Structured Bibliography on P2P and the Commons
Ira Mollay and Michel Bauwens will work on this bibliography during the summer of 2019.
Module 1: The anthropology of peer to peer and the commons
P2P as a relational dynamic: new social relations, then and now
Commoning Against The Crisis. (Chapter 6)
By Angelos Varvarousis and Giorgos Kallis.
URL [1]
The commoning movement in Greece analysed along the lines of liminality as a catalyst following a rhizomatic pattern.
The Commons as an Institution
Understanding the commons: Institutional analysis and ethical arguments.
By Rafael Augusto Ferreira Zanatta. Master Thesis, International University College of Turin Master of Laws Program, 2015.
URL p2p wiki [2] URL later version [3]
The dissertation examines three different schools of the commons (Ostrom, Mattei, Benkler) and examines them for differences in institutional analysis as well as ethical arguments.
The Social Philosophies of the Ostroms' Institutionalism.
By Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter J. Boettke | Mercator Center, George Mason University, Apr 22, 2010
URL [4]
"The main objective of this paper is to explore what we call the “social theory” or the “social philosophy” that presumably shapes, inspires and defines the Ostroms’ research program. Our argument is that what we have called the “social theory” behind the Bloomington School’s research agenda has in fact two facets that may or may not be consistent with each other. Even more, they may or may not be necessarily and inseparably connected with the rest of the program. ..."
The Commons in History
The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe.
By Tine de Moor. IRSH 53 (2008), Supplement, pp. 179–212
URL [5]
Looking back at guilds and fraternities that formed in the late Middle ages to be institutionalized later on. The strong movement was bottom-up, required collective action and relied on tacit agreements between rulers and their subjects.
From Medieval Guilds to Open Source Software: Informal Norms, Appropriability Institutions, and Innovation.
By Robert P. Merges
URL [6]
The essay argues that some modern institutions show features of the medieval guilds, among them open source software development.
The Common Good of Humanity
By François Houtart. Basic Text in six languages.
URL [7]
The essay discusses the history of the Common Good notion through different cultures and its relation to capitalism. It explores the transformation of four fundamental areas of society and the role of orientation that it can give in this process.
Land as a Commons in the Cooperative Tradition
By Pat Conaty.
URL [8]
"The loss of commons land continues to increase with the demise of county farms and the growing sales of public sector land to raise money to close the fiscal deficit. ... Can we go back to the future? History indicates an affirmative answer. Here are some highlights of the historic connection between the fight to reclaim the commons and the practical vision of a Co-operative Commonwealth."
The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.
By E.P.Thompson.
URL [9]
"What is significant about Thompson’s analysis is the way in which he returns agency and thought to the ‘riotous crowd’. Not yet a ‘political’ subject with a clear program for change the people he describes are still capable of resistance and self-organization. These nascent movements emerge sporadically and ambiguously from different ways of valuing and knowing the world."
Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust.
By Larry Lohmann. Corner House
URL [10]
Blockchain, smart contracts etc. in the context of their ecological history and pictures of labour, commons, and capital accumulation seen through different lenses from Marx to Wittgenstein.
Cooperation and morality
Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies.
By Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. Current Anthropology 60, no. 1 (February 2019): 47-69.
URL [11]
Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior will be considered morally good in all cultures. The paper identifies seven cooperative behaviors as plausible candidates for universal moral rules.
The Commons and Nature
Crisis of the Pastoral Commons
By Sandeep Chachra, Executive Director. ActionAid India and Managing Editor, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy (SAGE)
The importance and interconnectedness of pastoral system and pasture commons has been missing from policy discourse. The main objective of this study is to facilitate alliance building and policy advocacy of pastoralists and their main stakeholders to make room for the recognition of rights of dependent communities and better use of pasture commons.
Module 2: The Commons as a mode of production / the commons as economic system
Peer production / peer governance / peer property
Keeping Land Local. Reclaiming Governance from the Market.
Acción Tierra Blog. Land Struggles III: LRAN Briefing Paper Series, Saturday 25 October 2014
URL [14]
"This collection of articles explores some of the challenges facing peasants, farmers, forest dwellers, fisher-folk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples and other local communities in their efforts to build systems for the governance of land, water, forests and territories that are just, participatory, ecologically sound and foster genuinely sustainable forms of living."
Design and Dynamics of Institutions for Collective Action: A Tribute to Prof. Elinor Ostrom.
By Christian Iaione. Conference Paper. Second Thematic Conference of the IASC.
URL [15]
Along a series of practical questions arising from a hypothetical person's thirst for a natural environment, the paper deals with their converging answers: urban spaces and services of common interest.
Student as Producer is hacking the university.
By Joss Winn and Dean Lockwood. (2013) Student as Producer is hacking the university. In: Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age. Routledge.
URL [16]
The paper discusses a project at the University of Lincoln and provides two case studies of the Student as Producer. One in the context of rhizomatic curriculum design, the other about Computer Science students redesigning and developing the tools used for research, teaching and learning.
Production and governance in hackerspaces: A manifestation of Commons-based peer production in the physical realm?
By Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros and Christos Giotitsas.
URL [17]
"This article deals with the phenomenon of hackerspaces and sheds light on the relationship of their underlying values, organizational structures and productive processes to those of the online communities of Commons-based peer production projects. "
Counter-commodification: The economy of contribution in the digital commons.
By Andreas Wittel (2013). Culture and Organization, 19:4, 314-331
URL [18]
"This is an article about digital production and the crisis of capitalism. It is about production in the digital commons and its implications for the building of alternatives to a commodified world. As digital production is at the very heart of cognitive capitalism, the digital commons is not just any other disruption of the process of commodification."
Student as Producer: A Pedagogy for the Avant-Garde; or, how do revolutionary teachers teach?
By Mike Neary.
URL [19]
"A key issue for Student as Producer is that social learning is more than the individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice. "
Student as producer: an institution of the common?
By Mike Neary
URL [20]
"This paper presents the further development of the concept of student as producer from a project that seeks to radicalise the idea of the university by connecting research and teaching, to a vision of higher learning and revolutionary science based on the reconnection of the natural and the social sciences."
A New Way to Govern: Organisations and society after Enron.
By Shann Turnbull. The New Economics Foundation, Public Policy Pocket Book No. 6, London
URL [21] and P2P Wiki article with selected Turnbull bibliography on network governance [22]
The booklet describes network organisations with multiple control centres or boards and identifies them as providing requisite variety of information and control channels to flexibly govern complexity.
Governance of Online Creation Communities for the Building of Digital Commons: Viewed through the framework of the institutional analysis and development.
By Mayo Fuster MorellWorking paper. (2013). Madison, M. J., Strandburg, K., & Frischmann, B. Convening Cultural Commons. Oxford University Press.
URL [23]
"This chapter challenges previous literature by questioning the neutrality of infrastructure for collective action. The governance of OCCs is here analyzed through the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework ..."
Occupy the Farm: A Study of Civil Society Tactics to Cultivate Commons and Construct Food Sovereignty in the United States.
By Antonio Roman-Alcalá. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE YALE UNIVERSITY, SEPTEMBER 14-15, 2013. Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue. Conference Paper #75
URL [24]
"Using the case study of the 2012 illegal occupation of farmland owned by the University of California (“Occupy the Farm”), this paper investigates the promises and practical limits of constructing food sovereignty through direct action in the global North."
Leading the 21st Century : The Conception-Aware, Object-Oriented Organization
By Bonnitta Roy and Jean Trudel
URL [25]
The article "decribes a Generative Systems Model : The “G5” – Five Generative Processes that "entail unique internal dynamics, give rise to unique types of structural organization, and operate in fundamentally different ways"
Organization in the crowd: peer production in large-scale networked protests.
By W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg & Shawn Walker. Information, Communication & Society. Volume 17, Issue 2, 2014, pages 232-260. Special Issue: The Networked Young Citizen.
URL [26]
"How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street."
A Common Assembly: Multitude, Assemblies, and a New Politics of the Common.
By Elise Danielle Thorburn. Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Volume 4 (2): 254 - 279 (November 2012)
URL [27]
The paper explores the assembly - seen recently in contemporary experiments like Occupy - as form, and examines the convergences between emergent assembly projects – such as the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly – and theoretical tools that Autonomist theory has provided.
Making Commons (attempts at composing prospects in the opening of production). PhD Thesis: Doctoral dissertation in Interaction Design. Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication, Faculty: Culture and Society, 2014
By Anna Seravalli.
URL [28]
"This thesis accounts for a designerly inquiry into the swamp of the opening of production. The “opening of production” refers to the rising of openness, collaboration and sharing in processes through which things are made and service delivered. It is defined as a swamp, because it represents a complex landscape where theory and practice meet and where diverse views and understanding of what openness, collaboration and sharing may entail are intertwined."
Sharing Design Rights: A Commons Approach for Developing Infrastructure.
By Nuno Gil and Carliss Y. Baldwin
URL [29]
In this paper, the authors study the dynamics of a commons organization created by Manchester City Council to design a number of new school buildings. It gave each school co-equal rights to approve the design and thus converted the decision-making process to a commons-based approach. Using the principles of Ostrom's commons theory the authors show that this brought with it concomitant risk, albeit significantly lessened through the creation of a robust commons organization.
Ethnographies of Co-Creation and Collaboration as Models of Creativity.
By Penny Travlou.
URL [30]
The article ponders the questions "How do communities form and change through the collaborative activities of their members? How do members of these online communities come together to reinterpret and facilitate creativity?" along three creative communities.
Secrecy vs. Openness. Internet Security and the Limits of Open Source and Peer Production.
By Andreas Schmidt. Doctoral Thesis, Delft University of Technology, 2015
URL [31]
"Secrecy vs. openness describes the realities of Internet security production through the lenses of open source and peer production theories" raising the question how open models could function in environments hostile to openness.
Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism: Components, varieties and applications.
By Heylighen, F. (2015). To appear in T. Lewis & L. Marsh (Eds.),* Human Stigmergy: Theoretical Developments and New Applications*, Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics. Springer.
URL [32]
"The present paper clarifies the issue by defining stigmergy as a mechanism of indirect coordination in which the trace left by an action in a medium stimulates a subsequent action. It then analyses the fundamental components of the definition: action, agent, medium, trace and coordination."
Axiomatization of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organizing Institutions: Concepts, Experiments and Challenges.
By Jeremy Pitt, Julia Schaumeier and Alexander Artikis. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, December 2012.
URL [33]
The article addresses resource allocation in open systems and proposes "to model resource allocation as a common-pool resource management problem, and develop a formal characterization of Elinor Ostrom’s socio-economic principles for enduring institutions."
The Reinvention of Social Capital for Socio-Technical Systems.
By Jeremy Pitt and AndrzeJ Nowak. IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE | SprING 2014.
URL [34]
The article explores the concept of trust in the context of social capital and argues to develop socio-technical systems, e.g. smart grids, for successful collective action.
Peer Production and Prosumerism as a Model for the Future Organization of General Interest Services Provision in Developed Countries. Examples of Food Services Collectives.
By Katarzyna Gajewska. World Future Review March 2014 vol. 6 no. 1 29-39
URL [35]
"Based on the examples of two collectives preparing lunches and giving them for free with an option of donation at Montreal universities, this article considers how services of general interest could be organized in an alternative way — namely how the combination of paid and unpaid work, spontaneous work involving high number of volunteers, and the dissociation of annual income from sale of output can serve as a model for providing needed public services."
Tri-Centric Governance Model for the Food Commons
By Jose Luis Vivero Pol
URL [36]
The brief article describes a governance model that will support the re-commonification of food and rests on the three pillars of civic collective action to preserve and regenerate the food commons, a partner government that enables such framework, and a private sector for niche demand.
The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States Contexts.
By World Bank, 2014
URL [37]
"Whether for tracking aid flows, reporting on poor government performance, or helping to organize grassroots movements, crowdsourcing has potential to change the reality of civic participation in many developing countries. The objective of this paper is to outline the theoretical justifications, key features and governance structures of crowdsourcing systems, and examine several cases in which crowdsourcing has been applied to complex issues in the developing world.”
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
By Langdon Winner. Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136
URL [38]
By drawing on urban planning examples from Paris and New York City, the article deals with the ways in which modern structures can embody power and authority. The article encourages to look closely at the interactions between technology and society, and at how design might establish patterns of power and authority.
Peer-To-Peer Law: Distribution as a Design Principle for Law.
By Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay. MEDIA@LSE Working Paper Series No. 31
URL [39]
The western conception of law is based on the individual. This legal theoretical conception does not take into account the concept of communities of peers. Peer-to-peer architectures question legal notions of liability, control, ownership and responsibility. The author proposes to integrate peer-to-peer as a design principle for the law, towards the recognition of collectives as subjects of rights and duties.
P2P in the anthropocene with the Convergence gathering as a case study.
By Victor MacGill. ISSS paper. 2015
URL [40]
The paper examines the case study of a group in New Zealand that has been exploring alternative lifestyles for over 30 years, exercising an organisational style without any ongoing leadership.
The university as a hackerspace.
By Joss Winn (2014). In: Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistance, 08-09 May 2014, Nottingham.
URL [41]
The article describes hacking as "a peculiar, historically situated form of labour that arose out of friction in the academy: vocation vs. profession; teaching vs. research; basic vs. applied research; research vs. development; private vs. public; war vs. peace; institutional autonomy vs. state dependence; scientific communalism vs. intellectual property; individualism vs. co-operation" and explores whether hacking in the university is still a possibility today.
Free software and the law. Out of the frying pan and into the fire: how shaking up intellectual property suits competition just fine.
By Angela Daly. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 3, July 2013
URL [42]
"This contribution will examine how competition law has approached free software by examining instances in which courts have had to deal with such initiatives ... The presence or absence of corporate involvement in initiatives will be an important factor in this investigation, with it being posited that true instances of ‘commons-based peer production’ can still subvert the capitalist system, including perplexing its laws beyond intellectual property."
