Peer to Peer – P2P Foundation

Podcast: Michel Bauwens, How Peer-to-Peer Can Change the World

P2P Foundation — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on thinkdif.co

In this podcast, Michel Bauwens joins some dots together and explains why the open source movement, the growing prevalence of peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms and new technologies like blockchain create the potential to create a fundamentally different economic model that circulates vale between businesses, people and the environment, rather than extracts it. Bauwens believes that we should move to an economy that is built on infinite resources like knowledge, rather than finite materials, and we have the structure and technologies to achieve it.

Ken Webster is a leading author, teacher and thinker when it comes to the circular economy.

Photo by Theen …

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Peer-to-peer-commons – The historical ‘third movement’ of radical science? It can only get better

Mike Hales — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Originally published 18 September 2018 at foprop.org

Mike Hales: When I first read Gary Werskey’s 2007 ‘three movements’ article – four years ago – I was sceptical. He discussed two British movements of radicals around science, in the 30s-40s and the 70s-80s, and speculated on the possibility of a third (which might possibly have an environmental impetus).

I was particularly unconvinced about the possibility of a Marxist movement, like the other two. But now, in 2018, I do have the sense that, yes, the peer-to-peer commons movement may be the thing that is in fact standing in that place. It would be worthwhile, at least, to proceed on the basis that it is – with substantial (if, for activists, secondary) implications for the field of science and technology studies (STS). I’m in no doubt that P2P-commons is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my activist lifetime . . and that it mobilises the stuff I’ve been cultivating these past 50 years, as a libertarian socialist with an orientation to the politics of knowledges and technologies.

It would be worth proceeding on the basis that P2P-commons is ‘the third radical science movement’

Lucy Gao and I have just finished a project to research and build a presentation at 4S Sydney 2018, the annual gathering of the academic research field of STS. The theme of the conference session – Lives in STS as a series of failed political experiments – was generated from a comment that Gary had made, and Lucy and I took his ‘three movements’ as a frame for narrating two stories of experimenting and ¿failing? in two ‘lives in STS’ – hers of ten years and mine of forty-five. The conference presentation is posted in Youtube (mirrored at hooktube) and a bundle of related materials on radical science and radical professionalism – including a one-page outline of the two stories and a transcript of several hours’ interviews – has now been posted here in 3 History, at Lives in STS. For length, a part of that presentation had to be dropped: an analytical framing of . . Fordism/post-Fordism and P2P as a mode of production in waiting . . STS academia and radical science activism, and . . organic-intellectual activism in-and-against the professional-managerial class (PMC). I had thought of making a ‘directors’ cut’ after the conference. However, too much other work waiting. So … regard this present blog post as the synopsis of the absent footage.

Three things stand out for me about this Lives in STS project, and the place that I got to through working on it with Lucy. Lucy is an Associate Professor in STS, in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was born 40 years after I was, and works in an academic field that burst full-formed upon the Chinese cultural world in the late 80s, with its churned and manifestly political (two-movements) history buried beneath a surface of glossy Westernism, managerialism and professionalisation.

‘Radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science?

The first thing is my own sense that ‘radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science, and that where I have gone to with it isn’t essentially ‘science’ either. I saw, and see, a bunch of cultural formations within a broad and deep generational movement of radical professionals. This has been theorised – among other framings – as a history of the PMC in what once (40 years ago!) was called ‘late capitalism’. In the past generation – I would say, as an aspect of the post-Fordist regrouping of capital and forces opposed to capital – there has been an emergence of a profound and historically new politics, of the producing and mobilising of knowledges, on a mass, globally distributed scale. In the 50s it was ‘Big Science’ and the underpinning of ‘the military-industrial complex’. In the 60s it was the ascendance of ‘science policy’ and arguments about the public or privatisable nature of research production. In the 80s (alongside computerisation) there began to be talk of ‘a knowledge economy’ and in the 90s ‘knowledge intensive business services’ and ‘innovation services’ were subjects of research in ‘national systems of innovation’. In the 90s I was part of this, as an STS researcher (more to be posted in due course).

But all the way through, in my perception, the sub-plot has been one of #organicintellectual production (Gramsci’s term, from Italian Marxism of the 1920s and 30s) and the increasingly clear possibility of – and need for – organising the production of knowledges – on a mass scale, on a class scale – to facilitate quite different modes of production, forms of living and relationships between professionals and other people who are ‘not paid to think’. This on-going story of organic intellectual practice is the concern of the 4 History thread here in FoP RoP. It also is why the analytical frame for the pattern language in the 2 Commoning thread has at its centre the choreography of ’the dance of knowing’, and the question of the historically altered production of #labourpower. In FoP RoP I’m proposing this as one of three spheres of literacy (see here) that can, combined, constitute a cultural-materialist ‘take’ on the historical evolution and ongoing activist production of a P2P-commons mode of production and everyday living.

The movement for P2P-commons may be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified

The second thing I note is that, although I’ve understood myself for 40 years now to be conducting an enquiry within #culturalmaterialism – rather than any kind of received Marxism – the movement for P2P-commons may also be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified by the kind of neo- (not post-) Marxian, carefully hybridised frame that I’m setting out to articulate in FoP RoP, and specifically, in 2 Commoning.

The #materialism within the P2P-commons movement is very obviously present in the core attention given to . . open architectures of apps and the peer-to-peer production of free code . . distributed web infrastructures . . open data, linked data/data ownership/document ownership . . licensing, and to infrastructural technologies of coordination over distributed fields of action including cryptocurrencies and credit-accounting mechanisms, hashchains, open-value supply-chain accounting systems and open-ledger algorithms and architectures.

The cultural-historical orientation is a little less visible. But it’s clearly present for example in the anthropological perspective that led Michel Bauwens to see the historical-evolutionary, post- and anti-capitalist significance of commons, and to inaugurate the P2P Foundation. Likewise it manifestly underlies the scholarly, activist research and development work of Bauwens’ partners in the Commons Strategies Group – David Bollier, Silke Helfrich – on cultural-historical stories of commoning, past and present, presented in their collections of essays The wealth of the commons and Patterns of commoning and under analysis in their work-in-progress towards a pattern language of commoning. See here for notes on the relationship between this and my own pattern-language work here in FoP RoP.

