Introduce yourself

I’m Stacco Troncoso, I was born in Madrid, Spain, but I spent my adolescence in London, England. Most of my time nowadays involves the day to day running of the P2P Foundation, where I’m strategic director, but I am also the co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, which is a P2P/Commons-oriented translation collective and co-op. I’ve worked as freelance translator in film and TV for many years and I’m also a musician and artist. All of these things somehow coalesce into the work I’m currently doing, which is also my life’s passion!

Tell me about your group – what is it? What do you do?

The P2P Foundation is an organization and network that researches and advocates for Commons-oriented, P2P dynamics and cultures. What this means, basically, is that we study modes of non-hierarchical value creation in many fields and see how this would apply to politics, production, property, governance, etc. Apart from research, other essential parts of our work are communications, networking and advocacy. You can check that side of our work in our Commons Transition site, or our daily blog.

In fact, Guerrilla Translation was inspired by the P2P Foundation and specifically, the theoretical work of its founder Michel Bauwens. We tried to imagine how to apply all of Michel’s recommendation for what an Open Coop should be, but applied to translation. This includes things such as active creation of commons, copyfair licensing, contributory accounting, post-credentialism, and many other innovative aspects. The collective is three years old now and we’ve provided a wealth of pro-bono translations from English to Spanish and viceversa in our Spanish and English websites. Combined, we’ve translated and published more than 130 pieces.

Shorter works like articles, essays and interviews are not as often translated as books, but they’re popular with readers who want access to more work by authors that they like. That’s how this got started, too – we were reading works that we wanted to share with our Spanish or English speaking friends and found that there weren’t enough articles in translation to share, so we started doing it ourselves. We’re not amateur translators, though, we’re experienced professionals and we practice old-school, handmade translation. All our stuff is done by humans: one translator and one copy editor working together to get the author’s message across as accurately as possible. And it’s great for the authors, too. They recognize that there’s a wider audience for their ideas, and sometimes that inspires them in turn to investigate and write about their new audience’s context.  We love what we do!

Right now we are working in collaboration with four small, commons-oriented publishers in Peru, Spain, México and Argentina to translate and publish David Bollier’s excellent book, “Think Like a Commoner”. This project is patterned after the P2P Foundation’s proposal to “Design Global, Manufacture Local”, which describes an open, participatory global design commons that feeds the production of material objects, partaken by small, locally-oriented coops and manufacturing shops, makerspaces and fablabs. In fact, this particular project is called “Think Global, Print Local”, and is presently being crowdfunded through Goteo.org, a great commons-oriented financing platform (and very good friends of ours).

It works like this: Guerrilla Translation is translating the text into Spanish. Once we’re done, we will release the digital version on the internet under a Peer Production License  so anyone can read or download it. Then, if someone wants a paper copy, they can get it printed and shipped from their nearest publishing node. We strongly believe that the project is of interest to commoners worldwide, and not just Spanish speakers, as it prefigures the sorts of productive capacities we want to encourage. Which is why we plan to expand the network very soon, in order to start publishing and printing English language materials – so stay tuned!

Why is working collaboratively important for your group?

It’s essential both from ideological and practical points of view. I think that collaboration has been relegated to an underdog position within the range of possible human interactions. Working within a system that favours and excuses competition as something desirable or even preferable – whatever the cost – turns this ideological position into a self-perpetuating myth, with disastrous consequences. But collaboration isn’t just a feel-good buzzword which will magically banish all of our woes. It is an often painful personal process of reevaluating your beliefs about yourself and others, and taking apparent risks. We are simply not taught to collaborate in this society, so we have to teach ourselves and each other. Sometimes it feels like groping in the dark, but when you reach out and find somebody else’s hand, it’s the best feeling in the world. Hanging on to each other when it’s needed, or letting go at the right time, is where the real work seems to be right now. The more we do it, the better we’ll get at it (and sharing it with others).

What problem were you trying to solve when you went looking for a decision-making tool?

