= What we share. Creations of both nature and society that belong to all of us equally, and should be maintained for future generations. The Commons has the potential to replace the commodity as the determining form of re-/producing societal living conditions. Such a replacement can only occur, if communities constitute themselves for every aspect of life, in order to take „their“ commons back and to reintegrate them into a new need-focused logic of re-/production. [1]

This new section exclusively devoted to the emergence of Commons in various fields.

Most commons fall into three general categories – gifts of nature, material creations, and intangible creations. [2]. Here are the Four Rules against the False Abundance of the Eternal Growth Economy.

Please partipate in our next International Commons Conference, “Constructing a Commons-Based Policy Platform,” which will be held in Berlin, Germany, on November 1 and 2, 2010. We also support the World Commons Day, October 15, 2010.

Introduction

Key Article from James Quilligan: Beyond State Capitalism The Commons Economy in our Lifetimes.[3]

James Quilligan:

"Our global economic system is now in grave crisis, threatening the entire planet, its institutions and species.

A new kind of common wealth is needed to protect the assets of Earth, resolve our private and public debts, and create a global society of justice, sharing and sustainability for everyone.

Our commons are the collective heritage of humanity — the shared resources of nature and society that we inherit, create and use. People across the world are now rediscovering these common goods and choosing to protect them for future generations.

Whether our commons are traditional (rivers, forests, indigenous cultures) or emerging (solar energy, intellectual property, internet), communities are managing them through unique forms of self-governance, collaboration and collective action. And in working together to preserve these resources, we are generating new standards of responsibility, mutual aid and sustenance for all beings.

Global Commons Trust promotes the creation of trusteeships, where the rights to our commons may be realized for the benefit of all." (http://globalcommonstrust.org/)

Key concepts [4] for a Global Common Wealth: 1) The Commons FAQ ; 2) The Commons Trusts FAQ; the Social Charters FAQ

Is there a difference between the Common and the Public?
Introduction to the Commons, the Tragedy of the Commons and the Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons
The Commons - Typology of Stefan Meretz; Ten Theses About Global Commons Movement
Establishing Global Commons Trust , Global Common Goods and a Commons Reserve Currency
The Co-Governance and Co-Production of the Commons through Commons Trusts on the basis of Social Charters
Replacing the scarcity-engineering of capitalist markets by the abundance engineering of the commons, see the Abundance - Typology and the Wealth Typology
Introduction to Commons-centered economics. By Sam Rose, Paul Hartzog et al.
Ryan Lanham proposes a set of P2P Commons Boundary Conditions
In this article on Use Communities, Alex Steffen argues that sharing infrastructures are vital for sustainability
Darryl Birkenfield: What is the Meaning of Being a Commoner?

Visualization

Twelve Key Assets of Ogallala Commons

Source: http://www.onthecommons.org/stem-cord-web-relationships

Charlotte Hess: Mapping the New Commons

Source: Hess, Charlotte, Mapping the New Commons (July 1, 2008).

Codex Justinianus revisited

ï¿½things	Access	Regulation
Res nullius	all	non-regulated
Res privatae	owner	market-regulated
Res publicae	public	state-regulated
Res communes	community	peer-regulated

Source: The Commons: Year One of the Global Commons Movement by Silke Helfrich (29. Januar 2011)

The logic of the market versus the logic of the commons

	Market	Commons
Focus	What can I sell?Exchange value	What do we need?Use value
Core beliefs	Scarcity	Plenty
	Homo oeconomicus	Homo cooperans
	Itï¿½s about resources (allocation).	Itï¿½s about us.
Governance	Market-State	Polycentric / Peer-to-Peer Governance
Decision making	hierarchical	horizontal
Decision making	Command (Power, Law, Violence)	Consensus, Free Cooperation, self-organization
Social relationships	Centralization of power (monopoly)	Decentralization of power(autonomy)
	Property	Possession
Access to rival resources	Limited by boundaries & rules defined by owner	Limited by boundaries & rules defined by usergroups
Access to nonrival resources	Made scarce (to ensure profitability)	Open access (to ensure social equity)
Use rights	Granted by owner	Co-decided by user groups
Dominant strategy	Out-compete	Out-cooperate
Results
For the resources	ErosionEnclosure	Conservation Reproduction & Multiplication
For the people	Exlusion & Participation	Inclusion & Emancipation

Source: The Commons: Year One of the Global Commons Movement by Silke Helfrich (29. Januar 2011)

Typology

1. See also: Commons - Typology

2. From James Bernard Quilligan in People Sharing Resources" [5]

Noosphere : indigenous culture and traditions, community support systems, social connectedness, voluntary associations,

labor relations, women and children's rights, family life, health, education, sacredness, religions and ethnicity, racial values, silence, creative works, languages, stores of human knowledge and wisdom, scientific knowledge, ethnobotanical knowledge, ideas, intellectual property, information, communication flows, airwaves, internet, free culture, cultural treasures, music, arts, purchasing power, the social right to issue money, security, risk management

Biosphere : fisheries, agriculture, forests, land, pastures, ecosystems, parks, gardens, seeds, food crops, genetic life

forms and species, living creatures

Physiosphere : the elements, minerals, inorganic energy,water, climate, atmosphere, stratosphere

3. Sam Rose and Paul Hartzog offer the following typology for Commons based on different distributed infrastructures:

  1. Energy Commons
  2. Food Commons
  3. Thing Commons
  4. Cultural Commons
  5. Access Commons

4. Seven Policy Switches By James Greyson

Examples

Physical Commons:

Knowledge/Culture Commons:

Institutional Commons:

Citations

Sam Rose on Transition Economics

"Where people work together to both share those resources that are shareable now (software, designs, knowledge, waste that can be used as food, surplus capacities and resources) and cooperate to produce items that are still based in scarcity, then re-invest the profits into creating more and more abundance-economy-based systems."

