The new site features four types of materials suited different levels of interest: short Q&A-style articles with illustrations; longer, in-depth articles for the more serious reader; a library of downloaded PDF versions of research publications by the P2P Foundation; and a collection of videos, audio interviews and links to other content.

The website does a great service in introducing topics that are sometimes elusive or abstract, giving them a solid explanation and lots of working examples. Go check it out!

Start with a series of Short Articles that addresses such questions as “What is a commons transition?” and “What is distributed manufacturing?” Then browse the Longer Articles section and read “10 ways to accelerate the Peer to Peer and Commons Economy,” a visionary piece on the movement to design global and manufacture locally.

The Library contains a number of major reports on how to embark upon a commons transition. The organizational study of Catalan Integral Cooperative as a post-capitalist model is fascinating. Check out the new conceptualizations of value in a commons economy, and the two-part report on the impact of peer production on energy use, thermodynamics, and the natural world.

There is also a wonderful overview of some leading commons, especially tech-oriented ones, in a collection of fifteen case studies. These explore such projects as Wikihouse, Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysan, Mutual Aid Networks, Spain’s Municipalist Coalitions, and the Ghent’s urban commons (in Belgium).

Elena Martinez Vicente has produced a number of fantastic infographics that really help demystify some abstract ideas (the new ecosystem of value creation, patterns of open coops, cosmo-local production). Mercè Moreno Tarrés did the dazzling original art for the site, which helps make the material so engaging.

The Commons Transition Primer was produced by the Peer to Peer Foundation and P2P Labs with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Kudos to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for conceptualizing the project and preparing much of the material, and to Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis for their contributions to the text.

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Our intention with this site is to make the ideas of the Commons and P2P accessible and attractive to commoners and communities worldwide. The site is organized into several sections:

1. Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
2. Long: In-depth, longer articles
3. Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
4. More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links

We’ve built some other useful features into this site, too. In the Short articles, Key Concept pop-ups offer definitions of specialized terminology. Case Studies outline the practices of existing commons communities, often adapted from our own research publications. Infographics and illustrations have sections of their own, for easy sharing. To keep things light, we’ve added a tab with a “TLDR” summary (internet slang for “too long/didn’t read”, if you didn’t already know), plus a tab for Resources which links to source and reference materials for the specific article.

This website was produced with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and is an outgrowth of our previous Commons Transition and P2P Primer in print form, which was co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis and produced in cooperation with the Transnational Institute (TNI). It will be followed in 2018 by a publication from Westminster Press titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto and written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis. We’d like to thank Heike Loeschmann, Joanna Barelkowska and Joerg Haas of the Böll Foundation for their consistent support and feedback during the process.

The Commons Transition Primer website project was coordinated, edited and/or co-written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel (except where other authorship is noted). Elena Martínez Vicente led the design and UX, Mercè Moreno Tarrés provided the illustrations while Javier Arturo Rodriguez took care of the technical details and backend. Thanks are due to David Bollier, Vasilis Kostakis and Rajesh Makwana for reviewing the texts in the “Shorts” section. Special thanks are also due for the technical expertise and last-minute interventions of our colleague, Lisha Sterling.

We offer thanks to the growing, worldwide P2P Foundation community for continuing to enthusiastically share, research, promote and experiment with the ideas and tools of the Commons and P2P. We hope you enjoy this site (and your feedback is welcome!)

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About Platform Coops

The Internet is slipping out of ordinary users’ control. Internet technologies are transforming our workplaces, relationships, and societies. Companies like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook are capturing vital sectors of the economy such as transportation and phenomena like search and social networking. All of us who rely on the Internet have virtually no control over the platforms that affect and inform us on a daily basis.

Platform Capitalism

The power held by these principal platform owners has allowed them to reorganize life and work to their benefit and that of their shareholders. “Free” services often come at the cost of our valuable personal information, with little recourse for users who value their privacy.

