You may not know it by its admittedly awkward name, but a process known as commons-based peer production (CBPP) supports much of our online life. CBPP describes internet-enabled, peer-to-peer infrastructures that allow people to communicate, self-organize and produce together. The value of what is produced is not extracted for private profit, but fed back into a knowledge, design and software commons — resources which are managed by a community, according to the terms set by that community. Wikipedia, WordPress, the Firefox browser and the Apache HTTP web server are some of the best-known examples.

If the first wave of commons-based peer production was mainly created digitally and shared online, we now see a second wave spreading back into physical space. Commoning, as a longstanding human practice that precedes commons-based peer production, naturally began in the material world. It eventually expanded into virtual space and now returns to the physical sphere, where the digital realm becomes a partner in new forms of resource stewardship, production and distribution. In other words, the commons has come full circle, from the natural commons described by Elinor Ostrom, through commons-based peer production in digital communities, to distributed physical manufacturing.

This recent process of bringing peer production to the physical world is called Design Global, Manufacture Local (DGML). Here’s how it works: A design is created using the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, and then produced using local manufacturing and automation technologies. These can include three-dimensional printers, computer numerical control (CNC) machines or even low-tech crafts tools and appropriate technology — often in combination. The formula is: What is “light” (knowledge) is global, and what is “heavy” (physical manufacture) is local. DGML and its unique characteristics help open new, sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption.

Imagine a process where designs are co-created, reviewed and refined as part of a global digital commons (i.e. a universally available shared resource). Meanwhile, the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind. The process of making something together as a community creates new ideas and innovations which can feed back into their originating design commons. This cycle describes a radically democratized way to make objects with an increased capacity for innovation and resilience.

Current examples of the DGML approach include WikiHouse, a nonprofit foundation sharing templates for modular housing; OpenBionics, creating three-dimensional printed medical prosthetics which cost a fraction (0.1 to 1 percent) of the price of standard prosthetics; L’Atelier Paysan, an open source cooperative fostering technological sovereignty for small- and medium-scale ecological agriculture; Farm Hack, a farmer-driven community network sharing open source know-how amongst do-it-yourself agricultural tech innovators; and Habibi.Works, an intercultural makerspace in northern Greece where Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees develop DGML projects in a communal atmosphere.

This ecologically viable mode of production has three key patterns:

1) Nonprofit: Objects are designed for optimum usability, not to create tension between supply and demand. This eliminates planned obsolescence or induced consumerism while promoting modular, durable and practical applications.

2) Local: Physical manufacturing is done in community workshops, with bespoke production adapted to local needs. These are economies of scope, not of scale. On-demand local production bypasses the need for huge capital outlays and the subsequent necessity to “keep the machines running” night and day to satisfy the expectations of investors with over-capacity and over-production. Transportation costs — whether financial or ecological — are eradicated, while maintenance, fabrication of spare parts and waste treatment are handled locally.

3) Shared: Idle resources are identified and shared by the community. These can be immaterial and shared globally (blueprints, collaboration protocols, software, documentation, legal forms), or material and managed locally (community spaces, tools and machinery, hackathons). There are no costly patents and no intellectual property regimes to enforce false scarcity. Power is distributed and shared autonomously, creating a “sharing economy” worthy of the name.

To preserve and restore a livable planet, it’s not enough to seize the existing means of production; in fact, it may even not be necessary or recommendable. Rather, we need to reinvent the means of production; to radically  reimagine the way we produce. We must also decide together what not to produce, and when to direct our productive capacities toward ecologically restorative work and the stewardship of natural systems. This includes necessary endeavors like permaculture, landscape restoration, regenerative design and rewilding.

These empowering efforts will remain marginal to the larger economy, however, in the absence of sustainable, sufficient ways of obtaining funding to liberate time for the contributors. Equally problematic is the possibility of the capture and enclosure of the open design commons, to be converted into profit-driven, peer-to-peer hybrids that perpetuate the scarcity mindset of capital. Don’t assume that global corporations or financial institutions are not hip to this revolution; in fact, many companies seem to be more interested in controlling the right to produce through intellectual property and patents, than on taking any of the costs of the production themselves. (Silicon Valley-led “sharing” economy, anyone?)