The P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in the 70s, ‘in-and-against the PMC’

The third thing I’m aware of is the way in which the P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – and expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in ‘the second radical science movement’ of the 70s. That was baby-boomers then. But now – although there are baby-boomers still on the scene – it’s another generation, who are discovering and enacting the organic intellectual mode differently. I began to see them only about 18 months ago. I’d been working on a notion of creating some kind of ‘college’ in which baby-boomer and twenty-something activists (and between) could engage in a cross-generation ‘legacy’ dialogue, theorising the ongoing practice of organic-intellectual, libertarian-socialist, activism. I sketched the idea in Humble origins 3 – Activists and the long march home. I’d decided the initiative called for an online platform of some kind (constituting a space for an ‘invisible college’) and had begun checking out the Loomio platform-for-deliberation www.loomio.org/. My ears pricked up here because Loomio was not only well-framed software with a wide and expanding voluntary-sector uptake across countries and cultures, but also because I clearly saw the attention to the #facilitation of group process that underlies the design. Here was a clear historical line, back to the discoveries and commitments of my own generation of community-oriented activism in the 70s (See ‘radical cultural R&D’ in 4 History and the Foreword/Preface to Location).

From Loomio the platform app, through Loomio the workers’ coop of developers, I came to Enspiral, the federation (family?) of post-Occupy activist hacktivist developers and cooperative entrepreneurs, among whom facilitation was a taken-for-granted dimension of activist culture. Thence, to Sensorica and an expanding world of anarcho-hackerist politics, Scuttlebutt infrastructure, a fediverse of code (and P2P producers of code and protocols); and wider formations of post-Occupy, anti-oligarch, direct-democracy research and development, ‘open-value’ value-chain accounting and ’agile’ post-Fordist cultural forms. This had all sorts of odd, contradictory resonances with my business-school experience of the 90s (when stealing the post-Fordist discoveries of Japanese and Italian flexible production systems was bread-and-butter for my colleagues in capitalist supply-chain innovation). Clearly, the histories were getting very mixed up, hybridising, rippling through, wave-fronts interfering. Clearly, there were younger radicals afoot now, in the teensies. who didn’t draw the same sorts of lines – between entrepreneurship and community, or solidarity and efficiency, or activism and technology, or politics and nurturing – that might have been problematic for an earlier generation, brought up in environments that were at once both more corporate, more professionally demarcated and careerist and more inclined to ‘design’ rather than ‘hack’ a solution. Then, it was corporate-competitive ‘right first time’, now it’s fail early, keep fixing and keep forking and federating.

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was (post-Fordism is far further on). Most directly, it’s a successor to the radical technology arms of that movement, all the way from the alternative energy community, committed to off-grid or anarcho urban-artisan living, to the ‘human-centred’ and participatory, labour movement-oriented design movements in corporate-industrial settings. Work on other things – ‘radical science’ history in 4 History, organising within the world of ‘platform cooperativist’ activism in 3 Platforming – is preventing me really getting to grips with the pattern language of commoning in 2 Commoning. But I’m in no doubt that that theorising venture is just as relevant (and on the same cultural-materialist basis) for today’s P2P-commons movement, as was 70s neo-Marxian labour-process theorising in the Radical Science Journal collective, for 70s radical professionalism. Except . . it’s a bigger field, the stakes are raised, the pluriversal cultural challenges sit more obviously and crucially on the face of things; and the Beyond the fragments challenge that faced baby-boomers at the end of the 70s has hatched many fresh forms. Things are on the move. Goodness knows what the ‘third movement’ will look like in China, where my STS colleague Lucy Gao is coming at things 40 years later, with no ‘second movement’, an established, otiose, first movement, and with all the waves of all the Fordisms crashing in a tsunami of history and economy, in the wake of the ‘Great Enlightenment’ of the late 80s.

Whatever . . Yes Gary, there is a third (Marxism-inheriting) radical science movement! It can only get better.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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This Machine Eats Monotheistic Meta Memes

Richard D. Bartlett — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Some scuttlebutt about Scuttlebutt

— hey squiddo, I can’t remember if we talked about Scuttlebutt yet. are you familiar? just a good one to have on your radar, v cool people with excellent tech and zero hype and bullshit

— Hmm interesting, is Scuttlebutt running in production for something yet? It’s like a service to run other things on, no?

— secure scuttlebutt (ssb) it’s a very low level protocol. works like gossip: messages spread between peers. uses the internet if it is available, but doesn’t need it: local wifi, bluetooth (coming soon), or USB sticks are enough.

identities have logs. log = a sequence of messages. they’re cryptographically authenticated so you can guarantee who said what. identities can follow each other. you replicate the logs of your peers. no central server, no off switch, no delete. so if you want to find me, you need to find one of my peers first. creates peer-to-peer archipelagos of friends and data connected by their relationships.

data can be of any type. apps decide what types of messages they pay attention to. e.g. Patchwork is a social media app, with a few hundred daily active users. other apps: a chess game, distributed github clone, soundcloud clone, blogging client, events, calendar, loomio clone, etc etc etc.

it is exciting because there is a steadily growing community, like great new developers showing up every week or two. and it is the only decentralised tech project I know of that is populated by really gentle, caring, community-building, good politics, critically aware but having fun kinda people

—Aha very cool, I’ll dig into it more and start following what’s going on. Sounds like a very interesting concept!

— its dooope. still bleeding edge in many places, so let me know if you get stuck on the way in

but it is getting to the point now where it is more than just my ultra nerd friends in there having a nice time. e.g. here’s a web view of a newsletter summarising activity in the scuttleverse this past week.

— So if you were to think about applications to what we’re doing with our festival community, what would they be?

— think of all the apps you currently use, but imagine they work offline-first

I think it could be a cool on-site mesh network for the festival, to start with, and then people will be delighted to find they can still stay in touch later, because it uses the internet if it is available

— How does it work, with regard to timing, when it cannot be ensured that messages are received in order?

— that’s right, you can’t guarantee order, there’s a lot of little weirdnesses like that which pop up in a purely subjective universe. messages always reference messages before them, so you can infer order

but yeah sometimes in discussions you will see “oh sorry I didn’t have your message when I wrote my comment”. but actually so far that seems mostly to be a feature, a constant reminder that you are just one subjective agent, there is no official arbiter of truth, everyone has a different experience of the world.

you’d be surprised at how much uptime there is when you have a few peers in a web of tight relationships, there’s nearly always someone online. so you don’t notice it much

you also will see missing messages, like, ‘someone wrote a comment here but they are outside of your network so you can’t see it’

which again, sounds like a bug, but I experience it as a feature. it’s very subtle but you keep getting these reminders that there is no single source of truth.