Worker self-management: A sociocultural and historical perspective.
By Carlos Eduardo Martínez. Translated by Level Translation (Steve Herrick).
URL [43]
The article looks at the concept of "appropriate technology" as an enabling factor for sustainable self-management of workers. Its political potential can only be realized if accompanied by networks allowing various forms of alliances and exchange. The article discusses the challenges of allocating scarce resources in open systems encountered in situations at run-time that were not anticipated at design-time.
Algorithmic governance of common-pool resources.
By Jeremy Pitt and Ada Diaconescu.
URL [44]
"Elinor Ostrom’s institutional design principles for managing common-pool resources provide a valuable template for designing effective Internet-based applications for algorithmic self-governance."
The Virtues of Moderation
By James Grimmelmann (April 1, 2015). 17 Yale J.L. & Tech. 42 (2015); U of Maryland Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2015-8.
URL [45]
"This Article provides a novel taxonomy of moderation in online communities. It breaks down the basic verbs of moderation — exclusion, pricing, organizing, and norm-setting — and shows how they help communities walk the tightrope between the chaos of too much freedom and the sterility of too much control."
The Blind Spot: Uncovering the Grammar of the Social Field.
By Otto Scharmer.
URL [46]
"The intention of this paper is to uncover the grammar of the social field -- the key variables that make it possible for the operating logics and modes (states and stages) of a social field to shift."
A Design Pattern for Decentralised Decision Making.
By Andreagiovanni Reina , Gabriele Valentini, Cristian Fernández-Oto, Marco Dorigo, Vito Trianni. PLOS One, October 23, 2015
URL [47]
The article proposes a design pattern for collective decision making grounded on experimental/theoretical studies of honeybee swarms. The studies could spur discussions how the "engineering of large-scale decentralised systems requires sound methodologies to guarantee the attainment of the desired macroscopic system-level behaviour given the microscopic individual-level implementation."
CrowdJury, a Crowdsourced Justice System for the Collaboration Era.
By Federico Ast and Alejandro Sewrjugin.
URL [48]
"This paper, we propose CrowdJury, a framework for court processes of adjudication adapted for the blockchain era. It combines the advantages of crowdsourcing and blockchain to create a system of justice both transparent and self-sustained. CrowdJury seeks to lay down the principles for a p2p court system based on collective intelligence."
Practising Communication Rights: Cases from South Korea and Honduras.
By Dorothy Kidd
URL [49]
The essay describes examples from Korea and Honduras that aim at the democratization of communication and media and strengthen communication rights.
Monetary Materialities of Peer-Produced Knowledge: The Case of Wikipedia and Its Tensions with Paid Labour.
By Arwid Lund, Juhana Venäläinen. TripleC, Vol 14, No 1 (2016).
URL [50]
The article discusses the discusses the explicit and tacit monetary dependencies of Wikipedia and sheds light on the strict perspective against commercial alliances by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Italian Community Co-operatives Responding to Economic Crisis and State Withdrawal. A New Model for Socio-Economic Development.
By Michele Bianchi and Marcelo Vieta. United Nations Task Force for Social and Solidarity Economy, 2019
URL [51]
This paper presents findings from an ongoing qualitative research project aiming to better understand the territorial and economic development impacts of Italian community co-operatives and their role in concretising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
DAOs, Democracy and Governance.
By Ralph C. Merkle. Version 1.9, May 31st 2016. Cryonics Magazine, July- August, Vol 37:4, pp 28-40; Alcor, www.alcor.org
URL [52]
The essay examines the question how to combine the expertise of all participants of a democracy without handing over control to “experts” and suggests Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) as a way to design a new form of government that is better able to meet the needs of its citizens.
Facilitatrice, protectrice, instituante, contributrice : la loi et les communs.
By Valerie Peugeot. "Contribution au colloque de Cerisy - VERS UNE RÉPUBLIQUE DES BIENS COMMUNS ? - Septembre 2016 – Version de l’auteur."
URL [53]
Protection of the commons and of property managed by communities without a legal entity is hard to embed into the current legislation based on private property. The article identifies ways that can act as leverage for legislative intervention based on examples from laws adopted in France.
Worker Cooperatives: Good, Sustainable Jobs in the Community.
By Virginie Pérotin. JEOD, Volume 2, Issue 2 (2013) 34-47
URL [54]
The paper examines research findings on worker cooperatives and their effects on the communities in which they are found, such as sustainable local employment.
Artificial intelligences and political organization: An exploration based on the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks.
By Yannick Rumpala. Technology in Society 02/2012; 34(1):23–32. DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2011.12.005
URL [55]
A series of science fiction novels as heuristic support for exploring new principles, e.g. a civilization based on anarchistic principles in which intelligent machines are largely responsible for handling community affairs
On the Political Economy of Copy Protection.
By Stefan Meretz. In: Tilman Baumgärtel (Ed.), A Reader on International Media Piracy, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 131-144. It is the English translation of Zur politischen Ökonomie von Kopie und Kopierschutz.
URL [56]
The article analyses the development of copying from the mere physical to analogous to digital, driving a separation of knowledge and competence and led to copy protection and fighting piracy. The next step should be towards general availability of products, thus abrogating private production and appropriation.
Scarcity/abundance: mutualization
Resource Cooperation through Transborder Communities
By James Quilligan
"Before long, governments will recognize the advantages of redistributing the power for resource management. As citizens invest in their commons and the commons pay them dividends, the extreme competition for resources and the potential for violence will decline because the commons are available for everyone’s use. To make this possible at regional levels, institutional mechanisms must be created to share power within and across borders for the common management of resources.
Between copyleft and copyfarleft: Advance reciprocity for the commons.
By Miguel Said Vieira & Primavera De Filippi. Journal of Peerproduction
URL [59]
"The copyfarleft licensing model is a concrete proposal related to the commercial usages debate. It suggests one way to improve on “non-commercial clauses”, arguably making them more effective in reducing negative social impacts, such as wage labour being exploited in building the commons. ... This position paper comments on them (as well as on some merits of this model), and proposes an alternative or complementary model that attempts to solve some of those drawbacks."
The commons and the market
Reframing the Commonwealth: Commercial or Civic.
By Marvin T. Brown. In Michael Boylan, editor, Business Ethics, 2nd Edition (Wiley/Blackwell, 2013)
URL [60]
"The work ahead, I believe, is the work of citizens, who through civic conversations give shape to a viable relationship between the commons and the commercial. Business leaders can participate in this work by exploring the role of their business in a particular system of provision. Ethicists and other can help to facilitate such conversations, so that the civic defines our commonwealth rather than the commercial."
The Wolf and the Caribou: Coexistence of Decentralized Economies and Competitive Markets.
By Andreas Freund and Danielle Stanko. J. Risk Financial Manag. 2018, 11(2), 26
URL [61]
Exponentially growing cryptocurrency returns may push competitive markets at risk of collapsing due to extraction of value. This paper explores novel ways for decentralized economies to protect themselves from, and coexist with, competitive markets at a global scale utilizing decentralized technologies such as Blockchain.
Going back to go forwards? From multi-stakeholder cooperatives to Open Cooperatives in food and farming
By Ajates Gonzalez, R., Journal of Rural Studies (2017)
URL [62]
This paper analyses the potential of multi-stakeholder cooperatives to recreate more sustainable food flows between rural and urban areas and to overcome the limitations of conventional farmer cooperatives that focus more on economic than social and environmental benefits.
The Free Market as Full Communism: Two Essays on Mutual Ownership & Post-Scarcity Market Anarchism.
By Kevin Carson. C4SS, 2013
Two essays exploring the possibilities for market exchange and competition freed from capitalistic privilege and the burdens of artificial scarcity as well as the question whether mutualistic markets will be driven to recreate the capitalist model by competitive logic, or can bring about alternative incentives, and dynamics that disperse wealth and progress.
Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies.
By Dario Azzellini. Critical Sociology 1 –14, 2016
URL [63]
The article argues that labour can be understood as a commons. This entails a shift towards a notion of labour power as a collectively and sustainably managed resource for the benefit of society. The article analyses examples of worker-recuperated companies in Latin America and Europe.
The commons and capitalism
How to be an Anti-capitalist for the 21st century
By Erik Olin Wright
URL [64]
Contextual citations: URL [65]
The book examines taming and eroding capitalism as the only viable options towards emancipatory forms of economic activity.
Market and Labour Control in Digital Capitalism.
By Philipp Staab and Oliver Nachtwey. TripleC, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2016
URL [66]
Based on basic assumptions of monopoly capital theory, the article argues that the expansion of digital control and the organizational structures applied by key corporate players of the digital economy are evidence for the expansion of capitalist labour, not its reduction.
Food as commons. Towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private.
By Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero Pol et al., December 2018. In Handbook of Food as a Commons, Publisher: Routledge, pp.373-395
URL [67]
The chapter unfolds how a tricentric governing model (an enabling public sector, a private sector not focused on profit maximization and self-regulated civic collective actions) could steer a fairer and more sustainable transition towards food systems that can nourish the entire human population, thrive within planetary boundaries and be regenerative enough to feed the generations to come.
Food: From Commodity to Commons.
By Gunnar Rundgren. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (Impact Factor: 0.94). 12/2015; DOI: 10.1007/s10806-015-9590-7
URL [68]
"... we need to find new ways of managing the food system based on food as a right and farming as a management system of the planet Earth. The solutions should be based on relocalization of food production and de-commodification of food and our symbionts, the plants and animals we eat."
Food as a new old commons. A paradigm shift for human flourishing.
By Jose Luis Vivero-Pol. World Nutrition, Vol 10 No 1 (2019)
URL [69]
Considering food as a commons anchored to the adequate valuation of its multiple dimensions of food to humans, can provide a discourse that embraces urban innovations as well as indigenous practices) food activities and challenges the obsolete industrial food system.
Epistemic Regards on Food as a Commons: Plurality of Schools, Genealogy of Meanings, Confusing Vocabularies.
By J. Vivero-Pol. Preprints 2017, 2017040038
URL [70]
This text discusses the different schools of thought that have addressed the private/public, commodity/commons nature of goods in general, and then explores how those schools have considered food in particular. The author uses diverse epistemic tools to re-construct food as a commons, based on the praxis to produce, consume and govern food collectively through non-market mechanisms.
Does Sharing Mean Caring? Regulating Innovation in the Sharing Economy
By Sofia Ranchordas (September 7, 2014). Preliminary version, Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology (Winter 2015), Forthcoming.
URL [71]
"The document is an approach to the technology innovation of marketplaces (websites or mobile applications) that turn out to be a meeting point between supply and demand, and which make it easy for nearly any citizen to become a goods and services supplier in exchange of a payment to any other citizen."
The sharing economy: make it sustainable.
By Damien Demailly, Anne-Sophie Novel. Studies N°03/2014. IDDRI, 2014. 32 p.
URL [72]
"Is the sharing economy a tool for ecological transition? The main objective of this report is to analyse the environmental potential of the sharing economy, considered in its full diversity, and the conditions for the realization of this potential."
3D Printers, The Third Industrial Revolutions And The Demise Of Capitalism.
By Ciaran Tully. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2016
URL [73]
The paper counters the idea that capitalism is nearing its end and will be replaced by a post-capitalist society through the forces created by new technologies. The paper uses 3D printers as an example to show that these notions do not hold up to scrutiny.
The Future of "The Commons": Neoliberalism's "Plan B" or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?
By George Caffentzis.
URL [74]
The essay claims there are two kinds of commons that are persisting or are in gestation: Pro-capitalist commons that are compatible with and potentiate capitalist accumulation and anti-capitalist commons that are antagonistic to and subversive of capitalist accumulation. This is considered an important discourse in the context of Neoliberalism using the tools of the commons to save it from itself.
The commons and post-capitalism
Anti-Authoritarian Metrics: Recursivity as a strategy for post-capitalism.
By David Adam Banks. Teknokultura, Vol 13, No 2 (2016)
URL [75]
This essay proposes that those seeking to build counter-power institutions and communities learn to think in terms of what the author calls “recursivity.” Recursivity is an anti-authoritarian metric that helps bring about a sensitivity to feedback loops at multiple levels of organization. The article spans topics from efficiency metrics to social conditions to the recursive beginnings of urban planning.
Engaging the Non-Flat World: Anarchism and the Promise of a Post-Capitalist Collaborative Commons.
By Hannes Gerhardt. Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2019 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–21
URL [76]
The paper argues for anarchism to embrace new, technologically enabled forms of action and engage in emergent nexuses with state and capital to further the vision of an anarchist-oriented post-capitalist future.
Thinking about Commons: A post-capitalist perspective for social work.
By Jef Peeters. In: A-L. Matthies & K. Närhi (eds.), The Ecosocial Transition of Societies: The contribution of social work and social policy (p. 71-88). Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4724-7349-3
URL [77]
Common goods managed by communities define a logic beyond market and state, based on the principles of sharing and cooperation. They can serve as a bridge between various alternative movements. The book aims at a broader horizon of transformational social change.
Rise of Alternative Currencies in Post-Capitalism.
By Boyd Cohen. Journal of Management Studies, 2016
URL [78]
The essay describes three forms of alternative currencies: local paper currency, timebanking and cryptocurrency and argues that alternative currencies discourage passive investment, and therefore serve as a powerful alternative to market-based capitalism.
Jasmine growers of coastal Karnataka: Grassroots Sustainable Community-Based Enterprise in India.
