Watch the video if you haven’t already and visit our site for further info:
www.we-guild.co.uk

Remember that it’s a project in the making and it needs your support! So you can help make it happen by doing all that social media stuff (liking, following and especially sharing it!) and join the mailing list.
Or if you can think of other ways to support us we’d love to hear from you.

Let’s make We-Guild happen!

Reposted from  We-Guild’s website

The post We Guild: a peer to peer social safety network appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The beautifully designed fifty-page booklet does not dumb down the topic; it simply makes some of the complexities associated with commons and peer production more accessible to the general reader in a single document. The primer explains the basics of commons and peer-to-peer production (P2P), how they interrelate, their movements and trends, and “how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental.”

The short video above explains that “the commons are a self-organized system by which local communities manage shared resources with minimal or no reliance on the market or the state.  P2P means collaboration, ‘peer-to-peer’, ‘people-to-people’ or ‘person-to-person.’  P2P is a type of non-hierarchical and non-coercive social relations that enables a transition to a fairer economy for people and nature.”

Besides introducing the commons & P2P, the booklet suggests five practical guidelines, with examples, for achieving a transition to a commons/P2P-based society:

1.  Pool resources wherever possible;

2.  Introduce reciprocity;

3.  Shift from redistribution to predistribution and empowerment;

4.  Subordinate capitalism; and

5.  Organize at the local and global levels.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, notes that because previous social revolutions have not always succeeded so well,

“what matters is the reconstruction of prefigurative value-creating production systems first, to make peer production an autonomous and full mode of production which can sustain itself and its contributors; and the reconstruction of social and political power which is associated and informed by this new social configuration.

The organic events will unfold with or without these forces, ready or not, but if we’re not ready, the human cost might be very steep. Therefore the motto should be: contribute to the phase transition first; and be ready for the coming sparks and organic events that will require the mobilization of all.”

Kudos to Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for the text of the primer as well to designer Elena Martínez for its attractive look.

The post A New Primer on the Commons & P2P appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Commons are a shared resource which is co-governed by its user community, according to the rules and norms of that community. Commons include not only the gifts of nature, such as water and land, but also shared assets or creative work, such as cultural and knowledge artefacts. The Commons is a concept and practice that has been steadily gathering increased attention. Deeply rooted in human history, it’s difficult to settle on a single definition that covers its broad potential for social, economic, cultural and political change.

The Commons is neither the resource, the community that gathers around it, nor the protocols for its stewardship, but the dynamic interaction between all these elements. An example is Wikipedia: there is a resource (universal knowledge), a community (the authors and editors) and a set of community-harvested rules and protocols (Wikipedia’s content and editing guidelines).

So how do we bring about a Commons transition?

1) Pool resources wherever possible

Commons-based peer production communities and their contribution-based technical systems of production can be characterized as open contributory systems, mediated through a number of filters to ensure high quality contributions. This allows commoners to freely contribute to one or more commons of their choice.

Pooling both immaterial and material resources is a priority. This capacity to pool productive knowledge is a key characteristic to obtain both “competitive” and “cooperative” advantage. Pooling — or in other words “the commons” — should be at the heart of the productive and societal system.

2) Introduce reciprocity

The mutual coordination characteristics of commons-based peer production have proven quite successful in the production of digital commons, but their inherent non-rival status (i.e. non- depletable, easy to reproduce and distribute) does not carry over to physical production, which is characterized by depletable assets, including human labor. To ensure the wellbeing and continuation of these assets, material production demands the principle of reciprocity, and the way to ensure it is by advocating for Open Cooperativism. Like an ecosystem, an economy does not work in isolation. Open Cooperativism seeks to enfranchise all participants in the economic value chain, not just those within the cooperative’s membership. This includes affective and reproductive labor, the creation of commons, and other forms of currently “invisibilized” work. This can be achieved through open contributory accounting systems, open supply chains and collaborative planning, as well as through the pooling of physical resources, mediated through special property regimens (where all contributors are participants in, and owners of).

3) Shift from redistribution to pre-distribution and empowerment

We need something beyond the welfare state’s logic of redistribution; we need a state that would create the conditions for the creative autonomy of its contributing citizens. This would require pre- distribution of resources rather than redistribution after the fact. The commons-based peer production ecosystem, as described above, comprises productive communities, coalitions of entrepreneurs, and for-benefit associations as the “management” or “governance” institutions. Broadened to the wider society, this structure gives a vision of a productive civil society which contributes to the commons. This would be supported by a predominantly generative market creating added value around the commons and protected by a partner state, where public authorities play a sustaining role in the direct creation of civil value.

