Overview of Thematic Working Groups

Participatory Tools for Democracy

Commons and democracy are intimately linked. This workshop addresses civic participation and ways to foster citizens’ involvement in the production of their cities through engagement with public bodies and direct forms of political action.

Lately, technology and digital tools are integral to these initiatives to enhance democratic processes. This workshop will consider this dynamic and look at the co-production of public policies and projects through digital platforms.

Participants are interested in analyzing changes produced by these new collaborative processes. They have experience in the production of tools and resources such as online maps, collective storytelling, repositories of experiences, and initiatives designed to support political decentralization and co-production, with and without support from political institutions. This work also includes the development of charters, contracts and structures between different urban actors involved in urban commons.around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Currencies and financing of commons

This theme promotes currency and finance as fundamental to the commons and solidarity economy. How are alternative currencies and digital tools and platforms at work, and what are the infrastructures and material environments that support communing and collective responsibility in this sphere? The workshop will examine how we can multiply or upscale some of the initiatives, methods, frameworks, and formats that have already been explored locally.

Participants have expressed interest in strengthening networks and collaborative projects, developing tools to develop an economy based on the commons, as well as strategies and methodologies on P2P mechanisms of value assessment and exchange. They have experience in time-banking and various cooperatives, have developed crypto-currencies and mobilized economic resources and human partnerships; contribute to community building, disseminate and create awareness and commitment around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Data commons and the collaborative city

This workshop brings together the topics of control of (civic) data and the collaborative economic models that depend on online platforms. There is increasing interest in exploring alternatives that respect data and promote its civic control, taking into account possibilities for different modes of production & collection of this data. In what way can we facilitate data management and control in line with the social common good?

The workshop will take into account how regulations and policies on open source and open data, on the one hand, and those on technology and decentralized infrastructure, on the other, can play a role in facilitating data sovereignty and new forms of local cooperativism.

Moving away from large corporation and capital-led city development, we have to rethink the Smart City model and imagine data commons that socialise the value of data. How do initiatives like guifinet and Fairbnb fit in?  The starting point for the workshop will be recent experiences in Barcelona and Amsterdam.

Embodied productions of commoning: Food, Health, and Leisure

This workshop takes a holistic view of health creation to include also food production and distribution as well as sport and leisure activities. It will address the different determinants of our physical and mental condition, based on social justice, solidarity economy, and respect to biophysical limits of ecosystems. The commons approach underlines the importance of self-organised, locally rooted, inclusive and resilient community networks and civic spaces in order to re-think the practices and the development of public policy-making in this domain.

Participants have experience and are interested in the interrelationship at all points of the journey from “Land to Fork”, including access to land, nutrition, food sovereignty, cultivation, etc.; new forms of distribution, including for recycling; access to medical knowledge and patient-guided health policies and services; democratization of healthcare and self-organization of citizen efforts to reduce bureaucratic hurdles; and reclaiming the field for grassroots sports while challenging norms to inspire new models of recreation.

Law for the Commons

In order to guarantee the protection and development of commoning practices, legal opportunities and tools need to be located and addressed. This workshop deals with the search for these opportunities in relation to pre-existing and potential urban commons projects. This can draw from existing knowledge and institutional analysis in management of traditional commons, as well as contemporary legal practices for local, national and European legislation. It can also investigate instances where these concepts have been applied at the local scale.

These include participants’ experiences in, for example, production of municipal regulations for shared administration, which protects urban commons (squares, gardens, schools, cultural commons, streets, etc.) and compels local governments to collaborate with citizens. Participants propose the generation of platforms to exchange existing knowledge and experiences in legal mechanisms, as well as the production of practical tools to be used at European and local levels in relation with legislation, norms and institutional interaction.

Right to the City (Public Space and Urbanism, Housing, Water & Energy)

This theme brings together different aspects of the configuration of the city: Public Spaces & Urbanism, Housing, Tourism, Water & Energy and Culture. Understanding the Right to the City as a collective and bottom-up creation of a new paradigm can help to provide an alternative framework to re-think cities and human settlements on the basis of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. The workshop will discuss processes of commercialization and privatization of public and common goods and resources; how commons can create forms of democratic urban management; and how re-municipalization processes of urban infrastructures can be linked to the commons discourse. It will also consider the policy frameworks for commons that can be implemented, how spaces can be collectively used for the common good and what kind of legal and economic frameworks are needed to stabilize communing practices.

There is a great diversity of experiences and interests within the group. Proposals include trans-local collaboration to develop perspectives on: urban rights, cultural ecosystems for integration within the city, commons-based housing plans, fighting gentrification and damaging tourism, among others. There is emphasis on sharing examples and tools and promoting the connection of practitioners, researches, professionals, and citizens with project initiators and grassroots actors. Participants draw from experiences including the redevelopment of brownfields and vacant properties, the creation of political platforms and public campaigning and engagement, and construction of community gardens and other spaces as learning environments for communing. Given the wide range of interests and backgrounds, for this theme we can also imagine a mix of general discussions and more specific working spaces, to be decided by the participants themselves, either in organizational process before the meeting or in situ.

