We acknowledge the natural, the virtual, and the social environments. Our responsibility is to recognize which resources are abundant, which are sufficient, and adapt accordingly through efficiency.

Technology is simply the means by which we communicate. We use local-first publishing so that each person owns their words and actions. Our solutions are piecemeal upgradeable, replaceable and incrementally improvable. Tending and pruning are not a stranger’s duty, it is through near moderation and free listening that we improve our surroundings. Infrastructure is a voluntary act, multimodal welcoming is how we on-board people via diverse connectivity modes (technological acts of inclusion) as well as with greetings (words of inclusion). No one “signs up” but everyone is invited.

Our community is a web of friendships: relationships defined not by a follow button, but by the flexibility of subjectivity. We cherish the freedom to be independent, but it is this same freedom which encourages – not coerces – us to be interdependent. We know we can at any time fork, but when individually recognizing the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, we tend to develop the collective. We value disagreement when it’s supportive, and see it as generative and bond forming.

Society is not made of homogeneous people, so we must allow pluralism of cultures to flourish. The edges of the social graph must extend to include all people and their diverse values, interactions, and customs. No one of us can build a welcoming place for all groups, because the very concept of welcoming is subjective. Instead, removing ourselves as arbiters of other communities, we must design platforms that are easy to re-design.

Video reposted from Vimeo

Article reposted from Scuttlebutt

The post A Scuttlebutt Love Story appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cory Doctorow: The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they threaten to wreck the Internet itself.

Photo by ccPixs.com

The post The EU’s Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This week I was asked why one of my stories was locked behind a paywall, so I wanted to report on the progress of my income-generating experiments, and explore the ethical considerations of these different options.

Pondering becoming @Medium member: I want to read more @RichDecibels – wondering if he knows his writing is now stuck behind a paywall? :-/ (BTW I already fund the media I want to see by routinely financially supporting LOTS of great projects see https://t.co/cO6pX2cH5k) pic.twitter.com/Dp3iECnwW0

— Josef Davies-Coates (@jdaviescoates) May 23, 2018

In the year since writing that post, I’ve written another 15,000 words of my mostly-finished first book, published on LeanPub as a work-in-progress-for-sale. I’ve published another 20,000 words in 21 articles, receiving 40,000 pageviews on Medium. In addition to Medium, I usually publish on my website for convenient reproduction, and on Scuttlebutt to guarantee permanent storage in the commons (Scuttlebutt is the peer-to-peer future of the Internet that I’m most excited about). I use creative commons licensing to encourage syndication of my stories, so I’m delighted when I’m republished on blogs like C4SS or P2P Foundation.

Experiment #1: Patreon

My ideal goal with Patreon is to eventually crowdsource a stable living wage from voluntary recurring donations. When someone makes a recurring pledge on my Patreon I take that to mean something like, “I think your writing is important, here’s a few dollars a month to encourage you to keep going”. This community of support feels to me like an ever-present low-pressure sense of responsibility to keep publishing. So far, I really love this. Every single new patron is extremely encouraging for me.

I feel like I am in relationship with these people in a much deeper way than say, a passing reader or commenter. I don’t feel like I have to give my patrons anything more than gratitude, so I don’t have to lock any of my stories behind a paywall. I have the option to give patrons early-access to new stories, or to give them free access to a book that I’m selling elsewhere.

Results so far

I signed up in May 2017. Most of my stories end with a link to my Patreon page, but I haven’t promoted it any more than that. Over the year, I’ve gained 44 patrons, and lost 5. Currently this earns me US$196/month. Patreon takes 5% for their service, and about another 5% is lost to transaction fees (boo PayPal). Total income for the year, after fees and VAT, before paying income tax: $1566.94. This is a lot less than a full salary, but also a lot more than spare change.

Ethical considerations

This represents the “gift economy” solution to the writers’ dilemma: my writing is a gift to the world, and some of my readers gift me some money in gratitude. This gives me nice warm feelings and makes me feel like I’ve outsmarted capitalism.