To avoid this, productive communities must position themselves ahead of the curve by creating cooperative-based livelihood vehicles and solidarity mechanisms to sustain themselves and the invaluable work they perform. Livelihood strategies like Platform and Open Cooperativism lead the way in emancipating this movement of globally conversant yet locally grounded producers and ecosystem restorers. At the same time, locally based yet globally federated political movements — such as the recent surge of international, multi-constituent municipalist political platforms — can spur the conditions for highly participative and democratic “design global, manufacture local” programs.

We can either produce with communities and as part of nature or not. Let’s make the right choice.

• Originally published in Truthout
• Art by Jared Rodríguez

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Imagine a prosthetic hand designed by geographically dispersed communities of scientists, designers and enthusiasts in a collaborative manner via the web. All knowledge and software related to the hand is shared globally as a digital commons.

People from all over the world who are connected online and have access to local manufacturing machines (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech crafts and tools) can, ideally with the help of an expert, manufacture a customised hand. This the case of the OpenBionics project, which produces designs for robotic and bionic devices.

There are no patent costs to pay for. Less transportation of materials is needed, since a considerable part of the manufacturing takes place locally; maintenance is easier, products are designed to last as long as possible, and costs are thus much lower.

Take another example. Small-scale farmers in France need agricultural machines to support their work. Big companies rarely produce machines specifically for small-scale farmers. And if they do, the maintenance costs are high and the farmers have to adjust their farming techniques to the logic of the machines. Technology, after all, is not neutral.

So the farmers decide to design the agricultural machines themselves. They produce machines to accommodate their needs and not to sell them for a price on the market. They share their designs with the world – as a global digital commons. Small scale farmers from the US share similar needs with their French counterparts. They do the same. After a while, the two communities start to talk to each other and create synergies.

That’s the story of the non-profit network FarmHack (US) and the co-operative L’Atelier Paysan (France) which both produce open-source designs for agricultural machines.

With our colleagues, we have been exploring the contours of an emerging mode of production that builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies.

We call this model “design global, manufacture local” and argue that it could lead to sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption. It follows the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global while what is heavy (manufacturing) is local, and ideally shared.

When knowledge is shared, materials tend to travel less and people collaborate driven by diverse motives. The profit motive is not totally absent, but it is peripheral.

Decentralised open resources for designs can be used for a wide variety of things, medicines, furniture, prosthetic devices, farm tools, machinery and so on. For example, the Wikihouse project produces designs for houses; the RepRap community creates designs for 3D printers. Such projects do not necessarily need a physical basis as their members are dispersed all over the world.

Finding sustainability

But how are these projects funded? From receiving state funding (a research grant) and individual donations (crowdfunding) to alliances with established firms and institutions, commons-oriented projects are experimenting with various business models to stay sustainable.

These globally connected local, open design communities do not tend to practice planned obsolescence. They can adapt such artefacts to local contexts and can benefit from mutual learning.

In such a scenario, Ecuadorian mountain people can for example connect with Nepalese mountain farmers to learn from each other and stop any collaboration that would make them exclusively dependent on proprietary knowledge controlled by multinational corporations.

Towards ‘cosmolocalism’

This idea comes partly from discourse on cosmopolitanism which asserts that each of us has equal moral standing, even as nations treat people differently. The dominant economic system treats physical resources as if they were infinite and then locks up intellectual resources as if they were finite. But the reality is quite the contrary. We live in a world where physical resources are limited, while non-material resources are digitally reproducible and therefore can be shared at a very low cost.

Moving electrons around the world has a smaller ecological footprint than moving coal, iron, plastic and other materials. At a local level, the challenge is to develop economic systems that can draw from local supply chains.

Imagine a water crisis in a city so severe that within a year the whole city may be out of water. A cosmolocal strategy would mean that globally distributed networks would be active in solving the issue. In one part of the world, a water filtration system is prototyped – the system itself is based on a freely available digital design that can be 3D printed.

This is not fiction. There is actually a network based in Cape Town, called STOP RESET GO, which wants to run a cosmolocalisation design event where people would intensively collaborate on solving such a problem.

The Cape Town STOP RESET GO teams draw upon this and begin to experiment with it with their lived challenges. To make the system work they need to make modifications, and they document this and make the next version of the design open. Now other locales around the world take this new design and apply it to their own challenges.

Limitations and future research

A limitation of this new model is that the problems of its two main pillars, such as information and communication as well as local manufacturing technologies. These issues may pertain to resource extraction, exploitative labour, energy use or material flows.