Solidarity as a commons: Migrants and Refugees

In many countries, migrants and refugees are confronted by very repressive policies, and in some cases violence. In certain places, citizens are responding by getting involved in local activities to distribute food, clothes and other commodities, to provide information about asylum procedures or how to meet basic needs and human rights, to facilitate the inclusion of migrants or refugees in cities and cohabitation between people in neighborhoods, etc. At a time when policies about immigration and refugees in most European countries are inadequate and troubling, these mobilizations are extremely important and sharing experiences is key.

The purpose of this workshop is twofold. First, it aims to share experiences and knowledge about local citizen-developed initiatives to help migrants and refugees across Europe. In addition, the workshop will be an opportunity to discuss solidarity with migrants and refugees as a commons. Themes to discuss include: the effects on policies and policy makers of the production of solidarity by citizens, the modalities of governance among civil society organizations around their initiatives, and the forms of interactions with municipalities around the initiatives of civil society actors.

Participants have experience in local initiatives of solidarity and hospitality with migrants and refugees; are engaged in research and activism on urban commons focusing on migrant rights; or are involved in initiatives like ecovillage movements, commons support for artists at risk, or community social centers that work to develop new forms of participative work and cooperation to build solidarity.

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These rights were secured after a long civil war against the King, who had relentlessly expanded his claims of exclusive control of the forest, punishing violators with fines, imprisonment and sometimes death. So it is fitting that we pause a moment and recall that 800 years ago, on November 6, 1217, King Henry III granted the Charter of the Forest, formally recognizing in writing the customary rights of commoners to have access to the things essential to their everyday lives.

The Charter of the Forest, with the Great Seal of King Henry III

Commoners depended on the forest for nearly everything. It provided  wood for their fires and houses, pastures for sheep and cattle, and  wild game for food. The forest had mushrooms, hazelnuts, berries, dandelion leaves, and countless herbs.  The forests were a source of acorns and beech mast for pigs; brush with which to make brooms; and medicinal plants for all sorts of illnesses and diseases.

“More than any other kind of landscape,” wrote English naturalist Richard Mabey, “[the English forests of the 13th Century] are communal places, with generations of shared natural and human history inscribed in their structures.”

How is it that the Charter of the Forest has been nearly forgotten? Historian Peter Linebaugh explains in his wonderful book The Magna Carta Manifesto that the two charters of liberty were often publicly linked.  Indeed, the very term Magna Carta was used to distinguish the Great Charter of 1215 with the “lesser” one issued two years later, the Charter of the Forest.

It wasn’t until 1297 that King Edward I directed that the two be treated as the single law of the land. In 1369, King Edward III issued a law that incorporated the two into a single statute, with the Charter of the Forest becoming chapter 7 of the Magna Carta. Over the centuries, the Charter of the Forest, seen as a minor subset of the Great Charter, was largely forgotten.

The Medieval manuscripts blog maintained by the British Library has a nice post on “how our ancient trees connect us to the past,” which mentions the Charter of the Forest and provides a rarely seen image of it. (Thanks to Juan Carlos de Martin and Ugo Mattei for alerting me to this.)  The post noted that there are over 120,000 trees listed in the British Woodland Trust’s Ancient Tree Inventory, some of which are over 1,000 years old and were around at the time that the Charter was issued.

The blog post discusses how the Charter of the Forest “rolled back the area of the forests to their boundaries at the beginning of the rule of King Henry II in 1152, where lands could be shown to have been taken wrongfully.  (Henry II had vigorously expanded the forest borders to the point of creating hardship.)” An early case of reclaiming the commons, one might say.

But what does the Charter mean for commoners today?

Two years ago, at an event celebrating the Magna Carta’s 800th anniversary, I gave a talk at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, called “Who May use the King’s Forest: The Meaning of the Magna Carta, Commons, and Law in Our Time.”  My focus was on the functional legal significance of Magna Carta (i.e., the Charter of the Forest) in meeting people’s everyday survival needs and in fulfilling human rights.

The document is significant because it assured that everyone may access the common wealth that we all inherit as human beings – or as I put it, Who may use the King’s forests? The commoners of the early 1200s had a ready answer to this question: “What do you mean, ‘The King’s forests’?  They belong to us!  They’ve been ours for centuries!”

This is the forgotten legacy of Magna Carta: its frank acknowledgment that commoners have rights to the things essential to human life: the right to use the forest, the right to self-organize their own governance rules, and civil liberties and protections against the sovereign’s arbitrary abuses of power.  All of these preceded the very idea of written law.  They were considered human rights based on fundamental needs and long-standing traditions.

It is fascinating to realize that, with the rise of the modern nation-state and capitalism, these rights have been steadily pared back and in many cases eliminated. There is no longer any broad enforceable right of access to resources essential to human survival, for example — although Italian legal scholar Stefano Rodota worked hard to try to resurrect this principle.

The struggle to resurrect a law for the commons in modern times is barely underway. But it is becoming clear that commoners must reclaim from reckless market/states their right to act as stewards of the planet’s ecosystems. Let us raise a toast to the Charter of the Forest and remember what it stands for.  We will be needing inspiration and instruction for it in the years ahead.

Photo by – bjornsphoto –

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For more information about the program, click here.

In cooperation with the Transeuropa Festival and MediaLab Prado, the assembly features 4 days of workshops, visits to local commons initiatives, debates, talks, art and parties in the heart of Madrid. An eclectic mix of commons activists from all over Europe will get together to discuss the commons and the future of Europe.

