State Policies to Enable Digital Commoning
Discussion
"Formal government policies to assist digital commoning remain mostly on the margin of mainstream politics and policymaking. However, a significant initiative in this area was the 2013-14 FLOK Society Project – Free/Libre Open Knowledge Society – in Ecuador. This project, headed by P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens, sought to “envisage an economy that would no longer be dependent on limited material resources, but on infinite immaterial resources.” The project developed a policy framework to promote online commons-based peer production in its many diverse forms, resulting in more than eighteen legislative proposals including a dozen pilot projects, which were validated in the Buen Conocer Summit at the end of May 2014.
The FLOK project’s detailed research paper addresses the many challenges of building commons-oriented productive capacities (sustainable agriculture, distributed manufacturing and energy), social infrastructure and institutional innovation (the social economy, the Partner State, Open Government), open technical infrastructures (free software, free hardware, cybersecurity), and policies to protect traditional and ancestral knowledge and biodiversity, among other topics. The general FLOK Society agenda, which has larger implications beyond Ecuador, is now continuing under the auspices of the Commons Transition Initiative, [1] headed by Michel Bauwens and Stacco Troncoso."
More Information
See also Bauwens’ assessment of post-FLOK priorities. [2]