The problem I’ve felt with online collectives is that it can be very hard to communicate all of that “additional”, yet very essential, information that you can’t transmit online: emotion, humour, affection: Think about things that we draw a lot of information from in person, like someone’s expression or bodily posture – all of that totally escapes us online. This is why our online systems of interaction have to be as clear and diversified as possible; to allow more of ourselves to come through. This clarity is essential when it comes to decision making. We need to foster online spaces where everybody can be heard, and misunderstandings are kept to a minimum.

How did you hear about Loomio? What made you decide to try it?

I heard about Loomio though an article by Douglas Rushkoff in early 2013, just as we were organizing the launch of Guerrilla Translation. GT was very much inspired by Occupy and the 15-M movement, so we instantly felt that we were dealing with a sister collective coming from the same place. I signed up for the Beta and we soon started to use it for GT. Then, sometime in 2014, we started using it occasionally in the P2P Foundation. In the last two years we’ve been using more heavily, and now it has become an essential communication tool for us. Lastly, we’re using it to coordinate with the groups in the publishing network for the Think Global/Print Local campaign.

Tell me the story of a specific decision your group has made together on Loomio.

A good example comes from the Think Global/Print Local group. The book translation was originally going to be launched under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License. We got some flak for that, so we discussed alternatives and we finally settled on the Peer Production License.  It was great to have the discussion clearly laid out and archived. With this very heterogeneous group we’ve also used Loomio to determine priorities, plan campaign promotion and budgets, solve conflicts, etc.

What else does your group use Loomio for?

The P2P Foundation has a combination of open and private groups. This allows us to have great discussions and collaboration with our extended network, while also giving us some much needed “quiet time” to reflect and mature ideas. Of the former, I’m especially excited about our Commons Transition discussion group. There are some great discussions in there and, as far as that particular group goes, we use it more as a forum. The core working P2PF team also uses Loomio extensively, not just for decision making, but for asynchronous communication in general. We’ve managed to cut out a lot of unnecessary email thanks to Loomio and we can now easily search for and refer to specific discussions and decisions we’ve made.

What does using Loomio enable for your group that wasn’t possible before?

With the Think Global/Design Local group, we were using a mixture of email, voip and instant messaging, and it wasn’t working out. A lot of valuable information was getting lost in the mix. It took some convincing, but we finally got everyone to sign up for Loomio and now communications (and decision making!) have improved tremendously. No one has to hunt through endless email threads to see when such-and-such was decided. It’s all clearly laid out.

Do you have any advice for other users of Loomio? Best practice or tips?

I actually want some advice myself, because I’ve found that the hardest thing about Loomio is getting people to use it! More specifically, to get out of their “comfort zone” of using email for everything. Once they overcome this barrier it’s easy for them to see the benefits, but sometimes we’ve lost people who made a prejudgement before trying it out. My advice for any group is to try to expand its usage beyond decision making and see it as an organizing tool. Specifically, I think it’s a highly preferable alternative to email or social media groups. Email is great for one-to-one correspondence but, in my experience, discussions with more than 5 people often go nowhere and are excruciatingly difficult to read or to join in at a later date. A Facebook group, for example, offers easy adoption, but discussions get lost, can’t be organized into subgroups, and there’s no mechanism for decision making. I might add that Facebook generally isn’t a great place to try to work if you’re avoiding distractions, let’s face it. Loomio solves all of that and it’s backed by nice real humans that you can talk too, instead of corporate goons. Tell everybody to join in!

What is the impact on the world you are hoping to have with your group? If you are very successful, what will be different in the world?

This is a difficult question due to the varied nature of the groups I’ve mentioned. The overarching characteristic is that we want to show that collaboration isn’t something that only happens in isolated instances or invisible environments, but that it can crystallize and become the preferred mode of creating value and caring for one another and the planet we live on. This is a big task, but we believe in that by communicating the potential of these already-existing practices people will see that there is a viable way out of this convergence of crises we’re mired in. At the largest scale (the type of work the P2P Foundation does), success would entail an increased prominence of P2P/Commons dynamics in politics, production and an explosion of creative solutions based in the stewardship of our shared resources. With something much more concrete, like the Think Global, Print Local campaign, we’ll be able to publish and distribute essential books to inspire changemakers without having to concede to the restrictions or wasteful, unchallenged protocols of the traditional publishing world. We would also show that knowledge needs to be free and global, but that production can be local, draw from the commons and also give back to it.