By Femida Handy, Ram A. Cnaan, Ganesh Bhat and Lucas C.P.M. Meijs.Entrepreneurship & Regional Development: An International Journal. Volume 23, Issue 5-6, 2011. Special Issue: Community-Based, Social & Societal Entrepreneurship
URL [79]
The article discusses the example of a local successful grassroots enterprise that has proved robust for over 70 years, examining its history, mechanisms, and interconnectedness. "We found that the existence of a natural, autonomously developed CBE without ‘western’ intervention can help to fine tune our knowledge of sustainable CBE and assist in helping practitioners learn what works and what does not when proposing a CBE."
Welcome to Post Capitalism (plus 5 layers of Corporate Transformation)
By meedabyte
URL [80] and discussion on Characteristics of Future-Proof Companies in the Age of the Collaborative Commons [81]
Part of the blog article and the discussion deals with future-proof companies - their drivers and characteristics and the effects the transformation has on five distinct levels of adaption.
Economy 4.0 and digital society: The participatory market society is born
By Dirk Helbing
URL [82]
"...the sharing economy, co-producing consumers (“prosumers”), and the makers community indicate the beginning of an entirely new era, which I call the Participatory Market Society. This society is ultimately characterized by the ubiquity of information, bottom-up participation, co-creation, self-organization, and collective intelligence as organizational principles, furthermore, by user-centricity and -control, personalized products, and hyper-variety markets. Furthermore, many people will engage in “projects,” empowered by social collaboration platforms."
The commons in the context of other alternatives
In search of an adequate European policy response to the platform economy.
By Brian Fabo, Jovana Karanovic, Katerina Dukova. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research / ETUI, April 6, 2017
URL [83]
Presenting empirical data, the paper argues that the current labour market and working conditions created by online platforms resemble 19th century laissez-faire and calls for the urgent creation of a regulatory framework along the suggestions presented.
Open Source Capitalism.
By Nic Wistreich.
URL [84]
The article questions why the cooperative movement and the open source movement are largely separate and independent from each other and explores the potential of those movementes joining forces.
On the Politics of Generative Justice: African Traditions and Maker Communities.
By Ron Eglash and Ellen Foster. Presented at “What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? MIT, November 13-15, 2014.
URL [85]
This paper describes some of the traditional African forms of generative justice and surveys maker spaces in Africa. The concept of human and non-human value circulation, rather than extraction, is essential in understanding how these contemporary maker communities are related to older African traditions of gift economies, and futures in which cultural and ecological survival can be mutually self-sustaining.
Indigenous Peoples and the Commons.
By Preston Hardison, December, 2006
URL [86]
"... the new commons movement ... risks making a similar “category mistake” about the commons that could foster its own enclosure‐like injustices. The mistake is in believing that the “cultural commons” is a monolithic, unitary concept for describing a set of shared resources collectively owned by everyone."
Convivialist Manifesto
Green European Journal
URL [87]
The manifesto aims at unifying the approaches of countless initiatives seeking ways to live together that allow humans to take care of each other and of nature, using conflict as a force that sparks creativity and wards off violence.
The commons in the context of the ecological crisis
Planning in and for a post-growth and post-carbon economy.
By John Barry. Chapter of the book: Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning and Sustainability, 2019
URL [88]
New ways of planning for a post-growth, post-carbon economy that include social justice ‘floors’ and ecological ‘ceilings’ and a more proactive state.
Interest Rates and Climate Change: Realigning our Incentives through the Power of the Commons.
By James Bernard Quilligan. Kosmos Journal, FALL | WINTER 2010
URL [89]
When the commons are traditional (rivers, forests, indigenous culture) or emerging (energy, intellectual property, internet), people are successfully managing them. When it comes to the atmosphere though, "society is trapped in a false dichotomy: we believe that only markets and governments are capable of providing solutions for climate change, even though these institutions were never designed to internalize the costs of negative externalities like carbon emissions."
A Whole New Cloth: Politics and the Fashion System
By John Thackara.
URL [90]
"Transformation can unfold quietly as a variety of changes, interventions, and disruptions accumulate across time. At a certain moment – which is impossible to predict – a tipping point, or phase shift, is reached and the system as a whole changes. Sustainability, understood in this light, is a condition that emerges through incremental change at many different scales."
Module 3: The Institutional, technical and societal logic of the commons
The commons as a technical infrastructure
Measuring the complexity of adaptive peer-to-peer systems.
By Michele Amoretti, Carlos Gershenson. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 2015
URL [91]
The paper proposes the design and analysis of adaptive P2P systems using measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis based on information theory.
Introducing the four quadrants
Michiel de Lange , (2019), The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons
In Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Rob Kitchin (ed.) The Right to the Smart City, pp.71 - 83
URL [92]
The paper contrasts the cybernetic view versus a humanist view towards the role of data in the smart city. It suggests the commons-as-interface that productively connects urban data to the human-level political agency and allows for more detailed investigations of mediation processes between data, human actors, and urban issues."
ICTs for a Global Civil Society.
By Markus Sabadello.
URL [93]
"In today’s interconnected world we see the emergence of a “global civil society”, which transcends national borders and attempts to solve global challenges that established political and economic structures fail to address. ... However, while popular social network services such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are often said to be powerful tools for peace and democracy, they are in fact highly centralized services operated by for-profit companies. For a global civil society to truly work, both the architectural structure and the governance mechanisms of its communication channels must themselves be based on civil society principles."
Open APIs and news organizations: A study of open innovation in online journalism.
By Tanja Aitamurto and Seth C. Lewis (2011). Paper presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, TX, April 1, 2011.
URL [94]
"This paper examines how and why news organizations are deploying open Application Programming Interfaces (so-called “open APIs”) as part of their online strategy, connecting this phenomenon with the “open innovation” paradigm ... Our findings offer a fresh perspective on the business strategy and the process of innovation, both for news organizations and the profession broadly."
How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?
By Brett Scott. UNRISD, 2016. Working Paper 2016-1
URL [95]
A primer on the basics of Bitcoin, raising potential points of concern and suggesting an evolution of the technology that embrace more communitarian ideals for cooperation.
Free Software Philosophy and Open Source.
By Niklas Vainio and Tere Vadén. IJOSSP 4.4 (2012): 56-66. Web. 25 Aug. 2015.
URL [96]
A primer on free software philosophy and its foundations.
Free Networks – A Global Survey – User Built Infrastructure Held as a Commons.
By Gordon Cook. The Cook Report.
URL [97]
A detailed account of the state of the free community networks purposefully designed so that no single person can own the infrastructure and it cannot be broken up.
Surveillance capitalism / data capitalism
Crowdsourced surveillance and networked data.
By N. Lally, 2016. Security Dialogue. doi: 10.1177/0967010616664459
URL [98]
Based on the enhanced possibilities for crowdsourced surveillance, this case study describes how algorithms, internet cultures and surveillance imagery, among others, contributed to entangled political complicity and resistance.
Big Data, Communities and Ethical Resilience: A Framework for Action .
By Kate Crawford, Gustavo Faleiros, Amy Luers, Patrick Meier, Claudia Perlich and Jer Thorp; 2013 Bellagio/PopTech Fellows. Draft Date: Oct. 24, 2013
URL [99]
A multidisciplinary group explored how data could be used to help build community resilience in the face of a range of stresses — environmental, political, social and economic and developed a framework to help guide the effective use of data for building community-driven resilience.
Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization
By Shoshana Zuboff (April 4, 2015). Journal of Information Technology (2015) 30, 75–89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5.
URL [100]
The article explores the logic and architecture of surveillance capitalism based on four Google practices. "Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries long evolution of market capitalism."
Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy.
By John Danaher.
URL [101]
The article explores the potential threat of data being mined by governments and corporations to democracy, ways to deal with it and proposes a solution.
Governing the commons
The Path of the Blockchain Lexicon (and the Law). 36 Review of Banking & Financial Law 713 (2017)
By Angela Walch, 2017
URL [102]
The article lays out the forces at play in shaping the language of Bitcoin and the problems the language raises for regulators, including challenges in identifying the facts about the technology, as well as increasing the chances of regulatory capture. Special emphasis is given to the term “immutable” and its potentially misleading nature.
Bitcoin Financial Regulation: Securities, Derivatives, Prediction Markets, & Gambling
By Jerry Brito, Houman B. Shadab and Andrea Castillo. (April 10, 2014). Mercatus Center Working Paper Series.
URL [103]
Alternative Forms of Energy Production and Political Reconfigurations: Exploring Alternative Energies as Potentialities of Collective Reorganization.
By Yannick Rumpala. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, April 3, 2018
URL [104]
The article studies how energy choices (that always tend to be political choices) can be redirected by technological developments associated with renewable energy, thus contributing to a redistribution of opportunities and correspondingly to social reorganizations.
The Invisible Politics of Bitcoin: Governance Crisis of a Decentralized Infrastructure
By Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck, (September 29, 2016). Internet Policy Review, Vol. 5, Issue 4.
URL [105]
The article looks at the socio-technical constructs of Bitcoin and analyses the inherent invisible politics that display a highly technocratic power structure.
Cooperative Enterprise as an Antimonopoly Strategy
By Sandeep Vaheesan and Nathan Schneider (November 6, 2018).
URL [106]
As part of an agenda to tame corporate monopoly, governments should revisit the idea of ownership design and exemptions from antitrust laws in order to protect and enable the cooperative model across the economy. Trust and coordination form important pillars just like the necessity to rely on a small core of developers.
Cooperative Firms as a New Mode of Production.
By Bruno Jossa. Review of Political Economy. Volume 24, Issue 3, 2012.
URL [107]
The essay explores whether a system of producer cooperatives would actually lead to the establishment of a new mode of production. "We conclude that LMF cooperatives do implement a new mode of production because they reverse the typical capital–labour relation right within a capitalistic system. An additional major point addressed in some detail is the main contradiction in capitalism."
Res Publica ex Machina: On Neocybernetic Governance and the End of Politics.
By Felix Maschewski and Anna-Verena Nosthoff. Institute of Network Cultures, October, 2018
URL [108]
The article examines the extent to which neo-cybernetic concepts promote a rather reduced vision of politics and argues that current approaches to ‘smart’ states or cities and their corresponding models of governance mark no entire automation of politics but at least in certain respects, a pragmatic actualization of cybernetic visions of the state against the background of surveillance capitalism.
Urban Commons, with Case studies
Escape into the City: Everyday Practices of Commoning and the Production of Urban Space in Dublin.
By Patrick Bresnihan and Michael Byrne
URL [109]
The article examines several approaches toward urban commons by independent groups in Dublin. Circumventing existing institutions, they try to escape the prevailing patterns of enclosure, regulation of public space, high rents, commodification of social life etc.
The City as a Commons.
By Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione. Yale Law & Policy Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2016
URL [110]
"In this article, we offer a pluralistic account of the urban commons, including the idea of the city itself as a commons. We find that, as a descriptive matter, the characteristics of some shared urban resources mimic open-access, depletable resources that require a governance or management regime to protect them in a congested and rivalrous urban environment."
City as a Commons.
By Christian Iaione.
URL [111]
"... What are the infrastructure and services that increase the quality of urban life and make people lives' worth to be lived and free to move around? What are the facilities and services that let people share or cultivate lifestyles more consistent with their own individual sensibility and with whoever lives in the same space? ... All these questions have a single identical answer: it is the urban commons, and that is urban spaces and services of common interest."
Common Space. The City As Commons.
By Stavros Stavrides. Zed Books, 2016
URL [112]
Common Space as a means of new forms of social relations and shared experiences through various lenses from public housing to public art and graffiti, revealing the hidden emancipatory potential within our urban worlds.
A peer-to-peer approach to energy production“
Co-authored by Chris Giotitsas, Alex Pazaitis & Vasilis Kostakis. P2P Lab
URL [113]
The paper analyses the evolution of infrastructure for energy production and their impact on socio-economic structures. The concept of microgrids serves as an example to review decentralized technologies for energy production. The paper proposes an alternative model that aims at creating a peer-to-peer energy grid.
Case studies
Technopolitics, ICT-based participation in municipalities and the makings of a network of open cities. Drafting the state of the art and the case of decidim.Barcelona.
By Peña-López, I. (2016). ICTlogy Working Paper Series #3. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
URL [114]
The paper is about decidim.Barcelona, an ambitious project by the City Council of Barcelona (Spain) to increase engagement in the design, monitoring and assessment of its strategic plan for 2016-2019. The paper focuses on the socio-political environment of this subproject, namely Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain.
Community currencies as laboratories of institutional learning: emergence of governance through the mediation of social value.
By Paolo Dini and Alexandros Kioupkiolis (2014). In: Inaugural WINIR Conference, 11-14 September 2014, London, UK.
URL [115]
Taking the Sardex mutual credit system as an example to explore its community-based practice as an alternative to capitalist market and its related systems.
The rise of Communitarianism and other Alternative Movements from the Athenian crises
By Nicholas Anastasopoulos, from the book: Yesterday's Tomorrow:On Utopia and Dystopia (Liz Russell, Pere Gallardo, eds. Cambridge Scholars, 2014
URL [116]
"This paper examines the alternative forms of emerging social, economic, political and cultural structures, and their impact and potential spatial representation(s) in the context of a communitarian movement. It also makes an attempt to trace the urban and architectural categories that may reflect this emergent condition."
Shanzai Culture
By. Marie Lechner. Article in the Pirate Book.
URL [117]
The piece explores Shanzai culture, the flourishing counterfeiting economy of China and its versatility and resourcefulness when faced with the demands of the global market.
Cosmo-Local Production Commons, with case studies
Localized production
Exploring the Maker-Industrial Revolution: Will the future of production be local?
By Anna Waldman Brown. BRIE, October 20, 2016
URL [118]
What happens to the ethnographic method when it goes open source?
By Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella. Ethnos, 2016
URL [119]
The article paints a picture of a long-term collaboration of digital artists and coders in Madrid, Spain, redefining existing projects into prototypes. This created new platforms for discourse and new infrastructural enabling factors.