The European Commons Assembly starts on Wednesday (the 25th of October) and ends with a closing assembly on Friday (the 27th of October). Saturday (October 28th) will be filled with trips to local commoning sites around Madrid and exciting sessions organized by Transeuropa Festival in the afternoon.

Workshop themes include ‘Participatory Tools for Democracy’, ‘Right to the City’, ‘Law for the Commons’, ‘Data Commons and the Collaborative Economy’, ‘Food’, ‘Health and Leisure’, and ‘Solidarity as a Commons: Migrants and Refugees’.

For more updates, follow us here on Twitter or join the event here on Facebook.

We hope to see you in Madrid!

Photo by Tom.Lechner

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The metaphysical reality that the law recognizes is one that remains quite alien to the western mind:  “I am the river, and the river is me.”  That’s how the Iwi express their relationship to the Whanganui; the two are indivisible, an utterly organic whole. The river is not a mere “resource” to be managed.

The idea of conferring of a “legal personality” on a river and explicitly guaranteeing its “health and well-being” is a major departure for Western law, needless to say. We westerners have no legal categories for recognizing the intrinsic nature of nonhuman living systems and how we relate to them ontologically. As if to underscore this fact, the practical legal challenges of defining and enforcing the rights of the Whanganui are far from resolved, notwithstanding the creation of a new legal framework.

Still, the law is an important start. It settles the historical claims on the river made by indigenous peoples, and it makes nineteen remarkable “acknowledgements” of the Crown’s behavior over the past century. The law even recognizes the “inalienable connection” of the iwi and hapū to the river, and tenders an official apology.

This latest episode in granting rights to nature is nicely summarized in a piece in The Guardian by Ashish Kothari and Shristee Bajpai of the Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group in India, and Mari Margi of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in the US.

The new law does not alter the philosophical foundations of Western law, but it does constitute a notable opening of new metaphysical possibilities. A sacred, natural flow of water now has a legal right to participate in government policymaking and go to court!

And why not?  The money-making organizational form known as the corporation is every bit as much a legal fiction. Surely natural systems ought to be entitled to have a legal personality to protect themselves against the state and the legal person known as the corporation.

The Te Awa Puua Act achieves this by establishing an office of Te Pou Tupua to act as a trustee and “human face” for the legal person of the . Kothari et al. note that the trust structure for the Whanganui has “its origins in the Maori concept of kaitiakitanga or “commons” / guardianship.”

The New Zealand law follows in the footsteps of other nations that have recognized the rights of nature.  Ecuador was the first when it recognized the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth, in its constitution in 2008. Bolivia also did so a few years later. In the U.S., many communities have also recognized the rights of nature – although the legal enforceability of those rights, standing in the jurisprudential shadows of US federal and state law, is problematic.

In any case, the trend to recognizing nature’s rights seems to be gaining some momentum. A few weeks after the New Zealand law was enacted, according to Kothari et al., “a court in India ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their related ecosystems have ‘the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities…in order to preserve and conserve them.’”

These grand declarations of law will require much addition work if they are going to have real impact. As Kothari and his coauthors write:

What does it mean for a river to have the rights of a person? If the most fundamental human right is the right to life, does it mean the river should be able to flow free, unfettered by obstructions such as dams? Does the right extend to all creatures in the river system? How can a river, with no voice of its own, ensure such rights are upheld or ask for compensation if they are violated? Who would receive any compensation? And can such rights undo past wrongs?

….How will [government] officials be responsible “parents” – as designated by the court – if their superiors continue to make decisions that are detrimental to the rivers, such as massive hydro-project construction? Can these officials sue their own government?

The limits of this approach have been seen in Bolivia and Ecuador, where enforcing nature’s rights in court have often encountered formidable opposition.

It seems that we stand at the threshold of a new field of jurisprudence whose terms remain uncertain because they are legally under-developed and still politically contested. But the problem goes deeper. The cold reality is that state law can only achieve so much without accompanying changes in social practice, personal beliefs and culture. These are arguably the bigger challenges ahead.

At least now there is a beachhead of legal precedent into which cultural energies can flow and develop. That’s progress!  Onward to the odyssey of changing the culture, and learning from the long struggles of indigenous peoples.

Photo by tewahipounamu

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Nicos Poulantzas Institute in cooperation with transform! europe organized an open lecture of David Bollier, researcher, activist and writer of a series of books concerning Commons. Find here the short report of the event on 14 February.

Our colleague David Bollier speaks about Law for the Commons at an event co-organised by the Nicos Poulantzas Institute & Transform! Europe. The text below was written by Theodora Kotsaka and was originally published in the Transform! Europe blog.

Theodora Kotsaka: Nicos Poulantzas Institute is working on Commons during the last four years, focusing on areas as water and its management as a common good, digital commons and applied policies on Commons related to productions model transformation. D. Bollier’s speech was organized in order to complete the picture by referring to the argent need of reinventing a law for the Commons.