Image by Ann Marie Utratel

The post Interviewed: Stacco Troncoso on Loomio, Guerrilla Translation and the P2P Foundation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’ve been thinking about using the Peer Production License (PPL) since we came up with the idea for the Think Global/Print Local campaign over two years ago. We didn’t end up doing it because it just seemed simpler to use the same license originally used for Think Like a Commoner, the book we are translating and using as a prototype for this campaign. We’ve heard criticism since the start of the process – which, to me, was spot on – about the use of the imaginary of “free licenses” in a campaign using a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. We took that criticism quite seriously. So, in dialogue with the book’s author, David Bollier, and a group of legal advisors, we’ve decided to license the translation under a Peer Production License and open the campaign to other publishers and collectives in accord with its established criteria.

In this article we’ll talk about the license, its particularities, the criticisms against it and how, for us, its use shifts the focus away from the book we’re going to translate and more toward the commons-based publishing network we want to build.

The campaign incorporates one of the ideas we promote at the P2P Foundation: interweaving the use of free/open digital knowledge commons with a manufacturing system grounded in the locations where the designs drawn from these commons will finally be materialised.

The ultimate goal is to enable mechanisms so commoners can support themselves and ensure their own social reproduction without resorting to capitalism.

This ideal, Open Cooperativism, has an essential element – commons oriented reciprocity licensing – to protect economic circulation within the commons and defend it against predatory or hostile interests. These licenses, grouped under the concept of CopyFair, present a host of complexities. Resolving these will require rigorous research and development. But the good news is that we already have a first example of a valid and functional CopyFair license: the Peer Production License.

This license is essentially identical to the ubiquitous Creative Commons non-commercial license (BY-NC), except for the following clauses extracted from the ‘Telekommunist Manifesto’ (which contains the full Peer Production License text):

1. You may exercise the rights granted in Section 3 for commercial purposes only if:

i. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and

ii. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners

1.  Any use by a business that is privately owned and managed, and that seeks to generate profit from the labor of employees paid by salary or other wages, is not permitted under this license.

What does this mean?

This fork on the original text of the Creative Commons non-commercial variant makes the PPL an explicitly anti-capitalist version of the CC-NC. It only allows commercial exploitation by collectives in which the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the value creators, and where any surplus is distributed equally among them (and not only into the hands of owners, shareholders or absentee speculators). According to Dmytri Kleiner, co-author of the license with the barrister John Magyar, it’s not a copyleft license, but instead copyFARleft. Kleiner explains the need to open the commercial restrictions defining CC-NC as follows:

What we mean here is that the creative “commons” is privatized because the copyright is retained by the author, and only (in most cases) offered to the community under non-commercial terms. The original author has special rights while commons users have limited rights, specifically limited in such a way as to eliminate any possibility for them to make a living by employing this work. Thus these are not commons works, but rather private works. Only the original author has the right to employ the work commercially.

All previous conceptions of an intellectual or cultural commons, including anti-copyright and pre-copyright culture as well as the principles of free software movement were predicated on the concept of not allowing special rights for an original author, but rather insisting on the right for all to use and reuse in common. The non-commercial licenses represent a privatization of the idea of the commons and a reintroduction of the concept of a uniquely original artist with special private rights.

Further, as I consider all expressions to be extensions of previous perceptions, the “original” ideas that rights are being claimed on in this way are not original, but rather appropriated by the rights-claimed made by creative-commons licensers. More than just privatizing the concept and composition of the modern cultural commons, by asserting a unique author, the creative commons colonizes our common culture by asserting unique authorship over a growing body of works, actually expanding the scope of private culture rather than commons culture.