The partner state, as well as being the guarantor of civic rights, would also facilitate the contributory capacities of all citizens. It would empower and enable the direct creation of value by civil society through creating and sustaining infrastructures for commons-based peer production ecosystems. Such a state form should be one that would gradually lose its separateness from civil society, by implementing radical democratic and even rotational procedures and practices.

While capitalism takes inequality as the cost of doing business and leaves its mitigation to an inefficient state, a commons approach builds in fairness from the start. The aim is to incorporate distributive actions in the generative enterprises and through their direct relation to the commons.

A partner state approach would transcend and include, not oppose, the welfare state model. It would retain the solidarity functions of the welfare state, but eliminate bureaucracy in the delivery of its services to citizens. The social logic would move from ownership-centric to citizen-centric, and the state should de-bureaucratize through the commonification of public services and public-commons partnerships.

4) Subordinate capitalism

Under capitalism, the markets are dominant and everything tends to be commodified. Capitalism is an extractive, profit-maximizing relationship. It exploits workers and gorges on the free labor of free and open-source software and open design workers, while cannibalizing the gifts of nature. But is the intention to get rid of markets altogether? Markets would continue to exist in a commons-oriented society, but they would be predominantly generative as opposed to extractive. By this we mean that markets would serve the commoners. Commons-based peer production participants today struggle to create livelihoods as they produce commons. While they could be supported by a partner state through basic income and subsidies, commoners can also create new market entities to facilitate the sustainability of their contributions and allow them to keep contributing to the commons.

One way to achieve this is through the use of CopyFair Licenses. In this approach, the free sharing of knowledge — the universal availability of immaterial commons — is preserved, but commercialization is made conditional on reciprocity between the sphere of the capitalist market and the sphere of the commons. This approach would enable the ecosystems of commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions to pool immaterial (and ultimately even material) resources to benefit all participants.

Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or “CopyFair” licenses) provide for the free use and unimpeded commercialization of licensed material within the Commons while resisting its non-reciprocal appropriation by for-profit driven entities, unless those entities contribute to the Commons by way of licensing fees or other means. A first working example of a CopyFair license is the Peer Production License, in effect a fork of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License which permits worker-owned cooperatives and other non-exploitative organizations to capitalise the licensed content, while denying this possibility to extractive corporations.

5) Organize at the local and global levels

Progressive coalitions at the urban, regional and nation-state levels should develop policies and laws that increase the capacity for the autonomy of citizens and the new economic forces aligned around the commons. These pro-commons policies should be focused not just on local autonomy, but also on the creation of transnational and translocal capacities, interlinking the efforts of their citizens to the global commons-oriented entrepreneurial networks currently in development.

Historically, commons have had a problematic relationship with conventional law, which generally reflects the mindset and priorities of the sovereign (monarch, nation-state, corporation) and not the lived experiences and practices of commoners. Still, in grappling with political, economic and legal realities, commoners often find ways to secure control over their common wealth, livelihoods and modes of commoning. It is also what is spurring many commoners today to invent creative new types of policy and law — formal, social, technological — to protect their shared interests, assets and social relationships.

The number of civic and cooperative initiatives outside the state and corporate world is rapidly increasing. Most of these are locally oriented, and that is absolutely necessary.

Today, there are movements operating beyond the local, using global networks to organize themselves. A good example is the Transition Town movement, and its use of networks to empower local groups. But this is not enough. A further suggestion is the creation of translocal and transnational structures that would aim to have global effects and change the power balance on the planet. The only way to achieve systemic change at the planetary level is to build counter-power, i.e. alternative global governance. The transnational capitalist class must feel that its power is curtailed, not just by nation-states that organize themselves internationally, but by transnational forces representing the global commoners and their livelihood organizations.

The Commons is now demonstrating its power as a “key ingredient” for change in diverse locations and contexts around the world.

This article is based on A Commons Transition and P2P Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature. It was originally published in TNI’s Medium blog.

For more perspectives on the Commons see Ferananda Ibarra, Andy Williamson, Mike Essig, Keith Parkins, Tíscar Lara, Ksenia Chabanenko, Alina Siegfried, or Creative Commons

The post Five Practical Guidelines for Achieving a Commons Transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.