In countries around the world, Bollier noted, a burgeoning ‘Commons Sector’ is developing effective, ecological alternatives to the increasingly dysfunctional market/state system. Commons are developing new types of food-growing and -distribution systems, alternative currencies to retain community value, platform co-operatives for online sharing, multistakeholder co-ops, open design and manufacturing systems, land trusts, co-learning projects, and much else. The goal in most instances is to meet essential human needs through inclusive participation, the decommodification of relationships, collaborative social organization, and long-term stewardship that links responsibilities and benefits.

The growth of the Commons Sector faces significant barriers from conventional law, however, because the state privileges individual property rights and market exchange, and even criminalizes commoning. Fixated on extractive economic growth, state policies do not recognize the actual value created through Commons. This reality that has forced commoners to devise ingenious ‘hacks’ on the law, as possible, to protect their ability to collectively manage seeds, water, farming, housing and much else.

To legalize and support commoning, Bollier calls for a new field of legal inquiry to validate and develop new forms of commons-based law. We need new types of effective legal mechanisms to help incubate, maintain and defend commons. Bollier argues that this is an essential challenge to meet if we are to imagine and invent fair economic and governance systems that can work for everyone.

David Bollier is cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project, and Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (US).”

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“The “right to the city” asserted by commoners is essentially a human right – a moral and political claim of access to resources that are essential to life, and to a right to participate in their use and management. So it is worth situating this entire struggle in the context of human rights law and social movements. The goals of commoning and human rights law have, in fact, a very long, entangled history. They go back at least 800 years, when King John adopted the Magna Carta and its lesser-known companion document, the Charter of the Forest, as a way to settle a bitter civil war. The Charter of the Forest (later incorporated into the Magna Carta) recognizes the claims of commoners to the common wealth that belongs to them as human beings, and who depend upon certain resources for their everyday subsistence.

For example, the Magna Carta formally recognized in writing the right of commoners to access and use forests that the King had previously claimed as his alone. It helps to remember that commoners in the thirteenth century relied on forests for nearly everything – wood to cook their food and build their houses, wild game to eat, plants to feed their cattle, acorns to fatten their pigs. The problem is that their long-standing customary use of the forest and other common resources was not legally recognized – and so the King and his lords could (and did) arbitrarily ignore the moral and human rights of commoners. The was a frank acknowledgment that commoners indeed have human rights – the right to use the forest, the right to self-organize their own governance rules, and civil liberties and rights to protect them from the sovereign’s arbitrary abuses of power.

There are other strands in this legal history of human rights and commons that are too involved to discuss here; my co-author Burns H. Weston, an international human rights and law scholar, and I explore them more fully in our book Green Governance. Suffice it to say that it is entirely consistent with human rights law for it to squarely embrace the right of universal access to clean air, water, food and other resources and ecosystems that are essential to life.

The problem is that human rights champions have historically sought to fulfill these rights within the prevailing system of law and commerce, i.e., the neoliberal state and markets. But given its commitments to individual property rights, “free markets” and economic growth, it should not be surprising that the actual vindication of human rights is a problematic affair. The idea of human rights has been aspirational, frequently stymied by hostile structures of the state, law and commerce. Surely it is an apt moment to consider how various types of common-based governance (as described above) could actualize human rights in more robust, stable ways.

To try to advance human rights law in such directions, Weston and I in 2013 proposed a Universal Covenant Affirming a Human Right to Commons – and Rights-based Governance of Earth’s Natural Wealth and Resources. It is our attempt to win recognition for the human right to “green governance” – to manage resources as commons, and thus to actualize human rights more reliably than existing systems of national and international law now do. A related effort should be the “reinvention of law for the commons,” a topic that I addressed in a 2015 research memorandum.

The paper calls for a new field of inquiry and legal innovation — Commons-Based Law – to consolidate the disparate areas of law that are trying to protect collective resources and practices from enclosures while providing affirmative legal support for people to enter into commoning.”

Photo by The British Library

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“This insight can help us imagine and build a new “ecolegal order” that has three strategic objectives, they argue: to disconnect law from power and violence (by reconfiguring the nation-state’s authority); to make communities sovereign (by empowering commons); and to make ownership generative (by integrating property rights with stewardship responsibilities). An eco-friendly legal order would recognize the holistic perspectives of commons in integrating costs and risks that market economies strive to externalize onto nature, communities and future generations.”

Book: Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei. The Ecology of Law, 2015

David Bollier reviews the argument for a law of the commons:

“State law is largely philosophically hostile to, or simply noncomprehending of, the very idea of commons and commoning. Civil law as administered by the state is focused on individual, private property rights and market exchange; it is structurally focused on “things” in isolation from dynamic social relationships, history, culture and ecosystems. The struggle to inscribe a “commons-based law” within the edifice of conventional state law is therefore an ambiguous or paradoxical challenge; some say it is impossible.

And yet it is absolutely needed because the nation-state is suffering a decline in legitimacy and efficacy as global capital becomes even more powerful, and as the scale and complexity of problems outstrip the capacity of corporate and governmental bureaucracies to solve them. Many people are starting to realize that the profound problems of modern life cannot be rectified by using the tools and mindset of modernity.

The physicist Fritjof Capra and law scholar Ugo Mattei recently shed light on this problem in their 2015 book, The Ecology of Law, which sees the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview.

