Participants

1. Alain Ambrosi
http://p2pfoundation.net/Alain_Ambrosi
(Communautique, co-founder Global Community Networking Partnership, World Summit on the Information Society)

2. Franco Iacomella
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Iacomella
(Argentina, executive director P2P foundation, peer production/mass collaboration, open education, copyright law)

3. Santiago Hoerth
http://p2pfoundation.net/Santiago_Hoerth
(founder and coordinator of latinamerican collective Código Sur (www.codigosur.org). He's part of the team Radialistas Apasionadas y Apasionados (www.radialistas.net) of Ecuador, and colaborates with the Centro Memorial Martin Luther King Jr. of Cuba (www.cmlk.org). He's co-founder and collaborates with the news site Nuestra América (www.nuestraamerica.info), and helps various social movements in Latin America. He has also participated in the Observatorio Latinoamericano de Geopolítica (CLACSO / UNAM) (www.geopolitica.ws).

4. Frederic Sultan
http://p2pfoundation.net/Frederic_Sultan
(http://www.remixthecommons.org/en)

5. Birte Friebel
http://p2pfoundation.net/Birte_Friebel
(anthropology student, online sewing community)

6. George Por
http://p2pfoundation.net/George_P%C3%B3r
(commons educator/activist, social media strategies)

7. Jose Ramos
http://p2pfoundation.net/Jose_Ramos
(alterglobalization, participant in the Asia Commons Deep Dive workshop, Oct 12-14, 2012; Bangkok, Thailand; co-founder Melbourne Social Forum, Plug in TV, runs futures workshops through Action Foresight, editor Journal of Future Studies)

8. Wolfgang Hoeschele
http://societyandenvironment.truman.edu/Faculty/Facultyweb/Wolfgang%20Hoeschele/indexWH.asp
(human-nature interactions, international development, social power relations, social construction of scarcity)

9. Melanie Dulong
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/mdulongderosnay
(copyright law, e-science, open access)

10. Wouter Tebbens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wouter_Tebbens
(Dutch, Free Knowledge Institute, Open University):

11. Prabir Purkayashta
http://p2pfoundation.net/Prabir_Purkayashta?title=Prabir_Purkayashta&action=edit
(participant in the [[Asia_Commons_Deep_Dive]] workshop, Oct 12-14, 2012; Bangkok, Thailand; member of the People's Science Network Forum, co-author of the statement on the commons in the Porto Alegre/Rio+20 process (People Summit))

12. Samantha Slade 
(co-founder, Percolab (social change enterprise); director Communautique)
http://www.percolab.com/team/?lang=en

13. Marion Sylla

14. Yves Otis 
http://www.percolab.com/services_en/?lang=en
(shift to next-gen processes, tools, organisational models. Focus on sustainability, systems thinking, light and agile processes, free and open-source software)

15. Hervé Le Crosnier
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herv%C3%A9_Le_Crosnier
(web technologies, numerical culture, scientific communications)

16. Marcelo Solervicens
(Canada, AMARC, world association of community radio broadcasters http://www2.amarc.org/)

17. Helene Finidori
http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/
http://p2p.coop/members/helene-finidori/
(Canada, France, Sweden, US, Australia, Indonesia, Spain - She developed a particular interest in making sense of what emerges in social systems to bridge vision and realization.)

18. Nancy Roof
http://www.kosmosjournal.org/bios/nancy-b-roof

19. Denis Postle
(founder Independence Practitioner Network, psyCommons, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/denis-postle/51/17a/648) 
20. Marvin Brown
http://p2pfoundation.net/Marvin_Brown
(writer, global civic economy)

21. Eimhin David Shortt
(http://academy-europa.eu/index.php/windows-8/98-group3/84-eimhin-david-shortt ? - European Academy for Education and Social Research, Ireland)

22. Bernardo Gutierrez
http://p2pfoundation.net/Bernardo_Guti%C3%A9rrez
(Spanish journalist, activist, digital consultant, 15-M, Movimento Social das Culturas, hacktivism, copyleft)

23. Neal Gorenflo
http://www.shareable.net/users/neal-gorenflo
(Shareable magazine, nonprofit online magazine for sharing)

24. Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh
Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh
(editor STIR magazine, http://stirtoaction.com/01_about/)

Agenda

Session 0: Welcome - (14,00)
♣	Round of personal presentations
♣	Explanation of the day agenda
Session 1: The current situation - (14,30 to 16,30 )
♣	What are the different narratives on the commons?
♣	Who is talking about the "commons"? (mapping activity)
♣	Who is related with the commons concept and surrounding ideas?
♣	What communication projects / examples / pieces already exist?
Session 2: Communication strategies - (17,00 to 20,00)
♣	what ideas about the commons are the fundamental ones?
♣	what is the best way to communicate them?
♣	what languages/methodologies can/has to be used in order to give a clear message?
♣	Which communication strategies (even from marketing/ publicity or advertising) can be used to strenghten our message?
Session 3: Communication and education projects (21,00 to 00.00)
Possible projects:
♣	Forming a "commons curation commons"
♣	Bank of Open Educational Resources about the commons
♣	Audiovisual documentary film
♣	Mapping global commons initiative"
♣	"(My city) Commons" on the "Paris en Communs" model: common platform for urban commons initiatives

Franco: We met at Latin America at the end of the last meeting, discussed a lot about communication dimension of the commons. Not many people understand the commons, why it's important, the narrative. At least in Mexico in many people it was related to education and communication, started to ask how can we reach more people, bring more people inside the discussion. We wanted to have a place where to meet with people interested in the topic, not just to present a showcase of projects but to think about the problems and challenges, how can we come together and co-create new projects. How to improve the communication about the commons. I assume that all of you have read the wiki, it's a starting point. Yesterday we were discussing this again, summarising it in three basic ideas. Objectives of this meeting is to understand commons language and narrative, map what is happening where, know the field, discuss, mix and connect with others, and finally to co-create new stuff, achieve certain points of merging. Maybe this can be the place where we come up with new ideas or ideas align with others, get stronger. 

Samantha here has experience with workshop methodologies, will facilitate this meeting. This is open experimentation.

Samantha: Logistics. We have to say downstairs if we'll be having supper here, we need to give an indication within 30 minutes. Tell people here in beta house what we want and when we want it. 

Wouter: Depends on what we get done. Maybe we'll come up with the perfect plan before dinner.

Samantha: Third block depends on what emerges in the first two sessions. I think it's important to make a collective decision about this now. One question - do they serve beer downstairs? It's good to know. Does anyone have an objection to us eating here this evening? [no objections]

Alain: Are we expecting more people?

Wouter: George Por.

Samantha: Can you go tell them? 24 people for 7pm. Maybe we should go round the circle once? I had a question for everybody - how have you been a commoner lately? Think of this however it speaks to you.

Monique: I came from Montreal today, or last night, I don't know. Last thing I did is reading a book, Economics and Democracy. 

Jose: By whom?  Monique: Don't know, it's from Quebec.

Neal: I'm from San Francisco. How I've been a commoner. Being inside a plane doesn't seem like being a commoner very much. When you walk down the street, breathe the air, you're a commoner. What we're doing is taking from some place where we are and pushing further.