A thorough evaluation of such products and practices would need to take place from a political ecology perspective. For example, what is the ecological footprint of a product that has been globally designed and locally manufactured? Or,to what degree do the users of such a product feel in control of the technology and knowledge necessary for its use and manipulation?

Now our goal is to provide some answers to the questions above and, thus, better understand the transition dynamics of such an emerging mode of production.

Reposted from The Conversation

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Peer production is on the rise as a new pathway of value creation, where peer-to-peer infrastructures allow people to communicate, self-organise and co-create digital commons of knowledge, software and design. Think of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the myriad of free and open-source projects such as Linux, or open design and hardware communities such as Wikihouse, L’Atelier Paysan, Sensorica or Farmhack.

The commons ecosystem

At the core of this new value model are the ‘productive communities’, which include both paid and unpaid labour. Around these commons, an economy of products and services that are based on the commons pools, but also adding to them, is formed. This is done by enterprises that create ‘entrepreneurial coalitions’ around the commons ecosystem and the productive communities.

These contributions to the digital commons are enabled by collaborative infrastructures of production, and supportive legal and institutional infrastructures, empowered by ‘for-benefit’ (as opposed to for-profit) associations. These foundations may create digital commons depositories, protect against infringements of open and sharing licenses, organise fundraising drives for infrastructure, and assist knowledge-sharing through local, national and international conferences.

Typically, the non-profit foundations of free and open-source communities, such as the Mozilla Foundation, manage and enable the infrastructure of co-operation. They defend the use of open licenses, sometimes provide training or certification, but overall their task is to enable and empower co-operation. These institutions generally function with formal democratic procedures, such as elections.

From communities to societies

These foundations operate as the ‘polis’, i.e. mini-states of the commons-based peer production ecosystems. Moving from what we can see of the existing practice at the micro-level, to the vision of a full social form, we can see that there is also a need for a ‘state form’.

In our vision, a commons-centric society would ideally have:

• a productive civil society that would contribute to the commons,
• a generative market that would create added value around the commons,
• a partner state, which is emerging prefiguratively in some urban practices, such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons or some policies of the Barcelona En Comú citizen platform.

In this vision, the partner state would be the guarantor of civic rights, but also of the equal contributory potential of all citizens. Without this function, communities could have unequal access to resources and capabilities, perpetuating inequality. In our vision, the state form would gradually lose its separateness from civil society, by implementing radically democratic procedures and practices.

Public-good institutions like these are necessary in the face of rising individualistic political philosophies, such as anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism, that only see individuals making contracts with each other. Society needs its specific forms of expression. The state is one of them. And the state imaginary we argue for, synchronised with the special characteristics of digital technologies, could be that of the partner state. Watch this space.

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation. Vasilis Kostakis is a senior researcher at Tallinn University of Technology and a research affiliate at Harvard University.

Lead image: Wikihouse is an open-source library of house-building plans. Photo: Wikihouse Foundation

Originally published in Red Pepper.

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WikiHouse Foundation is a non-profit registered in the UK, please donate to support us at http://www.wikihouse.cc/support/

@WikiHouseUK

Supported by Wikihouse Foundation http://www.wikihouse.cc
Production by Dynamichrome http://www.dynamichrome.com

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But open source projects tend to exist in somewhat of a paradox. They are propelled by extremely skilled and well-educated people, but the financial compensation for projects is often low or nonexistent. Even though they are sometimes used by communities of many thousands or millions of people, the output of projects is often expected to be free of charge. While open source methods are responsible for many profound innovations in our lives, most societies have yet to understand or appreciate the meaning of “open source.”

If open source projects do not always make money, what propels them to continue growing? How does an open source project get started, and how does it evolve? What are some things to embrace and avoid when working on open source projects? The following noteworthy initiatives offer some instructive answers.

Open Source Ecology

The ambitious goal of this small organization is to develop fifty open source industrial machines that can be used to build a civilization from scratch. This includes everything from bread ovens to ploughs and 3D printers. In each case, the idea is to make useful tools out of cheap, accessible parts and share how to do so on the Internet.