The paid work that people execute on digital platforms like Uber or Freelancer allows owners to challenge hard-won gains by 20th-century labor struggles: workers are reclassified as “independent contractors” and thus denied rights such as minimum wage protections, unemployment benefits, and collective bargaining. Platform executives argue that they are merely technology (not labor) companies; that they are intermediaries who have no responsibility for the workers who use their sites. The plush pockets of venture capitalists behind “sharing economy” apps allow them to lobby governments around the world to make room for their “innovative” practices, despite well-substantiated adverse long-term effects on workers, users, the environment and communities. At the same time, in the gaps and hollows of the digital economy, a new model follows a significantly different ethical and financial logic.

Platform Cooperativism

Platform cooperativism is a growing international movement that builds a fairer future of work. It’s about social justice and the bottom line. Rooted in democratic ownership,co-op members, technologists, unionists, and freelancers create a concrete near-future alternative to the extractive sharing economy.

Making good on the early promise of the Web to decentralize the power of apps, protocols, and websites, platform co-ops allow households with low and volatile income to benefit from the shift of labor markets to the Internet. Steering clear of the belief in one-click fixes of social problems, the model is poised to vitalize people-centered innovation by joining the rich heritage and values of co-ops with emerging Internet technologies.

Ecosystem

Countless platform co-ops and initiatives supporting them have developed rapidly over the past two years. This ecosystem challenges the practices of the “sharing economy” and the often misogynist ‘win at all costs’ culture of Silicon Valley. The cooperative platform ecosystem ranges from alternative financing models, labor brokerages for nurses, massage therapists, and cleaners, to cooperatively owned online marketplaces, and data-protection platforms for patients.

Rather than posing as the solution for the quick defeat of the extractive investor-owned model, successful platform co-ops have already and continue to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those who participate in them. It is a project that people can work on in their lifetime. Uber drivers are organizing in co-ops, designing their own taxi apps. Photographers are offering their work for fair prices on a platform where they’re in charge, and journalists are crowdfunding news portals co-owned by their readers. New decentralized networks are enabling people to share their data with each other without relying on a corporate cloud.

Examples

Here are some examples: Up & Go offers professional home services like house cleaning, (and soon childcare and dog walking) by those who are looking for assistance with laborers from local worker-owned cooperatives. Unlike extractive home-services platforms which take up to 30% of workers’ income, Up & Go charges only the 5% it needs to maintain the platform.

Similarly, the 25% fee that corporate ride-hail (taxi) platforms extract from drivers has led some drivers to create cooperative platforms across Europe and the United States. Cotabo (Bologna, Italy), ATX Coop Taxi(Austin, TX), Green Taxi Cooperative (Denver, CO), The People’s Ride (Grand Rapids, MI), and Yellow Cab Cooperative (San Francisco, CA), among others, have each provided their worker-owners the dignity of a living wage by developing their own taxi apps.

MiData, a Swiss “health data cooperative,” has created a data-exchange which will securely host member-users’ medical records. By integrating this traditional health data with emerging data streams from FitBit devices and personal genomic services, MiData aims to out-compete private, for-profit data brokers and ultimately return the control and monetization of personal data to those who generate it.

As some open-source projects find it hard to pay a dedicated development team, the funding platform Gratipayprovides a free subscription-based patronage infrastructure for developers of such ventures. Gratipay provides credit-card transactions at-cost, subtracting only the processing fees from users’ subscriptions. Tools like Gratipay are at the core of the platform cooperativism ecosystem; they expedite the work of other projects.

Join Us

The Internet can be owned and governed differently. The experiments now already underway show that a global ecosystem of cooperatives and unions, in collaboration with movements such as Free and Open Source Software, can stand against the concentration of wealth and the insecurity of workers that yields Silicon Valley’s winner-takes-all economy. The “sharing economy” is more vulnerable than it appears. New alliances in support of the cooperative platform economy are gaining momentum. They include: “rebel cities,” inventive organizations, policy makers, incubators, experimenters, researchers, educators, and community-builders at the grassroots level. Co-shape our work. Support our network. Get involved.

Photo by Kit4na

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