To earn a full salary from Patreon, I would need many more supporters, requiring a marketing effort that starts to feel like begging. The gift economy is lovely in theory, especially because there’s no coercion: contributions are voluntary, and there is no punishment for readers who choose to not contribute. But when I interrogate these dynamics at a deeper level, I’m less satisifed.

In my point of view, social capital is subject to the same accumulative and alienating dynamics as financial capital. It’s even more dangerous in some senses, as the transactions are impossible to track, so it is much harder to redistribute accumulations of wealth.

Personally I redistribute 10% of my income to other Patreon creators who I think are doing more important and less fundable work than me: street poet David Merritt and anarchist authors William Gillis and Emmi Bevensee. At least this is a gesture to remind myself that the social capitalist is no more woke than the financial capitalist.

Frankly, as a producer, the clean transaction of buyer and seller just feels better to me. It feels good to produce something of value and have that value acknowledged by somebody purchasing it.

Experiment #2: Medium Partner Program

I happily signed up to pay $5/month for Medium membership as soon as it became an option.

As a reader, I want to support a sustainable and ethical citizen media ecosystem. You know the expression who pays the piper calls the tune? That explains in a nutshell why I prefer participating in a business model where the customers are readers, not advertisers. Reader-supported publishing incentivises high quality writing; advertising-supported media incentivises high quality data mining and manipulation.

In addition to being a paying Medium reader, I recently joined the Medium Partner Program, which means I am now on both sides of the Medium marketplace. With this scheme, when I write stories I can choose to mark them as members-only, or leave them free for all. This creates a semi-permeable paywall: readers who are paying the Medium membership fee have unlimited access to members-only stories; free users can read up to 3 of these stories per month. In return, I get paid based on the level of reader engagement with each story.

Results so far

I’ve only just joined the program and published 2 stories. The payout algorithm considers page views, readers and fans. I was surprised at the low level of engagement with my first locked post. In the first month it got 140 views, 59% reader completion, 11 fans. I would have expected maybe 5 times that amount if I had published a similar story without the paywall. So I was disappointed with the small audience, but then I was pleasantly surprised by the high payout: $4.27 for the first month. Considering I regularly write stories that get 10-50 times more engagement than this one, that’s a promising sign that the paywall could deliver a reasonable chunk of revenue if I use it for my really high quality stories that have a big audience and a long shelf-life. Estimating audience size is an inexact science so I intend to publish a few more locked stories to get more data.

Ethical considerations

The main obstacle to me embracing the Medium Partner Program is the audience perception. Simply: people don’t like paywalls. In particular, a significant portion of the people I write for have values that are explicitly against anything that looks like an enclosure of the commons. My people are advocates of free culture/ creative commons/ platform coops/ social enterprise/ and decentralisation. Some of them have a knee-jerk reaction against Medium because it doesn’t tick those boxes.

I’m happy to debate on this topic, but for what its worth, so long as Medium respects my right to license my own content, I feel pretty stable on my moral high horse. I could choose to release some of my work to a paying audience first, if that proves to be a viable funding model, but all my writing will maintain its commons license. I expressly don’t put limits on reproductions or derivatives of my articles, because I want to encourage distribution and engagement.

As a writer, I feel like I’m renting audience-discovery services from Medium. When I publish on Medium, most of the audience-discovery is done by algorithms, augmented by human curators. When I publish on C4SS or P2P Foundation, the audience-discovery is done entirely by humans, painstakingly cultivating a community of readers and writers. There are pros and cons to each method, but either way there’s valuable work being done which I think is worth paying for.

Experiment #3: LeanPub

I’ve spent most of the summer in Aotearoa New Zealand writing a short practical book about decentralised organising. I write using Markdown, which is a text formatting syntax designed for portability. As I completed the first draft, I started researching the technicalities of publishing: how will I convert these text files on my computer into an ebook in various formats?