Wolfgang: I've just been yesterday I left a conference in Austria (Schwenz), tiny little place, which was called Man your Life about alternative economies. We did quite a bit of singing in a circle and that kind of stuff.

Birte: I'm from Germany, I just arrived from another self-organised seminar that was about utopia, lots of singing and cooking together, discussing, sharing.

Tina: I'm from London, Occupy, active listening, consensus practice.

Nancy: I'm from the United States, I publish a journal called Cosmos that has a very large section on the commons. Right here in this room, all of us have been a part of many circles.

Tim: I'm from London. My most recent experience of being a commoner is working with Friern Barnet library, started as a protest and became a commons but without declaring itself as such. We do things together but I think there's something other than communality involved in getting a commons. 

Eimhin: I'm from Ireland. I try to connect people from different supercultures, ivory cultures, try to form different connections.

Jonny: I'm from London and publish STIR magazine. Second issue is a special commons issue, at the moment we're working on special departments, seed-saving comic street, trying to get other people commoning as well. We've been given sourdough starters from Bristol, you feed the starter, you take off 3 spoonsfulls and share, so it networks. Things that people can actually do practically.

George: I'm also from London, I'm co-director and co-founder of the school of commoning, a small organisation for education and research for commons culture and social renewal, we organise courses online and face-to-face. We've had a series of meetings with remarkable commoners, like Silke. I'm an evolutionary thinker and activist, interested to align myself in the most radical movements of the time and the commons movement is that, in the sense of going to the roots. I was also involved with the founder of the Future of Occupy online magazine, trying to build bridges between

Yves: I'm involved with Percolab, a social enterprise in Montreal. I was a commoner the day I left Montreal because I was doing gardening in my back yard and decided to plant edamame so everybody would be able to pick them up.

Marion: I'm French, living in Dakar, Senegal. It's through Alan and Frederic. I run a place for art, we work a lot with open source. 2011 World Social Forum in Senegal, they gave us the Heinrich Boll publication and

Ruby: I live in Helsinki. Commoning is a think that is very difficult in the sense that we have a time-bank, with close to 3000 members, last weekend we drew up our chart of our principles of acting and I can tell you it's not easy, this thing called commoning. Another part of the story is the hope between north and south, I work for an ecological foundation, partners in Latin America, now also Mali, the struggle for the commons is everywhere. Increased politicising of all those experiences, like where my food is coming from, but how to speak about it, understand that it's all about the same thing.

Abdou: I'm a social scientist from Senegal. I hope I'll find the opportunity to discuss my academic preoccupation and activism also. 

Helene: I'm from Montreal, very happy to be here with you to share this side event. I'm involved with lots of social enterprises in Montreal, with some people here, generally as a project manager or communication builder. Recently I realised I was a commoner by all those everyday practices, when I'm online just managing the community on a platform or when I'm in a circle. How I've been a commoner lately, just this morning I connected with a team I'm working with right now intensively, it's called Residence, is an emerging social initiative with the city of Montreal and two other cities, it's a co-creative process, experimental, I'm learning a lot.

Wouter: I'm from the Netherlands, I live near Barcelona in Catalunia, Spain. How I've been a commoner lately. I volunteer in renewal energy cooperative that's been growing from 0 to 7000 members in 2.5 years. We produce our own energy and connect it through grids to our homes, that's 100% renewable energy. I contribute as a volunteer to a social network for people to share knowledge. We also try different ways to replicate what George has been doing in Barcelona. We share knowledge about different forms of commons with different groups. I'm also part with our family of the local consumption cooperative, we try to put in practice a different form of consumption, have a direct relationship with the producers on a daily basis. More ecological and more proximity produced food. I'm also co-founder of the Free Knowledge Institute.

Franco: I come from Argentina and I think I'm the only one from Latin America here. How I've been a commoner lately, I've spent the last weeks sleeping very little and spending a lot of hours trying to build an infrastructure of this crazy stuff of the Economics Commons Conference. 

Samantha: I'm from Montreal. In a lot of the work we do in our social enterprise we've always been working in the sphere of tending to the collective in the spirit of serving the centre. Last week I was accompanying a community group to do strategic planning from the heart process, to ensure that both the process and the output is shared within the wider world of community organisations. Just tending to this mandate makes me feel I'm a commoner.

Alain: I'm from Montreal, part of the Remix the Commons project. Recently I've been involved a lot in the organisation of this meeting, I think that's a way of being commoner, also involved in the first meeting in a project of mapping the commons in Montreal. A l'ecole de commun, is a project that we have as an example the school in Barcelona and London from the very beginning.

Marvin Brown: I'm from Berkeley, California. I used to spend a lot of time participating in the commons. Last few days I've been with in-laws in Germany and arguing about the commons. I also come back to a notion of the commons that for me is very important, it's our common humanity. Wherever we are, we're living in this time and place with a world that looks terrible for children and grandchildren. This is a common life, it's very important for us to acknowledge this common humanity that everyone belongs to.

Frederic: I come from France, Paris and I think that usually I'm commoning in the afternoon with my friends. Seriously, I join your idea with the humanity, it's very important. I started being interested in the commons some years ago in the World Social Forum because we discussed a declaration of the social movements and we wrote together a core for reclaiming the commons and it was the first time I understood the commons as something very simple. I'm a social worker and if I look in my past I think that I was practising the commons in different ways and activities. It's just a process of continuation, I didn't have the name, vocabulary in this activity, for me it's very interesting to bring the vocabulary and understand how we manage our activities.

Helene: I'm French and live in Barcelona, for me the commons has also been a process, realising that it is indeed what creates our humanity and what enables livelihoods in all different forms and so commoning would be how do we create and generate some positive value, why we live on this earth together and individually. How I'm commoning is trying to work on communication and languages to try and find ways for different streams and views of the commons to coalesce around something that's a bit fuzzy but still there. Lately I've been participating in a kind of hackathon on how we can use some form of semantic technology to find out how to describe objects we're trying to share and can help us discover things.

Jose: Born in Oakland, grew up in Los Angeles, via Japan and Taiwan ended up in Australian, married with children in Australia. I'm reading e-book "Future is the Commons", fantastic by the way, that's quite inspiring. There's fiction in there, I find some of those stories very transformative, they reach deep into the soul. That connects to us, communication and art. The last 4 months I've started a community kids soccer club. In Australia a lot of this stuff has been commercialised, you pay this company $25 a session so your kid can run around, it's absurd isn't it? We don't use money at all. That's a pretty radical innovation right there. I got involved through World Social Forum process, organised for 5 or 6 years, copyleft projects for community TV. Edit a journal called the Journal of Future Studies, looks at future studies from a critical views, strategic pathways. I'm interested in the strategic landscape of commoning. 

Susan: So here's a proposal for this first session. By talking together we need a way to connect the dots not just between our projects but also amongst ourselves. We thought that one way of getting there would be to give ourselves the same exercise to do, then come together and share/build from that. If each of us could think about 3 projects, experiences or emerging projects that connect to the commons, not necessarily that you're doing but that you're bringing together from the community that you're bringing to this room. The idea is that if for each of those ones, 4 bits of information would be enough to get us going. 1) What is this project or experience in its intent/intention; 2) How does that connect to the commons; 3) What are the communication around the commons challenges in this work; 4) What is the ecosystem within which this is taking place, within which you need to be communicating clearly? Who it needs to be communicating with? Will take us 20 minutes, half an hour to do all that? We'll already have a sharing of 60 activities, might find shared patterns or intelligence that will come out of that. I realise that the one question that's missing, that's deliberate, stay a little bit high level.

