The maps serve many purposes at once. They help amass new groups of commoners by giving them shared digital platforms. As the maps become dense with user-contributed information, they show the growth of horizontal, participatory power, especially in reclaiming rights to manage shared resources. These resources include everything from valuable urban spaces and lakes to fruit orchards accessible to anyone, environmental projects and hackerspaces. The many maps depicting commons and people-centered economic projects tell the story of communities rejecting the status quo, reconnecting with the places they inhabit, and creating a renaissance through new relationships.

Below, we describe some of the more notable projects that map commons. (A complete list of maps and weblinks is included below.)

A significant number of mapping projects focus on urban commons. Mapping The Commons(.net), founded in 2010, uses an open-workshop process to ask people to identify important common assets in their cities. Developed by principal investigator Pablo de Soto in conjunction with local research fellows, the Mapping the Commons workshop methodology has been used in Athens, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Quito and Grande Vittoria. Workshop participants describe their relationship to each city’s commons and name the unique natural resources, cultural treasures, public spaces, digital commons and social actions that matter to them. Short videos are then produced and overlaid on an online map of the city. De Soto’s paper, “Mapping the Urban Commons: A Parametric & Audiovisual Method,” received the Elinor Ostrom award in 2013 in the category of “Conceptual Approaches on the Commons.”

Italians are forging some of the most innovative projects. World of Commons is a map that identifies forms of collective governance that constitute “best practices” for a variety of resources such as housing, public space, pastures, forests, and lands that have been treated as common property since medieval times. The project was created by LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons in Rome, which itself is a collaboration between Labsus (Laboratory for Subsidiarity) and LUISS Guido Carli Department of Political Science. LabGov is attempting to develop experts on commons govern­ance and new institutional forms. To promote its ideas, LabGov offers a series of educational workshops in partnership with the cities of Rome, Bologna, Taranto, and the province of Mantua. The Bologna Lab has been particularly focused on developing new types of collaborative governance for urban commons. It has mounted a campaign to bring the principle of “horizontal subsidiarity” to Italian cities as a way to give citizens a constitutional right to participate directly in all levels of government.

Another mapping project in Italy is Mapping the Commons(.org) – unrelated to the Pablo de Soto venture of the same name. The mapping initiative was part of the initial unMonastery project launched in Matera in early 2014. The unMonastery is a social commune that is trying to help communities suffering from unemployment, empty buildings and a lack of social services.¹ The project engages skilled people and local citizens in a collaborative process to develop innovative solutions. Mapping the region’s cultural assets, local traditions, knowledge and stories are used to assist this process.

The Great Lakes Commons Map is unique in its focus on a bioregional ecosystem. The map was launched in May 2012 by Paul Baines, a teacher in Toronto, during a multicity educational tour organized by the Council of Canadians, an activist group that focuses on water as a commons. The Great Lakes Commons is a collaborative effort among many groups – including the Council of Canadians, On The Commons, indigenous peoples, municipalities, and urban and rural citizens – to create effective stewardship and governance of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Commons Map invites people to tell their own stories of personal experience and community healing and environmental harm at various locations around the lakes. The map includes lively videos and narratives as well as map layers that identify the locations of First Nations, pipelines and bottled water permits as well as supporters of the Great Lakes Commons Charter. The map is itself a commons in several respects: its stories and data come from people who love the Great Lakes, the map is shareable under a Creative Commons license, and the map platform is powered by Ushahidi, an open-source crisis mapping platform.

The P2PValue project maps a wide variety of digital projects created through Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), which is a form of online social collaboration among large numbers of people in producing valuable information and physical products. P2PValue was created by a consortium of six academic partners to support the creation of public policies that benefit the commons.² P2PValue has identified over 300 CBPP projects from which it has identified best practices and favorable conditions for horizontal collaborative creations. Because digital commons as artifacts of cyberspace cannot be mapped geographically, P2PValue’s projects are listed in a searchable directory. The project is open to public contributions, and all project data and source code are freely available.

Some mapping projects focus on resources and organizational forms in the “new economy” and solidarity economy. Shareable and its global Sharing Cities Network have hosted dozens of “mapjams” in 2013 and 2014 to bring together urban commoners to compile notable sharing projects. The mapjams produced more than seventy urban maps that identify local coops, commons, public resources, and sharing-oriented platforms and organizations. Shareable cofounder Neal Gorenflo says, “Taking stock of your resources is frequently a precursor to action. Such maps indicate an intention, change the mindset of participants, and are a practical organizing tool.”