It is important to note that the PPL is primarily designed to liberate cultural or consumer goods or products, and to offer more choices to content creators or artists presently using Creative Commons non-commercial options. But Kleiner does not recommend the PPL for productive or capital assets. The latter should be licensed with copyleft (GPL, AGPL, etc.), allowing large corporations and capitalist consortia to exploit these commons to their benefit. What is this all about?

To understand the distinction, it is important to grasp the concept of “exvestment” (wordplay on “investment”). Kleiner explains it as follows:

[Exvestment occurs…] when a company spends money to improve Linux because that company makes money running a social networking site, that company benefits from such expenditure, however it is exvestment not investment, because the capitalist class as a whole does not benefit since this reduces the market for commercial software by improving free alternatives and makes such means of production available to non-capitalist producers as well.

This is why I think we need to be careful when we apply the PPL (or similar) to software, because I think to maximize transvestment [the transfer of value from one mode of production to another] in the direction of commons-based production we need to keep Department I goods (Capital Goods or Producers’ Goods) free for capitalists so they can exvest in them, while keeping Department II (Consumer goods or commodities) goods non-free for them.

We think of the Peer Production License as a viable alternative for artists, musicians and content creators. Here’s one well-known example: Yahoo, the company which owns Flickr, decided to sell images that its users licensed under Creative Commons, which allows commercial exploitation (CC-BY). This large corporation is enriched by the works of content creators who get nothing in return. In fact, the creators cannot do anything: they have licensed their work with a free license which does not distinguish who the benefactor is, whether it’s Yahoo or a small cooperative that manufactures handmade books. Copyleft licenses do not discriminate or make distinctions between the economic bases of those who exploit these works. PPL, however, does; in fact, it is their raison d’etre.

Is it the perfect license? Of course not; in fact, I think there has never been and never will be a “perfect license”, although in the future licenses may be developed with more complexity or dynamic adaptability. The PPL is not without criticism or suggestions for improvement, but, probably due to that same complexity, no other viable alternative exists as of now – although there are some in early stages of development.

The license in the context of the Think Like a Commoner campaign

As noted in the beginning of this article, we are very pleased to have been able to change the license the book will be published under only days before the first round of the crowdfunding campaign ended. Here are some of the reasons.

Visibility. A lot has been written on the PPL, but almost no one has implemented it. By using the PPL, we give more visibility to the license and open conversations about it. We hope that other artistic groups or content producers can learn about the PPL and put it into use. The campaign is no longer only about the book, network or other models of publishing production and distribution, but now also includes a practical experience in copyfarleft licenses. Being totally honest now, clearly we also hope this will give more visibility to our crowdfund.

Adaptability in the face of criticism. It hasn’t been easy to implement this change in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign, but we always wanted this to be a dynamic project capable of establishing a dialogue with its followers. For this, we’re very grateful to all who have offered criticism regarding our use of the CC-NC.

Breaking out, and adoption by other publishers. The PPL opens the campaign beyond its initial parameters, freeing it from our control. If you’ll allow me an exaggeration in terms of scale, we saw this kind of mercurial reinvention in 15-M and Occupy, and we love it. By using this type of licensing, the publishing network can be extended and strengthened through self-allocation instead of having to wait for prior approval from the existing publishing consortium. We would be delighted if other publishers and collectives would contribute to the campaign by spreading the word or offering material contributions. They, in turn, can benefit through the production and physical distribution of the book. Ultimately, we’d love to see examples of indirect reciprocity and communal shareholding, not just with this project but with future uses of Copyfair licensing.

Commons publishing networks in other languages. Moreover, with the P2P Foundation and Telekommunisten (the political/art collective Kleiner belongs to), we are planning to launch Think Global, Print Local in English-speaking countries by working directly with the PPL, broadening the scope of the initial campaign.