OSE is the brainchild of Marcin Jakubowski, whose original mission to start a sustainable farm was hindered by the fact that proprietary agricultural tools are expensive and difficult to repair. To help his farm and his wallet, Marcin began building his own tools like a tractor and a press to make compressed earth bricks useful for building. He documented his work rigorously on a blog and YouTube channel, catching the attention of other tinkerers who began contributing time and resources to support Marcin’s efforts.

Marcin’s goals evolved quickly from developing a farm, to inventing an ecosystem of modular open source tools called the Global Village Construction Set. The project aims to supply anyone with designs and tutorials to build their own machines, thus enabling people to become more autonomous as farmers and less dependent on industrial producers. Adopting radical open principles, Marcin began documenting his work on a public wiki, including theories, detailed plans, and even financial information. A successful crowdfunding campaign and a supporter subscription system helped fund early development, but for the first few years, the project was often financially precarious.

After building a productive following of hundreds, several successful prototypes, and a community living space onsite, OSE’s proof of concept seemed to be emerging. The project received several lucrative grants to continue development, and an invitation to speak at the celebrated TED conference.

Although OSE was attracting a lot of attention, its infrastructure, both in terms of governance and the physical space at his farm in Maysville, Missouri, was not able to deal with the flow of people wanting to collaborate. Marcin’s brainchild needed other brains to grow, but living conditions were poor and he lacked basic skills in community management. After several fallouts with OSE collaborators, he became seen as unappreciative of the community and the organization evolved into a one-man show where credit for the work of many seemed to be going only to Marcin. This was obviously harmful to the collaborative environment, and led to an unhealthy, disempowering dynamic within the community. OSE needed structural stability, but with the team constantly changing, the project began to suffer. However, the vision and goals were compelling enough that money and people continued to pour in.

Currently OSE seems to be stabilizing, but the lofty ambition of developing fifty Global Village Construction Set machines still seems far off. This is the story of a project that evolved organically, but perhaps too fast and without stable governance. With a focus on machines and not on people, the vision has suffered, but there remains great potential for its future, should these issues be resolved.

Perhaps OSE’s most profound achievement is the influence it has had, which reaches far beyond the thirty acres of farmland in Missouri. In pioneering open agriculture and engineering with such ambition, new shoots are rising to adopt and spread these methods, as seen in robust collaborative projects such as Farm Hack.

WikiHouse & Open Desk

As recent graduates in 2011, architects Alastair Parvin and Nicholas Ierodiaconou found themselves hired by an innovative London design practice called Zero Zero Architecture. Both shared a passion for open design and were given the opportunity to experiment with their ideas.

While exploring CNC [computer numerical control] fabrication, the two architects and their team used automated printer-like technology to design files that could be fabricated from plywood, which in turn allowed them to develop a construction system made of large, flat wooden pieces. These pieces could be assembled quickly and with unskilled labor to make the structural shell of a home.

After publishing the Wikihouse construction system as open source files available to anyone, the project encouraged others to adapt its creations for different environments. They released a manifesto outlining the core principles of the organization, and invited people to sign up in their own individual chapters. This allowed a collaborative network to form without compromising anybody’s autonomy. The community, twenty chapters strong in 2015, is able to connect with the project without requiring management from Wikihouse and its small team. Wikihouse is now registering as a nonprofit foundation, using grants and pre-made kits to fund development.

Open Desk is an online platform developed by Alastair and Nicolas for selling furniture that is designed and produced through open source principles. Although structured as a for-profit company, Open Desk is a collaborative community of designers, makers and buyers. Designers propose furniture designs that can be made using the same plywood fabrication technique used by Wikihouse. The proposed designs are voted upon by the community, and if demand is high, they are added to the official product line. Users have the choice to either download the files and make the product themselves (for a small fee) or buy a prefabricated product though the site. Orders are assigned to a fabrication facility local to the client, and revenues are split three ways between the designer, the manufacturer and Open Desk.

The system is not entirely open source because use of the designs must be purchased (albeit only for a small amount) and they come with licenses that prohibit commercial reproduction of the products (although noncommercial, personal copying is allowed). This has been done in an effort to protect and incentivize Open Desk’s designer community.

Open Desk and Wikihouse were intentionally founded on open principles in an effort to foster communities of designers and users. By changing the traditional model of design and manufacturing, they are allowing for global collaboration linked to local production, slowly inverting the standard “producer to consumer” production model to something more participatory, innovative and accessible.

