The map’s creators say they envision an equitable distribution of land and resources in the country. According to the nonprofit Urban Institute, the wealth of White families was seven times greater than that of Black families in 2016.

The following article was written by Jean Willoughby and originally published by YES! magazine

Jean Willoughby: Last month, Dallas Robinson received an email from someone she didn’t know, asking if she would be open to receiving a large sum of money—with no strings attached. For once, it wasn’t spam. She hit reply.

Robinson is a beginning farmer with experience in organic agriculture, and has had plans to establish the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm on 10 acres of family land near her home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Located in an area where the poverty rate hovers at nearly 20 percent, according to census data, and where both food insecurity and obesity rates are even higher, the farm will focus on serving the needs of the surrounding community by producing vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms.

The gift from the stranger arrived thanks to a new online map, the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a project to promote “people-to-people” reparations.

Robinson’s project was the first to be fully funded, says Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm, which created the map. Penniman credits Viviana Moreno, a farmer from Chicago, for suggesting the idea.

“This past summer at our Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion program, we were all talking about two farms given by White people to farmers of color as examples of reparations and restoration, and Viviana said we need more of this people-to-people giving,” she says. Moreno’s own Catatumbo Cooperative Farm is listed on the map, and as a fellow graduate of the program, Robinson was invited to list her farm. The map now includes more than 40 projects, which are all directly connected to farming organizations led by people of color.

The map’s creators say they envision an equitable distribution of land and resources in the country. According to the nonprofit Urban Institute, the wealth of White families was seven times greater than that of Black families in 2016. Penniman cites data from the USDA Census, which show that about 95 percent of farms are operated by White farmers.

“This map will catalyze the voluntary transfer of land and resources to people of color as a means to rectify this injustice,” she says.

Robinson says that she’s eager to connect with those who’ve contributed to her project.

“The person who wrote to me, Douglass DeCandia, mentioned hearing me speak at the keynote that Mark Bittman gave at the Young Farmers Conference and at the group dialogue that happened afterward,” Robinson recalls, referring to the conference that was held in December. DeCandia wrote that he would be honored to support her project.

“I started crying,” Robinson says. “Then I wrote back and said, ‘Yes, please,’ and sent my information.” Within days, she received a check for all that she had asked for in her listing.

Now she wants to know more about what moved DeCandia to give. “Because,” she says, “there are millions of people who don’t understand that so many of us, especially young people, are struggling.”

DeCandia says it started with a question posed at the conference: “How do you hold yourself accountable to communities of color and vulnerable communities?”

Both Robinson and DeCandia were in the audience at the conference, at Stone Barns Center in New York, where chef and educator Nadine Nelson directed this question to Bittman, author and former New York Times food columnist. Noting that Bittman spoke often about racism and sexism in the food system, Nelson said she wanted to know what he was doing to hold himself personally accountable.

At first Bittman responded only with “fair enough,” then sat in silence until Nelson asked if he was going to answer, to which he replied that he didn’t know what “hold yourself accountable means.”

It was after listening to this tense exchange that Robinson addressed the room: “Your dismissal was hurtful. It was enraging,” she said. “Y’all don’t listen to us.” She also offered her support to Black people and other people of color in the audience.

“I really wanted to say to Black people: ‘I got us.’”

Robinson explains that several White speakers, Bittman included, had been saying things like “we’re all friends here,” “we should be grateful to be here,” ignoring the racial dynamic of what happened.

But, Robinson says, “accountability means that we listen to each other. Friendship is about being able to have hard conversations together.”

Nelson’s question at Stone Barns has led to such conversations taking place with more urgency and resolve among communities of color and White people.

“Nadine putting her neck out like that and getting ignored led to about 30–40 White people coming together afterward and asking what they could do,” Robinson says.

Two offshoot groups formed, with people of color meeting to discuss their frustrations and needs, and White people gathering to create a list of resources they could share, “a reparations list.”

“That was a powerful moment,” DeCandia says. “As a White, cisgendered, middle-class male, I’ve been asking myself how I’m actually holding myself accountable.”

Since the event, he says, he’s started asking that question of others—at work, the farmers market, and at home. He and others in his community have also used video of the Nelson–Bittman exchange as a teaching tool.

When a friend sent him the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, it reignited the question he’d been asking himself.

“I opened the map, and the first project I saw was the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm,” he says.

