Berlin Commons Conference/WorldCafe

World Cafe

We had a very short - one round World Cafe. Here is the stories of the table hosts.

Michel Bauwens

We dealt with the third question. So we asked ourselves: what makes for "selfish commons". We agreed on a paradox result: The weaker the internal organisation of commons, the weaker the ethical rules towards the outside. Another paradoxical statement was: global commons have weaker rul es than local commons. Some global commons can weaken local commons. For example, there is a DNA Project called "Barcode for Life". So companies can take biological findings in a database without having to deal with local communities and sharing the benefits of their findings.

So how can you deal with that? The answers given were either by external regulations or by conditional access; so if you dont abide by the rules you cannot enter that commons. Pat Money explained that companies who use Open Patents could modify the code and privatise it. Interestingly, the people from the digital commons that were present on that table did not contradict this.

Patrice Riemens

We also had the third question to deal with. The first remark was wether this would apply to natural commons only or to the commons in general, which was later reformulated as "the digital commons". The answer was that it did not matter, the concern was common to all kinds of commons. The differences are there, but there are issues of potential harming in all kinds of commons. The question as it was formulated was thought to give a negative inflection to the issue, it would be better to talk in terms of enabling commons in such a way that the issue of harming will not arise and / or solve itself.

The reason for that is simple: commons are not stand-alones, Commons need Commons....Repricocity is the main characteristics of the commons, a principle that applies within and outside (between) commons.

When the interests of a local commons collide with the interests of a larger commons the question arises: is there a hierarchy of commons, are some commons more imortant than others? Several examples were put forward, usually in the fields of (natural) conservation (putting up a natural reservation and excluding humans). The answer to that was to prioritize the local, its is more concrete while the general is more a construct. The conclusion was: Prioritize the local and the general will take care of itself.

The discussion then focussed again on the traditional-rural-physical, especially on the agricultural as the most typical common. We were talking about commons practises in rural areas - and alternative ways of life. Doing that you minimize the potential of harmful interaction between commons. At that moment we were running out of time. Two points were raised and not finished:

• The tipping point issue: if enough people would do it, the commons could become mainstream (where we obviously are far away yet).
• The other one to look at property and property laws as essential to create an enabling environment for the creation of commons -as opposed to the current system, which is defined by the corporate / state -nexus.

The conclusion was that is possible to create an enabling environment for commons which takes care of its inherent conflict potential by itself.