Help us finish the second round of financing

As of today, May 10th, we have just one week before the campaign ends on May 18^th and we’re still more than 1500€ short of our optimum target. We know that there are enough people who want to read this book in Spanish, to have a hard copy and/or to get any of the other rewards offered in the campaign. More importantly, there are people who care deeply about the issues discussed here and in our crowdfunding campaign text, and want to support this first attempt to create a distributed, transnational, commons-based publishing network that uses licenses such as the PPL. The question is reaching these people in time to achieve – or even surpass – our optimal funding goal. One thing that sets Goteo campaigns apart is this second round “for the optimum”. It can be difficult to distinguish between absolute necessities and those things which make a project really come to life, and this second round helps us fulfill our best aspirations. Can you help us? We’d greatly appreciate it if you would share this article and the link to the campaign – and of course, if you want to contribute to the crowdfund directly, we’d be eternally grateful.

Keep Calm and Keep Commoning!

Stacco Troncoso. Co-founder, Guerrilla Translation. Strategic Direction, P2P Foundation.

• Images by OpenSource.com, 2, Código Abierto, Sursiendo and Guerrilla Translation y Commons Transition
• Translated by Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso from the Spanish version, originally published in Guerrilla Translation.

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The plan is to translate my book into Spanish and then use small-scale printing and distribution to publish the book in Spain and throughout Latin America. — initially Peru, Argentina and Mexico, to be followed later in other locations.  The Spanish edition of my book will be entitled Pensar desde los comunes: una breve introducción.

It is difficult for a project this innovative to obtain financing, so the organizers have launched a crowdfunding campaign this week through the Spain-based Goteo website.  I’m thrilled to have my book be the focus of this pathbreaking translation/publishing experiment.  I’m also excited about having my short introduction to the commons accessible to the Spanish-speaking world!

The “claymation” video by Espacio Abierto of Peru, explaining the project, is particularly wonderful, especially the animated clay rendition of me!  If you go to the Goteo website for the campaign, you can watch the video, learn more about the project and contribute to it.  It’s off to a strong start, but it needs to minimally raise 8.042 euros — 10,602 euros is optimum.

The organizers of the project are Guerrilla Translation and Traficantes de Sueños in Madrid, Spain; Sursiendo in Chiapas, México; La Libre de Barranco in Lima, Peru; Tinta Limón in Buenos Aires, Argentina – with support from Goteo in Madrid. A special thanks to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for their hard work in making this project happen.

The team explains its plans in this way:

We want to pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. This model makes the best use of the digital knowledge commons by freely offering the translated text online while printing and distributing hard-copy books at the local level through nodes in various locations. In this way we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping….[The project] will help build bridges across languages and cultures, and enable concrete, material commoning practices. For this reason, we urge our English-speaking and indeed all multi-lingual friends to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort.

Let’s help this new effort in international commoning and publishing.  It would be great to bypass the costs, inefficiencies and commercial limitations of conventional publishing (something I discuss at greater length here).  Let’s think global, print local!

The post Think Global, Print Local: A New Commons-Based Publishing 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.

We’re launching a new kind of publishing network, with a team of P2P/commons publishers in Europe and Latin America. The idea here is to “think global” – create a book translation and release a free e-book – and “print local” – support small, local printers and publishers, and avoid environmentally destructive long-distance shipping. This project is being crowdfunded with our friends at Goteo. An extract of the crowdfund text is reproduced below but please click here to read the full text, see the rewards and contribute to this project.

Think Global, Print Local: Taking action towards a new model of publishing and distribution

Think global – print local. We’re a consortium of commoners in Latin America and Spain taking action towards a new model of publishing and distribution. Our group includes P2P-minded translators and copyleft publishers starting a new process for translating, publishing and distributing books in a decentralized way that also reduces or eliminates expensive, wasteful long-distance shipping.

Our team’s plan, with the help of this crowdfund, is to translate a specially selected book into Spanish. Its content will be made freely available online and its message will be materialized locally through small scale printing and distribution in several locations: Spain, Peru, Argentina and Mexico, with more nodes to come.

The book we have chosen to translate and follow our model is David Bollier’s popular Think Like a Commoner. 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. By thinking as commoners, we open ourselves to the process of commoning, crystallizing actions and reimagining systems in order to empower collaboration and community benefit.

