Top Ten P2P Trends of 2015

1. Poor to Poor, Peer to Peer: The year of self-organized mass migration and "trans-migrants"

This was the year in which mass migrations of millions of war refugees [1] were organized by social media (specifically through 'secret' Facebook groups) and in which scores of citizens organized themselves through peer to peer networks to assist them. This is also the year of publication of a major book on transmigration, i.e. the movements of people who come to the West not to stay, but in rotational organization, often organized as ethnic and religious phyles, as documented in the book by Alain Tarrius, entitled, "Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer" [2] (Editions de l’Aube, 2015). One example many Europeans may be familiar with are the indigenous people from Otavallo, Ecuador, with their pan-flute music and sale of Alpacca wool in many European cities with over 40,000 people, and responsible for one third of the local GDP; and also the sufi brotherhoods from Senegal, selling not so authentic luxury goods on the continent's beaches. Tarius has uncovered many such circuits, linking the poor of the Global South, to the immigrant neighborhoods of western countries. For P2P Foundation documentation, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Solidarity

2. Inspired by Enspiral: The further maturation of post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions

The ethnic and religious phyles mentioned above are mirrored by the strengthening of affinity-based commons-oriented business eco-systems.

We mentioned their emergence as one of the great trends of 2014, and they have mostly continued to grow and mature. Beyond the corporation, there are now these budding seed forms of post-corporate business eco-systems that creating livelihoods for productive communities and their commons, such as Enspiral with Loomio and the open hardware designs of Sensorica.

This year, I visited Enspiral in their heartland of New Zealand, seeing them up close and I very much liked what I saw.

Here's a good [3]description from Josef Davies-Coates:

"Enspiral is made up of three parts: The Enspiral Foundation, Enspiral Services and Startup Ventures. I’d say they’re the best current example of an Open Co-op, but how they actually describe themselves is as “a virtual and physical network of companies and professionals working together to create a thriving society” and as an “experiment to create a collaborative network that helps people do meaningful work.” A core part of their strategy is to open source their model. In short, not only are they doing almost exactly what United Diversity wants to do — they’re also building the open source tools actually needed to do it!

The Enspiral Foundation is the charitable company at the heart of the Enspiral network. It’s the legal custodian of assets held collectively by the network, and the entity with which companies and individuals have a formal relationship. Decisions are made using Loomio and budgets are set using Cobudget.

A network of professionals work together in teams to offer Enspiral Services, a range of business services under one roof. By default members pool 20% of their invoices into a collective bucket, 25% of which goes to the Foundation. Loomio and Cobudget are then used to decide how to spend the rest. For Startup Ventures, Enspiral works with social entrepreneurs to launch start-ups who then support the work of the Foundation, and Enspiral as a whole, through flexible revenue share agreements: ventures choose their own contribution rate, usually around 5% of revenue."

Check our wiki descriptions of Enspiral, Las Indias, Sensorica, Ethos, and Fora do Eixo.

Ouishare and other partners organized a seminar to examine these new practices this December, here is their video presentation reflecting the emergences of these practices, see at https://vimeo.com/142884370

* For P2P Foundation documentation on the new open corporate formats, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open_Company_Formats and specifically on the post-corporate ethicla entrepreneurial coalitions, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Post-Corporate

3. The Collaborative Technology Alliance, digital synergy, and the blockchain: making the alternative P2P infrastructure interoperable

While it is too early to predict how successful this effort will be, I consider the meeting and the launch of this alliance, which brings together post-corporate alliances like Enspiral and a dozen others, to be a pivot. The aim is not to compete with hacker alternatives to Facebook, but simply to make already used technology, like Loomio and Co-Budget for Enspiral, interoperable with each other. This is definitely the most realistic strategy to arrive at a interconnection of ethical and non-netarchical technologies.