— Hmm right, so you need to have done explicit individual authentication with each every other party?

— some of the peers are special, they’re called “pubs”. practically the only special thing about them is they are guaranteed to have much higher uptime than your average peer and they can hand out “invites”. If you redeem an invite, that means you follow them, and they automatically follow you back. they work a bit like servers, but not much

so if you connect to a pub that I’m connected to, you’ll be able to find me

then you’ll see a list of people that I’ve followed, and you can choose if you believe the name and avatar is who you think it is

there’s not an emphasis on real world identity verification, but it could be done. most people use real names but a decent fraction also enjoy pseudonyms

—Ah right, and if a pub sees your activity, and I’m connected to the pub, I see your activity?

— yep, but there are people who follow no pubs, and they have a fine experience too, so long as there are a few friends of friends

— Gotcha. Yeah, there are definite interesting advantages of this, for sure

— you can also extend your range, they call it “hops”. by default hops is set to 2, so when you follow me, you replicate my feed, plus all my friend’s feeds. in Patchwork you can see the “extended network” which will show you everything public from your the friends of your friends.

My tech knowledge is pretty patchy so I might be misrepresenting the details. I’m not the official source of truth. (there isn’t one.)

when you get deep into it, the main advantage i see is that it is agent centric (people, relationships), rather than location centric (documents, websites). so I have built up a web of relationships and content on my identity. When I move from Patchwork (social media) to Ticktack (blogging) to GitSSB (github clone), all my relationships and data come with me.

solves one of the common headaches of running online communities: you define the group once, and bring that definition with you to any app you want to use. seriously reduces onboarding friction

which means you actually have competition for social media interfaces, there’s no walled garden that owns your social graph

so the geeker types don’t use Patchwork, they use Patchbay, which has the same people and content, but a different interface that sacrifices some UX niceities but gets you closer to the code

— Right, but that also means that you become a carrier for a lot of messages that someone else with the right key could decrypt, ensuring more redundancy and coverage of data

— so long as you keep your secret key, you can lose your computer and rebuild all your past data based on the copies your friends are keeping for you

as one of the ‘butts said, your friends are now the data centre.

— Ah. Yeah. Got it. That’s a huge advantage.

— Can I have your permission to publish this conversation?

— Absolutely! If it’s useful to have my identity attached to the conversation, you have my permission for that too

— thanks. i think i will recast you as a sweet emoji friend

— Yeees! Haha

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Building a Cooperative Economy

Oliver Sylvester-Bradley — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 08:00:00 +0000

In permaculture terms the economy sometimes feels like a segregated monoculture planted with terminator seeds, sprayed with patented pesticides on venture capital backed farms designed to maximise profits in an unsustainable market place full of thieves and cheats. No wonder people prefer to potter in their gardens and allotments – and try to forget the craziness of corporate capitalism!

But no matter how much we try to ignore the corporate machine it ploughs on regardless and at various points in all of our lives we are forced to interact with the unsustainable, greed-based economy whether we like it or not. We all need to travel, buy energy, we like presents and holidays and now we are buying more and more of these goods and services online, from people we do not know.

As local banks close in favour of apps, local taxis are driven out by Uber and the likes of Airbnb and other holiday and comparison websites offer us ‘guaranteed savings’ – the brave new world of digital platforms is being thrust upon us, whether we like it or not.

The dominant form of business in our economy has not changed, but the method of delivery has. Platform businesses which reach further and wider than conventional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses, that are able to ‘scale up’ and attract customers in their millions are forcing out the smaller players, just like supermarkets killed the traditional garden market. Except these “platform monopolies” are taking things to a new level – often unbeknown to us they’re gathering our data and using sophisticated algorithms to work out how to sell us more things, that quite often we don’t need or want. They’re aggregating data and dissintermediating in ways that we never knew were possible. Uber is valued at over 60 billion dollars but does not own a single taxi…

From monoculture to platform co-ops

To someone practicing permaculture, there is something almost offensive about vast fields where businesses cultivate the same single crop and, in a similar way, the exponents of ‘peer to peer’ and ‘open source’ technologies get equally offended by monolithic platforms that dominate the digital landscape.

Peer to peer, (where individuals share content with other people, rather than relying on centralised servers) and open source software (which is free to use and adapt, without requiring a licence fee) are like the digital community’s own versions of permaculture. They provide a pathway to greater independence, autonomy, diversity and resilience than is offered by the dominant system.

David Holmgren’s ideas about creating small scale, copyable, adaptable solutions which have the power to change the world by creating decentralised, diverse, and more resilient systems have huge parallels with open source, collaborative software projects, which are developing as a response to the monolithic, proprietary and profit driven enclosures that dominate today’s Internet.

The end goal of this work is to create ‘platform cooperatives’, as alternatives to the venture capital backed platforms. Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled – allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed. Co-ops are an inherently different form of organisation than Limited or Public companies, which place community before profit, hence have entirely different principles than their corporate rivals. For this reason they are more resilient in downturns, more responsible to their communities and environments and more effective at delivering real (not just financial) value to everyone they interact with.

Platform co-ops provide a template for a new kind of economy built on trust, mutual aid and respect for nature and community. By placing ownership firmly in the hands of the people and applying democratic forms of governance they offer a legitimate alternative to the defacto form of business. There are several platform co-ops that already provide comparable, and often better services than their corporate rivals and with more support others will continue to develop.

On 26 and 27 July the OPEN 2018 conference at Conway Hall in London will showcase platform co-ops such as The Open Food Network – which is linking up local food producers and consumers through Europe, Resonate – the music streaming co-op, and SMart from Belgium which provides support for a network of thousands of freelancers throughout Europe. The beginnings of a viable, self-supporting and sustainable economy are stating to emerge and OPEN 2018, along with similar events in the US and across Europe, is bringing together the people with the ideas, the tech developers and the legal experts to help catalyse the transition.

