A directory of social and political movements related to the P2P (participatory), open (open access to knowledge), and 'commons' paradigms.

Introduction

Marco Berlinguer:

"The free culture movements comprise a wide range of experiences mainly emerging around the internet and the digital revolution. They have generally developed independently, but they are loosely aligned and show a mutually reinforcing dynamism – a ‘viral spiral’, as David Bollier begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting terms it.

All these movements emerged as practical and cultural critiques of the aggressive attempts by corporations, aided by Northern governments, to extend intellectual property rights to knowledge, culture, information, communication and even organisms and data. The process has been described as ‘the second enclosures movement’ – the first being the enclosing of common land and turning it into private property in late and post-medieval England.

Following Felix Stalder, we can group these movements into three different clusters:

• the Free Software Movement, focusing on software source code;
• the Free Culture Movement, focusing on cultural goods; and
• the Access To Knowledge (A2K) movement, focusing on access to knowledge-intensive goods."

1. Benjamin Mako Hill explains the Difference between the Free Software and Free Culture Movement
2. Conflicts in open source discourse: review of idea currents in the free and open source software movement.
3. David Bollier: Is the Commons a movement?

Sister Organizations

The following are most similar in intent:

• Oekonux
• Open Knowledge Foundation
• On The Commons

Key Resources

Key Articles

1. David M. Berry, 2004. “The Contestation of Code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movement,” Critical Discourse Studies, volume 1, number 1 (April), pp. 65–89 [1]
2. Benjamin Mako Hill, 2005. “Towards a standard of freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,” [2]
3. The Politics of the Libre Commons by David M. Berry and Giles Moss. First Monday, volume 11, number 9 [3]
4. On the Convergence of social movements to fight IPRs on information in various fields: 10 contributions
5. Stefan Meretz: Ten Theses About Global Commons Movement