Santiago: I come from Argentina. I believe to an organisation called Contigo Sur. We work with free software. 

Angelica: I'm Brazilian but I arrive in Mexico for 12 years. I work in a civil association organisation.

Marcello: I'm originally from Chile but am based in Montreal. 

Melanie: I'm a researcher in France in law and technology. Have been involved with creative commons for almost 10 years. 

Samantha: Let's go around the circle 3 times. When we're done, let's put them on the floor between us and see if we can cluster them, based on the communication challenges, might be a good clustering vector. 

Jose: Is it worth recording? Audio, you just pass it around. 

Eimhin: Would it make sense if you start with the location and go from there?

Samantha: It's four o'clock. Let's do a round and see what time it is.

Wolfgang: I'll start with Commons Abundance Network. It's via the internet, potentially anywhere. Intent is to interlink commoners with commoners to improve their own missions, innovate, collaborate. Connects to commons because provides tools for commoners. Challenges: conveying to people the practical value of the problems, gaining momentum, getting feedback, keeping data alive (updates), making a first impression on our website, catering to diversity on commons. Ecosystem: people committed to diverse commons projects and people committed to learning about the commons and finding what others are doing.

Helene: It's not launched yet, it's to create.

Samantha: Put the challenges on a post-it, see if we can connect there.

Monique: Name of the project is EcoFarm. Maybe everyone knows about Fabla. We have a local fabla that favours community base. Fabla opening the doors of objects production to the public in the same way that internet democratised journalism and publication. This approach fits into the DIY movement leads one to believe that our world will be deeply changed, allows citizens to appropriate means of production, break out of patterns of traditional consumption. Communication challenge: no one can imagine this, need to see the treaty printed first. Ecosystem: creators, artists, anyone can have a place in this. Citizens use communal space to satisfy their needs or desire to create.

Neal: Our main project is Shareable.net. What it is is the main program of shareable (online magazine). Everything on the site is creative commons, we have about 2000 articles. Might be the largest collection of sharing-related how-to's on the web. Challenges: take these ideas, paradigm, mainstream, we've made some progress but have a long way to go. Last month we had 7000 unique visitors, came to read about sharing. A lot maybe for our field but a drop in the bucket. Ecosystem: it's on the web, we also interact with mainstream media, we have built a distribution network, Christian Science Monitor, Yes magazine, probably about 20, this greatly amplifies our reach. Based in California but have a global audience.

Angelica: Visiones Communes es un video documental proposo experienceias de las organisaciones de los movimientos sociales a los differentes tipos de communes en America Latina. Para positionar debate, movimientos organisationes sociales, para general elementos teoricos e metodologicos, historias des experiencias para sensibilisar la sociedad civil, visibilisar las problematicas de los communas, utopias y practicas para la construction. 

Franco: Codigo Sur, idea is they're starting a project for an audiovisual documentary to document and map different experiences across 10 different countries across Latin America, how social movements can participate and start to talk in the language of the commons. I imagine this is really related with the actual political situation in this region of the world. 

??? : German-speaking commons wiki. Commonopolis.de. Not openly set up already. It collects states, projects, debates, all sorts of information about commons culture. Trying to network commons projects and people in Germany and Austria, trying to map and explain and connect commons. Right now, one of our main problems, struggles is where to draw the line between commons and where, when does it stop being a commons and is something different, e.g. social business, how critically to we communicate the commons, how radical are we, which language do we use, what level, are we talking with and about, people who are in the commons debate for many years or new people, who can and will contribute to it, looking to connect with other platforms, thinkers, content producers. 

Tina: New tech exploring consensus culture. Part of CITRUS Data & Democracy Initiative. Explore potential of Opinion Space (Ken Goldberg) to enhance communication of complex subjects via deliberative polling, collaborative filtering, collective discussion, all voices heard. Challenges: Unknown (about to be tested, improved, feedback etc.). Ecosystem: digital commons.

Nancy: Kosmos mission: creating the new civilisation. We're in consultative status with the United Nations. We have visitors from 82 countries. We're seeking to identify where the commons fit in this time of transformation, looking at several different areas that cross-cut all institutions, spiral dynamics, new spirituality, all the changes that are going on, transformational leadership. Challenge: people don't know what it means. It's very hard to give a cohesive definition, because every time you're trying to create something you limit and border it. Maybe we shouldn't be trying to define something, be more working around the characteristics of this movement. We're recognising we're in an evolving not static world, where things can be defined by limitation. Our ecosystem is global, we see the commons evolving at all levels. Local appears much easier to handle, communities able to evolve much better. But at global level there are real problems because we have no real global governance. Major problems with environment and so forth are all global problems. Two biggest challenges: how do we characterise the commons and how do we work towards a global governance process.

Tim: Community library, called Friern Barnet. Was going to be closed down by the council. Started off as a protest against this closure. Sits on common land. Was going to be privatised. Miniature commons but attracted a lot of media coverage. Membership is quite self-selective, drawn by the community. Stays open for longer hours. Has a completely different feeling. Has to raise money, hire out its space. Gets some council funding, looks to get funding externally. Main challenge is communication with the council. Would only communicate with the protesters after a court ruling where the court said they had to negotiate with the protesters, the council refused to do so unless they formed a legal structure. Any such structure in the UK is vertical. Rewriting of history going on. Ecosystem: with Barnet council and its agenda (privatisation).

Helene: Project is called Vivacite Montreal. Is a non profit, startup. Communication land trust. Commons connection: give community a resource. It's working with local organisation policy and citizen. Communication challenge: process of buying and selling a house, why people can pay same price as rent fee. Find the words to show how it connects to a larger community process. Ecosystem: All the social and economic development organisations, the city, government and people who dream to have a house.

Eimhin: I'm talking about reality you could make a project of it. Impact investment space, philanthropy crew. Socioecological sustainability. Bioresilience tool, ocean and ecology thread, part of social market capital conference next year. Funding of urban farming, interest in global impact space in information commons. How they can connect their info resources together. Main challenge: inter-commons communications. They are still based in centralised, egoic, specialised space that needs to be informed and mentored. Ecosystem: all agroecological methodologies, P2P, policy and government, social information, enterprise, maker labs, science and academia.

Jonny: Project STIR magazine. Idea of publishing about the Commons is to make the ideas and practice visible through different forms of publication. Online, annual, quarterly print magazine. Huge need/deficit of comics, childrens' books etc. Not just academic text. Magazine advocates and presents examples of already-existing stories of commons. Publishes under copyleft, freely available to share and reproduce. Challenges: use of language/lexicon for commons experience, needs to be one that's inclusive, doesn't exclude those unfamiliar with lexicon of commons. Funding - we crowdfunded last year, raised 5.5k. Funding for publishing at the moment is very, very difficult to come by. Ecosystem: work very closely with movements and campaigns, not externally producing commentary, we do events in community gardens, microbreweries and so on.

