P2P Foundation:Purpose

The purpose of the P2P Foundation as outlined in the P2P Foundation:Incorporating Documents, filed in Holland in 2007, is to:

1. Support peer-to-peer practices, on related work that encompasses the broadest incidental meaning of these words.
2. The foundation pursues its goal to be achieved through: documentation, promotion and research.

Over time some part of this activity has been directed towards studying "the impact of Peer to Peer technology and thought on society."

Additionally, these goals are accomplished by:

• Combining subjectivity (values), intersubjectivity (relations), objectivity (enabling technology) and interobjectivity (forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, supporting the evolution of a P2P with many perspectives.
• The P2P Foundation serves as a common initiative that provides a platform to draw attention to the P2P ethos that implicitly associates discrete separate movements and projects
• By bringing people and information together The Foundation connects and mutually informs
• The Foundation strives for integrative insights from the many interwoven fields of study and application;
• The Foundation facilitates the creation and linking of other nodes active in the P2P field, organized around topics and common interests, locality, and any form of identity and organization which makes sense for the people involved
• The web publishing platform of The Foundation is a set of website including a directory, an electronic newsletter and blog, and a magazine. It aims to be one of the places where people can interconnect and strengthen each other, and discuss topics of common interest.

Additional, additional notes: We function as a clearinghouse for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented initiatives.

We aim to be a pluralist network to document, research, and promote peer to peer alternatives. Our political aims could be summarized under the following maxims:

1. ending the destruction of the biosphere by abandoning the dangerous conceptions of pseudo-abundance in the natural world (i.e. based on the assumption that natural resources are infinite);
2. promoting free cultural exchange by abandoning the innovation-inhibiting conceptions of pseudo-scarcity in the cultural world (i.e. based on the assumption that the free flow of culture needs to be restricted through excessive copyrights etc...).