A similar initiative is growing in France and the francophone world, under the name Synergie Numerique, https://journeesynergienumerique.hackpad.com/Rsum-Journe-synergie-numrique-iQ9qiuqFRrB

• For P2P Foundation documentation on technological peer to peer infrastructures, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Infrastructure

4. From commons in the city to The City as a Commons: political commons transitions at the city level

This year the IASC, the venerable scholarly association which continues the work of Elinor Ostrom, held a memorable conference that sealed the evolution from paying attention to commons in the city, to actually seeing the whole city as a commons. The work of Christian Iaione and his team at LabGov, co-responsible already for the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, is exemplary for this trend, which is expanding in a number of other Italian cities (co-mantova, co-palermo, co-battaglia, ..) . This evolution parallels the historic wins of the commons-oriented municipal coalitions in a number of Spanish cities, such as the En Comu coalition in Barcelona. In Saillans, France, and in Frome, UK, with their Flatpack Democracy Toolkit, civic coalitions displaced the political parties, and the big win of a progressive coalition in Grenoble, was also a vindication of citizen-centric attitudes by the political parties in this coalition.

* For P2P Foundation documentation on commons-centric urbanism, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Urbanism

5. The launch of independent, commons-centric civic organisations

I called for this about three years ago, but they are finally emerging.

A proto-Assembly of the Commons has been operating in Ghent, Belgium; and on the occasion of a big francophone city festival on the commons (Villes en Commun), Toulouse and a few other french cities launched Assemblies of the Commons. A Europe-wide Assembly meeting is planned at the EU-level. In Chicago, a Chamber of the Commons was launched, and just this month, a Commons Transition Coalition for Melbourne and other places in Australia. This means that commoners will increasingly learn to have a political and social voice.

* For P2P Foundation documentation on p2p and commons movements, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Movements

6. The Poc 21, OSCE Days and the blockchain-based open supply-chains as important steps towards an Open Source Circular Economy

Poc21.cc was a great project by Ouishare and OpenState that brought together a dozen sustainable open hardware project in an attempt to interconnect them as a miniature circular economy, a proof of concept to be given to the COP21 organizers, who failed once more to offer a real solution to climate change (though the imperfect agreement is at least a first positive step in the light of previous failures to even come to an agreement). Watch the video of the experience here.

The OSCE Days organized by Lars Zimmerman et al. were also a great set of experiences that spread the message about the crucial necessity for open sourcing productive supply chains. The Provenance group has written an essential report outlining how the Blockchain may play a vital role in this.

How the Blockchain could function in this mutual coordination economy, particularly in the context of open source participatory and open value chains that operate as eco-systems, is the object of a White Paper by the Provenance group [4].

Also check the work of Bob Haugen, Lynn Foster and others at Sensorica on Radically Distributed Supply Chain Systems and Network Resource Planning, in particular the software projects around the open value flow project such as Mikorizal, and converging projects like Wezer by the Valeureux group in France.

At the P2P Foundation, we theorized for the first time, the overall thermodynamic efficiencies that will come out of the open source stack, and with the help of the Blaqswans collective, will be calculating the effects more seriously in the coming year.

Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

• Article [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text

• Article [2015] “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”. text

For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sustainable_Manufacturing

7. Platform Cooperativism, Commonfare the new mutuals for precarious labor

The CSG report

The NYC conference

The Ouishare conference

Examples

The Saw-B report

Examples of commonfare

Planned basic income experiments in the Netherlands and Finland

For P2P Foundation documentation on open and platform cooperativism, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Cooperatives

8. The Emergence of Meta-Economic Networks

The Mutual Aid Network, Madison, Wisconsin

Encommuns.org

Solidarity Districts

Common Good Economy

For P2P Foundation documentation on , see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:

10. The initiation of a legal tradition for the Commons

For several years, we have been collating the evolution of a new law of the commons on our p2p foundation website, but David Bollier has published a synthetic overview this year that does a lot to advance our understanding of this trend. See the version of David's work, the Law and the Commons project, here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Law_and_the_Commons_Project

The new book by Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community [5] is another illustration of this trend, and the progressive Catholic journalist Nathan Schneider has argued that the Pope's latest encyclical, Laudate Si, is part of that same evolution.

For P2P Foundation documentation on the emergence of P2P and Commons Law, see here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Law David Bollier's report