Capra and Mattei argue that we must transcend this legacy if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. They criticize modern state law because it privileges the individual as the principal agent despite the harm that this produces for the collective good and ecological stability. Law also presumes that the world can be governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life, especially the power of human subjectivity, caring and meaning. Capra and Mattei note the important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. All of them saw a cosmological order that is rational, empirically knowable, and governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy and law.

The Ecology of Law explains how this understanding of the world prevents us from effectively addressing our many ecological catastrophes, and how jurisprudence as now conceived is a key part of the problem. Modernity is based on the sanctity of private property and state sovereignty, write Capra and Mattei. It is an order that presumes to be an “objective,” natural representation of reality, and that regards distinctions such as “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective,” as self-evident descriptions of reality.

Any practicing commoner knows that this is a highly reductionist and misleading way of understanding the world. In actual experience, individuals are nested within collectives, and they develop and flourish as individuals only through cooperating with others. Similarly, subjective experience and objective fact are not isolated and separate; they blur together. The either/or divisions of modernity function as a kind of consensual social fiction, with law affirming and enforcing these (misleading) categories of thought. For example, modern law presumes that if there is no external limit imposed on an individual citizen, each should be free to act as a “rational actor” to extract as much from nature as he/she wishes. This is presumed to improve upon nature, create value and advance human progress. In the modernist worldview that law embodies, individuals are imagined as the primary agents of change, and as isolated agents without history, social commitments or context. This gives individuals permission to be self-regarding and hedonistic in the face of collective and ecological needs – a capitalist-libertarian delusion that is celebrated and defended.

Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies. It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview as embodied in law. What we need, Capra and Mattei argue, is a major paradigm shift in science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings. Instead of seeing the Earth and human societies as a machine of parts, we must see them as a holistic, indivisible ecological system: the world as a network of interdependencies. Law is not something that exists independently “out there” as an objective reality. It is a socially constructed order – a power that we must reclaim. “Law is always a process of commoning,” Capra and Mattei write, reminding us that law originates in social practice and norms; it emerges from communities of commoners. This insight can help us imagine and build a new “ecolegal order” that has three strategic objectives, they argue: to disconnect law from power and violence (by reconfiguring the nationstate’s authority); to make communities sovereign (by empowering commons); and to make ownership generative (by integrating property rights with stewardship responsibilities). An eco-friendly legal order would recognize the holistic perspectives of commons in integrating costs and risks that market economies strive to externalize onto nature, communities and future generations.”

Photo by Woody H1

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We live in a contradictory world, just as it is undoubtedly true that problems are worsening in the dominant system — including ecological destruction, increased social inequality, and increased state repression — just as true is the fact that there is an exponential rise in the creation of non-state, non-corporate initiatives in which citizens the world over are taking matters into their own hands. Many of the below trends were identified last year — we only mention them again here if they significantly matured.

Perhaps the main negative development in the field of p2p, and the commons, was the abandoning of the transformative change program by Syriza, which highlights the failure of the traditional Left to believe in its own promise for transition. This points to a strong need for a renewal of politics around a Commons Transition program. It is therefore particularly heartening to see the simultaneous creation this year of several local commons groups, such as Assemblies and Chambers of the Commons.

There is much to rejoice in the list below. There is now a palette of p2p-based solutions that can be used by those that are serious about reconstructing our world with distributed infrastructures, shared resources and commons, and livelihoods around such engagements.

We’re particularly happy this year to see the strengthening of post-corporate business eco-systems such as Enspiral that are co-creating commons. As we confront climate change, the capacity to drastically reduce consumption while supporting decent lives point to the need to use peer production to dramatically augment the “thermo-dynamic efficiencies” of our current production system. While we are in the early stages of a transition from the failing old system to a new one, the good news is that the transition has started nearly everywhere — civil society is responding to the combined market and state failures.

Refugee Action protest, Melbourne. Image by Takver

1. Poor-to-Poor, Peer-to-Peer: The year of self-organized mass migration and “trans-migrants”

This was the year in which mass migrations of millions of war refugees [1] were organized by social media (specifically through secret Facebook groups) and in which scores of citizens organized themselves through peer-to-peer networks to assist them. This is also the year of publication of a major book on transmigration, i.e. the movements of people who come to the West not to stay, but in rotational organization, often organized as ethnic and religious phyles, as documented in the book by Alain Tarrius, entitled, Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer [2] (Editions de l’Aube, 2015). The P2P in the subtitle is justified by the absolutely essential role that the Internet plays in all stages of these circuits — for example, from taking orders for Chinese electronics to warning at which market at which time they will be delivered. One example many Europeans may be familiar with are the indigenous people from Otavallo, Ecuador — with their pan-flute music and sale of Alpacca wool in many European cities with over 40,000 people — who are responsible for one third of the local GDP; and also the Sufi brotherhoods from Senegal, selling not-so-authentic luxury goods on the continent’s beaches. Tarius has uncovered many such circuits, linking the poor of the Global South, to the immigrant neighborhoods of Western countries.

From the ethnic and religious phyles described here — i.e. business ecosystems at the service of communities and their commons — we move to our next trend, which sees similar ecosystems now evolving for affinity-based peer production communities.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our P2P Solidarity Section

From left: Sophie Jerram (Letting Space), Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation) and Alanna Krause (Enspiral Foundation).