Public Lab

Public Lab is an organization that creates cheap, open source hardware and software tools to help citizens document and investigate environmental problems together. It began in 2005 when a group of loosely affiliated activists set off to Louisiana in the wake of the BP oil spill. There, they began documenting coastal oil pollution using low-tech kite mapping techniques. Over the past few years, the organization has grown into an international community whose members are working to understand their natural environments with greater scientific precision, and to hold to account those responsible for damaging them.

Public Lab describes itself as a community supported by a nonprofit organ­ization. Through their store, they sell low-cost open source monitoring kits, which are legally considered donations. This allows them to secure foundation grants while also earning revenues from sales of their monitoring products. As an open source hardware developer, Public Lab provides guides on how anyone can make their tools at home for free.

Public Lab’s real value is not in the tools, but what is done with them. The balloon mapping kit, for example, allows users to create exceptionally high-resolution aerial photographs (to map oil pollution or coastal erosion) for exceptionally low costs. The images can then be uploaded to Public Lab’s website where users can stitch them together using open source software, and where the maps can be analyzed by the community. The resulting images (if good enough) are even scraped by Google and added to their mapping services. (This is an example of how open-platform corporations often appropriate things from the commons for their own profit-making purposes, and why many digital commoners are now turning to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses.)

Public Lab is a fine example of how a dedicated community with useful open-source tools can populate a digital commons with valuable data. The website is heavily editable in the manner of a large public wiki/notebook hybrid so that everyone’s work is documented. The community is motivated by a curiosity or concern, and the Public Lab website gives people access to the tools and information they need to help investigate. The resulting discoveries can be documented, shared and used to lobby for political change.

Jeff Warren, one of Public Lab’s cofounders, calls this “speaking the language of power.” Rather than petitioning for change through traditional means of protest, which may or may not be respected by authorities, the hard scientific data produced by the Public Labs community gives it powerful factual justifications to launch official investigations.

Public Lab is a project which evolved organically from a group of activists who realized they were developing an important new form of community activism based on the power of open data, open hardware and open source software to influence government policymaking and enforcement.

Conclusion

What motivates these projects to contribute to our commons? I think the answers vary a great deal. Open Source Ecology is driven by a desire for autonomy in farming. Wikihouse wants to lower barriers to custom design. Open Desk is expanding creative designs and localized production. Public Lab is pioneering new forms of effective, scientific activism.

. There is another salient force here: a recognition that business as usual often serves to separate us from what is really important and cannot create the scale or speed of change needed to address the multitude of challenges we face in the modern world.

Tristan Copley-Smith (US) is a documentary filmmaker and communications expert aiming to empower positive disruptions in technology and society. He has worked with organizations like Wikileaks and Open Source Ecology to build supportive followings and communities, and is cofounder of the Open Source Beehives citizen science project.

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 Will Scullin

Photo by oranginaaaa

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The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy.

Can we transform the renting economy of Uber and AirBnB into a genuine sharing one? Platform cooperatives must become open and commons-oriented.

Text by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis: If feudalism was based on the ownership of land by an elite, the resource now controlled by a small minority is networked data. Or, as in the case of Uber, AirBnB and TaskRabbit, it takes the form of a kind of on-demand labour system, where individuals-freelancers contribute their infrastructure and labour.

What is platform cooperativism?

The concept of “platform cooperative” has been proposed as an alternative to such “sharing economy” firms. A platform cooperative is an online platform (e.g. website, mobile app) that is organized as a cooperative and owned by its employees, customers, users, or other key stakeholders. For example, see a directory of several platform co-ops around the world.

We fully support the broader movement of platform cooperativism. However, we cannot be content with isolated cooperative alternatives designed to counter old forms of capitalism. A global counter-economy needs to be built. And this could happen through the creation of a global digital commons of knowledge.

How could commons-based peer production converge with cooperativism?

Commons-based peer production has brought about a new logic of collaboration between networks of people who freely organize around a common goal using shared resources, and market-oriented entities that add value on top of or alongside them.

Prominent cases of commons-based peer production, such as the free and open-source software and Wikipedia, inaugurate a new model of value creation, different from both markets and firms. The creative energy of autonomous individuals, organized in distributed networks, produces meaningful projects, largely without traditional hierarchical organization or, quite often, financial compensation.