George: I believe that the economics and commons conference is a magic moment in the history of the global commons movement, may well become a milestone. It is a prefigurative of what global commons governance can become some day. I would feel bad about myself if my project would not try to contribute to that possibility. Project is wrapping this conference in a blanket of collective intelligence practices. What would it do: increase the flow of ideas, info and inspiration across commoners, streams and side events. Integrate the harvest, output in various media. Commons knowledge garden, linked to P2P foundation and any other integrative. Challenge: collective wisdom, intelligence, are now exactly household terms. Don't communicate easily with the activist on the ground. Need to be translated. Ecosystem: Bell foundation, any commoners who feel attracted to doing this kind of integrative work.

Yves: Metadata for learning opportunities. Create small metadata and provide this to learning provider. Just-in-time learning. Main issues: it's a toy for very geeky people. Issue of communication, be formalistic and also pragmatic. How to get rid of this bridge, formal and end user, learning provider and learners. Other part of ecosystem, academics. 

Marcello: Project is to know the commons. In terms of process and content, they're two different things. First of all, connection with the commons, is to define more clearly the paradigm that is the commons, exists there and has to be interpreted as such, in terms of new learning and approach to the matter. Key challenge: complexity of the issue that cuts through the whole spectrum of humanity, nature, everything. Definition of the elements should be between theory and practice, an open process. Key to make the interactivity throughout the different places where people interact. e-discussions, bibliography, develop like in our case a series of radio programs explaining the issue. Water access or other issues that are clearly connected to the commons. 

Marion: Petit Dejeuner en Commun. Cycle of public discussion about the commons. We ask artists, one of the point of view about the commons, we make a film and after we make a public discussion inside our centre or outside. Like this we have approached different aspects of the commons, material or other. Challenge: intercultural aspect of commons, approach. Problem of language. Share different definitions about commons. Ecosystem: community, neighborhood, artists community, social activists. 

Ruby: Much aspired for. In Finland, it's the issue of open space in a city, to be able to engage in commoning activities. Basic infrastructure, bottom line. Solidarity mapping in the city. Cut through the often very corporate structures, how to have an autonomous space. Also a dialogue, discussion with the city, what are you doing with your food policy, how can we have an impact on that. Challenges: can you really give out the free space, infrastructure. Is this just a big society tool. Empowerment, not just a justification for cutting. Space.

Abdou: Create tools of social regulation. How to transform savoir faire into operational tools of social regulation. Challenges: how to use social representation and daily life discussion in popular theatre, animation film, academic institution to fit the articulation between power and knowledge. Ecosystem: our main partners, civil society, 

Fred: Project, place to share stories about commons and of commoners. To remix these stories but also the commons themselves. It's a library of documents that talk about commons practices or issues. Main challenge, one of them, is the vocabulary. How we can create a frame to have an understanding, vision of the commons. But also one other challenge is to play with the stories, our stories, have something to share, enliven our new vision of your life. Ecosystem: educators, communicators, editors, everyone.

Wouter: Som Energia, renewable energy cooperative in Spain. Also works on awareness raising. Relation to commons: commons governance structure of the cooperative, hundreds nowadays of local but also regional, territorial groups. Each of those groups works on sharing knowledge and doing local action about how the market is organised, against the oligopolies, attract new members to the cooperative. It's almost 100% replicable. There is actual discussions in different parts of Spain that are considering replicating the cooperative now that it has grown so big so exponentially. It's also about producing a sustainable lifeform. Challenges: communication. In 2011, when I joined, it had just started and many groups were suing several anti-commons communications technologies, like Facebook, so we set up a group to set up free software, commons-based social network that was autonomous, in-line with ideals and ideas of the cooperative. Exponential growth, definitely challenging. What level of transparency do we have internally. Another challenge is legal reforms at different levels. Spanish government is making it more expensive to produce renewable energy. Language issue: Spain has 4 official languages. Ecosystem: members of the cooperative, attract new users, industries. Dialogue with public institutions.

Franco: Education project, Gribo, ongoing. Distribute web platforms to communicate alternative education but with a specific interest in commons-education. It's not about learning commons theory it's about finding education institutions that practice commons. Crowdfunding campaign was a success. Challenges: transparency (crowdfunding is about people funding in a P2P way, we make copyleft content but we need to achieve more level of transparency and participation), community (you can have community but not collective action; how to engage this community, commonalism, start to practice, not just support and be a fan). Challenges to communication: people don't understand that these types of platforms are coded by humans. Not familiar with the importance of self-governance on these platforms.

Melanie: Free Basel campaign. A commoner is in prison in Syria. It's a campaign in order to free a commoner. It can be related to the commons because you can end up in prison for doing work for the commons. Free software activist in a dictator country. Challenges in communication are similar to other traditional subjects: raise awareness, find activities which volunteers will be willing to fulfill and reach mainstream media and then diplomacy. Also important to keep the momentum between events, e.g. birthdays. Ecosystem: all the various media formats which can be effective for storytelling. Last event was about organising local events in restaurants, now it's more about doing investigation in various media formats.

Samantha: Project in Montreal but connects to international community of art of hosting, paradigm and practice of having significant conversations together and taking care of relationships between people, in the spirit of improving everything. The project is building capacity for building capacity for hosting in Montreal. Art of hosting community is somehow a fine example of commoning spirit, practice, tool-sharing, infrastructure, international community. As we're developing this community, challenges: frameworks (what is art of hosting), then link that to the commons, two layers of explaining. There's a complexity to them, and you need a certain rigour. Right now it's about making sure that art of hosting doesn't just get diluted and go into all sorts of other things. Keep strong essence of clarity of what it is we're doing here. Get the space to connect it to the commons should be simple but it's not. Ecosystem: the vast, local, emerging art of hosting community in Montreal and the international community bridging between the two.

Alain: My first choice was distributed documentary film but our friends from Latin America took it so we'll work together. Crowd-mapping of the Montreal commons is my second choice, more local. That's a social-technical platform, allows mapping of different commons practices. Commoners as well as basic citizens can contribute through their own phones, cameras, through gamification methodology. Main challenges at communication level: have a common definition of the commons. Question of classification, typology, categorisation. Second challenge is the editorial policy. Third is interculturality. Ecosystem: commoners, basic citizens, different social movements at the city level, working on housing, food etc., the open data activists that work with city decision makers and also there is now an opening with French-speaking commons network, we will meet here in Berlin. First project is vie en commun. Open that to what already exists in Latin America, the big experiences in Barcelona, I hope we'll talk more about mapping here in Berlin as well.

Martin: I'm thinking of the city as commons or as a civic commons. I've done a lot of work around this triad of the commons, the social and the city. The city emerges in that space between the commons and the social. The social is the place where we have disagreements. There's finally a common humanity that unites us and it's that unity that allows us to deal with disagreement and diversity. I think that's what happening in San Francisco, Berkeley, Berlin, celebrations of diversity, people are developing this notion of right to the city. It's my view that those articulations, that framework needs to be strengthened and to be part of the urban celebrations that are happening all the time. The challenge is leadership, it's also the challenge of holding together diversity and unity. The environment is that doing this is essential and doing this is almost impossible.