My research lead me to LeanPub, which at first was interesting to me purely as a technical solution. You can write in Markdown on your computer, use Git or Dropbox to sync the files to LeanPub, and with one click generate html, pdf, epub and mobi formats.

The “lean” in “LeanPub” comes from “lean manufacturing” or “lean startup”, i.e. an approach to product development combining rapid iterations and ample user feedback. So LeanPub has created a marketplace for selling in-progress ebooks. I came for the publishing toolchain, stayed for the marketplace.

Results so far

I published the first version of the book when it was about 75% complete. LeanPub allows variable pricing, so I set the minimum price at $4.99, with a suggested price of $14.99. I gave free access to all my Patreon supporters, and sent out one Tweet to announce the publication.

I published my book! Now I just need to finish it…https://t.co/Hh83QNHd5w

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) April 20, 2018

I was quite stunned with the positive response from such a small amount of publicity: 21 purchases in the first month, totalling $302.36 in total revenue, 80% of which comes to me.

The best part is the audience interaction. Readers are invited to join this Loomio discussion group to give feedback. I’ve already had detailed, page-by-page feedback from two readers, which is immensely valuable. They’ve pointed out weak or awkward parts, and provided a tonne of encouragement that this work is worth doing. I’ve got a really clear list of homework to do next time I get into writing mode.

While my articles are published with no rights reserved, for now at least the book is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. That means anyone can reproduce or modify the work, if they meet 3 conditions:

• BY = they must credit me as the author
• NC = non-commercial (they’re not doing it for profit)
• SA = share-alike (derivative works must use the same license)

I’ve chosen this as an interim measure, to keep my options open while I figure out the best balance between free and paid sharing.

Ethical considerations

Because this is a straightforward commercial transaction, it’s pretty easy to analyse the ethics of this approach. On the plus side, buyers can freely choose to pay at least $4.99 if they want to read my work. On the down side, this excludes people who don’t have money.

I don’t want to exclude people who are broke, but I also don’t want to make it overly easy for freeloaders either. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll ride this balance yet. I could tell people to contact me if they want a free copy, or just drop the minimum price to $0 after some period of time. I’m not totally certain of my choice to use CC-BY-NC-SA, so perhaps I’ll switch to CC0 (no rights reserved) too.

Next steps

So, the trickle of income from Patreon feels nice, but I don’t want to self-promote more than I already am. Medium’s paywall is a promising income stream, but I risk losing the audience I care most about. So far it feels like publishing on LeanPub hits the sweet spot between revenue and ethics. So I’m considering that my next experiment could be to package up my existing blog posts into a kind of “best of” ebook that people can buy if they want to support my writing.

Reading back through this post, I’m not feeling certain about any of the ethical choices. I’m publishing this in the hope that some of you clever loving people challenge my thinking and enhance my ethics. I’d also love to hear from other authors who feel like they’ve solved the dilemma between the paywall and the commons.

p.s. this story is licensed with no rights reserved, available for reproduction on my website

Photo by mrhandley

The post Paywalls vs Creative Commons: Experiments with Patreon, Medium and LeanPub appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Unfortunately, that’s in itself fake news. The link tax won’t help fight fake news – it will make the problem worse.

The two main reasons are:

1. Putting a price tag on spreading articles from legitimate press publications (or at the bare minimum, adding legal uncertainty) is guaranteed to end up decreasing the circulation of professional news. The visibility of other sources will in turn be boosted, including fake news and propaganda.
2. The link tax will disadvantage small, new and independent publishers who rely on being listed in aggregators and having their content shared on social media. As a result, innovation in the sector and media pluralism will be harmed, which will impede the diverse and vibrant news ecosystem we need to effectively counter fake news.

Academic consensus against

In an open letter released on Wednesday, 169 scholars (including professors of journalism studies) say the plan will “play into the hands of producers of fake news” because it will “restrict further the circulation of quality news”, and thus “not guarantee the availability of reliable information so much as the dominance of fake news”.

Previous studies found that the link tax “may well set back the function of the press as public watchdog” and ”will not foster quality journalism”.