This represents both challenges and opportunities for traditional models of cooperativism, which date back to the nineteenth century, and which have often over time tended to adopt competitive mentalities. In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting, or producing commons, and they usually function under the patent and copyright system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around their local or national membership. As a result, the global arena is left open to be dominated by large corporations. Arguably, these characteristics need changing, and today, there is a way for them to change.

What is open cooperativism?

The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons-based peer production. Pat Conaty and David Bollier have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other.”

To a greater degree than traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives would statutorily be oriented towards the common good by co-building digital commons. This could be understood as extending, not replacing, the seventh cooperative principle of concern for community. For instance, open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of immaterial and material commons; and be socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

Can we go beyond the classical corporate paradigm?

We outline a list of six interrelated strategies for post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions. The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy.

First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Though knowledge can be shared easily and at very low marginal cost when it is in digital form, closed firms use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digitized knowledge. Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so that extra profits may be generated. This is particularly galling in the context of life-saving medicines or planet-regenerating technological knowledge. Open cooperatives, in comparison, would recognize natural abundance and refuse to generate revenue by making abundant resources artificially scarce.

Second, a typical commons-based peer production project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute. For instance, in free and open-source software projects, participants contribute code, create designs, maintain the websites, translate text, co-develop the marketing strategy, and offer support to users. Salaries based on a fixed job description may not be the most appropriate way to reward those who contribute to such processes. Open co-ops, therefore, may practice, for example, open value accounting or contributory accounting. Any income the contributions generate then flow to contributors according to the points they accrued. This model could be an antidote to the tendency in many firms for just a few well-placed contributors to capture the value that has been co-created by a much larger community.

Third, open cooperatives could secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “CopyFair” licenses. Existing copyleft licenses – such as Creative Commons and the GNU Public License – allow anyone to reuse the necessary knowledge commons on the condition that changes and improvements are added to that same commons. That framework, however, fails to encourage reciprocity for commercial use of the commons, or to foster a level playing field for commons-oriented enterprises. These shortcomings can be met through CopyFair licenses that allow for sharing while also expecting reciprocity. For example, the FairShares Association uses a Creative Commons non-commercial license for the general public, but allows members of its organization to use the content commercially.

Fourth, open cooperatives would make use of open designs to produce sustainable goods and services. For-profit enterprises often aim to achieve planned obsolescence in products that would wear out prematurely. In that way, they maintain tension between supply and demand and maximize their profits; obsolescence is a feature, not a bug. In contrast, open design communities, such as these of the Farmhack, the Wikihouse, and the RepRap 3D printers, do not have the same incentives, so the practice of planned obsolescence is arguably alien to them.

Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives could reduce waste. The lack of transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed enterprises means they will have a hard time creating a circular economy ­– one in which the output of one production process is used as an input for another. But open cooperatives could create ecosystems of collaboration through open supply chains. These chains may enhance the transparency of the production processes and enable participants to adapt their behavior based on the knowledge available in the network. There is no need for overproduction once the realities of the network become common knowledge. Open cooperatives could then move beyond an exclusive reliance on imperfect market price signals and toward mutual coordination of production, thanks to the combination of open supply chains and open value accounting.

Sixth, open cooperatives could mutualize not only digital infrastructures but also physical ones. The misnamed “sharing economy” of Airbnb and Uber, despite all the justified critique it receives, illustrates the potential in matching idle resources. Co-working, skill-sharing, and ride sharing are examples of the many ways in which we can reuse and share resources. With co-ownership and co-governance, a genuine sharing economy could achieve considerable advances in more efficient resource use, especially with the aid of shared data facilities and manufacturing tools.

How does the concept of platform cooperativism relate to the notion of open cooperativism?

Cooperative ownership of platforms can begin to reorient the platform economy around a commons-oriented model.

We have highlighted six practices that are already emerging in various forms but need to be more universally integrated. We believe that the major aim for fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value which is now feeding speculative capital, and re-invest it in the development of commons-oriented productive communities. Otherwise, the potential of commons-based peer production will remain underdeveloped and subservient to the dominant system. Platform cooperatives must not merely replicate false scarcities and unnecessary waste; they must become open and commons-oriented.

Note: This text is based on the authors’ chapter in Ours to Hack and to Own (edited by T. Scholz & N. Schneider, OR Books, 2016). Parts of this text have also been included in A Commons Transition and P2P Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature.

Cross-posted from Open Democracy

Photo by xeconomiasolidaria

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