Main Features

Using David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons as a first prototype, we want to pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. This model makes the best use of the digital knowledge commons by freely offering the translated text online while printing and distributing hard-copy books at the local level through nodes in various locations. In this way we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping.

Production and labor costs for translation, design, formatting and manufacturing will be covered by the crowdfund. Work will be performed globally and locally, as appropriate, by the consortium of: Guerrilla Translation (Spain, Portugal and Argentina); Traficantes de Sueños (Spain), Tinta Limón (Argentina), La Libre (Perú), SurSiendo (México).

Why this is important

This is a very important campaign for commoners worldwide, and not only in the Spanish-speaking world. It will help build bridges across languages and cultures, and enable concrete, material commoning practices. For this reason, we urge our English-speaking and indeed all multi-lingual friends to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort. In the cultural aspect it will amplify and enrich the conversation on the commons in Spanish-speaking countries through the translation of David Bollier’s book. There are more than 400 million native speakers of Spanish worldwide; with this project, Spanish speakers can read and share what is possibly the best introduction to the Commons in book form. Notably, many of the traditions and innovations of the Commons are taking place in Spanish-speaking communities, where Latin American cultures have a rich history of commoning.

In order to bolster commoning as challenge to the standard narrative of market economics and defend our shared wealth from enclosure, we must create new relations and structures of production. We are proposing this nascent distributed physical production network, and are initiating it through this project. A successful campaign will allow us to ‘learn by doing’, and repeat the experience with new books and texts in the future. We also want to find other partners, and to help create similar localized networks for book publishing in other languages.

Goals of the crowdfunding campaign

The first goal is to enable the translation Think Like a Commoner into Spanish, with the time and dedication of a group of translators who are familiar with the commons and the linguistic idiosyncrasies of its terminologies in both English and Spanish. The campaign will also support the simultaneous publication of the book in four distinct manufacturing and distribution locations, through the work of commons-oriented small publishers and a globally-available e-book. These communities will host events focused both on the commons in general as well as the book itself, grounding and developing the book’s theme. This campaign is a pilot project for an expanded, transnational publishing network which is commons-oriented in content, as well as practice.

Team and experience

The consortium presently includes a P2P translation collective and four commons-oriented publishers/book shops.

1. Guerrilla Translation (Translation, editing and project coordination/Transnational) is a P2P translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain, whose members love to translate and share knowledge about the commons, P2P, and the socio-environmental issues affecting us today.
2. Traficantes de Sueños (Formatting and editing, publishing, distribution/Madrid, Spain) is critical and committed publishing project mapping the lines that constitute other orders of life and creating theoretical and practical tool kits for the coming decades. Committed to free access to knowledge, Traficantes publish all their texts with open licenses that allow anyone to copy, download and distribute them.
3. Sursiendo (Book design, publishing, distribution/Chiapas, México) is a research collective dedicated to the collective building of knowledge for a more a more tolerant, inclusive world and its embodiment through shared actions. Focused on activism, communication, design, education, art and cultural management, they operate from a gender based and commons-oriented perspective.
4. La Libre de Barranco (Campaign Video, Publishing, Distribution/Lima, Peru) is an independent bookshop and library featuring independent Peruvian literature, the classics, poetry and photography. Dedicated to alternative means of sharing culture, La Libre educates on and shares knowledge under open licenses.
5. Tinta Limón (Publishing, Distribution/Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a self-managed editorial collective. Tinta Limón translates as “Lemon ink”, a steganography technique used in clandestine writings. Their collective recaptures this clandestine spirit by avoiding the obvious and steering their thoughts towards the everyday practice of coalescing constructive experiences.

Please click here to contribute to the Crowdfund campaign

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Let me tell my own story about two experiments in commons-based book publishing.  The first involves Patterns of Commoning, the new anthology that Silke Helfrich and I co-edited and published two months ago, with the crucial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The second experiment involves the Spanish translation for my 2014 book Think Like a Commoner. 