The focus of Vivir Bien’s mapping project is the solidarity economy and a variety of noncapitalist, not-for-profit initiatives and organizations. Founded in Vienna in 2010 by the Critical and Solidarity University (KriSU), the Vivir Bien mapping project has a European focus. The project website is Creative Commons licensed and utilizes OpenStreetMap.

The explosion of new mapping projects is itself creating new challenges that are currently being addressed. One of the most remarkable is surely TransforMap, which emerged in early 2014 from a collaboration of programmers and various people developing alternatives to the prevailing economic model in Germany and Austria. They concluded that all the maps being created need a common digital space. So they began working on an open taxonomy based on the criteria of human needs, which can be used globally. The global mapping process is guided by the motto: “There are many alternatives. We make them visible.” TransforMap is intended to make it just as easy for people to locate the closest place for sharing, exchanging, or giving things away in their own neighborhood as it is to find the nearest supermarket. Standardizing the datasets – a mid-term goal – will make it possible to amalgamate data from various existing maps into a single, open and free map, most of which will be made available on OpenStreetMap.

CommonsScope is a project of CommonSpark, a Texas-based nonprofit. CommonsScope features several collections of maps and visualizations about commons and common-pool resources. The website is a portal to several hundred commons-related maps including ones focused on food, community land trusts, social movements, public assets, indigenous cultures and sharing cities. Some of the more notable maps of specialized concerns include FallingFruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forageable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trust directory maps. CommonsScope also features in-depth profiles for existing commons projects. The TransforMap initiative and the P2P Foundation also steward large collections of commons and new economy maps.

Thanks to many enterprising cartographers, a growing universe of commons and new economy maps is helping people see and reclaim all sorts of resources that have been systematically destroyed by colonial and capitalist cultures. The maps are also helping people create new forms of community self-governance and increase awareness of commons stewardship. Taken together, these maps tell the big story of this historic moment – how system-change originating from the grassroots is radically altering civilization from one that exalts private wealth to one where wealth is shared. The maps are far-seeing tools that empower us with the means to accelerate the emergence of a just and thriving world.

Ellen Friedman (USA) is project lead and founder at CommonSpark. Her work as an activist and professional counselor focuses on individual and collective wellness and liberation.

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 rvacapinta

The post Patterns of Commoning: Mapping Our Shared Wealth: The Cartography of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

An update from our friends at the unMonastery in Matera, Italy and, as you’ll soon see, beyond.

Over the past 6 months the unMonastery has been going through a number of significant developments, explorations and experiments?—?these initiatives have had mixed results, some very successful and some borderline disastrous; the net effect has restricted our capacity to report back in our usual constant stream of communication (un)consciousness.

This post signals an initial effort towards opening out those activities by updating you on major developments, flagging plans for the year ahead and inviting people to play a greater role.

Key areas covered in this post are; the formation of a formal unMonastery organ(isnation), the ongoing development and creation of individual unMonastery nodes and our part in a very exciting H2020 consortium (focused on the development of localised community owned offline networks). Obviously there’s a lot to cover; so this post will for the most part serve as an index for a series of posts to be published over the next two months that go into greater detail on specific areas of exploration.

‘Waking the unMonastery Organ’

The flashy news is the formation of our formal organ: back in February of this year we hosted the first unMonastery unSummit in Berlin as part of Transmediale: Capture All (at which the majority of the core family were gathered). As part of this gathering we held a series of meetings and events, in which together we sought to identify what was essential to the ongoing development of unMonastery.

One of the central requirements identified during our circles, was the need to form an autonomous legal organ in order to establish clearer structures and models for participation, acknowledge the vast mix of contributions being made by individuals to unMonastery over time, decentralise tacit control within an accountable structure, and advance opportunities for resources to support the establishment of individual unMonastery nodes. This was particularly crucial given that over the past year the initiative and network had grown far beyond its early stage development within the EdgeRyders community.

During this meeting we hit upon an organisational model that we felt was both open and inclusive. Whilst light as a foundational starting point, the key invention for this was that membership can be claimed by all those who commit significant energy and time to the development of unMonastery. Thus The unMonastery Deep Time Bank was born.