The combination of the Stone Barns incident and the reparations map has given DeCandia a new framework for understanding accountability.

“I realized I have to start mobilizing in White communities, my family, my friends,” he says, “and doing that in direct accountability with folks who are most impacted, meeting stated needs rather than creating some idea in my head about who needs what and what needs to be done.”

Several articles have been published since the Stone Barns conference, and the National Black Food & Justice Alliance responded with a statement echoing the need for accountability.

Bittman apologized on Twitter, and Nelson says that he has also reached out to her personally.

But she would still like for him to respond to her question.

“He should also ask his contemporaries: Michael Pollan, Anna Lappé, Tom Colicchio, and others,” Nelson says. “He could do a roundtable, a podcast, whatever works. I want him to dig in and help present the responses.”

In sum, Nelson wants Bittman to organize in his community among his peers.

As for herself, Nelson was inspired by what happened. She recently launched “Stir the Pot,” a series of community cooking and conversation events. Hosted in collaboration with the New Haven Food Policy Council, each gathering uses an essay from Julia Turshen’s Feed The Resistance as a starting point for conversation. Nelson sees it as a model other communities can borrow.

“This is an isolating field to be Black, young, and gay in,” Robinson says, speaking of her farming experience. “If you’re a male farmer, you’ve got more people to identify with. If I want to find women or people of color to learn from or work for, it’s harder.”

She hopes that will change with her Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm, which she envisions as a place of cultural connection, drawing on what she describes as a transformative experience she had training at Soul Fire Farm.

“We learned about the agricultural geniuses that our ancestors were,” she said. “Farming is part of our culture.”

As for Soul Fire Farm, they’ve just given the country at least one way to resolve a $6.4 trillion debt to Black America.

If Black people had been paid for their agricultural labor, rather than enslaved, today they would have at least that much in the bank. For those unfamiliar with reparations math, that’s the lowest major estimate. It was originally made by Martin Luther King Jr., who calculated that $20 per week since the late 1700s for 4 million slaves would total $800 billion, about $6.4 trillion today.

Along with people-to-people reparations, Penniman says, creating equity in the food system will take social movements, better farm policies, and legislation like H.R. 40, a bill introduced repeatedly by Rep. John Conyers since 1989 to research the impact of slavery and discrimination in order to “recommend appropriate remedies.” She says that the new map complements a larger effort coordinated by the National Black Food & Justice Alliance to promote reparations.

Such efforts will require answering difficult questions, but at least asking them acknowledges their importance.

“Because of Nadine’s question,” Robinson says, “I was able to get all that I asked for, because of her belief in the importance of asking this question.” She also gained something intangible, a sense of connection.

“We went through something together. We all got closer and got to experience some healing as Black people.”

About Jean Willoughby

Jean is a writer and film/video producer. She co-wrote and produced the documentary film Under Contract: Farmers and the Fine Print (2017). Her latest book is Nature’s Remedies: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Herbs (Chronicle Books, 2016). Her writing has been published in Food Tank, MAKE: Magazine (online), and The New Farmer’s Almanac. Follow her on Twitter @jean_willo.

The post A Digital Map Leads to Reparations for Black and Indigenous Farmers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

MJ Kaplan: The future of jobs, work, and workplaces is facing rampant transformation. One of the most visible changes has been the rising number of contract workers, who, according to the Freelancers’ Union, number 57.3 million people in the US. That’s 36 percent of all workers! If current trends continue, by 2027, contract workers will outnumber wage workers nationally.

These 57 million freelancers benefit from some aspects of on-demand arrangements, such as flexible schedules. But the negative consequences of the gig economy often overshadow the positives. Contract workers face fewer protections, low pay, lack of job security, and no benefits. For example, the Freelancers’ Union notes that 63 percent of contract workers have to dip into their savings at least once a month, compared to 20 percent of wage workers.

Amid this upheaval, platform cooperatives are emerging as a new type of enterprise. These startups build on the positive heritage of more than 100 years of cooperatives, with a deeply human-centered ethos, and leverage platform technology for scale and sustainability. Stakeholders—users, employees, and other members—govern the company and share in the success.