Shared values and the network effect

By Dmgultekin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8273108

There are so many similarities between permaculture’s philosophy and principles and the works of other progressive groups that hope to encourage a more sustainable, more resilient and equitable future. From Occupy to Open source, Permaculture to Peer to Peer and Collaborative Technology to the Commons Transition groups there are clearly overlapping values.

David Bollier, writing on the Peer to Peer Foundation blog has suggested that “…permaculturists and commoners need to connect more and learn from each other…” and the idea that these communities are ultimately working towards the same objective seems especially important to recognise if we are to accelerate the development of a more sustainable world.

There is already an evolving “shared narrative” between these various, disparate initiatives, but it is often sidelined by our self-selecting filters which lead us back into the communities we know and trust. Collaboration and cooperation can be hard work and as groups get bigger they can become harder still but that’s no reason not to try. The fact that Wikipedia provides a better encyclopaedia for free in more languages than Britannica ever managed proves that online, open source collaboration can deliver greater value than proprietary, closed source systems.

The true value of a collaborative, open networks only really manifests when its members communicate, and work together, through connected systems. Sharing ideas, discussing problems and addressing challenges in larger networks creates positive feedback loops via the network effect – a term which describes how the value of something increases in proportion to the number of people using it (like a phone, or social media network) – something all the various ethical and progressive networks could benefit from enormously.

Parallels between collaborative, open source software development and permaculture principles:

1. Observe and interact

Progressive software projects often utilise ‘user focused’ design strategies to ensure they meet people’s needs. Taking time to understand how users interact with software systems via user experience testing groups and an ongoing, iterative design processes are recognised to deliver higher quality solutions which suit specific user needs.

2. Catch and store energy

Peer to peer networks don’t rely on centralised servers but instead make use of the latent capacity of other user’s machines. Imagine how much more efficient it would be than deploying huge server farms if our computers were not shut off at night, or left idle, when they could be providing valuable processing power for others. The Holochain project aims to make it simple and secure for anyone to join a truly peer to peer network and to share files and processing power in this way – and to even earn credits for hosting other people’s files and applications.

3. Obtain a yield

The Peer Production License provides a means by which open source developers can make the code they develop available for free and still benefit from it’s use. Sites like the Internet of Ownership, which contains a directory of cooperative platforms use the PPL to “permit reuse exclusively for non-commercial and worker-owned enterprises” thereby helping to grow the commons. The ultimate goal of the PPL is to enable mechanisms so commoners can support themselves and ensure their own social reproduction without resorting to capitalism.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

This principle is particularly integral to open source development since the concepts of ‘user focussed’ and ‘agile development’, ‘branching’ and ‘forking’ are all designed to ensure that software projects are self-regulating by listening to the users needs, driven by user feedback and that they are able to be adapted to changing needs.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services

Open source technology is inherently more renewable in the way it enables the reuse and repackaging of code for new purposes. Ethically minded hosts and developers such as Green Net power their servers with renewable energy.

6. Produce no waste

As above, open source code is often re-used and repurposed but progressive developers still have a lot to gain from better collaboration. There are often multiple teams working on identical problems and ideas and whilst this has benefits in terms of developing strength and resilience through diversity it also leads to waste, mainly in terms of time. At least the waste ‘product’ of web development is only digital and so old technology and code doesn’t littler the streets or pollute the environment as much as physical products can, especially if archives are stored on renewably powered servers.

7. Design from patterns to details

Genuine online collaboration has been slow to evolve, with the best examples being Linux (the open source operating system), Firefox, the open source web browser and Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. It is only recently, with the rise of monolithic capitalist gardens such as Google and Facebook and Amazon that the hive mind of the internet is recognising the need to step back and redesign its’ systems according to new patterns. The push for “Net neutrality” and Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project are examples of this in action as is the Holo project, a very exciting and truly peer to peer “community of passionate humans building a distributed cloud, owned and run by users like you and me.”

8. Integrate rather than segregate

The move from centralised to decentralised, to distributed and federated technology is a a key element of open source and collaborative technology design. The entire Peer to Peer philosophy is based on the recognition that the connections and relationships between nodes (people or computers) in a network is what gives it strength and value. Collaborative technologists still have a lot to gain from developing deeper and wider integrations, like we see in nature, and which permaculturists know so well.

9. Use small and slow solutions

Designing a computer system to be slow is not something you will normally (ever?) hear a programmer talk about but they often talk about small, in many guises. Small packages (of code), small apps, “minified” (meaning compressed) code and even small computers, like the Raspberry Pi are key features of collaborative technology which all aim for increased efficiency.

10. Use and value diversity

Diversity is intrinsic to open source and collaborative technology. The plurality and adaptability of open source solutions ensures a highly diverse ecosystem. Users are free to adapt open source code to their needs and the open nature of most open source projects values contributions from anyone, irrespective of race, gender, age or any other factor. It is true that the majority of contributors to open source projects are normally young, white and male but the reasons for that seem more to do with societal inequalities and stereotypes rather than any specific prejudices or practices.

11. Use edges and value the marginal

The explanation of this principle places most value on “the interface between things…” and this is a central component of web design. Web services have now realised the necessity of providing intuitive user interfaces, to allow users to navigate complex data and to investigate deeper informational relationships but, more interestingly the latest developments in linked open data enable users to interface with more specific, more granular and more timely data to provide increase value. The Internet Of Things will facilitate a massive increase in the number and type of products which can interact over the internet. Whilst it is not the norm, drawing diverse information from the edges and valuing the marginal is something the open internet can really facilitate.

12. Creatively use and response to change

Most open source, collaborative projects use some kind of agile development, which advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Permaculture and open source see eye to eye on this principle which bodes very well for a growing, symbiotic relationship in our rapidly evolving world.

Lead image by Dmgultekin, Wikimedia Commons.

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Messages from the Immaterial Commons: 1) becoming psySavvy with p2p support groups

Denis Postle — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 15:00:24 +0000

PsySavvy – supporting and building resilience

At some point in our lives, all of us are likely to find ourselves facing human condition difficulties, challenge, loss, critical choices, disappointment, success, poverty, illness, fame, stress, discrimination, wealth, ageing, abuse, burnout.

How well we cope with any of this seems dependent on our beginnings, the mix of vulnerability and resilience that we have learned or absorbed – how psySavyy we are.