Journalists oppose it

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project calls the link tax “a giant step backward in the fight against misinformation”, because it “would severely limit the ability of OCCRP and other independent media organizations to provide accurate and fair reporting”.

A coalition of innovative publishers representing hundreds of news outlets – who the Commission claims would benefit from the link tax – are likewise fighting against the plan, warning that it will “stifle media pluralism” and have “serious negative effects on the quality of the press”.

After years of experience with the similar German law, the journalists’ association DJV concluded: “Best abolish it”.

Competent conservatives disagree

Dorothee Bär, Germany’s new Digital Minister and a member of the staunchly conservative CSU, said that she rejects the extra copyright for news sites because it “hasn’t stood the test” and “doesn’t work”.

The CDU’s internet policy spokesperson in the German Bundestag – a fellow party member of both Günther Oettinger (who originally proposed the law) and Axel Voss (who is pushing to make it even worse) – likewise recognises the link tax as “extremely dangerous” and “a bad proposal”, correctly warning that it may lead platforms to remove real news and thus elevate dubious sources.

Jumping on the buzzword bandwagon

The Commission’s own high level expert group on fake news and disinformation did not recommend the neighbouring right. This supports the suspicion that it was included not for factual reasons, but in an attempt to jump on a buzzword bandwagon to shore up support for the Commission’s struggling proposal.

When the neighbouring right proposal was originally presented, combating fake news was not given as a motive. Adding it as a retroactive justification, unsupported by a proper impact assessment, is mission creep that’s in conflict with the much-touted principles of “better regulation”.

What to do instead

If the Commission is serious about fighting fake news, it needs to correct its course on the neighbouring right immediately.

• The “presumption rule”, an alternative proposal supported by the Greens/EFA group as well as former Parliament rapporteur Therese Comodini and multiple member states in the Council, would help publishers enforce existing copyrights without sabotaging the circulation of legitimate news.
• The Greens/EFA group today launched a report on alternative models of financing investigative journalism, which suggests a number of policy solutions.
• Regulating ad targeting, as I argued in Parliament last week, may be the best option: Ending the profiling arms race, in which internet giants gather ever more data on us in order to ever more precisely target ads, would not just protect our privacy and eliminate one way of delivering fake news to those most susceptible to it, but also return a share of the advertising market to content businesses like the news.

To the extent possible under law, the creator has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Lead image: Alan Levine, Flickr

Originally published on Julia Reda’s blog

The post “Fake news” is the newest, fakest justification for the EU link tax appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Open Access Scholarly Publishing

For generations, scientists and scholars have used scholarly journals to share their latest research discoveries and theories. These journals – usually run by commercial publishers selling subscriptions to university libraries and research institutes – provide the easiest, most efficient way for academic disciplines to advance their collective knowledge.

But the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies has called into question the expense and information restrictions of this commercially driven system. Thanks to digital publishing, it has become far cheaper and easier for a field of researchers to share their specialized research with anyone on the planet. To be sure, there are still costs associated with editing a journal and the peer review of articles, but Web-based publishing has radically reduced (and sometimes eliminated) the expenses of print production, distribution and marketing.

Most commercial journal publishers, not surprisingly, have seen these developments as a troubling threat to their business models. They have continued to assert strict copyright control over articles, putting them behind Web paywalls and charging high subscription fees. In short, they have limited access to research that could otherwise be made freely available – research that taxpayer money has often financed.

In the early 2000s, a variety of academic researchers in the US and Europe began to address this significant problem by starting the open access, or OA, movement in scholarly publishing. Its goal has been to make academic research freely and openly available to anyone in perpetuity. Open access advocates have had to pioneer new revenue models for academic journal publishing, overcome the limitations of copyright law by using Creative Commons licenses,¹ and fight fierce opposition from commercial publishers, uninformed politicians and slow-moving university administrators.