The unMonastery Deep Time Bank

As a decentralised membership steered organisation, we needed a criteria for inclusion. We settled upon a membership ‘fee’ of 100 hours of unpaid unMonastery labour as the marker for meaningful commitment, and?—?we sent out an invite to all those that had contributed this level of time to the initiative up until then. We then got deliciously sidetracked by field level developments in Athens. Now, finally back on track, this organisational document should outline how we anticipate the organisational structure will work in practice as both a membership base, organisation forum and commitment management account. We are very happy to announce the composition of this new organisation of intrepid souls committed to the continuation of the unMonastery initiative:

• Jeff Andreoni
• Emmanuele Curti?—?@emmcurti
• Ilaria D’Auria?—?@iaichka
• Bembo Davies?—?@bembodavies
• Arthur Doohan?—?@artied
• Vinay Gupta?—?@leashless
• Katalin Hausel?—?@katihausel
• Muhammad Khaleel Jaffer?—?@mkjaffer
• Kei Kreutler?—?@keikreutler
• Luisa Lapacciana
• Lauren Lapidge?—?@llapidge
• Gaia Marcus?—?@la_gaia
• Juliana Maria Van Hemelryck?—?@julianavanh
• Ola Möller?—?@OlaMoller
• Marc Schneider
• Ben Vickers?—?@benvickers_

If at this stage you would like to participate to a greater degree, or have been working in isolation on unMonastery related activity let us know ([email protected]) and time permitting be sworn into the unOrder at the next annual general meeting.

If the model we’ve established is of interest to you and you’d like to help us to refine it further, use it for your own organisation or assist in the development of a complementary technology stack, drop into this thread on discourse.

Development of unMonastery Nodes

Since leaving Matera in October 2014 the majority of energy being injected into unMonastery activity has been focused on three key areas: the creation and release of a toolkit for establishing individual nodes (see unMonastery BIOS), scouting missions and site visits to offers of land and property for possible future unMonasteries, as well as supporting others who are interested to establish the model.

To give an overview of these activities, please find a brief list below.

• New Lebanon, New York, USA?—?[In development]?—?Back in September BenB posted on the possibility of a unMonastery in upstate New York, in a very short time this has moved forward to sculpting a call for participants. (Point of contact is: BenB)
• Athens, Greece? —?[In development]?—?Since March a mix of long time unMonasterians have been careening around Athens, building and supporting local projects, creating small scale shared living experiments with plans for a new test lab currently in development. (Points of contact: Katalin, Lauren and Jeff)
• Berlin, Germany? —?[In development]?—?Amidst the city and greater Brandenburg area, distributed gathering sites will play host to the development of appropriate technology, resource distribution, and collective protocols, working towards the launch of an Open Source Observatory and a node of the Public School. (Point of contact: @keikreutler)
• Alessandria, Italy? —?[Scoping]?—?Bembo and Kei recently embarked on a site visit to Alessandria to assess a reconfiguration of a mothballed municipal theatre as a community services hub, reported here. (Point of contact: Bembo)
• Göhrde, Lower Saxony, Germany? —?[Scoping]?—?The unMonastery was contacted through several channels to investigate a unique resource in Lower Saxony. Göhrde. At the beginning of September Bembo, Katalin and Ben paid a site visit, loose plans are afoot for a potential summer school, site visit reported here. (Point of contact: Katalin)
• Pessegueiro, Sines, Portugal?—?[Scoping]?—?An initial dialogue has revealed a promising possibility of a ‘creative immersion centre’ in a beautiful unFortress overlooking the sea 100 km south of Lisboa.

MAZI?—?Building offline networks together.

“We have ths mode of thinking outside of the internet, of local networks for local interactions, this is a specific technology very popular for many years but mostly between hackers and activists, but it has not yet arrived for the mainstream.”?—?Interview with Panayotis Antoniadis’ during CAPS2015.