Platform co-ops are forming in response to formidable platform monopolies. In the West, Google controls search, Facebook and Twitter rule social media, and Amazon leads in e-commerce. You’re probably also familiar with ridesharing services, which are dominated by Uber and Lyft. As Nick Srnicek writes in the Guardian , “Data is quickly becoming the 21st-century version of oil—a resource essential to the entire global economy, and the focus of intense struggle to control it. Platforms, as spaces in which two or more groups interact, provide what is in effect an oilrig for data.”

Platform co-ops offer a mechanism by which users co-own and govern these companies, providing a means for users to protect their data judiciously rather than exploit it through algorithms to maximize profits. Not every algorithm is problematic, of course; most of us, for example, prefer to have private data extracted in order to be informed of traffic tie-ups. But, a platform co-op makes it possible to subject the decisions that are made about when and how to use private data to democratic control.

Platform co-ops also provide a way to share the wealth generated by the data. For example, Uber drivers in Great Britain barely earn more than the minimum wage , yet Uber itself has a market capitalization of close to $70 billion . Presumably, because the profits generated in a driver-owned Uber would accrue to the drivers themselves, a driver-owned Uber would share the wealth far more equitably than an Uber controlled by venture capital investors.

Cooperatives are largely misunderstood, even though they contribute substantially to the economy and to communities. A 2009 study estimated that 30,000 US cooperatives account for nearly $654 billion in revenue. More than 120 million Americans are also member-owners of a co-op, most commonly of a credit union or electric co-op. Yet only 11 percent of respondents could define basic elements of a co-op, according to a 2015 survey .

Fundamentally, cooperatives are businesses owned and run by and for their members. Whether customers, employees, or residents, members have an equal say in what the business does and a share in the profits. Cooperatives work in a variety of sectors and range from neighborhood-based, such as a children’s preschool or grocery store, to multinational.

Many co-ops are major players in their industries. For instance, roughly 900 electric cooperatives in 47 states provide service to over 42 million people. Because electric co-ops are concentrated in rural areas, electric co-op distribution lines provide power to regions that cover almost three-quarters of the nation’s landmass. These companies actively support their communities in addition to providing safe, affordable and reliable power.

Another sector where US co-ops are highly prominent is credit unions, where over 5,000 not-for-profit credit unions serve 112 million member-owners, with assets totaling $1.38 trillion. Cooperatives are often more resilient than traditional businesses in part because of strong relationships with their users. Ace Hardware , the world’s largest hardware retail cooperative, grew to 5,000 locations in 60 countries this year at a time when most brick-and-mortar retailers are facing stalling sales, declining stores, and layoffs.

The founders of platform co-ops are designing alternatives to firms like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit (purchased recently by Ikea). Uber may be the poster child for digital market disrupters that are swirling in controversy. These controversies include toxic cultures marked by rampant sexual harassment, as well as additional harmful and illegal practices , such as skirting labor regulations and insurance requirements. Uber has been criticized for its poor treatment of contract labor, employees, and customers, along with its negative impact on local communities.

Infused with massive venture capital, these firms seem to pursue skyrocketing growth at all cost. In contrast, platform co-ops aim to reinvest in their users, employees, and communities, and value positive workplace practices in tandem with profitability. Getting platform cooperatives to scale will not be easy, however. Deep-pocketed firms like Uber have raised billions of dollars and have a first-mover advantage. Moreover, one of the biggest challenges with platforms is that name recognition is highly powerful and there is a tendency toward monopoly.

That said, a growing number of grassroots efforts around the globe are challenging this dynamic. For example, Modo is a car-sharing platform cooperative in Vancouver, British Columbia, with 19,000 members. According to board member William Azaroff, Modo is transforming communities by connecting people with places in a way that is affordable, convenient, inclusive and sustainable. Azaroff spoke at The Platform Cooperativism Consortium’s 3rd annual conference at The New School in New York City in November. Approximately 350 participants from more than 15 countries gathered to share and amplify the value of platform co-ops for workers and sustainable communities.

Homecare workers and cleaners are some of the lowest paid workers, with few rights or protections. Up & Go is a site that promotes and schedules on-demand quality cleaning services for several women-owned cooperative businesses. Workers earn $4–5 more dollars per hour than other cleaning-industry workers in the area and retain 95 percent of the income they generate. The workers can build equity as owners, in addition to earning a fair wage. The software platform amplifies the network’s marketing and streamlines customer support.