Jose: There's a project I'm part of in Australia, it's called training for change. It aims to train incidental activists, people who are thrown into it because their livelihoods or environment are being put to risk by Australian mining interests. In Australia at the moment there's a huge push for fracking, coal mining that's impacting farming communities, every type of mineral extraction, it's really threatening the people around the continent as a whole. Project is about people learning the campaign skills they need in order to resist these transnational mining interests with intelligence and solidarity. There's a huge power differential. Challenge: how do you develop a story, narrative that connects with people in Australia but also around the world. Ecosystem: stock footage, high profile support, platform development, P2P skills, crowdfunding.

Helene: Building narrative and language. There was a very interesting talk by Ann Pendleton-Jullian ("Power and Ecosystems of Change"), to change paradigm you need to have a fuzzy strategic goal, that is not delineated enough so it can coalesce lots of initiatives around it. She was referring to David Rumfeld's network theory, that networks can change power distribution etc. Talked about using these fuzzy strategies for a new paradigm to emerge. I kind of tilted, that's the commons. How can we characterise, define the commons, as something fuzzy enough so we can tell all the stories of everything that can connect to the commons. How can we find in each project for good, be it sustainability or spirituality, the little connector, the little metadata that connect it to the commons, how can we find adjacencies and pathways between the various initiatives, so people can hop from one to the other. Challenge: how can we work together and leverage collective intelligence of this conference to try and do this mapping, all the various world views, types of perspectives on the commons, express the variety, let go of prioritisation, find the limits (at what point it's not a commons anymore), risk of cooptation. Ecosystem: all of us and all of our initiatives. How can we work on that today?

Samantha: For step 2 we had planned to do whatever makes sense, organise yourselves in small groups, pick a time slot, nice chunk of time but have some kind of intention or connection. 

[15-minute break]

Samantha: We have some extra people that have arrived since the break. Will the people who have arrived just present who you are and where you're from.

Bernardo: I'm from Spain. Local innovation network, it's called Futura Media (futuremedia.net), linked with 15M. I'm working in several processes in Latin America. 

Mayo: I'm a wikipedian, I'm part of the school of the commons in Barcelona. Do research on the governance of digital commons. Also in Boston.

Max Holland: I'm from London, anthropologist, recently published a book on the biology of cooperation, trying to move away from gene level.

Carolina: From Madrid, currently living in Berlin, part of 15M/Take the Square part of global revolutionary networking, been doing this since two years. 

Samantha: We've shared some projects that relate to the commons. We have two others ready to share but there's a time factor. Description of the project, how it connects to the commons, communication challenges and ecosystem. Papers of the floor map out challenges of communicating the commons.

Now we're at the best method for us from now until summer. There's a proposal that was discussed, suggestion is maybe what we should do is share the topics or themes that we would like to discus and then open the space. We have these two rooms in which we can continue the discussions. Room across is a quiet space but downstairs and outdoors. If we chose to stay around the building we could move around between the conversations.

George: If I can recap, the idea is that we are looking for integrative patterns, things that can pick up more than one of the previous project descriptions. A number of people mentioned different kind of mapping projects (city, global, cultural commons). I would like to be hosting an open space session about the cartography of the commons which would be not focused on one particular map but more on the generic questions, principles and practices of mapping different kinds of commons.

Samantha: Mapping the commons, principles and practices. 

Neal: I want to talk to anyone who does online media about how we can collaborate and amplify our voices together.

Birte: I'm wondering about what's the logic of the commons and how we can represent that in images, languages and action. Active narrative of the commons.

Franco: Interesting to discuss the necessity of a kind of interface between these kinds of commons experiences and the state. Some of the experiences here need nested regulation, that Ostrom talked about. These problems that local commons experience with the powers on top of them.

Wouter: You mean find commonalities in terms of legal reforms? Partnerships?

Samantha: Ok, so what I've put here is commons and state, power, interface with imagery.

Jose: There was a proposal, a couple of people connecting with Santiago's project, basically distributed model, approach, to commons-oriented documentary filming. 

Alain: We are a couple of people here interested in these kinds of projects.

Neal: What I'm interested in, not only but, is how much reach do we have and how do we pool it. 

Samantha: So distributed approach to film-making about commons.

Jose: One way of doing this is keep the groups together but one theme starts and then the other one. 

Neal: I'd love to talk to people making media.

Eimhin: Digital infrastructure and tools is a good one as well. Common Abundance Network. For communication.

Tina: Serious games.

Wolfgang: I'm feeling I'll have to cut myself into several pieces.

Alain: Problem of interculturality. As was mentioned right now it's not just a question of language, you can go beyond the problem of language via serious games and gamification, when we're talking about the narrative of the commons, there are different modes of doing things together without using a language. You can do things through art, without the problem of the translation. 

Jonny: Using symbolism.

Neal: Can I clarify. That's what I want, a session, where each ones is leading that discussion.

George: Ideally not only lead but take some responsibility for harvesting the key points (who were the people present, what were the highlights of the conversation and what action was decided at the end of the session). In physical space it's very difficult to be in more than one space at a time. Post these key points at the forum. This shouldn't be the last day of our conversation.

Ruby: What about a north-south alliance communication?

Alain: The problem is that that's not really my priority at the moment. I'm already splitting my interest in the mapping and the co-production. 

Is there some place to talk about traditional media? What we can do with them?

Neal: Can we make it a more general media session?

Jose: In terms of understanding what each group has decided to do, what they learned etc., that's really important. Is part of building a practice, working together to support each one of these projects. Each one of those groups is a prism of the larger group.

Alain: Asking George, you had this project of curation.

George: This is a step towards us becoming the commons, taking responsibility for the shared resources that we have, which is our passions for different projects. One step is a community of learners, where we are present in the collective, exchange of ideas, for the benefit of my project, becomes better through the exposure to others. It's not only a community of learners but a community that learns. What Jose describes is an important step in this direction.

Tina: What subjects are closer together? Serious games should be part of non-language communication. Example interculturality communication, arts and symbolism.

Jonny: Online media should be just media.

Wolfgang: Tools of mapping also relates to the media.

Samantha: If we all come back together and share in real time at the end, I think maybe that's really worthwhile for getting the connectors between those conversations. Is that enough for us to get going? Is this one round or two?

Two!

Samantha: If we're going to do two rounds - how does this work?

Helene: I think the symbolism is close to the logic, the thing is to express the commons in a certain way, derived from a certain logic and then how does this logic apply to different media. The question becomes do we talk separately from the logic and then how it derives in different forms and media or do we deal with them together?

Neal: We decide what goes in session one and what goes in session two.

Jose: If after the first round each group has the chance to summarise very quickly it gives more coherence to the next round.

Samantha: So let's put some timing on all that. It's now 6:30. For a round 45 minutes? Half hour? One hour? Ok, this one's going to go from 6:30 to 7:30 which means at 7:30 we need a break to get our food. Makes sense to have a break and eat downstairs.

Digital infrastructures group

Present: Carolina, Helene, Max, Tina, Wouter, Eimhin, Melanie, Fred, Yves
Minutes: Tina

Eimhin: First of all, there will be specific interests here, people will have ideas of tools. I'll ask you of example of tools that you have in mind.