Sharing Prosperity. Enabling co-operative enterprises to grow the green economy.
By Mike Lewis and Pat Conaty. Cymru/Wales
URL [120]
"The Co-operative Cymru/Wales has commissioned a study into opportunities to assist community environmental organisations to expand their provision through the use of co-operative methods.
This report, commissioned to assist environmental organisations to use cooperative methods, has provided findings and recommendations on good as well as bad practices and on how social-public partnerships could be co-designed and co-developed.
Protocol cooperativism
Thwarting an Uber Future for Complementary Currencies: Open Protocols for a Credit Commons.
By Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater. Paper prepared for the IV International Conference on Social and Complementary Currencies: Money, Consciousness and Values for Social Change, 10th to 14th May, 2017, Universita Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, 2017
URL [121]
The paper explores the rationale and potential for practitoners in both complementary currencies and platform cooperatives, and their associated researchers, to consider the role of open protocols to grow the digital commons and avoid a digital dystopia of platform monopolies. The importance of developing open protocols in order to create conditions for new entrants to thrive, including “protocol cooperatives” is explained.
Case studies
(Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona.
By Igor Calzada. Sustainability 2018, 10(9), 3252
URL [122]
This paper examines how the city of Barcelona is marking a transition from the conventional, hegemonic smart city approach to a new paradigm—the experimental city which increasingly considers (smart) citizens as decision-makers rather than data providers. Examining three different understandings of the commons and how they overlap with other movements.
Module 4: P2P as transformative emancipatory movement
The Commons as a political project vs history of emancipation
Emancipatory Commoning?
By Stavros Stavrides. Open! 2016
URL [123]
The paper argues that the commons redefine the public and can provide valuable tools for anti- or post-capitalist struggle.
Co-operatives: The Italian Experience.
By Carlo Borzaga, Sara Depedri, Riccardo Bodini.
URL [124]
The article discusses the long history of the Italian cooperative movement as a major component of the national economy, touching the evolution of legislation after World War II and more recent developments.
Commons' Movements & “Progressive” Governments as Dual Power : The Potential for Social Transformation in Europe.
By Antonios Broumas. Capital & Class, 2016
URL [125]
Counter-movements in the neoliberal era do not take the form of revolutions, but protect and facilitate social revolution. Failure to do so leads to either failed states or progressive governments interrelated to grassroots movements. Dual power may prove to be the most effective revolutionary praxis.
The Italian water movement and the politics of the commons. Water Alternatives 9(1): 99-119
By C. Carrozza and E. Fantini, 2016.
URL [126]
The article questions how question: how the notion of the commons has been understood, adopted and translated into practice in Italy around the example of countering the privatisation of water services.
“Fifth structure”- emergence in economics: Observations through the thermodynamic lens of world history.
By Peter Pogany.
URL [127]
The article discusses Gebser's description of consciousness transition into the integral-arational constellation and how this is entwined with a change in the global socioeconomic system.
Alternative Platforms and Societal Horizon: Characterisation and Strategies for Development.
By Guillaume Compain, Philippe Eynaud, Lionel Maurel, and Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, June 2019 Communication to the SASE 31st Annual Meeting; Fathomless Futures: Algorithmic and Imagined; 27- 28 June 2019 - The New School - New York City
URL [128]
A study that systematically looks at how platform coops combine elements of the open source movement (sharing knowledge), with those of the cooperative movement (protecting cooperative property. It highlights the emergent practices of Open Cooperativism
Food as Commons or Commodity? Exploring the Links between Normative Valuations and Agency
By J. Vivero-Pol in Food Transition. Preprints 2017, 2017010073 (doi: 10.20944/preprints201701.0073.v1).
URL [129]
By exploring the normative values in the transition landscape, this paper seeks to understand how relevant is the hegemonic narrative of “food as commodity” and its alternative of “food as commons” to determine transition trajectories and food policy beliefs.
Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm.
By David Bollier. Next System Project, 2016
URL [130]
The paper describes how commons offer possibilities for a new system integrating production, governance and participation to form much more than just an economic system. Its flexbility and adaptability towards the needs of the community would make the new system stand out.
Commons transition as a political process
Freedom Technologists and the Future of Global Justice.
By John Postil. 'The State of Power 2016', TNI, 2016
URL [131]
The article looks into the political successes and setbacks of different kinds of freedom technologists (geeks, hackers, online journalists, digital rights lawyers, Pirate politicians, etc.) particularly in Iceland, Tunisia and Spain and how to reconcile the pursuit of liberty with that of social justice.
Transforming the Productive Base of the Economy Through the Open Design Commons and Distributed Manufacturing.
By George Dafermos. Journal of Peer Production, 2015
URL [132]
This policy document examines the application of social knowledge economy principles with an emphasis on manufacturing. Firstly critiquing the effect of restrictive IP rights on the knowledge economy, then introducing the FLOK model as an alternative, exploring case studies on RepRap and Wikispeed, concluding with general policy principles drawn from those case studies.
Autonomous Politics and its Problems: Thinking the Passage from Social to Political.
By Ezequiel Adamovsky
URL [133]
The article aims at presenting some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements, based on the author's experiences with various movements he had been part of and their strategic position towards heteronomous politics.
Digital Activism and Non-Violent Conflict.
By Frank Edwards, Philip N. Howard, Mary Joyce. Digital Activism Research Project, 2013. 23 pp. Seattle, University of Washington.
URL [134]
"We define a digital activism campaign as an organized public effort, making collective claim(s) on a target authority(s), in which civic initiators or supporters use digital media. With a team of over 40 coders, reviewing hundreds of cases and two decades of digital activism, we used the highest of social scientific standards to build the best available data set on one of the most important trends in global politics."
Activism in Brazil: hacker spaces as spaces of resistance and free education.
By Raquel Renno.
URL [135]
"Hackerspaces and medialabs in unusual and traditional cultural places seem to be the alternative to the educational and digital gap between rich and poor in Brazil. Raquel Renno analyses this gap and reconstructs the subversive potential auf heterotopic spaces."
Transforming the energy matrix: Transition Policies for the Development of the Distributed Energy Model.
By George Dafermos, Panos Kotsampopoulos, et al.
URL [136]
"This policy paper examines the application of the principles of a social knowledge economy to the energy sector", critiquing the capitalist model, exploring alternative models and discussing general principles for policy making based on the example of Ecuador.
People helping people: the future of public services.
By Emma Clarence and Madeleine Gabriel. Nesta, 2014
URL [137]
"With ten detailed case studies highlighting the opportunities and benefits of reshaping public services to mobilise people, the report argues that public services that are open, facilitating and recognise and reward the contribution of people will help public services to address changing demands and social needs, and improve experiences and outcomes for people."
The Commons as a Template for Transformation.
By David Bollier. Great Transition Initiative, April 2014
URL [138]
"This essay argues that, in the face of the deep pathologies of neoliberal capitalism, the commons paradigm can help us imagine and implement a transition to new decentralized systems of provisioning and democratic governance. The commons consists of a wide variety of self-organized social practices that enable communities to manage resources for collective benefit in sustainable ways. ... These more equitable, ecologically responsible, and decentralized ways of meeting basic needs represent a promising new paradigm for escaping the pathologies of the Market/State order and constructing an ecologically sustainable alternative."
Common Wealth Trusts: Structures of Transition.
By Peter Barnes. August 2015. Pre-publication release.
URL [139]
"Organizing common wealth ... requires the creation of common wealth trusts, legally accountable to future generations. These trusts would have authority to limit usage of threatened ecosystems, charge for the use of public resources, and pay per capita dividends. Designing and creating a suite of such trusts would counterbalance profit-seeking activity, slow the destruction of nature, and reduce inequality."
Re-politicising participatory design: What can we learn from Fairphone?
By Maja van der Velden.
URL [140]
"Is the Fairphone just 'less bad' or is it paradigmatic example of an alternative technological vision? There are many lessons to be learned from Fairphone, not just by Participatory Design. Most importantly, Fairphone shows the importance of relating the things we help design to futures that become possible or impossible. "
One transition, many transitions? A corpus-based study of societal sustainability transition discourses in four civil society’s proposals.
By Giuseppe Feola and Sylvia Jaworska. Sustainability Science, pp 1–14, September 2018.
URL [141]
Comparative discourse analysis of four different sustainability transition proposals with respect to politics, emotions and place.
From choice to collective voice. Foundational economy, local commons and citizenship.
By Filippo Barbera, Nicola Negri, Angelo Salento
URL [142]
Defence and management of local commons in the framework of Foundational Economy (FE) as referring to the «civic infrastructure» serving everyday household needs help reconsider citizenship as «the capacity and desire to act collectively».
What does it mean to win? Everyday Water Politics and the Struggle for Alternatives in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
By Patrick Bresnihan
URL [143]
The article describes how a broad alliance of stakeholders forced the Bolivian government to return the water system of Cochabamba to public control, thus defeating an international consortium and the IMF. What happened in the fifteen years since then?
Resource Rents, Redistribution, and Halving Global Poverty: The Resource Dividend.
By Paul Segal. World Development, Volume 39, Issue 4, April 2011, Pages 475–489
The article proposes the concept of Resource Dividend: countries distributing their resource rents directly to citizens as a cash transfer. Using global data, the article estimates a considerable effect on poverty reduction.
Transition towards a Food Commons Regime: Re-commoning Food to Crowd-feed the World.
By Jose Luis Vivero Pol. Chapter 9 in book: Perspectives on Commoning. Autonomist Principles and Practices. Ed. by Guido Ruivenkamp and Andy Hilton. Zed Books, 2017, pp.325 - 379.
URL [146]
In this paper, the commons approach is applied to food, deconstructing food as a pure private good and reconstructing it as a commons that can be better produced and distributed by a tricentric governance system compounded by market rules, public regulations and collective actions. Examples of the implications for the governance of the global food system if food was considered as a commons.
Prototyping and the new spirit of policy-making.
By Lucy Kimbell and Jocelyn Bailey. Journal CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, Volume 13, 2017 - Issue 3: Special issue: Co-Design and the Public Realm, Pages 214-226
URL [147]
The paper examines the emergence of a design practice, prototyping, in public policy-making that have led towards greater flexibility, provisionality and anticipation in responding to public issues while further encroaching market logics into government.
A Civic Economy of Provisions.
By Marvin Brown. Next Systems Project, 2016
URL [148]
An economy of provisions encompasses three basic practices: providing for one another, protecting one another and creating meaning together. The paper takes through these ideas and exemplifies the food and the health care systems as systems of provisions that could be organized in a way that benefits and makes provisions for all.
Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis .
By Luis Moreno-Caballud. Modern Languages Open, 2015. Special Issue
URL [149]
Transition towards a food commons regime: re-commoning food to crowd-feed the world.
By Jose Luis Vivero Pol
URL [150]
In this article, the author proposes a transition pathway towards an alternative food commons regime and suggests to knit a different and bigger food web capable of confronting the industrial food system for the common good.
Transforming Markets
Escaping the Polanyi matrix: the impact of fictitious commodities: money, land, and labor on consumer welfare.
By Gary Flomenhoft. real-world economics review, issue no. 74, 2016
URL [151]
Based on Polanyi, the paper argues that commodification of land, money, and labor is detrimental to a functioning market economy. The author introduces the "Polanyi matrix" to describe this commodification and argues that alternative economic concepts cannot be successful in creating prosperity and sustainability unless the operating system of the economy can be reformed in those three areas.
Contributive Accounting
Toward a Common Theory of Value
By James Quilligan. Series in Kosmos Journal
URL [152] [153] [154] [155] [156]
"This series of articles will attempt to reconceptualize the social and natural order of economics through an analysis of the commons—the natural, genetic, physical, social, cultural and intellectual resources which people manage by negotiating their own norms and rules."
Three Steps to a Stable Economic Value Representation for All Agents and All Transactions.
Submitted by Marc Gauvin on behalf of the Passive BIBO Currency Board to FLOK Society Ecuador
The work at www.bibocurrency.com is focussed on defining requirements for value representation or money that satisfies stability requirements as well as records of transactions. Communicating a new science of money to society at large and developing prospects of a new paradigm for social governance are further objectives of Bibo Currency.
The uneasy transition from supply chains to ecosystems. The value-creation/value-capture dilemma.
By Soumaya Ben Letaifa. Management DecisionVol. 52 No. 2, 2014pp. 278-295
URL [159]
Based on a field study of a Canadian ICT ecosystem, the paper applies life cycle theory to identify the different stages of value creation and value capture processes in an ecosystem.
Quantitative Metrics for Generative Justice: Graphing the value of diversity
By B.R. Callahan, C. Hathaway and M. Krishnamoorthy, 2016. Revista Teknokultura Vol. 13(2), 567-586
URL [160]
This paper introduces a quantitative data measurement, contributory diversity, which can be used to enhance the analysis of ethical dimensions of value production under the Generative Justice lens. It combines the traditional assessment of demographics with a measure of value generation. This mapping allows for previously unacknowledged contributions to be recognized.
Real-Time Organigraphs for Collaboration Awareness.
By C.J. van Aart and A.H.J. Oomes.
URL [161]
The article describes a web based visualization tool that gives insight into informal information exchange. It aims at laying open Informal interaction including informal communication channels, actual decision making on the spot and multi disciplinary joint activities in order to increase collaboration awareness.
Translating Commons-based Peer Production Values into Metrics: towards Commons--based Crypto-Currencies,
By De Filippi, P. (2014) in Lee Kuo Chen D. (ed.), The Handbook of Cryptocurrency. Elsevier
URL [162]
"Based on empirical research on emerging value forms in the context of CBPP, we seek to achieve a better understanding of the value produced by CBPP communities, so as to come up with an alternative, universal, denominator of value that could act as an interface between the commons-based ecosystem and the market economy."