According to Nithin Coca, writing in Sharable , Up and Go got off the ground with the assistance of multiple grants, including “one from the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit based in New York City that focuses on fighting poverty, and another from the citizenship initiatives program of the multinational British bank Barclays .” According to Sylvia Morse, Up & Go’s project coordinator, “The impetus for launching Up & Go came from our understanding of the marketing challenges facing worker co-ops—along with the Robin Hood Foundation’s research and focus on the impact of the digital gig economy on low-income workers.”

Unions are also playing an important role to support platform cooperatives. Abby Solomon, a union organizer, spoke at the conference about Carina , a nonprofit online platform that connects low-income seniors and people with disabilities with union represented caregivers in Washington state. The project is a partnership between SEIU 775 and the State of Washington. In California, United Health Workers West helped nurses launch the NursesCan Cooperative , a platform for licensed vocational nurses to provide on-demand care options for health care providers.

Another health care startup is Savvy Cooperative, created by two founders who live with chronic illness. This marketplace connects healthcare innovators and researchers with patients so they can work collaboratively to co-create meaningful patient-centered solutions. Jen Horonjeff, Savvy founder, explains why they chose a co-op structure:

Savvy’s mission is to elevate the patient voice and ensure that patients are fairly valued for their contributions to new innovations. We practice this ourselves as a co-op. By allowing patients to become co-owners, it gives them a vote and share of our profits. We believe this encourages a larger and stronger network of motivated patients, which will better amplify the patient voice in the healthcare industry.

Stocksy United is a stock photo platform cooperative founded in 2012 and based in Victoria, British Columbia. Photographers may seem like they have little in common with homecare workers, but they too face challenges getting work and fair prices. Quality is a hallmark of Stocksy’s success; according to Nuno Silva, its Vice President of Product, Stocksy has nearly 1,000 contributing artists who earned $4.9 million in royalties based on revenues of $10.7 million in 2016. A substantial startup loan was instrumental to jump-start this growth. The cooperative structure provides the foundation to run an ethical, sustainable business that is made stronger by its member-shareholders, according to Silva.

Access to capital is another major challenge facing platform cooperatives. The novelty requires a great deal of education among investors, attorneys and other key players. I experienced this challenge personally in my work with the social enterprise Loomio , a worker-owned cooperative that is a platform for collaborative decision-making. Impact investors were enthusiastic about our mission, values, and prospects for growth. But they were unfamiliar with cooperative structure. So, we needed to educate prospective investors. This cultivation resulted in $460,000 investment in 2016. Loomio’s progress benefitted from the maturing social enterprise sector that has nurtured enabling systems such as policies, legal options and investment. The ecosystem for platform co-ops is nascent, so pioneer founders must overcome many barriers.

Do these startups have a chance for breakout success? If Mara Zepeda has her say, they will. Zepeda, co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, instigated Zebras Unite , a grassroots cooperative movement to change the narrative by funding an ecosystem for purpose-driven startups like platform cooperatives. “Zebra” companies differ fundamentally from Silicon Valley “unicorns”—private startups valued at $1 billion or more. Zebras, mostly founded by women and people of color, favor quality over quantity, reward creation over consumption, and seek sustainable growth over quick exits. Zebras are about repair, not disruption.

Zepeda and her allies aim to remedy the astonishing reality that a mere three percent of venture funding goes to women and less than one percent to people of color. The Zebra network gathered recently at DazzleCon in Portland, Oregon to galvanize the movement to create alternative business models that will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. The Zebra network is committed to create a more just and responsible society. These companies will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.

Trebor Scholz, a New School associate professor and host of the November conference, writes that, “[Platform Cooperatives] can be a reminder that work can be dignified rather than diminishing for the human experience. Cooperatives are not a panacea for all the wrongs of platform capitalism. But they could help to weave some ethical threads into the fabric of 21st-century work.”

This article was originally published by Nonprofit Quarterly.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published with edits to style and grammar. It was updated on January 8, 2018 to reflect how it originally appeared on nonprofitquarterly.org.

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Open Access Scholarly Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

 – David Bollier

Book Publishing as a Commons for Regional Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 – David Bollier

A Community of Commoners in the Guise of a Magazine

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

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

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

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

 – Lara Mallien

A Growing Network of Commons-Oriented Magazines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 – David Bollier and Santiago Hoerth Moura

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

Photo by brewbooks

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