Wouter: Maybe you should define needs before we enter into solutions. Do we have criteria as well? Should be commons-based?

Eimhin: Yes, commons is the key word.

Wouter: So, if someone says Facebook we can shoot him off.

Helene: Not necessarily. Describing tools will describe needs that go with it.

Wouter: So then we have needs, solutions but at the same time we need to problematise if the tools are not commons-based.

Max: Let's add some contents to these headings.

Helene: Navigational tools in knowledge, memes, practices. It's a need. Based on what you observe. 

Wouter: Mapping would relate to it, right?

Helene: Say that you identify practices practices, needs etc. and you get the Wikipedia page and you draw from the list of these observations a graph of how on Wikipedia they are interconnected and the graph that comes from it you can navigate between what you know, within what you know and then it uncovers what you don't know because between what you have observed there are other links and so you can discover and enrich your discovery that way and also monitor how a practice, social object, whatever.

Melanie: It would be like a mind map.

Helene: It would be something that evolves. Sphere of the know. Monitor how knowledge and practice evolves within what you know.

Eimhin: In itself it sets knowledge as an objective. You wouldn't want to create directions and limitations where knowledge goes a certain way.

Helene: By association. Visual thesaurus. But the difference with visual thesaurus is that you only have what's in your periphery, whereas if you input a set of markers, it draws a graph of a domain that you can create. Applications for this is learning, making discoverable the content of any type of wiki because for now once stuff is 

Yves: DBpedia, databasepedia work, is what it's based on. They just provide the links and you can play with them.

Helene: If we instill worlds that relate to the commons we could create pathways that relate to the commons.

Wouter: A system that takes data from Wikipedia and creates pathways. Gnowsis, is a semantic explorer, more than an explorer, built in India. Gnowledge.org.

Carolina: How many uses normally free software? Free on both sides.

Eimhin: What sort of tools do you feel that there is need for>

Max: Horizontal networks. 

Carolina: What do you understand by vertical networks?

Max: Like if you want to access internet you have to go to your internet provider.

Eimhin: Oh so like open protocol. It needs to be scaled up.

Carolina: Freifunk is one. Guifi is another, they have 15000 nodes or so. 

Max: Freedom Box is another one, was from the Occupy movement.

Helene: There was one in Mexico, I don't remember the name.

Max: What about social networks? 

Eimhin: The reason FB is like it is, is because it does what it does very well. A new thing has to do something else, facilitate people to do something they missed.

Helene: Could it be a social object-based network?

Eimhin: A social network is removed into space. You can relate the web back to real life back on the planet, like what they're doing downstairs with mapping.

Max: If you want a collaborative social network to do commons project...

Eimhin: But is it a social network at that point anymore?

Carolina: Lorea is one such network, distribution of ELGG. Revo, Franco's project, is based on this as well. Kune. These have quite different functions. Diaspora is more like Facebook. Kune is collaborative work social network.

Wouter: You also have pump.io, it's the next thing out of Twitter, it's based on free software. You should check it out. identicaa, was the alternative initially, free software.

Yves: Made in Montreal. Open standard, software and license. This is the basic and must be the part of any project that claims to be open. Do we need some kind of open standard for describing the commons? This is a cue that we can use to build new systems. People talk about the language of the commons but we can build the metadata of the commons to identify easily-

Wouter: Licensing is already included. 

Melanie: You're the person that mentioned ISO standards earlier.

Eimhin: How do I put that here? I need help. 

Yves/Melanie: It's a need, we'll find some examples of it but we have tools in terms of formats and licenses. 

Helene: The idea is to be able to converse with anybody without even going through a social network.

Wouter: Yes, standards or specifications.

Yves: Specifications is industry-based. 

Wouter: You need a standard-setting body. 

Melanie: I was thinking about adding a non-digital layer when earlier it was mentioned this project, the art of hosting, I had no idea about it but was thinking how it would be possibly, or possibly not, to integrate it online. It's apparently a way of leading group conversations. It's a communications methodology as far as I understood it.

Max: Methodology can be a tool.

Melanie: We're always talking about legal, technical openness, economic governance but communication, not so much.

Yves: We could call it the art of commoning, the way we learn from each other and work together. I don't know how to do that. We can manage to create a body of knowledge on how to common, part of building a culture. 

Wouter: But is it a digital infrastructure?

Yves: We can build it in that spirit. Have more collaborative way to work.

Tina: Opinion Space, communication methodology, mass communication/content focalizer/aggregator.

Melanie: Liquid democracy for decision-making, is between communication and governance. 

Max: I think we can make a note of those things.

Eimhin: I think it's a fundamental part of this. You need to look at the commons transnationally. You have no legislation developed with regards to body of water but you should be able to go into the repository at github and take for your legislation and tailor to your national needs.

Helene: Is it that you want to describe it in a more abstract way? When you talk about tools, say one about making decisions, you have loads of tools that make decisions but none of them do what you want to do. Could we describe what we want the tool to do? 

Carolina: We can use tools for whatever we want but they're not focused on decision-making. Liquid democracy is specifically designed for decision-making.

Yves: You can hack those tools and make them more commons-friendly but they're copycat software.

Eimhin: What's the difference between liquid democracy and github policy?

Wouter: To do democratic elections, sort of, but in the community. 

Eimhin: Participatory democracy. We have to get rid of the buzz words.

Max: Liquid democracy is an existing tool.

Carolina: A couple of communication tools. Mumble, a mass audio conference tool.

Melanie: Pirate Party also uses it.

Wouter: Can we ditch Hangout and Skype?

Carolina: Big Blue Button. It's also for learning, not just video conference. Has video, audio, chat, translational chat.

Wouter: IRC should be there as a communication tool, is one of the oldest but works the best. We did Jabber five years ago but IRC still rules.

Eimhin: We didn't go anywhere near crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, crowdaggregation. It's a very important tool. 

Wouter: I thought it was digital infrastructure about communication.

Helene: Tomorrow there's a value session.

Eimhin: Can we take a new piece of paper and start jotting down quickly these kind of things.

Helene: (...) Personal portable ids for the sharing economy. The guy of Sharetribe was incorporating the key of the personal API into the Sharetribe. The idea is to have an event where we'll try and develop these tools to create another event. Bootstrapping stuff.

Eimhin: Interoperability, personal APIs, OS interoperable Digital Ecosystem. Sharetribe - community marketplace. 

Yves: TLD, top level domain. We started a co-op in Montreal. We have to pay $2000 just to have the co-op in the domain.

Eimhin: That's a very good idea. Simple. What is it that takes time to build, say a .is?

Yves: Not in government interests. But since we're not damaging any goods in the business side, we needed to prove that we were a big community, as a movement.

Eimhin: What about crowdsourcing, crowdfunding?

Wouter: Do we talk about digital complementary currencies? Can we talk about Bitcoin? Brickle?

Eimhin: We just want to get it on paper.

Wouter: It's too much. Focus.

Helene: So what would we pick if we wanted to create a network of the commons.

Wouter: Interesting. How would we design it?

Max: We create a Facebook group.

Helene: We created a Wordpress site because it's a very low learning curve.