Measuring Value in the Commons-Based Ecosystem: Bridging the Gap Between the Commons and the Market.
By Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan. MoneyLab Reader, 2014
URL [163]
Commons-based peer-production has become an important driver for innovation, but the estimation of its value cannot rely on traditional market mechanisms. The essay presents a three-layered system that can resolve some of these most recurrent valuation problems.
Generating Community, Generating Justice? The production and circulation of value in community energy initiatives
By T.C. Dotson and J.E. Wilcox (2016), Revista Teknokultura Vol. 13(2), 511-540.
URL [164]
Building upon an analysis of New York energy policy and on-the-ground cases, the article explores the potential of community energy. What kinds of value are being generated by community energy systems and for whom? How could such efforts be more generative of justice across a broader range of values?
Blockchain and Value Systems in the Sharing Economy: The Illustrative Case of Backfeed.
By Alex Pazaitis, Primavera De Filippi, Vasilis Kostakis, published in: Technological Forecasting & Social Change.
URL [165], URL [166], URL [167], URL [168]
The article explores the potential of blockchain technology in enabling a new system of value that will better support the dynamics of social sharing. It discusses the solutions featured by Backfeed and describes a conceptual economic model of blockchain-based decentralised cooperation.
Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development
By Joshua M. Pearce. Modern Economy, 6, 1-11. doi: 10.4236/me.2015.61001
URL [169]
Quantifying the value of Free Open Source Hardware (FOSH) development is challenging. In order to overcome that challenge, the article evaluates the following methods to quantify the value of FOSH design including: 1) downloaded substitution valuation; 2) avoided reproduction valuation and 3) market savings valuation along with additional benefits related to market expansion, scientific innovation acceleration, educational enhancement and medical care improvement.
The dangerous dynamics of modern capitalism (from static to IFRS’ futuristic accounting).
By Jacques Richard. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 30, 07-2015
URL [170]
Based on the history of accounting, the article claims that the evolution of accounting through three stages permits the acceleration of profit recognition and contributes towards financial crises.
Module 5: Urban Transformations
Public-commons cooperation
The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism.
By Alberto Corsín Jiménez. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32,
URL [171]
"This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. ... the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property."
Commonification of public services
Open Infrastructures for Water Management
By Violeta Cabello Villarejo
URL [172]
The article explores what on open infrastructure for water management could look like. "This requires of course a new way of understanding management of natural resources based on open standards and collaboration between citizens, researchers and managers. These platforms could be hubs for these different actors engaging in collaborative governance regimes that could improve both efficiency and democratic practices of water management organizations."
More than Medicine: New services for People Powered Health.
By Katharine Langford with Peter Baeck and Martha Hampson. Nesta, 2013
URL [173]
"This report brings together our practical learning and evidence on different ways to integrate and promote community-based services into health and social care."
Module 6: P2P Theory as Theory
The subject of history: p2p class theory
The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society.
By J.Z. Garrod. Triple C, Vol 14, No 1 (2016)
URL [174]
The article argues that Bitcoin technology neglects the power that capital holds over us and that a decentralized autonomous society (DAS) might be a far more dystopian development than its supporters comprehend.
The communitarian revolutionary subject: new forms of social transformation.
By David Barkin and Alejandra Sánchez. Third World Quarterly, June 2019
URL [175]
The paper examines the potential of indigenous and peasant communities as revolutionary actors – "... collectively organised and deliberately involved in processes of social and productive transformation with a legitimate claim to territory – whose present-day activities involve them in concerted processes to consolidate a different constellation of societies on the margins of the global capitalist system."
Oligarchies of the World Unite.
By Kees van der Pijl.
URL [176]
The paper argues that neoliberalism was initially intended to restore market discipline but is degenerating into speculative, predatory forms undermining stability in the global economy and fostering oligarchic enrichment.
In Defense Of The Digital Craftsperson.
By James Losey and Sascha D. Meinrath. Journal of Peer Production, Issue #9: Alternative Internets
URL [177]
The article argues that the increasing control of the Internet limits its generative potential and creates barriers for end-user innovation. The paper analyzses control along five dimensions and suggests how open digital platforms could offer an alternative in support of the future digital craftsperson - someone with the desire and the ability to innovate.
Theorising and analysing digital labour: From global value chains to modes of production.
By Christian Fuchs. The Political Economy of Communication, Vol 1, No 2 (2013)
URL [178]
The paper analyzes the supply chain of digital labour, products and services based on empirical data and studies, the analysis being grounded in Marxist political economy.
Digital Workers of the World Unite! A Framework for Critically Theorising and Analysing Digital Labour.
By Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval. Triple C, Vol 12, No 2 (2014)
URL [179]
"The overall task of this paper is to elaborate a typology of the forms of labour that are needed for the production, circulation, and use of digital media."
Reading between the lines: Blueprints for a worker support infrastructure in the emerging peer economy.
By Denise Fung Cheng. June 2014. Master of Science MIT THESIS.
URL [180]
This thesis is a confluence of historical analysis, economic theory, sociology, rhetorical analysis, qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, and legal precedents that culminates in interventions for the peer economy. First and foremost, it considers whether the peer economy is a livable work lifestyle. The peer economy is a charismatic and rapidly spreading concept that is fundamentally transforming the way many people think about employment."
“Inspire and conspire”: Italian precarious workers between self-organization and self-advocacy.
By Annalisa Murgia and Giulia Selmi. Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Volume 4 (2): 181 – 196 (November 2012)
URL [181]
Over the last ten years, Italy has seen the emergence of a complex social movement to counter precariousness. These "... movements refuse the delegation of the conflict, promoting instead a modality of action based on the organizational form of the network, sharing knowledge and direct representation. This paper explores two particular movement experiences in the Italian context."
Polycentric Law.
By Tom W. Bell. Humane Studies Review, Volume 7, Number 1 Winter 1991/92
URL [182]
The article explores the evolution of law from Anglo-Saxon to royal to polycentric and State Law. Focusing on polycentric law, the example of Iceland and other societies is explored which proved effective and flexible, characterized by a legal system within an essentially voluntaristic, stateless society.
Cultural Techniques of Cognitive Capitalism: Metaprogramming and the Labour of Code.
By Jussi Parikka. Cultural Studies Review, VOL 20, NO 1 (2014). (UTS ePress)
URL [183]
"This article addresses cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. The author argues that to understand the full implications of the notion of cognitive capitalism we need to address the media and cultural techniques which conditions its range and applications. The article offers an expanded understanding of the labour of code and programming through a case study of 'metaprogramming', a software related organisation practice that offered a way to think of software creativity and programming in organisations. "
The transformation of contemporary capitalism and the concept of a transnational capitalist class: A critical review in neo-Poulantzian perspective.
By Joachim Hirsch and Jens Wissel.
URL [184]
"The aim of this article is to review the approaches in question critically. We assume that existing theories of transnational class formation are charac-terized by significant weaknesses, both in terms of basic class and state theoretical assumptions and in terms of accounting for the role of state apparatuses in class formation.... ""
Is There a Global Digital Labor Culture? : Marginalization of Work, Global Inequalities, and Coloniality.
By Antonio Casilli. 2nd symposium of the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication (PARGC), Apr 2016, Philadelphie, United States.
URL [185]
"Digital labor studies have so far mainly focused on US and Europe. A new breed of research projects aims to correct this bias by intersecting labor, media, postcolonial, and subaltern studies, and tackle developing and emerging countries where the rise of digital labor accompanies low rates of formal employment. "
Consumption in cognitive capitalism: Commodity riots and the dictatorship of the proletariat of consumption.
By George Tsogas. Knowledge Cultures.
URL [186]
The essay argues that in cognitive capitalism, consumption dictates what production does, when and how. But what we are seeing in the post-industrial global society is that production is asphyxiating in the structures and norms of industrial capitalism that are still in place.
Peasant Sovereignty?
By Evaggelos Vallianatos. Independent Science News, March 2015
URL [187]
The article deals with developments in the recognition of peasant and small-scale farming.
Value, Rent, and the Political Economy of Social Media.
By Jakob Rigi and Robert Prey. The Information Society 10/2015; 31(5):392.
URL [188]
The article revisits Marx’s theory of value in connection with social media and informational capitalism and argues that value is not generated through the social interactions, but through primary revenue sources.
The Theory of Permanent Counterrevolution.
By Kees van der Pijl, 2005
URL [189]
The paper presents a first outline of the argument of a forthcoming book, The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism." It describes the history of counter-revolution and transformation from the days of the bourgeois revolts of 1848 to the Cold War and today.
Alive in the sunshine
By Alyssa Battistoni
URL [190]
"There’s no way toward a sustainable future without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs. And the way to do that is through a universal basic income."
Repurposing the hacker. Three temporalities of recuperation. By Delfanti, Alessandro, and Söderberg, Johan. (as yet unpublished, 2015)
URL [191]
The essay describes the recuperation of hackerdom by capitalist society in three different stages.
Digital Labor and the Anthropocene.
By McKenzie Wark | Digital Labor and the Anthropocene. Ed. by Marvin Jordan. Transcript taken from a talk delivered at the Digital Labor conference presented by The New School.
URL [192]
Labor isn’t the only class struggling in and against the digital for being controlled by it. "The hacker class is distinguished by a few qualities. It usually means working with information, but not in a routine way. It is different from white-collar labor. It is about producing new arrangements of information rather than ‘filling in the forms'."
Striking with social media: The contested (online) terrain of workplace conflict.
By Martin Upchurch and Rickard Grassman Organization, 08/2015; DOI: 10.1177/1350508415598248
URL [193]
The article explores the potential of social media for mobilizing social movements in labor conflicts, based on a case study of a British Airways cabin crew dispute. Attention is also paid to potential challenges, e.g. to internal union authority or the risk of commodification of private as well as working lives along the way.
The sharing economy: A pathway to sustainability or a nightmarish form of neoliberal capitalism?
By Chris J. Martina. Ecological Economics, Volume 121, January 2016, Pages 149–159
URL [194]
The article analyses the online sharing economy discourse by identifying its major framings. They share a common vision of decentralising and disrupting established structures. It concludes by stating that the pursuit of the sharing economy as a purely corporate economic opportunity it is unlikely to drive a transition towards sustainability.
iCapitalism and the Cybertariat. Contradictions of the Digital Economy.
By Ursula Huws. Monthly Review, Volume 66, Issue 08, January 2015.
URL [195]
The current period sees the commodification of new areas of life impacting daily lives, labour and consumption.
The Internet Revolution: From Dot-com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism.
By Richard Barbrook, with Andy Cameron. Institute for Network Cultures, 2015. Network Notebook No. 10.
URL [196]
With an introduction bringing things into a current perspective, this anniversary paper combines two essays from the 1990s, pioneering on Net criticism. Mass surveillance and the corporate take-over of the Net validated the criticism.
The very idea of democracy at work.
By Richard Hyman (2015). Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 22 (1). pp. 11-24. ISSN 1024-2589
URL [197]
Is democracy possible within an employer-employee relationship? Providing a historic and geographic overview, the article discusses how workers' rights have been reversed under neoliberalism and looks at ways to regain past achievements.
Digitalisation of the economy and its impact on labour markets.
By Christophe Degryse. ETUI, 2016
URL [198]
This paper gives an overview of the possibilities created by digitalisation and examines its effects on the labour market as well as the role that trade unions can play.
Confusion and collectivism in the ICT sector: Is FLOSS the answer?
By Abigail Marks, Shiona Chillas, Laura Galloway, Gavin Maclean. Economic and Industrial Democracy, March 13, 2017
URL [199]
This article examines broader forms of collectivism for Information and communication technology (ICT) workers, drawing on survey and interview data. The focus is on social class, attitudes towards unions and professional bodies and participation in the broader ICT community. Despite the absence of formal organization, there are opportunities for collectivization particularly with regard to participation in FLOSS communities.
Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis.
By Nancy Fraser
URL [200]
The essay adds emancipation as a third given to Polanyi's double movement of marketization and social protection as a mediating element between those two political projects.
Issues: horizontality vs verticality / hierarchy theory
Algorithmic Accountability: On the Investigation of Black Boxes. Knight Foundation and the Tow Center on Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.
By Nicholas Diakopoulos.
URL [201]
Algorithms take consequential decisions in our lives – from online review systems to how political campaigns are run t0 how social services are managed, thus becoming the new power brokers in society. The article describes the idea of algorithmic accountability and how reverse engineering can provide an alternative way to characterize algorithmic power and raises broader issues of human resources, legality, ethics, and transparency."
A Conceptology of Learning and Leading at Work.
By Rune Kvist Olsen.
URL [202]
The paper seeks to "construct and establish an alternative belief system that would entitle everyone in the workplace the same conditions and access of mutual trust and personal freedom. The intention is to advocate the values and standards of health, liberty, dignity and equality as common principles applied for all the people involved."
Par Cum Pari. Notes on the Horizontality of Peer to Peer Relationships in the Context of the Verticality of a Hierarchy of Values.
By Michel Bauwens. In: Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work Together. Fourteenth Plenary Session, 1-6 May 2008. Acta 14, eds Margaret S. Archer and Pierpaolo Donati. Vatican City, 2008. pp. 708.
URL [203]
The essay offers an ethical evaluation of peer production, governance and property, and examines how they fare on the realization of personhood, common good, solidarity and subsidiarity.
Fractal Organisation Theory.
By Janna Raye. Journal of organisational transformation & social change, Vol. 11 No. 1, April, 2014, 50–68
URL [204]
Fractal organisation theory recognises an emergent human operating system that mimics nature in its capacity for creativity, adaptation, vitality, and innovation. At all levels of a fractal organisation, members share information iteratively and make decisions collectively in response to constantly changing conditions.