For an introduction to psySavvy and 40 instances of self-help, peer-to-peer, grassroots organisations supporting and building resilience, read on>>

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Bandcamp | P2P Foundation

Keith Parkins — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:28:33 +0000

The surprise is not that artists use bandcamp, the surprise is that they use anything else.

singer-songwriter Jewelia at Staycation Live 2014 / Keith Parkins

Great music is priceless, bad music is worthless. — Steve Lawson

The best way to support an artist is to pay then directly. — Ethan Diamond

When I am at a live music festival for example Staycation Live and the musicians tell the crowd to find them on iTunes I groan, when they tell the crowd to find them on spotify I want to scream out loud.

Why oh why, are they sending people to sites where everyone gets ripped off, where everyone gets a raw deal?

Amazon or iTunes, take a big cut, iTunes even charges for being there, spotify you do not even want to go down that sewer. The least said about spotify the better, other than major record labels have a stake and artists receive a pittance.

Bandcamp by contrast, takes somewhere between ten and fifteen per cent. It used to be a straight thirteen per cent.

With Amazon, a few seconds lofi sample. That is to insult both the musicians and those wishing to listen. How can you judge a piece of music in a few seconds except maybe to reject as unbelievably bad?

On the other hand on bandcamp, can listen to entire album in reasonable quality mp3 128.

Bandcamp was co-founded by Ethan Diamond as a site for musicians.

The principle behind bandcamp is if you want to support musicians then pay them directly, not pay a global corporation in the hope that something trickles down to the artists.

Two years ago, I found few artists knew about bandcamp, now I am finding more and more do, and it offers both them and their fans a very good deal. And yet what is strange, they are still directing fans anywhere other than bandcamp, even when they themselves are on bandcamp.

It is not only they and their fans, by directing to bandcamp, they benefit all the other independent artists who are on bandcamp.

If you have the resources to record an album and if not, play a few gigs, crowd source, then you do not need a record label.

Sometimes artists have their own kludgy media player on their website. Why re-invent an inferior wheel, when you can embed bandcamp media player?

From the perspective of the fans, you can listen to an album on-line, the entire album in reasonable quality mp3 128 unlike Amazon or iTunes where all you get is a few seconds lofi sample.

Download is easy. And can download hifi not lofi, mp3 320, or better still studio quality non-lossy FLAC.

Monsters – Jewelia

Fans can choose to pay more. Many do. Jewelia recently reported someone paying £30 for an album listed at £5 (or maybe it was for the free download).

Monsters her début album, limited edition signed copy or digital download.

Band Camp Fan Support

Artists set a low price, sometimes free, leaving fans to pay more if they wish. Because fans are not being ripped off, because they know the money is going to the artist, they quite happily pay more.

Selling Right Now: Monsters sold for £25, £20 over the asking price.

Selling Right Now: The Kitchen Table sold for £16, £7 over asking price.

Bandcamp has a very unusual feature. What is selling is shown in real time, including how much is being paid over and above the asking price. This is in addition to a listing of the top selling albums.

Artists get the data.

Bandcamp is a model of how websites should be.

Bandcamp is not backed by venture capitalists. It is not supported by advertising or abuse of personal data. It is supported by the music community.

Because of the way bandcamp works, especially its sharing button, word, essentially word of mouth, spreads laterally, or in other words peer to peer.

In essence this is the gift economy, sharing, collaborative economy at work.

If you like a piece of music or an artist, you spread word of mouth using social media.

Those who like, will spread the word, they may download, they may toss some money by the way of the artist, they may attend a gig.

Serendipity plays a part, as people stumble across something they may like, or a friend may tell them, or share with them. I stumbled across Quantic whilst writing this article on bandcamp.

The important aspect here is sharing.

Those who share, do not get anything out of it, thus a gift, but the artist may benefit through their collaboration. The artist will then feel it is a viable way to earn a living, and do what they wish to do, play and produce more music.

Everyone has a stake in the outcome.

It would be an interesting social experiment, having mentioned Jewelia, what difference she sees.

The big record labels hate the internet, they complain of piracy, criminalise those who wish to listen to music.

Bandcamp turns this on its head, far from seeing the internet as bad, sees as a force for good, the means to share music.

If I listen or download music for free, no one has lost out. On the other hand, if I like, I may buy, I may attend a gig, I may tell others. In other words an opportunity has been created.

And it is a truism, I cannot like a piece of music until I have heard it. Through sharing, makes it more likely to hear it.

Those artists who only make available a few seconds lofi sample, or in too many cases, nothing at all, are not doing themselves or their fans any favours.

Hope & Social make their music available for free for digital downlands, the productions costs for a CD. They do not get ripped off. Turn up to one of their gigs, buy a CD, you set the price.

Cotton Wool and Knotted Wood – Hope & Social

Cotton Wool and Knotted Wood a beautiful magical live acoustic album from Hope & Social is on a pay-what-you-think-it-is-worth or what-you-can-afford model. For CD it is minimum price of what the CD costs to produce (plus shipping).

Into the Trees – Zoe Keating

Cellist Zoe Keating published her accounts on-line, to enable people to see a breakdown of her income.

2013 music sales & streaming numbers for a middle-aged mom in a non-album cycle http://t.co/4YEV44vDGB

— Zoe Keating (@zoecello) February 21, 2014

iTunes 32,170 single tracks and 3,862 albums netted her just over $38,195
Bandcamp 185 tracks and 2,899 albums netted her $25,575
Amazon mixture of physical and mp3 earned her $11,571
Spotify 403,035 streams earned her $1,764

Apple keeps 30% of iTunes sales, bandcamp takes a 10% cut of sales.

On bandcamp, albums considerably outsell tracks.

Jazz pianist and composer Will Todd is a classic of how not to.

I happened upon a rehearsal in a church for a concert that evening. A large poster for Lux Et Veritas. Had Will Todd been around I may have bought a copy of Lux Et Veritas. I was told he would be there in the evening. I checked out his website. Big record label outmoded thinking stamped all over it. Snippets of videos, lofi mp3 samples. This does absolutely no justice to the works of Will Todd and is an insult to those who may like and wish to listen to his music. He is not doing himself any favours.

What is the point, releasing music, then making it difficult to listen to?

Were I a radio producer, not a writer, they would be beating a path to my door asking to be put on my play list.