Earlier this year in the run up to CCC and Transmediale a number of those involved in unMonastery began to participate in the offline networks community, as part of the Transmediale we deployed a localised network for the Alpha release of the unMonastery BIOS. Following this gathering, Nethood (Ileana Apostol and Panayotis Antoniadis) set about bringing together a group under the banner MAZI (meaning “together” in Greek) that could develop specific tools, platforms and contexts with the objective of making DIY network’s more widely available and useful to more people. As part of this a consortium formed to apply for CAPS, building upon existing initiatives in the creation of community owned local wireless networks.

From the MAZI website:

“MAZI wishes to invest in an alternative technology, what we call Do-It-Yourself networking, a combination of wireless technology, low-cost hardware, and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) applications, for building local networks, mostly known today as community wireless networks. By making this technology better understood, easily deployed, and configured based on a rich set of customization options and interdisciplinary knowledge, compiled as a toolkit, MAZI will empower citizens to build their own local networks for facilitating hybrid, virtual and physical, interactions, in ways that are respectful to their rights to privacy, freedom of expression and self-determination”

In September it was announced that the bid was successful, and we’re very excited to get started working with the incredible combination of partner organisations that make up MAZI, which includes the NITlab at the University of Thessaly, the Zurich-based non-profit organization NetHood, the Edinburgh Napier University, the Design Research Lab at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Open University, the INURA Zurich Institute, SPC in London and Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin

Over the course of the last months we’ve already begun to participate in and contribute to a number of related workshops including Networked Social Responsibility (Brussels), 2nd International Conference on Internet Science (Brussels), From Smart Cities to Engaged Citizens (Volos) and Hybrid City (Athens), our core role in MAZI will be as a use case in the deployment of this localised technology at specific unMonastery sites, which Katalin discusses here.

Future Gathering Points

We would like to meet with you and ourselves face to face more often.

Despite our very distributed nature, we’ve found in recent months that working remotely and online has produced significant difficulties in maintaining alignment and ensuring an accessible model of participation. This has been under much debate and in a move to learn from Robin Hood Co-op’s recent establishment of ‘Open Offices’ and ‘Labs’, we’ve begun to formulate our own iteration, whilst we’ve yet to christen this with its own conceptual framing (although we hear murmurs of ‘General Chapter’ ) we have begun to set a series of future dates for possible meeting places. In the new year we will put forward a schedule for the year.

• PreSummit Athens?—?Next week several of us will be gathering in Athens to spend time together, focus energy on working structures and join Robin Hood Co-op for their Lab.
• Workshops and Open Dinner Berlin?—?17th and 18th December?—?Kei, Ben and Ola will be workshopping the unMonastery BIOS and hosting dinner.
• LOTE5: FAIL # UNFAIL?—?25–28th February 2016?—?Antiheroes and Edgeryders are teaming up to run this years annual Living on the Edge.
• Nottingham Event?—?28th-30th April 2016?—?We’re currently plotting a collaborative event with Near Now in Nottingham, home of the luddites and robin hood which will be focused on civic tech, platform cooperativism and new organisational forms.
• Annual unSummit, 2016? —?Whilst the location is still in discussion, we have zoned in on the dates June 19th to July 3rd, with the intentions of developing a new slower format for our annual gatherings, that will allow us to spend meaningful time together, coupled with a more intense few days of your average unConference setup?—?if you have ideas do post on discourse.

Things you might have missed:

• In the summer we released our second book Code/unCode: Tracing Monastic Patterns
• In May we ran a ‘Mapping the Commons’ workshop at CommonsFest (Athens)
• In June we connected OSCE days and Festival of Solidarity (Athens)
• Since the beginning of the summer unMonasterians have been involved in supporting projects aiding refugees in Athens.
• We wrote a feature for STIR magazine’s Autumn issue.
• In September we spoke and participated in the #longprogressbar
• We interviewed Edwin Mingard.
• In October we participated in and presented at a gathering of monastic orders at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield upon the invitation of Fr. George Guiver alongside Rev. Richard Coles and Frankie Ward.
• In November we presented our work in Athens at the Urban Commons conference (Bologna)
• Currently we are working towards opening out our slack channels and reconciling communications.
• Alberto began work on ‘The Protocol’
• In September and November we presented unMonastery work at the 14th Istanbul Biennial?—?Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms.
• In October we held one-to-one Nomadic Fortunes workshops as part of Transeuropa (Belgrade)
• We’ve begun a conversation with Robin Hood Co-op and OSCE days about Open Processing organisations with the first call online.

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