Extra tips & tutorials

Lowimpact.org are working closely with Mutual Credit Services, the Credit Commons Society, Island Power and Local Loop Lancaster & Morecambe to help build commons institutions / a new, commons economy. New ideas are emerging that are summarised here. These new ideas allow us to take infrastructure into common ownership without incurring debt – which I think is the main reason that (much as …

Most of people’s needs through (pre)history have probably been met through commons, and an estimated 2 billion people today depend for at least part of their livelihood on resources held in common.

Garret Hardin became infamous for promulgating his view of commons as ‘a tragedy’. Elinor Ostrom’s painstaking research shows him to be unhelpfully mistaken in his perception.

Preventing and ending enclosure is a core commitment of commoning.

A co-op is a commons of ownership and thus will by definition have some kind of democratic stewardship machinery. But formal ownership and the right to enjoy benefits of ownership are not the same as stewardship and curating: fundamental dimensions of commoning.

If there are people whose subsistence is threatened, support them – join Survival International.

Conventional banks have been given a state monopoly on the creation of money-as-debt, with compound interest attached. You couldn’t invent a system that concentrates wealth and damages nature more, if you tried.

Exercise and cultivate the common capacities of people to know, to do and to organise, which have been enclosed by regimes of wage-work and professionalised authority.

Software code, algorithm-steered systems, digital media, etc constitute a prominent present-day still-emergent kind of material that can be commoned.

The world wide web could have been a commons, and lots of people who work in the software and web sphere remain committed to the principles of P2P-commons in software code, digital data and digital processing capacity.

Microsoft enclosed an emergent software code commons: GitHub.

Facebook is not commoning, and is not costless. It’s a way for a giant corporation to pump value out of your traffic and unselfconscious gossip, for profit, surveillance and Big Brother manipulation of your buying (or voting, or social ‘othering’) behaviour.