P2P Foundation:About

Mission and Objectives

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives proposes to be a meeting place for those who can broadly agree with the following guiding ideas, principles and propositions, which are also argued in the essay or book in progress, P2P and Human Evolution:

• that peer-to-peer based technology reflects and holds the potentials for a change of consciousness towards individual and networked participation, and in turn strengthens it

• that the "distributed network" format, expressed in the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of organizing and subjectivity, and an alternative for many systems within the current socio-econominic and cultural-political order, which though it does not offer solutions per se, points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organizing formats, i.e. it represents different processes for arriving at such solutions; it ushers in a era of ‘nonrepresentational democracy’, where an increasing number of people are able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of autonomous and interdependent networks and peer circles; that global governance, and the global market will be, and will have to be, more influenced by modes of governance involving multistakeholdership

• that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement; that universal common property regimes, i.e. modes of peer property, such as the General Public Licese and the Creative Commons licenses should be promoted and extended

• that the principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the General Public License, and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements, provides for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life

• that it reconnects with the older traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization; it has the potential of showing that the new more egalitarian digital culture, is connected to the older traditions of cooperation of the workers and peasants, and to the search for an engaged and meaningful life as expressed in one’s work, which becomes an expression of individual and collective creativity, rather than as a salaried means of survival

• that it offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of ‘cognitive capitalism’; P2P is a language which every ‘digital youngster’ can understand. However, 'peer to peer theory' addresses itself not just to the network-enabled and to knowledge workers, but to the whole of civil society (the 'multitudes'), and to whoever agrees that the core of decision-making should be located in civil society, and not in the market or in the state, and that the latters should be the servants of civil society

• it combines subjectivity (new values), intersubjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and interobjectivity (new forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives addresses the following

• P2P currently exists in discrete separate movements and projects but these different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds them

• thus, there is a need for a common initiative, which

1. brings information together;
2. connects people and mutually informs them
3. strives for integrative insights coming from the many subfields;
4. can organize events for reflection and action;
5. can educate people about critical and creative tools for world-making

• the Foundation would be a matrix or womb which would inspire the creation and linking of other nodes active in the P2P field, organized around topics and common interests, locality, and any form of identity and organization which makes sense for the people involved

• the zero node website, i.e. the site of the P2P Foundation, would have a website with directories, an electronic newsletter and blog, and a magazine. It aims to be one of the places where people can interconnect and strengthen each other, and discuss topics of common interest.

Michel Bauwens, November 29, 2005

Structure of the P2P Foundation

The P2P Foundation is a decentralized organization. In order to foster its growth, however, it has been necessary to create some centralized and managed structures. These are documented here.

• The P2P Foundation is a registered institute founded in in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It's local registered name is: Stichting Peer to Peer Alternatives, dossier nr: 34264847.
• There are no formal operational roles, but Founder Michel Bauwens produces most of the content creation and takes care of community management.
• Bios are available for the P2P Foundation's 3 Founders
• The P2P Foundation has several nodes on the web: a wiki, a blog, a social network, and an email discussion list. Each has an administrator.
  • The wiki is administered by James Burke; technical assistance is regularly provided by Kasper Souren.
  • The blog is administered, and the server space paid for, by James Burke
  • The list is administered by Ryan Lanham and Kevin Carson
  • The social network at Ning was created by Joseph Davies-Coates and is (mainly) administered by Michel Bauwens
  • Moreover, the P2P Foundation maintains a blog and a wiki in Greek, which are administered by Vasilis Kostakis

Read here for more on the History of the P2P Foundation

What Other People Are Saying about Us

• Franz Nahrada GIVE - Global Villages Lab, Austria:

  "The Peer to Peer Foundation is the one organisation that brings toghether knowledge about the emerging cooperative economy and society from all walks of life. Be it new products based on collective imagination and testing, be it participatory forms of decisionmaking, be it good practises of strengthening the cultural commons - P2P foundation spans it all and provides us with knowledge resources essential for our daily work in harnessing the power of local community and global networking."