Peak Inequality: The 0.1% and the Impoverishment of Society.
By David DeGraw.
URL [205]
"An extensive analysis of economic conditions and government policy reveals that the need for significant systemic change is now a mathematical fact. Corruption, greed and economic inequality have reached a peak tipping point. Due to the consolidation of wealth, the majority of the population cannot generate enough income to keep up with the cost of living. In the present economy, under current government policy, 70% of the population is now sentenced to an impoverished existence."
Anti-leaders(hip) in Social Movement Organizations: The case of autonomous grassroots groups.
By Neil Sutherland, Christopher Land et al. Organization June 5, 2013
URL [206]
"Through the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, the idea of horizontal, leaderless organization has come to the attention of the mass media. In this article we explore radical, participative-democratic alternatives to leadership through an empirical study of four Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). "
The internet, social media and the workplace.
By Martin Upchurch. International Socialism. Issue: 141
URL [207]
The article examines the role of social media between a tool in workers' armory to organize and its problems with internal union democracy which make it vulnerable to outside challenge.
The Scored Society: Procedural Due Process for Automated Predictions.
By Frank Pascuale and Danielle Keats Citron.
URL [208]
The article looks at the recent trend for using big data to rank and score human behaviour, e.g. for job applications or likelihood of committing crimes. The authors suggest possible reforms to existing legal processes and argue for a more robust system.
Information Asymmetry and Power in a Surveillance Society.
By Geoffrey Lightfoot and Tomasz Wisniewski (2014). Munich Personal RePEc Archive.
URL [209]
"The paper concentrates on the techniques that foster information imbalances, such as media and propaganda, knowledge production, educational systems, legal and organizational structures, exclusive information networks, and surveillance. We conclude that in the absence of greater transparency, the deleterious effects of unequal access to information will continue and deepen."
Social Power and Psychological Distress. A social materialist approach to clinical psychology.
By David Smail.
URL [http://www.davidsmail.info/
"One cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society. Such an understanding is the focus of this web-site."
Feminist Theory and Free Software
By Katja Mayer and Judith Simon
URL [210]
The essay suggests that feminist theory can help to better understand the epistemology of free software rather than just looking at a gender gap or the coproduction of gender and technology.
Algorithmic Accountability: Journalistic Investigation of Computational Power Structures.
By Nicholas Diakopoulos. Digital Journalism, 2015
URL [211]
Based on the previous paper, the author discusses five case studies in which journalists used reverse engineering to examine algorithms. The essay "identifies the scenarios journalists typically encounter in their reporting on algorithms as well as the challenges emerging from these investigations in terms of human resources, legality and ethics."
The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city.
By Jathan Sadowski and Frank Pasquale. First Monday, Volume 20, Number 7 - 6 July 2015
URL [212]
Smart technologies turn cities into IoT-platforms and webs of surveillance. The article exemplifies this with biometric surveillance and automated policing and offers normative guidelines for governance of this "smart" infrastructure.
Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality.
By T. Dávid-Barrett, R. I. M. Dunbar. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biological Sciences, 2013
URL [213]
The article explores information processing capacity as a limiting factor to social group size and the break-throughs that are enabled by an increase in the sophistication of information processing.
The Quasi-Totalitarianism of Global Trusted Networks.
By Athina Karatzogianni and Martin Gak. New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics (2015)
URL [214]
The article describes examples of the digital surveillance ideology and frames it in the challenging context for formulating digital politics: "the process of political disenfranchisement by corporations looking to profit, governments looking to regulate information flows, and coopted groups in civil society looking to appropriate the legitimate concerns of users for their own political and financial subsistence."
Distributed Network Architecture
"Reclaiming the Internet" with distributed architectures. An introduction
By Francesca Musiani and Cécile Méadel in a First Monday Special Issue.
URL [215]
The paper explores the political, social and legal implications of distributed network architectures and introduces the challenges that these architectures pose.
Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code.
By Primavera De Filippi, Samer Hassan. First Monday, Volume 21, Number 12 - 5 December 2016
URL [216]
With the advent of blockchain technology and associated smart contracts, code is assuming a stronger role in regulating people’s online behavior. The paper describes the shift from code having the effect of law to the concept of law being defined as code.
Economics of Blockchain
By Sinclair Davidson, Primavera De Filippi and Jason Potts. (March 8, 2016).
Illustrated with a case study on Ethereum-based Backfeed, the paper argues that Blockchain facilitates new forms of governance and economic organization. Seeing Blockchain in the context of public choice economics models blockchain as a new technology for creating spontaneous organizations.
URL [217]
Infrastructural gap: Commons, state and anthropology.
By Dimitris Dalakoglou, Jan 2017
URL [218]
The paper explores a framework for a paradigm shift in understanding infrastructures’ governance and function, based on the example of Greece where innovative forms of civil activity emerged around the infrastructural gap brought about by the Euro crisis.
Spiritual theory
Participation and the Mystery: Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion.
By Jorge Ferrer. SUNY Press, 2017
URL [219]
Human beings as active cocreators of spiritual phenomena and the introduction of a participatory philosophy of education of mysticism and embodied spirituality are the main strands of this book.
Spiritual Teachers as Moral Educators: Shifting Patterns of Religious Authority And Praxis.
By Zachary Stein.
URL [220]
The paper explores contemporary structures of religious authority particularly in educational contexts in the post-industrial West.
No Time to Think. Reflections on information technology and contemplative scholarship.
By David M. Levy. Ethics and Information Technology, December 2007, Volume 9, Issue 4, pp 237–249
URL [221]
The paper argues that the accelerating pace of life is reducing the time for contemplative scholarship at a time when scholars, educators, and students have gained access to digital tools of great value to scholarship. It explores what this says about the nature of scholarship, and what might be done to address this challenge.
Back to the Future: Toward a Political Economy of Love and Abundance.
By Margaret Stout. Administration & Society 42(1):3-37 · March 2010
URL [222]
The article presents a reconceptualization of public administration framed around a in a relational rather than material understanding of “progress” using collaboration and cocreation as its main methods, thus replacing degenerative principles of scarcity and fear with the generative ones of love and abundance.
Making Place for Abundance.
By Wolfgang Hoeschele.
URL [223]
The author presents a strategy that seeks to literally make place for abundance, focusing on places "with cultural significance, where people have a sense of identity and of home connected with that place, and where people continue to work together and with the natural environment in order to enhance its desired qualities."
Participatory Public Policy Microcosms: Diversity and Empathy as Generators of Creative Wholeness.
By Rosa Zubizarreta. Spanda Journal, 2015, VI:2. Pre-publication version of article published in Spanda Journal, 2015, VI:2 ; full issue available through spanda.org
URL [224]
MacLean'w "Canadian experiment", South Africa's Mont Fleur and Vorarlberg's (Austria) Civic Councils serve as examples for a new mode of discourse that works creatively with differences and creates societal learning, systemic insights and powerful convergences.
Other
Technology and Social Change: Some Shifting Patterns of Technological Contention.
By Steve Walker. Paper for the ISIS Summit in Vienna, 2015.
URL [225]
The paper is a sketch of some differing roles ICT has played in the workplace and for unions, illustrating the struggle between competing visions of the use and abuse of digital.
André Gorz‘s Concrete Utopia of the Knowledge-Based Society.
By Andreas Poltermann.
URL [226]
The essay is about André Gorz's vision of a knowledge-based society that took an interest in its emancipatory potential but also saw the ambivalences of this development such as precarisation. He developed the idea of knowledge-based communism that could represent the result of the crisis of capitalism.
Economics and the Near-Death Experience of Democratic Governance.
By June Sekera. GDAE Working Paper No. 15-02, May 2015.
URL [227]
The paper traces "the connection between mainstream, market-centric economics and what James Galbraith has called “the collapse of the public governing capacity"" and introduces a public non-market theory that can improve public administration.
Liquid Feedback in Large-Scale Civic Contexts: Framing Multiple Styles of Online Participation.
By Giulia Bertone, Fiorella De Cindio, Stefano Stortone. Journal of Social Media for Organizations. Volume 2, Number 1
URL [228]
The paper analyses the online platform LiquidFeedback for online deliberative processes. It evaluates the use of the platform in a large-scale Italian deliberation project along several criteria.
Towards an ontology of networked learning.
By Steve Walker and Linda Creanor (2012).
URL [229]
"Networked learning, conceived of as networks of people, informational resources and technologies, constitutes what has been termed a ‘highly interwined’ technology. In this paper we develop our earlier argument that sociotechnical networks can form the basis for a non-determinist theory of learning technology."
Entrepreneurship, sovereignty, and violent social conflict.
By Jurgen Brauer and Robert Haywood. WIDERAngle, Article Archive 2009-2010, May 2009
URL [230]
The article considers the role that territorial-based sovereignty plays in violent social conflict and global governance, and suggests a way in which the sovereign state-centric global system can be augmented to better address violent conflict.
Living Systems, Seeing Systems, Being Systems: Learning To Be the System That We Wish to See in the World
By Alexander Laszlo. Pages 163-17
URL [231]
"What we need are Technologies of Organizational Communion (TOCs) to serve as evolutionary guidance systems for the Technologies of Information and Communication (TICs – aka ICTs) that now stand the chance of connecting us not only with each other, but with the planet, with future generations, and most importantly, with ourselves." Systems thinking and its power to make the world a better place.
Democratic Capitalism in the Last Stages? Capital as Agency in Wolfgang Streeck’s Analysis of the Crisis.
By Kees van der Pijl.
URL [232]
A critique of Wolfgang Streeck’s Gekaufte Zeit/ Buying Time.
A Proposal for Modernizing Labor Laws for Twenty-First-Century Work: The “Independent Worker”.
By Seth D. Harris and Alan B. Krueger. The Hamilton Project - Brookings, 2015
URL [233]
Jobs in the online "gig economy" do not qualify for the usual legal benefits and protections. The paper proposes a new legal category that covers the gap between employees and independent contractors.
The Care-Centered Economy: Rediscovering what has been taken for granted.
By Ina Praetorius.
URL [234]
"By identifying “care” as an essential category of value-creation, Praetorius opens up a fresh, wider frame for how we should talk about a new economic order. We can begin to see how care work is linked to other non-market realms that create value -- such as commons, gifts of nature and colonized peoples --all of which are vulnerable to market enclosure." David Bollier
Torrent poisoning: What the fuck do you think you are doing?
By Marie Lechner, in: The Pirate Book. (Ed.) by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Co-published by Pavillon Vendôme Art Center, Clichy. Produced by Aksioma, Pavillon Vendôme, Kunsthal Aarhus and Abandon Normal Devices, 2015.
URL [235]
Pirate or “privateer” tactics include torrent poisoning which consists in sharing data that has been corrupted or files with misleading names on purpose.
Refounding Legitimacy. Toward Aethogenesis.
By Olivier Auber. Technoetic Arts Journal, 2016
URL [236]
Findings from an art project that looked into the legitimacy of an anoptical perspective. "... Therefore we could emulate a kind of Global Immune System that would prevent the takeover by some illegitimate bodies. Towards which direction? Nothing less than an new Singularity which would augur an era where the systemic predation of our species against itself and its environment would have vanished. I propose to call this era: Aethogenesis.“
In Praise of Deficit: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice
By Mary Mellor, article based on her book "Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice" Paper presented to AHE conference July 2015
URL [237]
The paper makes the case that deficit is essential for socially just and sustainable provision by redefining public money as a debt-free currency with no necessity to grow. The introduction of two circuits of money - public and commercial - liberates the public sector from its notion as a dependent household.
The Transformative Effects of Crisis: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the New Economic Cultures in Spain and Greece.
By Janosch Sbeih. M.A. Thesis. Schumacher College, 2014
URL [238]
Reframing the concept of crisis by examining the revealing and resulting effects. "Crises offer the opportunity to implement policies that lead to profound political and economic changes on the fast track as societies are in turmoil and unable to organise themselves against these implementations."
Secrecy and Unaccountability: Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure.
By David S. Levine . Florida Law Review, 2014
URL [239]
With public infrastructure being increasingly provided by private entities, the doctrine of intellectual property with its ensuing trade secrets is intruding into public infrastructure, e.g. voting machines, telecommunication or the Internet at large. This conflicts with the democratic values of accountability and transparency.
Cryptosecession and the limits of taxation: Towards a theory of non-territorial internal exit.
By Trent J. MacDonald & Jason Potts. PUBLIC CHOICE SOCIETY CONFERENCE, March 2016
URL [240]
"This paper presents a model of partial internal exit that captures the competitive dynamic between incumbent and potential governments in a non-territorial political system."
The Corporation as Commons: Rethinking Property Rights, Governance and Sustainability in the Business Enterprise.
By Simon Deakin.
URL [241]
The essay discusses the question whether viewing corporations as commons would be a fit one. Conclusion: "Applying to the corporation the property rights and institutional design associated with the commons would help sustain the corporate enterprise and deliver benefits for all of its stakeholders and for society as a whole."
The collaborative roots of corruption.
By Ori Weisela and Shaul Shalvib. Edited by Susan T. Fiske. PNAS August 25, 2015 vol. 112 no. 34 10651-10656
URL [242]
While the advantages and positive effects of cooperation are generously praised, this paper focusses on its possible negative effects as shown in experiments with dice-rolling.
Theory of Unbundled and Non-Territorial Governance. RMIT
By Trent MacDonald. PhD-thesis.
URL [243]
The thesis aims to unbundle the functions of government and devolving responsibilities to non-territorial jurisdictions. It further explores non-territorial governance and describes how political systems and jurisdictions change.
The Ontologized Commons.
By Joost de Bloois. Open! 2016
URL [244]
The author critiques the absence of effective leftist action and sees "ontologized commons" as a consequential cover-up and further argues that commoning plays into the neoliberal dismantling of public institutions.