Max: For the commons network they just set up Wordpress. Or was it BuddyPress?

Carolina: Crabgrass is another social network, they have inside Etherpad as well as Lorea that you can use without losing other parts of the program. One thing I would like to know is what infrastructures, which servers do we have or do we know that we can use for a commons or social things? Like riseup, occupy.net they have set up etherpads and forums, several tools.

Wouter: We have one and a half servers/machines at the institute. We were talking about sharing this.

Carolina: I'm interested in the economy part and know that these infrastructures need to be supported, also the people that are behind.

Wouter: The developers and all that.

Eimhin: To get everybody on the same page. These are all early stages in development, tweak people in the investment and philanthropy communities. 

Wouter: This infrastructure is really important for the commons, we need to support software development but also running of the servers.

Carolina: The reason we use google it's not so easy to find a server that allows you to have a mail with 10Gb. So Riseup gives you 25Mb and a free account. And also Occupy talk, they have at least mumble and some other services. In Spain we have tomalaplaza (take the square) .net. In Italy there is artistici.

Wouter: So these are community-organised, commons-based.

Yves: There's y-nternet. Working also in Brazil and Switzerland, platform-mixing. Facebookish with some stuff.

Wouter: N-1 server (n-1.cc) is the most famous one. Lorea server.

Eimhin: I was thinking about the way to arrange different software that do different things, then create different resource circuits. You have the people from Centup, it's like Flatter, you give people to content that you like, 50% goes to content creator, 50% to a non-profit organisation that Centup has (it's actually Centup). Funds end up redistributed in a network of people who are already sharing skills and resources. Flatter is attached to your man from the Pirate Party, he's going for MEP now isn't he. 

Say the EdgeRyders network, activist types. This has now incorporated as a non-profit organisation, they're also doing something that's edging towards time-banking. By aligning them and their content creators you can pump out media and arrange that in such a way so that media creators get supported but also by virtue of their coalition they do work that needs to be done. Trying not to think in terms of this software does this but this connects to this connects to this.

Appdecks, software-based decks, they can be community-based in the same way of social bookmarking. These two aspects of both functional and social application decks. Like a hand of cards. A software deck or a resource circuit.

Helene: Isn't that what plugins are trying to achieve? Is it something different?

Eimhin: Now people build something so that it does something by itself not so that it does something when connected to something else. Network aggregation.

Carolina: All these projects are not sustainable. Developers are on the market.

Helene: DGConnect (from European Commission) are looking for projects that are not in the traditional arena, like students, hackers, rather than institutions, universities etc.

Eimhin: If you build a sharing network, you'll have people moving around.

[end of group session - break for dinner]

Samantha: The agreement was to take 10-15 minutes just to see what came out of the different groups. I'm sure there are some suggestions for the rest of the evening. Maybe we can finish earlier than midnight. How about we do the sharing, then a second round, sharing, then call it an evening. Does that work for everybody? It's eight o'clock now, it will still be late.

Joao: Is there time to talk together about how we can form a solidarity system to support what we're all doing. I still fell that we're still here talking on our own, what's the agreement, the practice? Maybe I'm asking too much.

Alain: Tomorrow morning the idea was to have a showcase of projects but we can change this, no problem. 

Samantha: So, why don't we look at that after the second round, do it this evening if there's time, if not tomorrow morning.

Eimhin: We had digital structure and tools for the commons discussion. We started from the premise of communication, broke into other types of tools before we realised that was too much and we would have needed a lot more time to go into it. We divided our two sides here, what kinds of tools would be needed for the communication and what tools already exist that approximate this work. Navigational tools for knowledge, needs and practices. You would have observable paths of knowledge, so you could start from what you know and then according to a linked nodal structure you could navigate paths of learning, based on what other people have learned. Kind of a social learning tool. What am I learning and who am I learning from. An example of this, connected but not the same is DBPedia, apparently it's semantic. DBPedia is a navigable knowledge-basis and Gnowsis has a structure of navigable links.

Horizontal mesh networks. Open protocol, the ability of not bowing down to the man. Freifunk, Guifi.net and Freedom Box. 

Then the idea of social network was brought up, I raised the point of whether the word social affects the activity inside. Can we reinvent social in a more "do" sense. Kuna, Lorea/Elg, Diaspora and pump.io. Of these, Kune and Lorea are collaborative project working suites, Diaspora is more a FB type of thing. 

From there we talked about open standards and open language, at this point I was way over my head.

Sub-tools, open licenses and open formats. The idea is to create a common language for the commons. 
With reference to art of hosting there was talk of communication methodology as a live tool, how to develop a commons tool for art of hosting for productive communication of and for the culture.

Content focalisation, aggregation, horizontal (Opinion Space). From there we talked about liquid democracy (tools that we already have). The idea is mass participation.

In terms of policy, we talked a bit about github policy and making policy creation participatory. The American government have open-sourced their policy a week ago.

Then we talked about project/community/software decks. This is like a version of social bookmarking. A suite of software that you use for working in functional projects with social groups. 

We briefly mentioned Mumble (audioconferencing), Big Blue Button as an alternative for Skype, BBB is also learning, knowledge-exchange, chat. When chat came up we mentioned IRC

BuddyPress as a platform for organising, social networking.

DGConnect, quite supportive of late. An important point that came up involved servers.

FreeKnowledge institute, Artistici, y-nternet, n-1

Need to support a lot of information, it's going to need server space and capital resources, same for developers for all these things.

Interoperable software, personal APIs and the creation of an open-source, interoperable ecosystem, which basically runs on the premise that you have commons

TLD, like .eu, .com, top level domain, that identifies the commons. I thought that was a brilliant idea, and within this situate functional translations for working group. There's enough foundational basis to attract and substantiate the resources to do that.

Crowdfunding, network aggregation - there wasn't time to go into it.

George: Actons and next steps? 

Eimhin: We need another two hours. We need to get into tools not related to communication, time-banking, sharing currencies, there's a whole host of other things.

Potential, ideally, a top-level domain and software with scope that can situate. We arrived to the idea, notion, fact, that all softwares in general work by themselves but don't interoperate. We looked at the idea of resource circuitry, like Centup. Platform is for internal and external projects, you could create circles, align projects and people like DIY days with DirectMountain projects...

Samantha: Would you like to put this project in for the second round?

Eimhin: Next step. Top level domain and then getting together a bunch of the key programmers and people with a good knowledge of these tools to build a suite where you put everything on the same page.

Helene: And how do we create a community here, now, tomorrow?

Samantha: Can I just be clear for this next session? Is there a side-event on this? I'm a little lost. 

Helene: Next steps for that would be how do we create the network of the commons. I have three sessions that I want to attend in the next one.

Samantha: Does someone want to be responsible for this in the next session? It's the same thing carried again to whatever the next part of it is. 

Franco: We already have the mailing list for this group. 

Neal: Media group. We organised ourselves around the question how can we help each other. We had a very free-flowing discussion, campaign, ideas, we shared notes about different innovations and tips that we've used or knew about. We closed up with a very simple to-do. We formed the commons media alliance and we're opening a forum on the Commons Abundance Network site and we'll continue the discussion there.

Wolfgang: The CAN is certainly open to anyone to start discussions, forums, and anything else they're interested.