Happily, these strong, sustained efforts to reclaim research from profit-driven publishers and reclaim it for the academic commons have had many great successes. The open access journals started by the Public Library of Science in 2003² have been followed by thousands of other publications that honor open access in one fashion or another. One example is the International Journal of the Commons,³ an open access journal published by the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Major funders of scientific research, including governments, have started to require that research be published under OA principles, and commercial journals have allowed academics to self-archive their work in open access repositories. Some of the largest journal publishers have themselves started OA journals, joining a small group of niche publishers that have pioneered OA publishing as a profitable enterprise.

As of July 2015, the Directory of Open Access Journals had indexed 10,354 open access, peer-reviewed journals that had published more than 1.8 million articles. A flood of major research universities, including Harvard University, now require their faculty to publish works under open access principles. While there remain many challenges in making scientific and scholarly research more accessible, open access journals have become one of the most significant success stories in reclaiming and reinventing knowledge commons.

 – David Bollier

Book Publishing as a Commons for Regional Culture

Dissatisfied with the costs and slowness of conventional book publishing, some newcomers are trying to re-introduce the craft, care and social relationships that once prevailed in the field. One of the most innovative examples is Levellers Press, a worker-owned and -managed co-operative in Amherst, Massachusetts (USA), the offshoot of a regional photocopying business, Collective Copies.

Levellers Press – inspired by the seventeenth-century commoners who denounced the privatization of common lands and called for greater equality – wants to give authors new opportunities to reach readers, and first-time authors new opportunities to publish. This means changing the relationships among publishers, authors and readers. As one local observer put it, “It’s something of a throwback to a different era, when publishers were also printers and worked more closely with writers on their books – and when books were produced not just for the sales potential but for their literary and informative value.”⁴

The authors who publish their books through Levellers Press usually live in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Many Levellers books cover regional topics that might not otherwise find a book publisher. Levellers’ first book, for example, was Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, by a retired Amherst College professor, Robert Romer. Since its inception in 2009, Levellers has published more than fifty books on a wide range of topics – fiction, poetry memoirs, social issues, health. Books are sold in local markets as well as via the Levellers and Amazon websites.

Two factors have been critical to Levellers’ success – its skillful use of new technologies to develop a new publishing model, and its founder, Steve Strimer, a worker-owner of Collective Copies since 1997. Strimer realized that the publishing marketplace was changing radically, and that a niche printer such as Collective Copies could prosper by pioneering a new form of regional publishing. New types of software, printers, scanners and bindery machines now make it possible for a small enterprise like Levellers to do print runs of 100 to 200 books for less than $10 a copy.

Such small-batch “print on demand” publishing helps avoid costly, unsold inventory while also giving unproven authors an opportunity to find their voice and reach readers. This publishing model also allows great flexibility in meeting unpredictable consumer demand. If a spurt of interest arises for Vital Aging, a guide for older people, or Girls Got Kicks, a popular photo-documentary book about “badass females,” Levellers can quickly print a few dozen copies within a few days for a very low cost. Most Levellers’ authors sell between 200 and 300 copies. After The Wealth of the Commons was rejected by a dozen conventional publishers, Levellers agreed to publish the book in 2012 and welcomed the editors’ use of a Creative Commons license. The book went on to sell well and earn a profit for the worker cooperative.

Authors like the Levellers publishing model because it is simple and fair: Levellers absorbs the startup costs of layout, design and printing for any book it chooses to publish, and the author gets no advance payment and must do most of the marketing. But once production costs have been recouped – usually after sales of 100 to 150 books – the author and publisher split all revenues 50-50. This is a far better deal for authors than the usual royalty rates of 7 to 12 percent. Levellers also has a self-publishing arm called Off the Common Books, which assists authors in printing and marketing books themselves. This was a perfect arrangement for Patterns of Commoning because of the greater author autonomy, low pricing, open licensing and production control that Off the Common Books makes possible.

