharing platforms like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa or BitTorrent. What’s your understanding of P2P?

Ann Marie Utratel: Although these platforms can be described as P2P, our understanding of it is more generally human-scale rather than exclusively tech-focused. For us, it means “person to person”, “people to people”. Peer to peer is a relational dynamic; it describes the process of people getting together and self-organizing in a non-hierarchical way to create common value. Processes like these have been happening throughout human existence, but with the advent of the Internet, we can see a rapid crystallization of P2P practices happening worldwide.

Stacco Troncoso: However, there are many different understandings of P2P. The key factor for us is whether these peer to peer dynamics channel the value they create into a commons. A platform like Airbnb, for example, may be P2P on the surface in that it is a group of people getting together to mutualize housing for travel rentals: but how is it creating a commons? Is the person who’s renting his or her house now a peer of Airbnb’s upper management or investors? In other words, do they hold a representative degree of decision-making power about the resources spent and gained in the enterprise? True P2P describes a more horizontal and self-managed system of peer interactions. Popular examples include Couchsurfing, Wikipedia and the Linux operating system, but we also see P2P practices increasing in the sectors of material production, politics and activism. When the structure becomes flatter and more broadly inclusive, less top-down, that’s a sign of P2P principles and activity.

Credit: Stefano Borghi

What are the advantages of peer-to-peer (P2P) for our society?

Stacco Troncoso: Commons-oriented P2P dynamics promote equal access, participation and fairness, all qualities that help foster democratic interactions. When civil society produces something of value, these achievements are sometimes invisible.

Ann Marie Utratel: We can even see this in the language used to describe this form of value creation: “non-governmental, non-profit or third sector”. It’s a rather marginalizing, even negating, set of descriptions that can create a subtle impression of outliers, or outsider activities, somehow less valuable. We believe that civil society, or “peers”, are in fact the main producers of value.

Stacco Troncoso: The roles of government and markets could be drastically altered through the introduction of P2P practices. Right now, cities like Madrid and Barcelona in Spain and Bologna in Italy are among those at the forefront of social innovation and democratic participation. Ethical entrepreneurial coalitions such as Enspiral and the Fairshares Association demonstrate that there are more democratic, fair and challenging alternatives to the market innovations of the start-up world.

Ann Marie Utratel: More “peer to peer” interaction means more innovation, engagement and creativity. It places tools into people’s hands, enabling their responsible participation in their own environments.

What were the initial reasons to form the P2P Foundation more than 10 years ago?

Stacco Troncoso: Our co-founder, Michel Bauwens, discovered through his initial research that while P2P was an existing, practical relationship dynamic, it was still very much invisible, even to those involved. An initiative was required to help gather information with which to produce a solid, integrative P2P theory, share this knowledge and help people begin to form a resilient network. This work began in 2005 with our participatory wiki and has since expanded to include more in-depth research and advocacy work to help people, organizations and governments’ transition towards commons-based approaches in all fields of life.

p2pfoundation.net is a comprehensive resource for peer to peer practices. What are your target audiences and what do they find in your wiki?

Ann Marie Utratel: Our audience is varied. It began with academics and researchers, activists and organizers, authors and speakers, but the truth is that through social media and in-person events and outreach, our audience has become much wider, transcending the more specialized initial audience for wiki.

Stacco Troncoso: Our main wiki is very extensive and far ranging, featuring over 30.000 articles and more than 2.000 users. We also maintain another wiki (Commons Transition) focused on concrete solutions for change makers, as well two blogs, a daily “newspaper” which has been reflecting the ongoing realities of the P2P/Commons movement during the last ten years, and Commons Transition, which highlights our most refined materials, as well as feature stories and reports. Our dedicated research division, the P2P Lab, also regularly publishes research papers painstakingly analysing the potential of P2P practices.

OSVehicle – TABBY EVO Platform Assembly Timelapse from OSVehicle on Vimeo.

Could you introduce us some current and innovative P2P projects you’ve encountered?

Stacco Troncoso: Examples abound in the fields of material and immaterial production. There are exciting projects like Refugee Open Ware, which provides open source solutions, education and prosthetics in war torn areas. There’s also the Tabby, an urban, open source car which can be manufactured in less than an hour, or Wikihouse, an open source construction set, allowing anyone to design, download and easily fabricate and assemble houses. The most widely visible projects include the Mozilla web browser, the Apache web server, and the Linux operating system and its offshoots.

Ann Marie Utratel: Apart from these manufacturing projects, we are also excited about P2P forms of governance in certain cities (mentioned above), with their inclusion of practises like participatory budgeting and civic decision-making. P2P is synonymous with innovation.

Are there any serious alternatives to social media platforms like Facebook and search engines like Google? And isn’t it hard to compete with these Internet giants?

Ann Marie Utratel: There are serious alternatives, such as GNU social, Duck Duck and Diaspora, but “serious” is not the same as “competitive”. In this, we have a long way to go. Even people who are educated about the dangers of centralized platforms find it hard to break away.

Stacco Troncoso: The pervasiveness of these platforms was built through huge investment programs and dubious business models (e.g. privacy concerns, harvesting user data), which have resulting in not only in popularity but also, far more attractive user interfaces. Decentralized platforms which do not traffic in user data find it much harder to find the necessary funding that would allow them to realistically compete with the giants.

Ann Marie Utratel: We need alternative funding options for platforms that create commons, not commodities, and which also offer real benefits to potential users, such as privacy, ownership of information, and more democratic interfaces.

As part of the core team at the P2P Foundation, Ann Marie Utratel is the communications steward. She also works on the Commons Transition platform, web magazine and its associated projects, as well as on the P2Pvalue project. Additionally, she is the co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, and is a Network Hubs correspondent for the Connected Actions for the Commons project of the European Cultural Foundation.

Stacco Troncoso is the strategic direction steward of the P2P Foundation as well as the project lead for Commons Transition, the P2PF’s main communication and advocacy hub. He is also co-founder of the P2P translation collective Guerrilla Translation and designer/content editor for CommonsTransition.org, the P2P Foundation blog, and the new Commons Strategies Group website. His work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship-building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners worldwide.

NOTE: The Prix Ars Electronica is featured in the CyberArts exhibition, the Prix Forums and the Ars Electronica Gala at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival (theme: RADICAL ATOMS and the alchemists of our time; dates: September 8-12, 2016). At Prix Forum II – Digital Communities on Saturday, September 10, 16, festivalgoers will have an opportunity to meet Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation and get first-hand information about this non-profit organization.“

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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

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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.

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