Very strange, musicians release music, which one would suspect they wish one to listen to, then make it difficult if not impossible to listen to.

Going back to the musicians telling the crowd where to find them, this time they say find us on bandcamp.

This makes a huge difference. Because of sharing, anyone who finds them, can click share, and immediately share with their friends, hey this is who I saw, they were great, word spreads. Or they may write about them and embed the bandcamp media player. Why write about music if no one can listen to what you are writing about? That would be as dumb as writing about a book or an author and not citing a few passages. Or writing about a work of art without a picture.

Although bandcamp is a centralised site not peer to peer per se, how it works in practice is peer to peer. There is lateral communication, and that is the key to the success of bandcamp, enabled by a share button.

We should never underestimate the power of sharing, of word of mouth.

What bandcamp does for music and the spoken word, leanpub does for the written word.

In the sharing economy, collaborative commons, a website should be an enabler that charges a small fee for its role, made self-financing by the users.

Bandcamp and leanpub fulfil that role.

Note: WordPress should embed bandcamp media player, with which can illustrate points made. For reasons not known, it is not possible to on P2P Foundation (even though running wordpress). I am having to work around the problem, album cover, click through for album, where can listen on-line, share, download. Or go to expanded version of this article on Medium.

Note: Reposted on wordpress (where possible to embed bandcamp media player). An expanded version of this article on Medium, with additional examples and extensive notes.

The post Bandcamp | P2P Foundation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism

Stacco Troncoso — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 11:25:51 +0000

Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis

Michel Bauwens’ and Vasilis Kostakis’ breakthrough paper, “From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism” was originally published by Triple C: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. It was also featured as part of Heathwood Press’ Global Voice Project. It’s an excellent time to revisit it if you didn’t catch it the first time around.

Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens

The following paper by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis contemplates a potential transitional approach to a post-capitalist economy, which combines both Commons-oriented open peer production models with common ownership and governance models, such as those of the co-operatives and the solidarity economic models.

From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism

Michel Bauwens* and Vasilis Kostakis**

Abstract: Two prominent social progressive movements are faced with a few contradictions and a paradox. On the one side, we have a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worked-owned enterprises which suffer from certain structural weaknesses. On the other, we have an emergent field of open and Commons-oriented peer production initiatives which create common pools of knowledge for the whole of humanity, but are dominated by start-ups and large multinational enterprises using the same Commons. Thus we have a paradox: the more communist the sharing license used in the peer production of free software or open hardware, the more capitalist the practice. To tackle this paradox and the aforementioned contradictions, we tentatively suggest a new convergence that would combine both Commons-oriented open peer production models with common ownership and governance models, such as those of the co-operatives and the solidarity economic models.

Keywords: Ethical Economy, Commons, Free Software, Business Models, Legal, Peer Production, Peer Property, Peer Production License, Co-operatives

Acknowledgement: Precursor of this paper were two entries by Michel Bauwens in the P2P Foundation wiki (http://tinyurl.com/p8syh49 and http://tinyurl.com/nbzqvwf). Vasilis Kostakis acknowledges support by the “Challenges to State Modernization in 21st Century Europe” Estonian Institutional Grant [IUT 19-13].

A few contradictions are observed in the modern social progressive movements.

On the one hand, we are witnessing a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worked-owned enterprises (see only Restakis 2010). However, they arguably suffer from certain structural weaknesses. The co-operative entities work for their own members and, thus, are sometimes reluctant to accept new co-operators that would share existing profits and benefits. In addition, they are practitioners of the same proprietary knowledge and artificial scarcities tactics as their capitalist counterparts. That is, they might adopt monopoly pricing mechanisms such as those enabled by exclusive intellectual property rights. Moreover, even though they are internally democratic, they often participate in the same dynamics of capitalist competition which contradicts and, in the long run, may undermine their own co-operative values.

On the other hand, we have an emergent wave of open and Commons-oriented peer production efforts in fields such as free software, open design and open hardware, which do create common pools of knowledge for the whole of humanity. Nevertheless, at the same time they are dominated by both start-ups and large multinational enterprises exploiting and capitalizing on the same Commons. In other words, peer production functions within the cycle of accumulation of capital but also within the new cycle of the creation and circulation of the Commons (Bauwens 2013). Today the egalitarian potential of the Commons-based peer production seems promising but also the possibility for a parody should not be negligible (Kostakis and Stavroulakis 2013).

Therefore, we need a new convergence or synthesis, an “open co-operativism” if you like, that would combine Commons-oriented open peer production models with common ownership and governance models such as those of the co-operatives and the solidarity economic models. What follows is a more detailed argument on how such a transition could be achieved.

1.Paradox

Today we have a paradox: the more “communist” the sharing license we use (that is, no restrictions on sharing) in the peer production of free software or open hardware, the more capitalist the practice (that is, multinationals can use it for free). Take for example the Linux Commons which has become a corporate Commons as well, enriching big, for-profit corporations such as IBM (see Kostakis and Bauwens 2014). It is obvious that this works in a certain way and seems acceptable to most free software developers. But is this the optimal way?

Indeed, the General Public License and its variants allow anyone to use and modify the software code (or design), as long as the changes are integrated back in the common pool under the same conditions for further users. Our argument does not focus on the legal, contractual basis of the GPL and similar licenses, but on the social logic that they enable, which is: it allows anybody to contribute, and it allows anybody to use. In fact this relational dynamic is technically a form of “communism”: from each according to his/her abilities, to each according to his/her needs. This paradoxically allows multinational corporations to use the free software code for profit maximization and capital accumulation. The result is that we do have an accumulation and circulation of information Commons, based on open input, participatory processes, and Commons-oriented output; but it is subsumed to capital accumulation. Therefore, currently it is not possible, or at least easy, to have social reproduction (that is, to create sustainable livelihoods) within the sphere of the Commons. The majority of the contributors participate on a voluntary basis, and those, who have an income, make a living either through wage-labor or alliances with capital-driven entities.

Hence the free software and culture movements, however important they might be as new social forces and expression of new social demands, are also, in essence, “liberal” in the tradition of the political ideology of liberalism. This is not only acknowledged by key figures such as Stallman, but also by anthropological studies like those of Coleman and others (2004; Coleman and Golub 2008; Coleman and Hill 2004). We could say they are liberal-communist and communist-liberal movements, which create a “communism of capital”.