Levellers has enriched the western Massachusetts area by carving out a viable new market for books of local interest – memoirs by community personalities, biographies, histories, recipe books, and many other books of quirky authenticity. Strimer concedes that he does not need to be as market-focused as conventional publishers to be profitable, and that is mostly the point: the Levellers publishing model blends financial practicality with localism, and makes book publishing a feasible creative outlet for a diverse roster of people who might not otherwise become authors.

 – David Bollier

A Community of Commoners in the Guise of a Magazine

The first time the printing presses were fired up for Oya, the word “crisis” followed “print media” like a mantra. Since March 2010, thirty issues of this young magazine from Germany have been published every two months. Oya emboldens readers to forge new paths in living a “good life.” Yet the editors do not themselves decide what a “good life” is supposed to be, but instead set out on an expedition with their readers. The journey winds a varied trail from open workshops and urban gardens to art in public spaces and communal residential projects. The magazine has gone to ecovillages, farms practicing eco-responsible agriculture, and schools in the wild.

Commons principles lie at the core of the projects. They all depend upon voluntary contributions, communal action, self-organization, self-determination and a diversity of participants. As the motto of Oya’s online edition (www.oya-online.de) puts it, “Much more interesting than a bunch of like-minded people is a community of differently minded people.” While Oya tends to focus on practical applications, it is also a thoughtful and reflective magazine. Its essays question the foundations of contemporary thinking and squarely face up to failures and disillusionment.

The magazine has been published every two months since March 2010 with a lively layout and strong photos, and of course, on eco-friendly paper. Roughly 90 percent of the print edition is available online under a copyleft license, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA). The project is run by Oya Medien eG, a cooperative whose preamble states that its goal is not to enrich its members, but to publish a meaningful magazine. Oya has a large and loyal following that warrants print runs of 10,000 copies – a cost financed mostly by subscriptions, advertising and sales at select railway news stands. One tenth of the magazine’s 4,000 subscribers are members of the cooperative and support it with shares of 200 Euros each: an impressive show of support, but not quite enough to make the magazine financially stable. That will require 5,000 subscriptions. In the meantime, the editorial staff, administrators, and authors made substantial gifts to the magazine in the early years in the form of their work.

Oya is not a glossy lifestyle magazine designed to promote a bit of sustainable consumption. It is a magazine by and for activist-minded people who are deeply concerned with the state of the world and want to make a real difference. In this sense, Oya is far more than a magazine. It is a community of commoners trying to develop and share commons-based ways of living and forms of economic activity that can thrive in a world framed by climate change and Peak Oil.

 – Lara Mallien

A Growing Network of Commons-Oriented Magazines

A number of magazines are starting to provide regular coverage of the commons and companion-movements. In the United Kingdom, STIR magazine, for “stir to action,” has introduced a fresh, vigorous voice to the coverage of politics, culture and social transformation. In addition to its coverage of co-operatives, open source projects and alternative economics, STIR has focused a great deal on the commons movement and its initiatives. Like Oya, STIR has re-imagined the idea of a magazine as a focal point for bringing together an active community of reader/activists/thinkers. Many small, local projects with great potential are woven together to suggest hopeful new visions for the future.

Another notable British publication on the commons is The Commoner, edited by Massimo De Angelis. The website is a rich body of Web commentary and analyses from an autonomous Marxist political lens. Since May 2001, The Commoner has published fifteen substantive collections of essays exploring how the commons is relevant to care work, domestic labor, free software, energy, money, the body and value, among other topics. The Commoner explains that it is “about living in a world in which the doing is separated from the deed, in which this separation is extended in an increasing numbers of spheres of life, in which the revolt about this separation is ubiquitous.”

In the US, several web and print magazines are providing valuable coverage of the commons. Shareable, based in the Bay Area, is a Web magazine with plentiful, cutting-edge coverage of developments in the “sharing and collaborative economy.” Shareable has pioneered the idea of “shareable cities” with a set of detailed policies, and organized dozens of projects to promote alternative local projects and activism. Yes! Magazine – the magazine for alternative futures – features an ongoing series of articles on “commonomics,” the development of local alternatives, from local co-ops to public banks to community-owned solar projects. On the Commons magazine, published from Minneapolis, generally focuses on the great variety of North American commons, giving special attention to placemaking initiatives, water commons and organizing efforts.