Whereas the German version of Patterns of Commoning was published with transcript-Verlag, a publisher we consider a strong partner in spreading the word on the commons, for the English version, we decided to bypass commercial publishers.  We realized that none of them would be interested – or that they would want to assert too much control at too high of a price.

We learned these lessons when we tried to find a publisher for our 2013 anthology, The Wealth of the Commons.  About a dozen publishers rejected our pitches.  They said things like:  “It’s an anthology, and anthologies don’t sell.”  “It doesn’t have any name-brand authors.”  “It’s too international in focus.”  “What’s the commons?  No one knows about that.” 

It became clear that the business models of publishers – even the niche political presses that share our values – were not prepared to support a well-edited, path-breaking volume on the commons.

In general, conventional book publishing has trouble taking risks with new ideas, authors and subject matter because it has very small economic margins to play with.  One reason is that commercial book distributors in the US – the companies that warehouse books and send them to various retailers – take 60% of the cover price, with little of the risk. They are the expensive middlemen who control the distribution infrastructure. Their cut leaves about 40% of the cover price or less for the publisher, author and retailer to split.

This arrangement means that book prices have to be artificially higher, relative to actual production costs, to cover all the costs of so many players:  editors, marketers, publicists, distributors, retailers.

So how did we bypass this costly apparatus and assert control of the publishing process?  How did we produce an affordable, highly shareable 400-page book? By looking to our international community of commoners.

We did a private crowdfunding outreach to solicit orders for advance bulk orders — $10/copy in increments of ten.  This raised enough money to finance about half of the cost of the print run of 2,000 copies. Silke and I personally paid for the rest of the print run, which we expect to recoup after selling a few hundred copies. We were able to reclaim control over what happens with our book and avoid the strict limitations imposed by conventional publishing business models.

We built on the logic of commoning:  First, build community (which took years of work), then support each other.  This is both more efficient and socially satisfying than relying on highly consolidated corporate markets that require ever-escalating prices, control and sales.

We had had a great experience in publishing The Wealth of the Commons in 2012 via Levellers Press, a regional press that took a chance on our book. Levellers was started a few years ago by its parent company, Collective Copies, a worker-owned, movement-friendly photocopy business in Amherst, Massachusetts, US.

So when it came time to publish Patterns of Commoning, we could have published with Levellers, but decided this time to go with Levellers’ self-publishing arm, Off the Common Books.  The big difference was that we, as authors/editors, put up the money ourselves to print and distribute the books.  Off the Common Books then sells and ships the books for a modest per-book fee.

Publishing Patterns of Commoning ourselves has been a wonderful liberation from the costly, unresponsive machinery of traditional publishing.  Even though our book is not available through most bricks-and-mortar bookstores, that’s okay; very few books are.  Patterns of Commoning can be bought directly through the Off the Common Books website  – our preferred source – or through Amazon (not preferred, but it’s hard to reach general book buyers otherwise).

Because our overhead costs are so low, we were able to keep the price of our book at $15 – much lower than a conventional publisher would charge – while pocketing higher revenues than typical publishing deals (a scant 7-10% of the cover price).  We can break even sooner, and enjoy fewer risks and costs because we have a smaller press run.

The Power of Commoning Over Marketing

Then there is marketing.  The authors of books usually end up doing most of the marketing because they know their reader-community better than most publishers.  Authors are motivated to reach out to readers, but US publishers entering a publishing season often have “more important” titles to promote than one’s own book.  “Lesser titles” are often left to fend for themselves.

When I published a book (with coauthor Burns Weston) with the esteemed Cambridge University Press, several people cycled through the job of marketing my book in the course of only two years.  The Press initially charged $85 for the hardback copy (now $55) because it apparently sees university libraries as its primary market for hardcover sales. When it was time to publish a cheaper ($35) paperback, the Press refused to correct the typos (“too expensive”) or even include an errata sheet.

Self-publishing in collaboration with our commons network let us avoid all of these problems.  We have been able to rely on our own network of commoners, Web visibility and word-of-mouth recommendations – avoiding the expensive and mediocre outreach and promotion that many publishers do.  We have also been able to use a Creative Commons license (in our case, a CC BY-SA 4.0 license), which authorizes foreign translations for free and lets us post the entire book online. (Chapters will be posted in the next month or two.)   We value impact and connection over profit.