• Sam Rose:

  "How will humans solve the problem of working together to create new and better working systems for technology production, energy, knowledge creation, education, conflict resolution, media production, health care, design, research and development, finance and natural resource management? If you are interested in engaging these questions, P2P Foundation is one of the few entities that gives those interested access to explore, develop, contribute and benefit from the largest knowledge base in the world of people trying to set right what is really abundant, what is really scarce, and act accordingly. Trying to help create a better world? Start here!"

• Natalie Pang:

  "In a world dominated by market relations, the Peer to Peer (P2P) Foundation provides a solid insight on how alternative structural mechanisms i.e. peer-to-peer and collaborative production can be applied to all aspects of everyday life. This includes technological developments, the economy, cultural and social development, research and development, and the sustainability of natural resources. While grounded in theory, the P2P Foundation also offers ongoing dialogue with interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to explore pragmatic solutions to contemporary issues and problems."

• Kevin Carson

  "The quality of writing on the P2P Foundation blog is incomparable, and I have relied heavily on material in the P2P Wiki on peer production, open source manufacturing, and desktop manufacturing, in writing Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen of my org theory manuscript. I highly recommend Bauwens' extended essay "P2P and Human Evolution," and his shorter introductory essay "The Political Economy of Peer Production."

Evolution of the P2P Foundation

Interview of Michel Bauwens by V. Sasi Kumar:

"Michel Bauwens was in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in December 2008, to participate in the Free Software Free Society conference and talked about the work of the Foundation. In this interview, done through email after his return to Thailand, Michel speaks about how he decided to leave his job and start the P2P Foundation, what principles the Foundation is based on, what its work is, and how the work has been progressing.

You were an information scientist and magazine editor before you started the P2P Foundation. Can you tell us about this evolution? How did it happen?

MB: My first job (but without any formal library and information science training, as I studied political science) was nine years as reference librarian and information analyst for a centre in Brussels. In 1990, I started working as strategic business information manager at the headquarters of the agribusiness wing of British Petroleum. At that time, I reformulated the role of librarian into that of ‘cybrarian’, ie managing “just in time, just for you” information streams to senior management who were not in any real sense using the physical library resources anymore.

As the animal feed businesses were divested by 1993, I moved on to creating a Flemish magazine that was a mix of Mondo 2000 and Wired, and then became one of the Internet evangelists in my home country, leading to work as a serial Internet entrepreneur.

From my very first encounter with the Internet, ie collective mailing lists combining experts from around the world, I knew this was a technology that would change the very fabric of our world. Never before had there been such real-time possibilities for human cooperation and collective intelligence on a global scale. From now on, the privileged communication infrastructures that were only in the hands of multinationals and the State, would be distributed and democratised, a shift at least as important as the effect of the printing press.

At the same time, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the corporate world, seeing how the neoliberal system not only created increased social inequality, exacted a terrible psychic cost from even its privileged managerial layers, while also creating havoc in our natural world. I started seeing the system as a giant Ponzi scheme (a scheme in which the profit of those who invest earlier comes from those who invest later), so what surprised me was not the meltdown of 2008, but why it took so long to actually manifest itself!

At the same time, there was a revival of social resistance starting in 1995, and I was noticing, as a professional trend-watcher, that there was a common template in the new forms of social organisation, the one I now call the ‘peer to peer’ dynamic, or ‘voluntary permissionless self-aggregation around the production of common value’.

Key for me was the observation of the Internet bust in April 2000, which I witnessed from a privileged position as I was working in the same sector. As the stock market imploded, pundits were predicting the end of the Internet because no more capital was available for innovation and development. In fact the opposite happened -- rather than diminishing, innovation increased, entirely driven by the social field of aggregating geeks, giving birth to the Web 2.0, the first social model based on an interrelationship between new forms of capitalism and user-generated production of value. I knew then that I would study this phenomenon more deeply, and in particular since I consider peer aggregation to be a non-alienating form of work, how it could be leveraged as a force for social change.