Kosmos, a beautifully designed quarterly magazine with an international readership, has frequently focused on the commons as part of a larger agenda of building a “planetary civilization and world community.” Published out of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, Kosmos also explores transformational leadership and spiritual dimensions of making change.

The Case for the Commons is a bimonthly e-publication that explores the implications of dozens of judgments and orders about the commons passed by the Indian Supreme Court, High Court and state governments. Produced by the Foundation for Ecological Security in India, the e-publication interprets and popularizes the legal rulings, with an eye toward improving commons governance.

In Latin America, Pillku – “lovers of freedom” – is an online magazine about free technology and culture, commons, good living, collaboration and commun­ity property. It is published quarterly by Código Sur, a nonprofit organization whose purpose, among others, is to assist the development and socialization of these concerns by providing basic funding and technical infrastructure. The Pillku website provides a collaborative space for debate on free culture and commons in Latin America and seeks to build a society based on the freedom to share. Although it meets the standards of scientific and scholarly journals, Pillku as an organization and magazine is dedicated to collective creation, even in its editing processes. Most of the work needed to produce Pillku is voluntary. Contributions to the website come from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, generating a vast commons of information and building relationships among various projects. The extended Pillku community and editorial board are comprised of committed social organizations in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico.

In India, Pratham Books is a not-for-profit publisher that has the avowed mission of “putting a book in every child’s hand.” It is an outgrowth of the “Read India Movement,” which seeks to cultivate a joy of reading among children and encourage education. Identifying a lack of affordable, quality books for children in India, Pratham Books has set out to publish inexpensive books in English and ten other Indian languages. It works with a range of partners – a foundation, a conservation group, social media enterprises and other publishers – to reach children. To date, it has published over 280 titles and over 12 million books.

Of course, there are also a wide number of blogs and websites devoted to the commons. The leading academic website on the commons include those run by the International Association for the Study of the Commons, founded by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom, and the Digital Library on the Commons, which hosts an extensive collection of documents. Another much-used resource is the P2P Foundation’s blog and wiki, a vast archive of materials about digital peer production, the commons and related fields.

 – David Bollier and Santiago Hoerth Moura

 Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by brewbooks

The post Patterns of Commoning: New Ventures in Commons-Based Publishing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Are there alternatives to the profit-driven models of translating, publishing and distributing books? “Information wants to be free”, a famous dictum reads; and the following article demonstrates, through a case study of Guerrilla Translation’s “Think Global, Print Local” initiative, how this could happen:

“To bolster commoning as challenge to the standard practices of economics, alternative relations and structures of production are needed. In this context, the starting points of this article are a problem and a nascent opportunity. The problem is the need to share a knowledge artifact, such as a book, with people and communities elsewhere, but in a language into which the artifact has not yet been translated. The opportunity is the convergence of decentralized online and offline ways of sharing knowledge, from the Ιnternet and book printers to commons-oriented copyright licenses and crowdfunding platforms.

This article discusses a case study that synthesizes the aforementioned dynamics and tools and, therefore, presents a new commons-based publishing model codified as “think global, print local”. The uniqueness of the case rests in its goal to pioneer a commons-based model of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. By using the digital knowledge commons as well as distributed nodes of printing hardware, this case study tries to avoid centralized production and environmentally harmful international shipping in an economically viable way for its contributors.

The question we address is the following: Can this experiment serve as a template or an example that could strengthen commons-based practices in the field of writing, translating and publishing? This article focuses on two interrelated aspects that may allow us to further the understanding of institutions for the use and management of shared resources. First, we describe an emerging techno-economic model of value creation and distribution in relation to the knowledge commons. Second, we discuss the dynamics of the chosen commons-oriented copyright license, named the Peer Production License.”