The question is whether Commons-based peer production, that is, a new proto-mode of production, can generate the institutional capacity and alliances needed to break the political power of the old order. Ultimately the potential of the new mode is the same as those of the previous proto-modes of production – to emancipate itself from its dependency on the old decaying mode, so as to become self-sustaining and thus replace the accumulation of capital with the circulation of the Commons. An independent circulation of the Commons, where the common use value would directly contribute to the further strengthening of the Commons and of the commoners’ own sustainability, without dependence on capital. How could this be achieved?

2.Alternative

Is there an alternative? We believe that there is: to replace the non-reciprocal licenses, that is those which do not demand a direct reciprocity from its users, with one based on reciprocity. You may consider it as a switch from “communist” to “socialist licenses” or a swift from non-reciprocal licenses to a Commons-based reciprocal license (for a discussion of reciprocity in relation to licensing see de Filippi and Vieira 2013). We argue that the Peer Production License (PPL), designed and proposed by Kleiner (2010), exemplifies this line of argument. PPL should not to be confused with the Creative Commons (CC) non commercial (NC) license, as its logic is different. The CC-NC offers protection to individuals reluctant to share, as they do not wish a commercialization of their work that would not reward them for their labor. Thus the CC-NC license stops the further economic development based on this open and shared knowledge, and keeps it entirely in the not-for-profit sphere.

The logic of the PPL is to allow commercialization, but on the basis of a demand for reciprocity. It is designed to enable and empower a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy that combines Commons that is open to all that contribute, while charging a license fee for the for-profit companies who would like to use it without contributing. Not that much changes for the multinationals in practice; they can still use the code if they contribute, as IBM does with Linux. However, those who do not contribute should pay a license fee – a practice they are used to. Its practical effect would be to somehow direct a stream of income from capital to the Commons, but its main effect would be ideological, or if you like, value-driven.

The entrepreneurial coalitions that are linked around a PPL-based Commons would be explicitly oriented towards their contributions to the Commons, and the alternative value system that it represents. From the point of view of the peer producers or commoners, a Commons-based reciprocal license, like PPL, would allow the contributory communities to create their own co-operative entities. In this new ecology, profit would be subsumed to the social goal of sustaining the Commons and the commoners. Even the participating for-profit companies would consciously contribute under a new logic. This proposal would link the Commons to an entrepreneurial coalition of ethical market entities (co-ops and other models) and keep the surplus value entirely within the sphere of commoners/co-operators, instead of leaking out to the multinationals.

In other words, through this convergence or rather combination of a Commons model for the abundant immaterial resources, and a reciprocity-based model for the “scarce” material resources, the issue of livelihoods and social reproduction could be solved. The surplus value would be kept inside the Commons sphere itself. It is the co-operatives that would, through their co-operative accumulation, fund the production of immaterial Commons, because they would pay and reward the peer producers associated with them.

In this way, peer production could move from a proto-mode of production, unable to perpetuate itself on its own outside capitalism, to an autonomous and real mode of production. It would create a counter-economy that could be the basis for reconstituting a “counter-hegemony” with a for-benefit circulation of value. This process, allied to “pro-Commons” social movements, could be the basis of the political and social transformation of the political economy. Hence we might move from a situation in which the communism of capital is dominant, to a situation in which we have a “capital for the Commons”, increasingly insuring the self-reproduction of the peer production mode.

For the moment, the PPL is used experimentally by “Guerrilla Translation!” and is being discussed in various places, such as in some French open agricultural machining and design communities (for example, in the ShareLex initiative). Also the team of the P2P Lab in Greece is discussing the use of the PPL in the second version of its collaborative theatrical plays platform named “Wikitheater”. The “man with the spotted tie” is probably the first play written on a wiki through asynchronous and distributed collaborative processes (for a full account of the initiative see Kostakis and Dreschler 2013). The text was firstly published in 2012 under a modified CC license: everybody was free to perform the play and use its soundtrack music for non-profit purposes. In a case of a for-profit usage, the creative team of the P2P Lab would negotiate on a case-by-case basis. With a modified license which offered negotiated reciprocity, the authors and musicians have managed to accumulate a small capital, now used to support the creation of an international wikitheater platform and the translation of “the man with the spotted tie”.

The new open co-operativism would be substantially different from the previous form. In the old one, internal economic democracy is accompanied by participation in market dynamics on behalf of the members, using capitalist competition. There is an unwillingness to share profits and benefits with outsiders, hence, no creation of the Commons. We argue that an independent Commons-oriented economy should be in need of a different model in which the co-operatives produce Commons and are statutorily oriented towards the creation of the common good. To realize their goals they should adopt multi-stakeholders forms of governance which would include workers, users-consumers, investors and the concerned communities.

As said, today we have a situation where open communities of peer producers are largely oriented towards the start-up model and are subsumed to profit maximization, while the co-operatives remain closed, use exclusive intellectual property licenses, and, thus, do not create a Commons. In the new model of open co-operativism, a merger should occur between the open peer production of Commons and the co-operative production of value. The new open co-operativism would: i) integrate externalities; ii) practice economic democracy; iii) produce Commons for the common good; iv) and socialize its knowledge. The circulation of the Commons would be combined with the process of co-operative accumulation, on behalf of the Commons and its contributors. In the beginning, the immaterial Commons field, following the logic of free contributions and universal use for everyone who needs it, would co-exist with a co-operative model for physical production, based on reciprocity. But as the co-operative model would be becoming more and more hyper-productive being able to create sustainable abundance in material goods, the two logics would merge.

3.Discussion

Our proposal distinguishes the sphere of the abundant Commons, and the sphere of co-operatives and ethical companies which deal with the allocation of scarce resources. The two spheres converge in the workers who are both contributors to the Commons and realize their livelihood in the co-operative sphere. Of course, there is no doubt that the capitalist power can severely impede the co-operative economy. As a result the co-ops may often exaggerate their adaptation to the capitalist system. This is precisely why we propose the concept of open co-operativism, which can be seen as a new form where the link to the Commons and the common good is constitutionally obligatory.

