David Bollier
David Bollier is the advocate for Public Commons, the co-founder of Public Knowledge, and the author of Brand Name Bullies. Along with Michel Bauwens and Silke Helfrich, he is a member of the Commons Strategies Group
URL = http://www.bollier.org/
Bio
David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and consultant who has spent the past ten years exploring the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He has pursued this work as an editor of On the Commons – a leading website about commons-based policy and politics, and Fellow at On the Commons. Bollier also collaborates with a variety of international and domestic partners, and co-founded the Commons Strategies Group as an international consulting project. In the spring of 2010, he taught “The Rise of the Commons” as the Croxton Lecturer at Amherst College.
Bollier has worked with American television writer/producer Norman Lear since 1984, and is Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is also co-founder and board member of Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the information commons. Bollier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Key Publications
Notable talks, essays and videos:
"This Land is Our Land," 46-minute film/DVD produced by the Media Education Foundation. Trailer: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=146 Embeddable clip: http://www.mediaed.org/wp/this-land-is-our-land-clip
"Framing the Commons" -- 8 minute interview after the International Commons Conference, November 3, 2010 http://www.vimeo.com/17781175
FLOSS as a Commons. Essay for FLOSS Roadmap project, September 2010. https://flossroadmap.co-ment.com/text/H8tMaryjDtl/view/
Seminar video: "Governing the Commons," Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, May 11, 2009. Examines how commoners assert differing notions of freedom, community boundaries, social norms and reliance on law to protect the integrity of their shared resources. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheons/2009/05/bollier
"The Commons as a New Sector of Value-Creation,"plenary remarks at "Economies of the Commons: Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online," De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 12, 2008.
A well-written newspaper article about the commons and my DVD, "This Land Is Our Land" http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=12661
Key Books
Bollier has written or edited thirteen books; the most recent deal with the commons.
- Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (2014) describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical new forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves.
- Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009) describes the rise of free software, free culture, and the movements behind open business models, open science, open educational resources and new modes of Internet-enabled citizenship.
- His first book on the commons, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Commons Wealth (2002), is a far-ranging survey of market enclosures of shared resources, from public lands and the airwaves to creativity and knowledge.
- Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (2005) documents the vast expansion of copyright and trademark law over the past generation.
More Information
- David Bollier on a Policy for the Commons
- David Bollier on Governing the Digital Commons
- David Bollier on the Viral Spiral
- David Bollier on Framing the Commons
- David Bollier on the International Developments of the Commons in 2012
- David Bollier on the Global Status of the Commons Movement in 2011-2012
- David Bollier on the Commons
- David Bollier on Green Governance and the Law of the Commons
- David Bollier on Building a New Digital Republic
- David Bollier on Thinking Like a Commoner
- David Bollier on the Commons as an Approach to Governance, Sustainability and Social Wellbeing
- David Bollier and Michel Bauwens on 800 Years of Commons Law since the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest
- Michel Bauwens in Dialogue with David Bollier on P2P and the Commons
- Academia as a Commons