Socialisme ou Barbarie: From Castoriadis’ Project of Individual and Collective Autonomy to the Collaborative Commons.
By Evangelos Papadimitropoulos. Triple C, Vol 14, No 1 (2016)
URL [245]
The content of socialism in relation to collaborative commons.
A New Printing Revolution? 3D Printing as an Agent of Socio-Political Change.
By Yannick Rumpala. International Journal of Technoethics Volume 7 • Issue 2 • July-December 2016
URL [246]
The paper asks whether 3D printing could have socio-political effects by examining its promises, its challenges to the current economic order and friction points that might affect future trajectories.
Additive manufacturing as global remanufacturing of politics?
By Yannick Rumpala. Paper for the Millennium Annual Conference 2012 “Materialism and World Politics”. London School of Economics and Political Science - 20-22 October, 2012
URL [247]
The paper analyzes whether 3 D printing could have effects beyond material production and consumption that reach into the political register.
Socialism and the Blockchain.
By Steve Huckle and Martin White. Future Internet 2016, 8(4), 49
URL [248]
This paper argues that blockchain technologies are not just a Libertarian tool, they also enhance Socialist forms of governance.
Fifty shades of open.
By Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek. First Monday, Volume 21, Number 5 - 2 May 2016
URL [249]
The word “open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. This essay disambiguates the many meanings of the word “open” as it is used in a wide range of contexts.
Openness as social praxis.
By Matthew Longshore Smith and Ruhiya Seward. First Monday, Volume 22, Number 4 - 3 April 2017
URL [250]
This article builds on “Fifty shades of open” by Pomerantz and Peek by offering an alternative understanding to openness — that of social praxis. It provides a contextually sensitive understanding of openness by focusing on three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Further, it points towards an approach to developing a practice-specific theory.
Talk is silver, code is gold? Contribution beyond source code in Free/Libre Open Source Software communities.
By David Rozas and Nigel Gilbert.
URL [251]
Using Drupal as a case study, the paper seeks to make “community-oriented” activities visible as contributions relevant to the sustainability of communities and draws on the concept of affective labour.
Social Democratic and Critical Theories of the Intellectual Commons: A Critical Analysis.
By Antonios Broumas. TripleC, Vol 15, No 1 (2017)
URL [252]
The article deals with theories of the intellectual commons as the productive force of our intellectual commonwealth coming in contrast with the dominant notions of the social intellect, which advocate the establishment of private monopolies over intellectual works.
Transient Solidarities: Commitment and Collective Action in Post-Industrial Societies.
By Charles Heckscher and John McCarthy. BJIR, Volume 52, Issue 4, December 2014, Pages 627–657
The article studies changes in solidarity over time and examines whether these new solidarities can be mobilized into effective collective action. It further suggests mechanisms rather different from traditional union mobilizations.
Patterns of Peeragogy
By Corneli, J., Danoff, C.J., Pierce, C., Ricaurte, P., and Snow Macdonald, L. 2015. HILLSIDE Proc. of Conf. on Pattern Lang. of Prog. 22 (October 2015), 23 pages.
URL [255]
The article describes nine patterns developed in the Peeragogy project for designing a roadmap for the future of learning with a focus on collaborative management of open learning projects.
The possibilities and constraints of engaging solidarity in citizenship.
By Jelena Vasiljević. FILOZOFIJA I DRUŠTVO XXVII (2), 2016
URL [256]
The is interested in solidarity as a politically operational concept around questions like: What does it mean to base a political community on the principles of solidarity? Can acts of solidarity be used not only to help (support) others, but with the aim to change power relations and constitute new political orders as well? One of the conclusions: Citizenship is a simultaneously inclusive and exclusive notion.
Liquid Democracy and the Futures of Governance.
By José Ramos. Grundversorgung 2.0 Project, Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana Universität, http://cdc.leuphana.com. Chapter 11 of the book published by Springer 2016: J. Winter, R. Ono (eds.), The Future Internet, Public Administration and Information Technology 17
URL [257]
The chapters clarify the significance of Liquid Democracy and web technologies for transforming social interactions and decision-making in the context of democracy and governance as well as develop scenarios for the futures of governance.
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
By JC Plantin, C. Lagoze, P. Edwards and C. Sandvig, (2016). New Media & Society. Pre-publication version, August 2016
URL [258]
Platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms.
Patterns that connect: Exploring the potential of patterns and pattern languages in systemic interventions towards realizing sustainable futures.
By Helene Finidori. ISSS Journal – 60th meeting. Advanced Author Paper presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences - "Realizing Sustainable Futures" - University of Colorado – 23 - 30 July 2016
URL [259]
The article explores possible roles that pattern language could play for systemic change and transdisciplinary collaboration.
Distributed Biotechnology.
By Alessandro Delfanti. Forthcoming in Tyfield, D., Lave, R., Randalls, S., Thorpe, C. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science, New York: Routledge, 2017
URL [260]
Distributed biotechnology includes amateurs as well as an emergent set of companies that provide laboratory equipment and digital platforms designed to foster citizen contribution to biotechnology research.
Leukippos: A Synthetic Biology Lab in the Cloud.
By Pablo Cárdenas, Maaruthy Yelleswarapu, Sayane Shome et al. BioCoder, Issue 4, 2014
URL [261]
The article presents an open web application that applies online cloud-based infrastructure and networks to synthetic biology projects to enhance connectivity among researchers. The article further exemplies a specific search engine and a game based on the Leukippos platform..
SBOL: A Community Standard for Communicating Designs in Synthetic Biology
URL [262]
"The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is a proposed data standard for exchanging designs within the synthetic biology community. SBOL represents synthetic biology designs in a community-adopted, formalized format for exchange between software tools, research groups, and commercial service providers."
BioCommons White Paper
By Rüdiger Trojok
URL [263]
"With regards to biotechnology, society relies mainly on patents as means to enable and secure innovations. In recent years, the limits of this intellectual property regime has become increasingly evident. New approaches to biological knowledge and technology, such as the attempts to establish open access and open-source practices".
Do-it-yourself biology: Challenges and Promises for an Open Science and Technology Movement.
By Thomas Landrain, Remi Sussan et al. Systems and Synthetic Biology, Vol 7., No. 1-2
URL [264]
"In this paper we analyze the rise of DIYbio, its community, its material resources and its applications. We look at the current projects developed for the international genetically engineered machine competition ... We also show why and how the DIYbio community, in the context of a global governance development, is putting in place a safety/ethical framework for guarantying the pursuit of its activity. ..."
The Failed Metaphysics Behind Private Property: Sharing our Commonhood.
By James Bernard Quilligan. Kosmos Journal, SPRING | SUMMER 2011
URL [265]
"Locke’s source code, both at the meta-level and physical level, is still driving our operating system. It repeats endlessly the ‘empirical’ story that nature intended the commons to be possessed through proprietary ownership. From the long view of social history and political philosophy, however, it’s Locke’s sacred cow of proprietary rights that has been devouring the commons, not Hardin’s hungry cattle or their poor herders."
Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.
By Dale Carrico. Existenz, Volume 8, No 2, Fall 2013
URL [266]
The article mentions seven basic distinctions aimed at understanding futurology as discursive as well as a sub-cultural phenomenon.
Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web.
By Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin. Digital Studies, 2013.
URL [267]
"Although no one can deny its now global influence, the fundamentally ontological presumptions of the social network has yet to be explored despite its present preponderance. To borrow some terms from Bernard Stiegler, how does the what of Facebook constitute our who?"
The Exit from Capitalism has Already Begun.
By André Gorz. Translated by Chris Turner. Cultural Politics: an International Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, March 2010 , pp. 5-14(10). Berg Publishers
URL [268]
"The essay ... is concerned most closely with the implications of the new capitalism's reliance on immaterial contents for its increasingly problematical reproduction and, most particularly, with the emancipatory potential inherent in such a situation."
Might Supplementary Tethered Currencies Reduce Financial System Risks?
By Shann Turnbull. (January 15, 2015).
"The research question is to investigate if supplementary tethered currencies might reduce financial system risks and provide a superior fallback position to Bitcoin in a crisis?"
The (A)Political Economy of Bitcoin.
By Vasilis Kostakis, Chris Giotitsas. Triple C, Vol 12, No 2 (2014)
URL [271]
"This essay explores the political economy of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Specifically, we examine the context in which this digital currency is emerging as well as its nature, dynamics, advantages, and disadvantages. We conclude that Bitcoin, a truly interesting experiment, exemplifies "distributed capitalism" and should be mostly seen as a technological innovation. ..."
Commons for Peace.
By James Quilligan. Kosmos Journal, FALL | WINTER 2011
URL [272]
In the field of human rights, the issue of state sovereignty is commonly mainly challenged only in terms of the legitimacy of foreign intervention. "The commons field takes a different approach. It questions the effectiveness of the traditional model of human rights and development, stressing the importance of socially created value and the management of resources by local communities beyond the purview of government jurisdiction or market incentives."
A Path to Understanding the Effects of Algorithm Awareness.
By Kevin Hamilton et al.
URL [273]
"This paper outlines an approach to studying how users perceive the algorithmic "curation" of their feeds, using Facebook as a sample case."
Encounters with otherness: Towards a participatory way of knowing.
By Joana Formosinho. MSc Dissertation. 2014 class of Holistic Science at Schumacher College, 2014.
URL [274]
In focusing on encounters with otherness, the author takes a journey into acquiring knowledge of things in themselves. "To be taught how to listen to nature is to be taught from nature about our own powers of perception."
The Ethic of the Code: An Ethnography of a ‘Humanitarian Hacking’ Community.
By Douglas Haywood. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 3, July 2013
URL [275]
"The aim of this paper is to present the findings of an ethnographic study carried out during a hacking event in 2012 which focused upon those involved in ‘Humanitarian Hacking’. Online and offline research explored the events that hackers took part in, the technologies they produced and the individuals involved. "
Economic aspects of additive manufacturing: benefits, costs and energy consumption.
By Martin Baumers. PhD Thesis: Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University, 2012.
URL [276]
"This thesis applies a methodology for the quantitative analysis of the shape complexity of AM output. Moreover, this thesis develops and applies a methodology for the combined estimation of build time, process energy flows and financial costs. A key challenge met by this estimation technique is that results are derived on the basis of technically efficient AM operation."
The Power of Free: In search of democratic academic publishing strategies.
By Jan Blommaert. CRTL+ALT+DEM RESEARCH ON ALTERNATIVE DEMOCRATIC LIFE IN EUROPE.
URL [277]
"In this polemical essay, I intend to engage with the current system of academic publishing, in light of the debates about possible Open Access publishing strategies."
Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers. CHI 2012, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA
By a collective of authors
URL [278]
"This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research."
Reconsidering the Bayh-Dole Act and the Current University Invention Ownership Model.
By Martin Kenney and Donald Patton.
URL [279]
The paper discusses the current model within which universities own the inventions made by their researchers and suggests two invention ownership models as superior alternatives.
Of solar collectors, wind power, and car sharing: Comparing and understanding successful cases of grassroots innovations.
By Michael Ornetzeder and Harald Rohracher, Linköping University Post Print, 2013
URL [280]
The paper aims at better understanding preconditions, growth patterns and success factors of grassroots innovation for more sustainable socio-technical regimes such as energy and transport.
Money as a Commons
By Graham Barnes
URL [281]
"This article is *not* a specification of a commons-based money-form. Rather it is an attempt to explore the concept of money from a commons perspective." ... "...a consideration of three important design areas from a commons perspective: convertibility, the equitable allocation of issued money, and how to provide capital investment; followed by a comment on division of labour."
Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine.
By Matteo Pasquinelli.
URL [282]
"If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze (1990) in relation to the power embodied in databases"
On the socio-political potentialities of experimental productive alternatives.
By Yannick Rumpala. Paper to be presented at the inter-disciplinary workshop on “Political Action, Resilience and Solidarity” (18th-19th September 2014, King’s College London).
URL [283]
Commons-based peer production has mainly been studied for immaterial products, but can play into more material aspects of human activities. To what extent can these material practices then change the relationship to work, production and consumption? This study is based on an exploration of the RepRap 3D printer and “Incredible Edible”, an initiative to transform public spaces into areas for growing open access food.
Open source 3D printing as a means of learning: An educational experiment in two high schools in Greece
By Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros and Christos Giotitsas. Telematics and Informatics, Volume 32, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 118–128
URL [284]
The paper discusses findings from a three-month high school project in Ioannina, Greece. 33 students collaboratively designed and produced creative artifacts with a 3D printer and a 3D design platform. The project attempted to examine the technological capabilities of 3D printing as a means of learning and communication.
This is not a Bit-Pipe: A Political Economy of the Substrate Network.
By Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle. Fibreculture Journal, Vol. 138
URL [285]
The paper explores the economic transformations to ICT business models within an economy that puts emphasis on user-generated content. It explores how various proprietary mechanisms facilitate the extraction of cognitive surplus. "How is surplus from the digital commons channelled through a material substrate? How is network infrastructure transforming in response to the fluid and fluctuating dynamics of cognitive capitalism?"
Logic trees for inclusive discourse. A research agenda proposal / request.
By Norbert Bollow. Discussion paper for the Round table: “Inclusion in the network society - mapping development alternatives, forging research agendas ”, Bangaluru, 29th September – 1st October 2014.
URL [286]
The paper proposes the “logic tree” method applied by the “Theory of Constraints” as a means of inclusive political decision-making. Using the logic trees to map concerns helps manage complexity, allows to identify power structures and to discuss new ideas. Further research and experiments for Internet governance and sustainable development are proposed.
If ‘Well-Being’ is the Key Concept in Political Economy...