2. Inspired by Enspiral: The further maturation of post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions

The ethnic and religious phyles cited above are mirrored by the strengthening of affinity-based commons-oriented business eco-systems.

We mentioned their emergence as one of the great trends of 2014, and they have mostly continued to grow and mature. Beyond the corporation, there are now budding seed forms of post-corporate business eco-systems that are creating livelihoods for productive communities and their commons, such as Enspiral with Loomio and the open hardware designs of Sensorica.

This year, I visited Enspiral in their heartland of New Zealand, seeing them up close and I very much liked what I saw.

Here’s a good description from Josef Davies-Coates:

Enspiral is made up of three parts: The Enspiral Foundation, Enspiral Services, and Startup Ventures. I’d say they’re the best current example of an Open Co-op, but how they actually describe themselves is as “a virtual and physical network of companies and professionals working together to create a thriving society” and as an “experiment to create a collaborative network that helps people do meaningful work.” A core part of their strategy is to open source their model. In short, not only are they doing almost exactly what United Diversity wants to do, they’re also building the open source tools actually needed to do it!

The Enspiral Foundation is the charitable company at the heart of the Enspiral network. It’s the legal custodian of assets held collectively by the network, and the entity with which companies and individuals have a formal relationship. Decisions are made using Loomio and budgets are set using Cobudget.

A network of professionals work together in teams to offer Enspiral Services, a range of business services under one roof. By default, members pool 20 percent of their invoices into a collective bucket, 25 percent of which goes to the Foundation. Loomio and Cobudget are then used to decide how to spend the rest. For Startup Ventures, Enspiral works with social entrepreneurs to launch startups who then support the work of the Foundation and Enspiral, as a whole, through flexible revenue share agreements: ventures choose their own contribution rate, usually around 5 percent of revenue.

Check our wiki descriptions of Enspiral, Las Indias, Sensorica, Ethos, and Fora do Eixo.

Ouishare and other partners organized a seminar to examine these new practices this December, here is their video presentation reflecting the emergences of these practices.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on the new open corporate formats, see Open Company Formats and specifically on the post-corporate ethical entrepreneurial coalitions, see here.

Tarragona Concurs Castells taken by calafellvalo, on Flickr.

3. The Collaborative Technology Alliance, digital synergy, and the blockchain: making the alternative P2P infrastructure interoperable

While it is too early to predict how successful this effort will be, I consider the meeting and the launch of this alliance, which brings together post-corporate alliances like Enspiral and a dozen others, to be a pivot. The aim is not to compete with hacker alternatives to Facebook, but simply to make already used technology — like Loomio and Cobudget for Enspiral — interoperable with each other. This is definitely the most realistic strategy to arrive at a interconnection of ethical and non-netarchical technologies.

A similar initiative is growing in France and the francophone world, under the name Synergie Numerique.

• Doing more together, together: seeding a Collaborative Technology Alliance
• For P2P Foundation documentation on technological peer to peer infrastructures, see here our P2P Infrastructure Section

The City as a Commons Conference, Bologna, Italy

4. From Urban Commons to The City as a Commons: political commons transitions at the city level

This year the IASC, the venerable scholarly association which continues the work of Elinor Ostrom, held a memorable conference that sealed the evolution from paying attention to commons in the city to actually seeing the whole city as a commons. The work of Christian Iaione and his team at LabGov, co-responsible already for the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, is exemplary for this trend, which is expanding in a number of other Italian cities (co-mantova, co-palermo, co-battaglia…). This evolution parallels the historic wins of the commons-oriented municipal coalitions in a number of Spanish cities, such as the En Comu coalition in Barcelona. In Saillans, France, and in Frome, UK — with their Flatpack Democracy Toolkit — civic coalitions displaced the political parties, and the big win of a progressive coalition in Grenoble, was also a vindication of citizen-centric attitudes by the political parties in this coalition.

• Commons Transition: Stories on Urban Commons. Urban Commons entry in the Law for the Commons Wiki. See also Urbanism and Municipalism in the Commons Transition Wiki.
• For P2P Foundation documentation on commons-centric urbanism, see our Urbanism Section

Poster from Le Temps des Communs Festival

5. The launch of independent, commons-centric civic organisations

I called for this about three years ago, but they are finally emerging.

A proto-Assembly of the Commons has been operating in Ghent, Belgium, and on the occasion of a big francophone city festival on the commons (Villes en Commun), Toulouse and a few other French cities launched Assemblies of the Commons. A Europe-wide Assembly meeting is planned at the EU-level. In Chicago, a Chamber of the Commons was launched and, just this month, a Commons Transition Coalition for Melbourne and other places in Australia. This means that commoners will increasingly learn to have a political and social voice.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on P2P and commons movements, see our section on P2P Movements

POC21 Trailer: “The World We Need” from POC21 cc on Vimeo.

6. The Poc 21, OSCE Days and the blockchain-based open supply chains as important steps toward an Open Source Circular Economy

Poc21.cc was a great project by Ouishare and Open State that brought together a dozen sustainable open hardware projects in an attempt to interconnect them as a miniature circular economy, a proof of concept to be given to the COP21 organizers who failed once more to offer a real solution to climate change (though the imperfect agreement is, at least, a first positive step in the light of previous failures to even come to an agreement). Watch the video of the experience here.