- See Sam Rose on the need for Cooperative Wealth Building facilitators

Neoliberalism as the Anti-Commons

"As neoliberalism converts every political or social problem into market terms, it converts them to individual problems with market solutions. Examples in the United States are legion: bottled water as a response to contamination of the water table; private schools, charter schools, and voucher systems as a response to the collapse of quality public education; anti-theft devices, private security guards, and gated communities (and nations) as a response to the production of a throwaway class and intensifying economic inequality; boutique medicine as a response to crumbling health care provision; “V-chips” as a response to the explosion of violent and pornographic material on every type of household screen; ergonomic tools and technologies as a response to the work conditions of information capitalism; and, of course, finely differentiated and titrated pharmaceutical antidepressants as a response to lives of meaninglessness or despair amidst wealth and freedom. This conversion of socially, economically, and politically produced problems into consumer items depoliticizes what has been historically produced, and it especially depoliticizes capitalism itself. Moreover, as neoliberal political rationality devolves both political problems and solutions from public to private, it further dissipates political or public life: the project of navigating the social becomes entirely one of discerning, affording, and procuring a personal solution to every socially produced problem. This is depoliticization on an unprecedented level: the economy is tailored to it, citizenship is organized by it, the media are dominated by it, and the political rationality of neoliberalism frames and endorses it.”

- Wendy Brown [8]

The commons vs. commoditization

"The main way in which propaganda has been used to try and dull people's thinking about what water is, what food is, what the land is, is by first and foremost redefining everything that we get from the earth as purely raw materials and commodities. It's a denial of the capacity of human beings, of living resources, of equal systems, which is at the heart of the corporate propaganda that enables privatization, that enables takeover and the creation of property in that which should never be private property, that which should always belong to the commons."

- Vandana Shiva on the commons vs. commoditization [9]

Key Resources

Graphic: Choosing the Right Form of Common Property

Film: This Land is Our Land. The Fight to Reclaim the Commons. Written by David Bollier begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting et al.

Delicious tag for updates: http://delicious.com/mbauwens/P2P-Commons

Key Articles

Key Blogs

Commons coverage by the P2P Foundation blog via http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/category/p2p-commons [10]

Kim Klein and the Commons
On the Commons
David Bollier's news and perspectives on the commons

In German:

Key Books

Christian Siefkes (2007), From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. [11]: proposal for a commons-based economic system
Book: Common as Air. Lewis Hyde. 2010

On specialized commons:

The Common Thread. By John Sulston: a nuanced defense of treating knowledge of the genome as a commons.
Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong? Ed. by Silke Helfrich. Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2009

Intro ; Online version

On the Water Commons: Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. By Maude Barlow.the Water Commons

Key Essays

Introductory article:

Four conditions for successful commons. by Mark van Vugt: "I have identified four key conditions for the successful management of shared environmental resources: information, identity, institutions and incentives. I believe we can and should use this 4i framework as the basis for a plan of action to combat local and global environmental catastrophe."

Major essays:

Christian Siefkes (2009), The Commons of the Future. Building Blocks for a Commons-based Society.
The Circulation of the Common = Analytical concept proposed by Nick Dyer-Witheford related to the reproduction of the commons [12]
Information as a Common-Pool Resource. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 111, Winter-Spring 2003. [13]: a paper contextualizing knowledge commons and the study of other commons
Global Commons and Common Sense. Jorge Buzaglo. real-world economics review, issue no. 51 [14] : policy proposals for a global governance of planetary commons
The Common in Commonism. Michael Hardt looks at what Marx had to say about the common. [15]
A typology for managing common resources: Wolfgang Hoeschele on Contributory Resource Use
The Five Commons - ( http://forwardfound.org/blog/?q=five-commons ) a “minimally necessary” set of practices to achieve a sustainable society.

Also:

Philippe Aigrain: The Reinvention of the Commons in the Information Age (french)

Manifesto's:

Strengthen the Commons Now!

Special Authors:

James Quilligan

People Sharing Resources. Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons. James Bernard Quilligan Kosmos Journal, Fall | Winter 2009: this article frames what a global commons-based policy and governance structure should be.
James Quilligan: Toward a Commons-based Framework for Global Negotiations

Special Topics:

Aesthetic Commons and the Enclosures of Instituting Autonomies. By Jordi Claramonte. [16]
Denis Postle: Psychological Commons, Peer to Peer Networks and Post-Professional Psychopractice

Key Events

International Commons Conference, “Constructing a Commons-Based Policy Platform,” Berlin, Germany, on November 1 and 2, 2010. Working document: Berlin Commons Conference

World Commons Day, October 15, 2010.

Key Organizations

On The Commons]

Key Policy Proposals

Securing the Commons. By Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Esther Mwangi, and Stephan Dohrn. CAPRi Policy Brief 4. [17]
Developing the Meta Services for the Eco-Social Economy: on developing a framework for an eco-social economy - includings its arrangements to manage natural commons. Text proposed by Feasta, Ireland. By Brian Davey with the assistance of John Jopling.

Key Videos

Introductions:

The Commons Video replaces the Story of Stuff with the Story of Sharing! [18]
What are the Commons, "does a good job of defining the commons and explaining why they're essential, whether digital or physical". [19]
The Remix the Commons Video Series [20]

Lectures:

All videos of the 2010 Berlin Commons Conference are presented via this consolidated link at http://www.boell.de/economysocial/economy/economy-commons-10451.html

Commons Encyclopedia

Introduction to the P2P Foundation Wiki Material about the Commons

Contents