Furthermore, the capital understands the hypercompetitive and hyperproductive nature of peer production, and invests in it. That is why we believe that the ethical Commons-oriented coalitions, which would produce, protect and use their Commons through reciprocity licenses, gain an extraordinary competitive edge. While the GPL licenses effectively enable a social logic of unlimited use, this includes use by multinational companies. The PPL restricts it. Of course we do not take the PPL as perfect, but as a new kind of Commons-based reciprocity licenses, whose detailed modalities can very well differ from the original PPL. Such licenses would fully allow commercial exploitation, but ask for reciprocity.

Take for example a traditional indigenous community using a GPL or a similar license. This means any commercial entity could use the knowledge and commercialize it, without any benefit or profit-sharing with the creators of the knowledge. A Commons-based reciprocity license would simply ask for reciprocity and would allow these traditional communities to generate autonomous living and livelihoods, something which is harder to do with the GPL. Furthermore, a Commons-based reciprocity license would not prohibit commercial exploitation but actually encourage it, while the non-commercial licenses prohibit it. The latter do not undermine sharing, but commercialization. While the PPL/Commons-based reciprocity licenses would encourage and allow both sharing and commercialization.

In fact, there is only self-determination of the contributory process in the GPL context, but full alienation to the capital in the surrounding commercial sphere. By contrast, the PPL not only allows full self-determination in the contributory sphere, but also requires self-management in the co-operative sphere of self-reproduction. This is much more difficult with the GPL, since it subsumes livelihoods to capital accumulation. Moreover, the GPL does not demand nor create direct reciprocity between people. It is entirely possible to use GPL material without any reciprocity, as the overwhelming majority of its users actually do. But the GPL requires what anthropologists call “general reciprocity”, that is at the collective level, a minimum of contributions is needed to sustain the system. Nevertheless there is absolutely no requirement for direct reciprocity. The reciprocity is between the individual and the system as a whole. A coder or Wikipedia contributor cannot expect any return from any particular individual but only expects the benefits of the whole system, which depend only on a general flow of contributions.

On the other hand, the PPL/Commons-based reciprocity licenses would indeed limit the non-reciprocity for for-profit entities, however they would not demand equivalent exchange, but only some form of negotiated reciprocity. The important aspect is to generate a flow of realized value, necessary for social reproduction, from the sphere of capital accumulation to the sphere of the Commons. The second aspect is organizational. The PPL arguably promotes the self-organization of an ethical economy, and makes those who want to join it, conscious of that fact (including for-profit companies which can decide to ally with the ethical entrepreneurial coalition).

It is important to highlight that the Commons-based reciprocal licenses, like PPL, are not merely about redistribution of value, but about changing the mode of production. Our approach is to transform really existing peer production, which is today not a full mode of production being incapable of assuring its own self-reproduction. This is exactly why the convergence of peer production in the sphere of abundance must be linked to the sphere of co-operative production, and thus insure its self-reproduction. Like in any past phase transition, the existence of a proto-counter-economy, and the resources that this allocates to the counter-hegemonic forces, are absolutely essential for a political and social change. This was arguably the weakness of classic socialism, that is, it had no alternative mode of production, and could only institute state control after a takeover of power.

In other words it is difficult, if not impossible, to wait and see the organic and emergent development of peer production into a fully alternative system. If we follow such an approach, peer production would just remain a parasitic modality dependent on the self-reproduction through capital. We argue that the expectation that one can change the society, by merely producing open code and design, while remaining subservient to capital, is a dangerous pipe dream. By contrast, through the ethical economy surrounding the Commons, it becomes possible to create non-commodified production and exchange.

We thus envision a resource-based economy which would utilize the stigmergic mutual coordination through the gradual application of open book accounting and open supply changes. We deem that there will be no qualitative phase transition merely through emergence, but it will require the reconstitution of powerful political and social movements which aim to become a democratic polis. And that democratic polis, could indeed, through democratic decisions, accelerate the transition. It could take measures that force private economic forces to include externalities, thereby ending infinite capital accumulation.

4.Conclusion

The key argument of this article was the following: the current fully-sharing open licenses which allow unrestricted commercial exploitation create a communism of capital, that is a sphere of open knowledge, code and design, which is subsumed to the present dominant political economy. But what we need is an autonomous sphere of peer production, in which commoners and peer producers can create their own livelihood, while staying in the sphere of the Commons. In other words, we need a capital for the Commons realizing through a new type of licensing. We are in favour of the PPL, not in its full detail, but as a first of a kind of a Commons-based reciprocal license that encourages commercialization, but transforms it into an ethical economy. In that way it becomes possible to converge the sphere of immaterial Commons contributions with a sphere of co-operative accumulation, through which the surplus value can stay within the sphere of Commons/co-operative production.

References

Bauwens, Michel. 2013. Thesis on Digital Labor in an Emerging P2P Economy. In Digital Labor. The Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz, 207-210. New York: Routledge.

Coleman, Gabriella. 2004. The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast. Anthropological Quarterly 77 (3): 507-519.

Coleman, Gabriella and Alex Golub. 2008. Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory 8 (3): 255-277.

Coleman, Biella and Mako Hill. 2004. How Free Became Open and Everything Else Under the Sun. M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0406/02_Coleman-Hill.php

Kostakis, Vasilis and Michel Bauwens. 2014. Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).

Kostakis, Vasilis and Stelios Stavroulakis. 2013. The Parody of the Commons. tripleC – Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 11 (2): 412-424.

Kostakis, Vasilis and Wolfgang Dreschler. 2013. Commons-based Peer Production and Artistic Expression: Two Cases from Greece. New Media & Society. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/14/1461444813511929.abstract

Kleiner, Dmytri. 2010. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Primavera De Filippi and Said Vieira. 2013. The Commodification of Information Commons. In Proceedings of the 1st Global Thematic IASC Conference on the Knowledge Commons, Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and Genetic Resources Commons, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://biogov.uclouvain.be/iasc/doc/full%20papers/De%20Filippi%20-%20Said%20Vieira.pdf

Restakis, John. 2010. Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers.

About the Authors

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation). Among others, he is one of three co-founders and partners of the Commons Strategies Group and, in 2014, he functioned as the research director of the FLOK Society transition program in Ecuador.

Vasilis Kostakis

Vasilis Kostakis (PhD, MSc, MA) is a political economist and founder of the P2P Lab. He is a research fellow at the Tallinn University of Technology as well as a collaborator of the P2P Foundation.

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