The OSCE Days organized by Lars Zimmerman, et al, were also a great set of experiences that spread the message about the crucial necessity for open sourcing productive supply chains. The Provenance group has written an essential report outlining how the blockchain may play a vital role in this.

How the blockchain could function in this mutual coordination economy — particularly in the context of open source participatory and open value chains that operate as eco-systems — is the object of a White Paper by the Provenance group [3].

Also check the work of Bob Haugen, Lynn Foster, and others at Sensorica on Radically Distributed Supply Chain Systems and Network Resource Planning, in particular, the software projects around the open value flow projectsuch as Mikorizal, and converging projects like Wezer by the Valeureux group in France.

At the P2P Foundation, we theorized for the first time, the overall thermodynamic efficiencies that will come out of the open source stack and, with the help of the Blaqswans Collective, will be calculating the effects more seriously in the coming year.

Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

1. Article [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text
2. Article [2015] “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”. text

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sustainable_Manufacturing. See also the Open Source Circular Economy.
• Commons Transition Stories on the blockchain.

Platform Cooperativism Conference, NYC. Image by Trebor Scholz.

7. Platform Cooperativism, Commonfare, and the new mutuals for precarious labor

Last year, we made a call for the convergence of the cooperative/solidarity economy models with the open commons model, i.e. for Open Cooperativism, and the Commons Strategies Group published a very good report on it, Toward an Open Cooperativism. This year, the realisation that the sharing economy is becoming dominated by huge monopolistic and extractive groups like Uber and Airbnb (the theme of the OuishareFest 2015 was “Lost in Transition” and referred to this) has created a first important reaction, i.e. a push for Platform Cooperativism, with thousands of attendees invited to New York City by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.

In platform co-ops, whose functions is to ease exchanges amongst peers, the commons’ part is the platform itself, which is owned by the different stakeholders, or at least those that most directly produce the value together. Amongst the examples cited in New York City were Stocksy, an artist-owned stock-photography website, and Resonate, a cooperative music streaming platform. Last year, we also mentioned Commonfare developments, which denotes the new solidarity mechanisms being instituted by precarious but networked workers, with examples such as the Dutch Broodfonds, the German Solidago, and the health-sharing ministries in the U.S. like the Freelancers Union, but also more commercial variants like Friendsurance.

This year, what has come to the fore, especially in the Francophone world, are the mutuals for independent workers, such as Coopaname, which allow independent workers to ally themselves and be part of the more official social solidarity mechanisms instead of being second class citizens as ‘independents’. The Belgian think-tank Saw-B has an excellent report on their emergence and growth (see Organisations solidaires pour les travailleurs de l’economie collaborative) and pinpoints the strategies to make them evolve into real labor mutuals (“mutuelles de travail”).

Important this year has been the news on the announced basic income experiments in both the Netherlands and Finland, but the utmost caution is advisable here as there are most likely projects that aim to do away with the basic social protections of the welfare state, and not improve on it. The announced 800 Euro amount in Finland probably can’t even cover rental costs.

• Commons Transition: Open Cooperativism Definition, Stories on Open Cooperativism. See also David Bollier’s and Pat Conaty’s Open Coops report
• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open and Platform cooperativism, see our Cooperatives Section and dedicated sections on Open and Platform Cooperativism.

Video for the Mutual Aid Network’s Crowfund Campaign. Contribute here!

8. The Emergence of Meta-Economic Networks for ethical value streams

As we argue in our 20-minute introductory video to the P2P Foundation strategy for change, millions of people are already involved in solving the three systemic crises caused by the present dominant system, i.e. they are working on sustainability, solidarity, and openness. The problem being however, that the three streams are not connected to each other, but even within them, fragmentation reigns. As I was told by Jason Nardi, the community-supported agriculture movement in Italy alone probably has a dozen different ordering systems. Thus, it becomes more and more important to not just align the initiatives as organisations, but to create integrate value streams for the ethical economy.

The most advanced practical project is probably the Mutual Aid Network in Madison, Wisconsin, which is already expanding beyond the city to places as far away as South Africa (Bergnek project). Very advanced conceptually, having developed ten criteria to assess commons-centric economic players, is the Encommuns.org project in Lille, northern France. And certainly worth mentioning is the integral accounting method developed for a Common Good Economy by Christian Felber in Austria used by 300+ companies. The solidarity economy movement itself is now working on developing “solidarity districts.”

• For P2P Foundation documentation on open value accounting and streams, see our section on P2P Accounting

Wikihouse NZ at the Makertorium at Te Papa. Read more here.

9. The Cosmo-Localization of WikiHouse, and other seed forms for a new wave of open platforms for sustainable living and housing

There was a time where we could think of projects like the Tabby, RiverSimple, or Wikispeed, i.e. the open source car projects, as people wanting to simply produce their own cars. And the same could be said of WikiHouse. But visiting the latter in Christchurch, New Zealand, I had a epiphany of sorts. That is far from what they are… they are, in fact, potentially and emergently, open platforms for sustainable living and housing, integrating the world’s knowledge so that every ethical entrepreneur can start building sustainable housing. In this, they are the budding business eco-systems of tomorrow, getting ready as seed forms to replace the extractive industrial system. Watch out for the new system of production, where “what is light is global and what is heavy is local,” called Cosmo-Localization by our Melbourne-based friend José Ramos.

The Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland has a regular column visiting such innovating seed platforms.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable housing, see our section on Housing

The Law for the Commons Wiki.

10. The initiation of a legal tradition for the Commons

For several years, we have been collating the evolution of a new law of the commons on our P2P Foundation website, but David Bollier has published a synthetic overview this year that does a lot to advance our understanding of this trend. See David’s work as compiled in the Law for the Commons Wiki.

The new book by Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community [4], is another illustration of this trend, and the progressive Catholic journalist Nathan Schneider has argued that the Pope’s latest encyclical, Laudate Si, is part of that same evolution.

• Law for the Commons Wiki
• More Law for the Commons material at the Commons Strategies Group Website
• For P2P Foundation documentation on the emergence of P2P and Commons Law, see our section on P2P Law and David Bollier’s four part memorandum on Law for the Commons.

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• Article cross-posted from Shareable.com
• Image by opensource.com

The post The Top Ten P2P Trends of 2015 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I met Burns about seven years ago when he was a professor for one semester a year at Vermont Law School.  He was writing a major legal treatise about climate change, and one element of the essay dealt with the commons.  A mutual friend, the polymath Roger G. Kennedy, introduced us, and the gravitational pull of Burns’ essay quickly drew me in. It was an irresistible disruption in my life that got me thinking a lot about environmental law and the commons.

Soon we were working together on a variety of projects:  a major scholarly book, chapters in anthologies, law review articles, grant proposals. In the course of it all, Burns exposed me to a great deal of human rights and international law, and he helped clarify their potential and limits for re-imagining international governance, environmental law and the actualization of human rights. For my part, I introduced Burns to the loose but growing network of international commoners and commons literature. He quickly realized that the commons is not just complementary to human rights; the two are long-lost partners with affirmative synergies.

Our conversations became more serious and, with a bit of serendipitous funding, we embarked upon a grueling book project, Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press.  It was a bold attempt to reimagine environmental law and policy through the lens of human rights and the commons.  We wanted to envision new ways to actualize human rights principles and commons practices at global and regional levels.  We wanted to think beyond the framework of the nation-state and international treaty organizations.  We wanted to think beyond the standard forms and institutions of law itself.

Burns attacked these questions with the enthusiasm of a first-year law student and the sagacity of a gray eminence.  He really wanted to come up with creative legal solutions, and he wasn’t afraid if they might require social and political struggle. Now that’s not a quality you find in your average law professor, let alone one in his seventies. Burns had a bold and questing temperament, and did not let himself be confined by the disciplinary blinders of law. That’s why, following the publication of Green Governance, Burns wanted to continue our explorations.  So we founded the Commons Law Project to see if we could propose an architecture of law and public policy to address climate change and other urgent ecological problems.

Burns retired from teaching in 1999, but his schedule was anything but retiring.  Somehow he juggled a daunting portfolio of chapters for book anthologies, law review articles, law school teaching, public talks, support for the Center for Human Rights, sitting on the editorial boards of over ten professional journals, and acting as series editor for the longest continuing international law book series in the US.  I was privileged that our collaborations could fit into this schedule, and that I could learn indirectly from the many people and ideas that coursed through his life.

At his death, Burns and I were exploring – along with Professor Anna Grear, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal on Human Rights and the Environment – the challenges of new forms of governance.  Anna and I still hope to convene workshops of venturesome legal scholars, activists and others to try to elicit some great ideas.  We will sorely miss Burns’ counsel, his mastery of the law and legal literature, and his friendships with a large network of legal thinkers.

Since I’m not a lawyer or a legal scholar, I had only glimpses into the world of international law and human rights in which Burns normally lived, and the many unusual experiences that he had in a prior life as an attorney.  He once chuckled at his meeting with Marilyn Monroe, for example, when he was a New York City attorney representing playwright Arthur Miller. Today, Professor Mary Wood, the indefatigable champion and scholar of public trust doctrine (Nature’s Trust), described sharing a podium with Burns just last week:

I stood with Burns just one week ago in front of the UN Association of Iowa to give an address on climate emergency.  Burns gave a resounding call to arms to those in the audience.  He said, if you think that you have a human right to the resources that sustain your survival, take that right to court.  It will not amount to anything if you don’t, he said.  It was thrilling to follow such a call from an incomparable scholar with my own address to the audience describing how youth across this nation are taking government to court in a global campaign spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust to force carbon dioxide reduction before it is too late.  Burns was an esteemed scholar in the atmospheric trust litigation amicus group supporting the litigation campaign.

Dean Agrawal has credited Burns with “putting Iowa Law on the map” in international law and international human rights.  He was responsible for recruiting some of our most distinguished faculty members in the fields of international and comparative law…and inspired generations of law students.”  She called Burns a “citizen of the world.”  I’ll say.

My deep condolences to Burns’ wife Marta Cullberg Weston and family, and to Burns’ colleagues at the University of Iowa.  We’ve lost a giant legal scholar, a restless mind and a dear friend.

The post Farewell Burns Weston, Questing Legal Mind and Dear Friend appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ugo Mattei, a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy, is interviewed by the American Society of Comparative Law.

The post Video of the Day: Ugo Mattei on Law for the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.