So in October 2002, I decided to quit my corporate engagement, take a sabbatical to think things through, and moved to Thailand to create a global cyber-collective to research and promote P2P dynamics.

Is there a basic set of hypotheses from which the Foundation starts?

Yes, I formulated the following principles when I started the Foundation:

• That peer to peer-based technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn, strengthens it.

• That the ‘distributed network’ format, expressed in the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political organising and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current political/economic order, ie I believe that peer to peer allows for ‘permission-less’ self-organisation to create common value, in a way that is more productive than both the state and private for-profit alternatives. People can now engage in peer production that creates very complex ‘products’ that can achieve higher quality standards than pure corporate competitors.

I also believe that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge-creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near-zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement; that universal common property regimes, ie modes of peer property such as the general public licence and the creative commons licences should be promoted and extended.

These principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the general public licence, and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements, provide for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life.

If we can connect this new mode of production, pioneered by knowledge workers, with the older traditions of sharing and solidarity of workers and farmers movements, then we can build a very strong contemporary social movement that can transcend the failures of socialism.

I think it also offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values.

I call the new peer to peer mode a ‘total social fact’, because it integratively combines subjectivity (new values), inter-subjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and inter-objectivity (new forms of organisation) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.

Was this mostly your work, or were others involved in formulating these principles?

I formulated the principles on my own, but also after at least two years of reading, and of being attuned with the zeitgeist (zeitgeist describes the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambience and morals of an era). Others were formulating similar ideas, though in different ways. So as usual we should not claim too much personal merit; we are standing on the shoulders of the giants of the past, and are simply lucky to accompany a deep shift in human consciousness that would be taking place without us just as well. At the most, we can try to put some extra grease in the machine.

What exactly does the Foundation do?

We want to be an interconnecting platform for people involved in realising the new open and free, participatory and commons-oriented paradigms in every social field. So, we are monitoring and describing real-world initiatives, theoretical efforts, creating a library of primary and secondary material, and trying to make sense of that aggregation by developing a coherent set of concepts and principles. We do this with a wiki, with nearly 8,000 pages of information, which have been viewed over 5 million times; through a blog reaching about 35,000 unique users last year, a Ning community with a few hundred members, and a number of mailing lists. The most active is the peer to peer research list, where academics and non-academics can collaboratively reach understandings. We also had two annual physical meet-ups in Belgium and the UK, and have some national groups such as in the Netherlands and Greece. There’s a lot of hidden activity acting as connectors between various initiatives, which, despite the global Internet, often don’t know they are working on very similar projects that could reinforce each other.

Peer to peer happens without us, but we want to add a little interconnecting grease to the system. My ultimate aim is to create a powerful social movement that can support the necessary reforms for social justice, sustainability of the natural world, and opening up science and culture to open and free sharing and collaboration, so that the whole weight of the collective intelligence of humanity can be brought to bear on the grave challenges we are facing.

How do you see the work that has already been done? Is it progressing according to your expectations?

I’m pleased on some levels, frustrated at others. In three years, we have constructed a sizeable amount of interrelated information and knowledge, and a ‘community of understanding’. I think we have a ‘really existing virtual community’ that cares about the ideals that we formulated. Each of these people are themselves active in their own real-world projects, some of which will be crucial change agents in the near future. Undoubtedly, the P2P Foundation is a global brand at least on the level of Internet users, as we have not crossed the boundary to mass media reporting. Our growth seems slow, but organic and rather strong, with not so much turnover and a lot of loyalty. Our internal culture of civil discourse seems very strong. On a personal level, I have a little more social and reputational capital, and have been privileged to explain P2P in several countries on four continents, which has allowed me to relate physical presence with the virtual network -- a strong combination.

My big frustration is that I failed to develop a ‘business model’ to sustain myself and my family, so I’m returning to paid employment in a few weeks, which will necessarily diminish my engagement, which has been full-time for the last three years, with the P2P Foundation’s work." (http://infochangeindia.org/200907137829/Technology/Features/Dreaming-of-a-peer-to-peer-world.html)