Read the full article here.

The post “Think global, print local”: A case study on a commons-based publishing and distribution model appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Have you ever wanted to share an inspiring book that you thought could help people and communities elsewhere, but in another language?

Have you thought about combining decentralized online and offline ways of sharing information?

Have you imagined more complex, layered projects crossing cultures and oceans, while also saving resources and building the commons?

For years, these ideas have been stars on the horizon for us at Guerrilla Translation. And, now, we’ve created a project that does all that — with your help — and we’re ready to share our crowdfunding campaign on Goteo. (Surely you know our friends who crowdfund the commons!) We took an idea the P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens often talks about — “What’s light is global, what’s heavy is local.” — and turned it into a multi-team, transnational publishing project.

Guerrilla Translation translates (English to Spanish, and the reverse) and shares articles on our web magazines about the kinds of change we want to see, and be, in the world. But we love books, too, and want to share our favorites with our Spanish-speaking friends.

Books pose many challenges to translate, produce, and distribute, though. For a Spanish translation, a book should be available in both Europe and Latin America — but transatlantic shipping costs a lot in resources, and a small publisher likely won’t have offices in multiple countries. Even within a continent, transnational shipping can be long distance. And what about the translation cost for a small publisher?

We believe a good book needs careful, skillful translation by humans, not software. Small-scale publishing and printing require time and resources. And, for these skills, we can’t simply ask everyone to volunteer their time; that’s also unsustainable. We want people to get paid fairly for their work.

We’ve come up with a new way to translate and share good books — a new kind of transnational publishing network that is commons-oriented and ecologically minded: Think global — print local.

With the help of this crowdfund, our teams will pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation, international book publishing, and distribution.

Our model starts by getting crowdfunding support for the translation plus basic design and formatting costs, then freely offering the translated text online as an ebook. But we also break out of digital space by producing a hard copy book through small-scale printing and distribution in several locations — in this case, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Spain.

This way, we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping; we provide the ability for local producers to print and sell the hard copy book; and we add to the knowledge commons with the free digital version.

We have chosen a special book as a prototype: David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner. (See what Mr. Bollier has to say about this project in this video and here in his blog.) This book explores the rich history and promising future of the commons — a self-organizing social system for the stewardship and enrichment of our collective wealth.

There are more than 400 million native speakers of Spanish worldwide; with this project, Spanish speakers can read and share a fantastic introduction to the commons in book form. We particularly want to add to the conversation around the commons in Latin America, where a long-standing tradition of the commons is getting new energy and attention.

We urge our English-speaking — and, indeed, all multi-lingual friends — to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort. This campaign is not only for the Spanish-speaking world — we feel this is an important campaign for commoners worldwide. You’ll notice that one of our crowdfund donation rewards is the option to sponsor a number of “library” copies for another community. Of course we also intend to publish books in English, if this project is successful. Together with you, we want to bolster commoning as a challenge to the standard narrative of market economics, defend our shared wealth from enclosure, and create new relations and structures of production.

A successful campaign will allow us to “learn by doing” and repeat the experience with new books and texts in the future. Eventually, we’d like to crowdfund more books and offer more local nodes the option to print and sell books locally in various languages, so everyone’s costs are covered and good books can land in the hands of eager readers — without the expensive and wasteful practices that result from centralized, old-school publishing and distribution models.

We can’t think of a better way to put our skills to work helping build the modern digital commons, while also enabling material commoning practices, so please join us with your support.

Production and labor costs will be covered by the campaign. Work will be performed globally and locally by the following P2P/commons-oriented translators and copyleft publishers: Guerrilla Translation (Spain, Portugal, and Argentina), Traficantes de Sueños (Spain), Tinta Limón (Argentina), La Libre de Barranco (Peru), Sursiendo (Mexico).

Check out our campaign here. There are many ways to help. Have a look and please spread the word!

The post Think Global, Print Local: A crowdfund for a new publishing and distribution network appeared first on P2P Foundation.