By Claudio Gnesutta. Economic Thought Vol 3, No 2, 2014
URL [287]
If ‘well-being’ is to be the key concept in political economy, economists can be in a difficult position to value the full implications of their policy prescriptions unless economic analysis is based on steadily defined categories. The article shows an economic-social scheme interrelated with the market equilibria, entailing both new analytical categories and a new socio-economic relations model.
Legal Framework For Crypto-Ledger Transactions
By Primavera de Filippi. Draft text
URL [288]
The article discusses the stages of the integration of law into computer technology leading to self-enforcing smart contracts and to what extent they are actionable and legally binding in the "real" world. The article goes on to introduce a global template system of codified legal texts to make the documents so modular that parties are left with only specific deal points and clear relationships.
FabLabs, 3D-printing and degrowth – Democratisation and deceleration of production or a new consumptive boom producing more waste?
By Charlotte Knips, Jürgen Bertling. Degrowth Conference Leipzig 2014 ; Group Assembly Process (GAP) - Stirring Paper
URL [289]
"... the technology of a decentralized production holds a twofold potential: on the one hand the risk of exploding production and consumption of easy-to-make, easy-to-throw-away gadgets and on the other hand new possibilities for sufficiency, ecological design and repair-culture."
P2P Search as an Alternative to Google: Recapturing network value through decentralized search.
By Tyler Handley. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 3, July 2013
URL [290]
The paper examines the intersection between Google's desire to "database the world's knowledge" and the how this approach affects the nature of the information as well as how users find it, thus monopolizing the socially constructed nature of Internet. The paper further explores new forms of search that allocate more control to the user and analyzes the Peer-to-Peer distributed search engine YaCy.
Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason's Post-Capitalism).
By Kevin A. Carson. Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016)
URL [291]
"Too often state socialists and verticalists react dismissively to commonsbased peer production and other networked, open-source visions of socialism, either failing to see any significant difference between them and the vulgar '90s dotcom hucksterism of Newt Gingrich, or worse yet seeing them as a Trojan horse for the latter. There is some superficial similarity in the rhetoric and symbols used by those respective movements. But in their essence they are very different indeed."
The Art of Being Many.
An assembly of assemblies, Kampnagel internationale Kulturfabrik, Hamburg 27/28-9-2014
URL [292]
Excellent and stimulating collection of articles about assembly-based self-organization and governance.
A systems and thermodynamics perspective on technology in the circular economy.
By Crelis F. Rammelt and Phillip Crisp. real-world economics review, issue no. 68
URL [293]
The paper explores concepts like the circular economy and cradle to cradle from a biophysical perspective based on insights from system dynamics and thermodynamics as an ecological reality check whether these concepts can hold their promise. The paper also reflects on society driving up production and consumption, assigning technology the role to resolve its ecological concerns.
Illich in the library: putting theory into practice.
By Dan Grace
URL [294]
"The purpose of this paper is to draw out critical concepts and ideas useful to understanding how the public library can help build resilient communities, particularly in relation to the challenges posed by climate change, from the theories of Ivan Illich."
Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics. A Plea for a Non-party Polity
By Kwasi Wiredu.
URL [295]
The essay discusses the use of the consensus principle for political theory and practice in Africa. This "could avoid the evident problems of both the one-party system and the multi-party system imposed by the West."
Spectre of the commons: Spectrum policy in the communism of capital.
By Rachel O’Dwyer. Ephemera, www.ephemerajournal.org, volume 13.3: 5-34
URL [296]
"Using a key example from core infrastructure, this paper will explore how controversies surrounding the management of the electromagnetic spectrum provide insight into the communism of capital in the digital domain."
How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons From the First Hackers’ Conference.
By Fred Turner. The Department of Communication at Stanford University. Forthcoming in David Silver and Adrienne Massanari, eds., Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions, New York University Press
URL [297]
In the early years when the Internet went mainstream, a near utopian consensus emerged that the Net would level social hierarchies, distribute and personalize work, and enable new, egalitarian forms of political organization. The author traces them back to find out how these beliefs came into being and how they were embedded into ongoing social and cultural transformations.
The Mission.
By Felipe V. Caicedo, 2014
URL [298]
"This article documents the positive long-term economic impact of the Jesuit Missions in South America, combining information from historical archives and municipal census data from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay."
Perceptions of Grassroots Urban Youth Entrepreneurs about Collective Engagement: an extensive case study in East Africa.
By Fernando Cesar Pires Baptista. Master’s Thesis in International Development Studies Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Amsterdam, 2011
URL [299]
Based on neo-liberal entrepreneurship not being effective at reducing poverty in Africa, the master thesis discusses a model of ‘grassroots collective entrepreneurship’ understanding by marginalized youths and its potential to engender common wellbeing.
The internal economic organization of the Jesuit missions among the Guarani.
By Crocitti, John J. International Social Science Review, Mar 22, 2002
URL [300]
"The object of this study is to reexamine the economic organization of the Guarani missions. The major sources for this study will be Jesuit accounts from the eighteenth century, the majority of which were written in the quarter century before the order's expulsion from the Spanish domain."
Merchant Sharing. Towards a Zero Marginal Cost Economy.
By Laurent Fournier.
URL [301]
Based on the Internet's zero marginal cost rule, the article proposes a theory of trading and sharing that discourages speculation while accruing taxes for government.
Thomas Piketty's Book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Karl Marx and the Political Economy of the Internet.
By Fuchs, Christian. 2014. On tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 12 (1): 413-430.
URL [302]
"Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has resulted in a sustained political and academic debate about capitalism in the 21st century. This article discusses the relevance of the book in the context of Karl Marx's works and the political economy of the Internet."
Perspectives on resilience to disasters across sectors and cultures.
By B. Walker and F. Westley. 2011. Ecology and Society 16(2): 4.
URL [303]
"... for general resilience we need both top-down and bottom-up institutions. ... This corresponds with the conclusions of E. Ostrom and colleagues ... on the need for both in common property adaptive governance institutions. However, barriers to adaptation are different at the two scales as Ditchley discussions revealed. In particular, from a resilience perspective the mechanisms for building social learning and memory were identified as different."
eLearning in Africa and the Opportunity for Innovative Credentialing.
By Gertjan van Stam
URL [304]
"The ubiquitousness of Information and Communication Technology triggers the current revolution in education. Online repositories of courses, through MOOCs or otherwise, open exciting possibilities for access to learning, also in Africa. A multitude of constraints must be overcome, spurred on by a vision of moral obligation and commitment to prepare the next generation and the swell of young people in Africa. The changing form of future education and the need for relevant certification calls for innovation in credentialing and validation of knowledge."
Mitigating “Anticommons” Harms to Science and Technology Research.
By Paul A. David. The WIPO Journal : Analysis of Intellectual Property Issues, 1(2), 2010:pp. 59‐73
URL [305]
The paper discusses the impediments to innovation caused by intellectual property rights on academic research results and analyzes the effects of distributed ownership of scientific and technical database rights.
Modern Money Theory and New Currency Theory A comparative discussion, including an assessment of their relevance to monetary reform.
By Joseph Huber
URL [306]
The paper discusses Modern Money Theory (MMT) from the perspective of a New Currency Theory (NCT) as represented by proponents of monetary reform.
Why the Soviet Internet Failed?
By Benjamin Peters. 2009 draft.
URL [307]
The paper explores the history of the Soviet version of the Internet, its fault-lines and structural design as a basis for analyzing its perceived failure.
Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.
By Dale Carrico. Existenz 8/2 (2013), 47-63
URL [308]
The article describes seven distinctions that aim to help grasp "futurology as both a discursive and a sub-cultural phenomenon".
Energy, Work and Finance.
By Larry Lohmann and Nicholas Hildyard. The Corner House, 2014
URL [309]
"This report, 'Energy, Work and Finance', aims to understand how both energy and finance have been constructed and contested during stormy transformations in industry, livelihood and exploitation over the past two centuries. ... The report concludes that looking at energy and finance not as static 'things' but as political processes in motion is crucial to strategies for a green, democratic, liveable energy future."
Five Assumptions To Transform Education
Taken from Near Future Lab
URL [310]
The article poses five assumptions for discussion about access to education, cost of education models, knowledge as a commons et al.
An Electricity-Backed Currency Proposal
By Gogerty, Nick and Zitoli, Joseph, DeKo. (January 4, 2011).
URL [311]
Central banks hold assets in the form of government debt and gold against the currency they issue. An alternative could be electricity delivering assets - either physical, e.g. fuel or power plants, or in the form of standardized Power Purchase Agreements for the delivery of electricity. This concept might offer more social benefits than gold and retain monetary value better than government debt.
Three Necessary Strategies Mitigating Peak Oil
By John Michael Greer
URL [312]
The article discusses the strategies of conservation, decentralization and rehumanization to counter Peak Oil.
From the Monetary Production Economy to the Financial Production Economy
By Andrea Fumagalli
Discussion of the role of money. "Money is, today, an expression of financial bio-power, since its value is determined by the financial conventions, whose governance represents a proxy of the expropriation of the common, as the new form of capital-labour exploitation in a cognitive bio-capitalism."
Reproducing wealth without money, one 3D printer at a time: The cunning of instrumental reason.
By Johan Soderbergh. Journal of Peer Production.
URL [315]
The paper investigates the relation between two approaches to transforming the world - a technological and a mobilization and conflict related one. The analysis deals with the self-reproductive capability of RepRap and the potential to undermine the market for these printers.
Promoting the Social Commons
By Francine Mestrum
URL [316]
The article raises the question what we can do to avoid social protection being at the service of markets and is advocating a new paradigm that offers economic and social security for all. " ‘Social commons’ aim at achieving a common good, a situation in which people are free, equal and emancipated, in a world based on human rights and solidarity."
The lost tradition of biblical debt cancellations.
By Michael Hudson
URL http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf]
The article reminds of a core body of law within the Judeo-Christian Bible: periodic restoration of economic order by rituals of social renewal based on freedom from debt-servitude and from the loss of one's access to self-support on the land - this meant the cancellation of debts. This tradition was practiced for two millennia in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and helped conserve self-sufficiency.
Revolution, history and dominating social systems: Notes on a foundational approach to systemic change.
By R.C. Smith
URL [317]
The author critiques that leftist politics rely on authoritarian, dominant and exploitative beginnings as well as purely political or economic notions of change, while being ignorant of the holistic needs of people.
Types, levels, and models of change.
By Laurence J. Victor
URL [318] and P2P Wiki article [319]
The essay describes tow levels of change, one maintaining the initial view of the world with a few tweaks while the other goes "out of the box". The first level can be used as a platform for the launching of new systems.
Indigenising Curriculum: questions posed by Baiga vidya.
By Padma M. Sarangapani. Comparative Education Volume 39 No. 2 2003, pp. 199–209
URL [320]
The paper explores the disjunction between the local and oral knowledge system of the Baiga in Central India and formal schooling. Further, questions on the epistemological feasibility of such an inclusion are raised.
Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.
By Gary Ruskin Essential Information, 2013.
URL [321]
This report aims to document corporate espionage and surveillance of nonprofit advocacy groups, including environmental, antiwar, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups. Corporations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics.
Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media.
By Andreas Wittel. tripleC 10(2): 313-333, 2012
URL [322]
The article claims that Marxist theory should be applied more to digital mass media and explores the concept of Marx's political economy and its relevance for a critical analysis of digital media. "These concepts are particularly relevant for a deeper understanding of phenomena such as non-market production, peer production, and the digital commons, and for interventions in debates on free culture, intellectual property, and free labour."
Revolutionary or Less-Than-Revolutionary Recognition?
By Richard Gunn & Adrian Wilding
URL [323]
The article discusses the concept of recognition via its major accounts of recent years versus Phenomenology which has been largely ignored in the neoliberal era. The article aims at contributing to a resurgence of Left Hegelianism.
Return to Eden? Promises and Perils on the Road to an Omnipotent Global Intelligence.
By Francis Heylighen, 2013
URL [324]
"The concept of Singularity envisages a technology-driven explosion in intelligence. This paper argues that the resulting suprahuman intelligence will not be centralized in a single AI system, but distributed across all people and artifacts, as connected via the Internet. ... By extrapolating present trends, technologies and evolutionary mechanisms, the paper shows that these abilities are likely to be realized within the next few decades. ..."
Expanding Design Space(s). Design in Communal Endeavours.
By Andrea Botera. Dissertation Aalto University, 2013.
URL [325]
"The present study explores collective design processes that both closely tied communities and emergent collectives are increasingly engaging in. ... The work introduces some resources and strategies for organizing extended collaborative design engagements in practice, in particular when it comes to new media for supporting and carrying out communal endeavours. ..."
#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.
By McKenzie Wark.
URL [326]
The essay looks at accelerationism from a perspective of political critique and suggests a way forward leaning more towards the left without considering politics as the solution for everything.
The Functionalist Theory of Society and the Problem of Socialist Economic Calculability.
By Karl Polanyi. Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. LII, 1924, pp. 218-227. (A Rejoinder to Professor L. von Mises and Dr. Feliz Weil).
URL [327]
"The acknowledgement of the need to create a “positive socialist economics” implies the admission that such a body of knowledge does not, as yet, exist. Our article addressed itself in detail to the articulation of an appropriate methodology, for the treatment of the problem of economic calculability in a socialist economy. We have consciously and deliberatively selected definitions and related postulates in a fashion which permits the development of a positive theory of the economics of socialism."
Populous Front
By Howard Slater.
URL [328]
"Howard Slater explores the vicissitudes of popular unity, from the history of compromises by variously aligned popular fronts to recent struggles in which ‘internal populations’ and the repressed or absent bodies of left politics come to the fore."
Occupy as Mutual Recognition.
By Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding
URL [329]
"Occupy-style events and initiatives point towards a future where mutual recognition serves as a guiding thread in human interaction. The present short paper explains the sense in which this is the case."