Of course, as non-academics, Silke and I don’t need to worry about the perceived prestige of a publisher.  Our careers are not dependent upon getting published with the most respected academic presses, which may also be expensive, averse to Creative Commons licenses, and focused on traditional marketing approaches.

I’ve published more than ten books with ten publishers in my career, and I’ve never had a happier publishing experience than with Levellers/Off the Common Books.  Steve Strimer, the publisher, is a wonderful guy who understands the commons and is creative and flexible in trying out new ideas.  The press can do print-on-demand, small-scale print runs for books, which means that its overhead costs are small, allowing it to turn a profit after selling only 200 to 300 copies of a book.  Steve takes pride in saying that he is one of the only for-profit US publishers of poetry, one of the most notoriously unprofitable genres of writing there is.  (Levellers’ poetry imprint is Hedgerow Books.) http://hedgerowbooks.net

I do think this commons-based model represents a superior commercial model for movement-oriented books so long as you have sufficient inhouse editorial and production know-how.  You can make your own choices about editorial content, control your own marketing, reap more of the revenues from sales, and use a Creative Commons license.  You don’t have to forfeit so much to a publisher and the commercial distribution apparatus.  In our case, it was crucial to have a partner like Off the Common Books, an author-friendly, movement-oriented cooperative.

I think the next step for commons-oriented publishing is to invent new sorts of cooperative book distribution systems so that small presses can avoid the crippling fees charged by the conventional book distributors.  A modest editorial and production infrastructure for a press could accomplish a great deal for very little money. (For those who read German: my colleague Silke Helfrich elaborated a bit on that idea and calls for a Commons Publishing or a Publishing Commons.)

Another Cooperative Publishing Experiment, in Spain

Let me quickly mention a second commons-based book publishing experiment now underway.  This project revolves around the Spanish translation for my 2014 book, Think Like a Commoner.  The book is licensed under a CC BY-SA license, which means that translators can do a translation for free.  So far, there are translations in French, Italian, Polish and Korean – with a Chinese one in progress.

Last year, a consortium of commons-oriented groups in Madrid organized by Guerrilla Translation – Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel – decided that they wanted to translate Think Like a Commoner as a collaborative project.  The consortium includes the Medialab-Prado, free software publisher Traficantes de Sueños, the commons crowdfunding website Goteo and the translation team of Georgina Reparado, Susa Oñate and Lara San Mamés.

This group, coordinated by Guerrilla Translation’s Xana Libânio, is mounting a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the translation, campaign management, and book editing and design.  Contributors can choose from among numerous rewards, including copies of the book.

What’s especially imaginative is how the Spanish translation project is engaging with publishers in Latin America to print, distribute, promote and sell the book in their various countries – Tinta Limón in Argentina, La Libre in Perú, SurSiendo in México.  Publishers will print a set number of copies for the initial crowdfund distribution, but will then be free to print and sell additional copies for their respective countries.

I am grateful to the Madrid team that has undertaken this project, and impressed by the creative structures and cooperation that they have devised.  It makes me wonder if the time is right to start a standing press on commons and movement concerns.  That would surely require more resources and reliable revenue streams, but it is certainly worth exploring.  The economics of conventional publishing is delivering less and less value to authors and readers even as book prices go higher.  Meanwhile, important new books never get published in the first place because they are deemed unmarketable.

We have a chapter in Patterns of Commoning that describes some of the more notable commons-based publishing innovations out there.  Besides open access scholarly publishing, there is Oya magazine in Germany, Shareable in the US, Pillku in Latin America, among others.  Maybe it’s time for a commons-based publishing summit.

Originally published in bollier.org

Lead image: “Peoples Library Occupy Wall Street 2011 Shankbone” by David Shankbone, David Shankbone – Flickr: Peoples Library Occupy Wall Street 2011 Shankbone. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons –

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