Alain: You have a special presentation of this on Saturday.

Wolfgang: Yes, it's the post-conference side event. It's still in formation so if people have ideas about tools that they would like to see put on this website or change the website that would serve everyone's needs better, we would appreciate all kinds of ideas. Also business model kind of ideas and so forth. One more thing about the media thing was about global sharing.

Neal: Global Sharing Days, June 2nd. Maybe we need more time to do something next year.

Samantha: Documentary film-making? Distributed approach.

Franco: I didn't take notes but we came to an agreement, we talked in the past how to join efforts between the people who have experiences in audiovisual communication. Santiago presented here today they are already working on a documentary project called Visiones Communes, focusing on Latin American reality, social movements and commons. Jose is also working, ongoing process starting to explore audiovisual language as a producer, located in Australia. And Remix the Commons, already introduced. It's an international platform, the agreement that we achieved. Since there are many projects and others can appear on the topic of the commons, the idea is to set a kind of protocol at a technical and legal level to be able to create and exchange a common pool resource so that everyone can take the raw data and remix, create your own piece. Join efforts in remix the commons, is already happening, do it with people who are doing similar projects. Visiones Communes, the idea will be that all the interviews and recorded material is uploaded on this common platform so the project will be supported in some way by Remix the Commons, by diverse projects and organisations. We also talked about what will be the next steps, not just share the audiovisual material but also the knowledge involved in this production, alternative finance models. I briefly recommend experience I had last year, 3 years working on The Forbidden Education, was screening in coordinated events, was also crowdfunded. We're just resuming the whole idea, planning on wokring together with Remix the Commons, to create new audiovisual products.

Eimhin: I didn't get to go to your talk but I was talking a few days ago to xx Boulanger, French choreographer, is initiating a 12-hour performance that's not for money. He's exactly like you say, creating a protocol for this footage. Wants to initiate a chain event of this happening throughout culture to show people that this is not begging, it's an art form. This man is very influential. I'd love to hear more about that.

Franco: We also commented on the possibility on sharing the social capital that the project has, for example a press agenda, alternative network of distribution model for these audiovisual pieces. For example in the movie we made last year we have 1000 screens around the world. We already have these contacts.

Birte: Mapping Challenges. We have an actual map, really beautiful one. First thing we did was talk about the challenges that come with mapping commons. One thing was that we found out that most maps start with one dimension and then the need for more and more and more dimensions comes. What we need is a multidimensional visualisation. For that we need tools that can do that. Then we came to the point, question, what can be on the map and what can not be. What is and what is not a commons, where do we draw the boundaries and do we want to do that because that includes power and who is to do that. Can people put themselves on the map. Can people who are already on the map do that? Then we found that there's a connection between this issue and the tools. The tools have to reflect, include the values that we already have. Fred also mentioned the difficulty between objective data, things that everyone can agree on, how they are used and interpreted by people or institutions. We have this issue with values and principles, like an editorial policy, or do we need some kind of manifesto. We found out that some principles for us would be the purpose, direction, journey for the map. We were talking about traveling, so you need a map. But since these commons that we want to show are in a process themselves and also the map is a process, the map needs to be evolving, not something concrete and fixed. Also, it should be beautiful because then people would want to use it and enjoy using it. Another question is which projects in my direct neighborhood I care about and find important, maybe that would be an idea for finding what to put on the map. Some of the goals for maps like this would be visibility that comes directly with power (who's on the map and who's not), solidarity, community formation and co-creating a reality, enabling participation. Another question: who are we addressing with this map. We decided to create a map or a list about other maps, so we would have a commons of map-makers. We would want to create different maps, identify their principles, who's mapping and what etc. Since we were wondering how can we find out what to put on the map and what criteria is going to be there, there's an interview guideline that a friend of mine suggested, it's in German but is based on Ostrom's 8 principles, what needs are you addressing, what resources are you using, how are you avoiding the commodity form, who's joining you and who's not and why, where's the boundary between including and excluding people and so on. 

Eimhin: You don't have to decide who goes on the map. The map doesn't have to be fixed if it's 4-dimensional, and I say 4-dimensional for mapping peoples' values. Imagine my body, you click veins, you only see veins. It's like you can search things by information filter if you have a tagging system, it's quite simple stuff. 

George: Would you join our commons of map-makers initiative.

Eimhin: If this happens, people will just want to go walkabout.

George: We collect actual commons maps, what Fred was suggesting, learn from it and compare. Next step will be exchange e-mails and I'll open a group space with those notes and the questions that came up from the conversation. I want to open it on the communication platform. If we want to form a commons of common cartographer would you be able to turn on the library, document function.

Franco: It's already on.

George: Another thing that would be useful for us is the wordpress wiki. Then we could co-edit documents.

Franco: Silke said it would open at the end of the conference. Depends on interests of people, using the tool. There are many platforms. 

George: So much thought and energy went into the organisation of this conference. There is wisdom in that, the five streams. Aligning ourselves with it would make sense to me.

Franco: In terms of technical problem, the CAN project already has a wiki. 

Neal: Are we reporting back or are we going into a freeform discussion?

Samantha: It's a tricky one, it's about harvesting.

Franco: It's possible we can do it.

Wolfgang: For mapping, is anyone familiar with social network analysis software? What's more centrally connected might be more related to commons.

Samantha: It's ten to nine. The proposal is to step into round two for one hour. Does anybody object? This recap took almost an hour (50 minutes), so I propose that next recap is for tomorrow morning. We're not going to give ourselves the time to do it properly if we do it tonight, won't have the quality. 

Alain: The only question is that tomorrow morning we were supposed to present different projects. I don't know if we'll have time to do both. Personally, I'll have to leave before the end.

George: I have a brief announcement. I heard that some people were interested in educational resources, as a reminder there'll be a side event, in the commons educations from 1 till 4:30 outside the lobby of the Heinrich Boll foundation. 

Helene: Is there a time when we'll wrap up the whole thing and say what we will do or not do during the conference?

Wouter: And after the conference.

Samantha: From picking up the energy in the room, it's not going to happen this evening.

Alain: These side events were not aimed to prepare something for the main conference, it was not in the objectives.

Fred: Important to discuss this also with David tomorrow, as he's in charge of this part, documentation of this conference. One is with video and the other is with David that will collect all the values, documentation and treat that after. I think it will be very important to discuss with him.

Tina: Merging serious games with Digital Infrastructure, if there's time to discuss.

Jonny: What's serious games?

Tina: It's games that offer more than entertainment, like knowledge, learning, social criticism etc.

Jonny: Like Co-opoly?

Tina: Yes, like Co-opoly the board game, only now there are lots of similar mobile apps.

Samantha: We have this room overnight, so we can leave papers and our stuff. Meeting back here again at ten.

Digital infrastructures group - round 2

Eimhin: We finished the last session at the border of communications tools, were about to start looking at tools relating to economics resources. Cultural community tools as opposed to simply communication.

George: What is the purpose, desired outcomes of the session? 

Eimhin: I'm freestyling here, the backbone of all the different facilities, end result being the possibility of bringing everything together.

Tina: What do we do next? 

Eimhin: Maybe we'll exhaust this list.

George: There are millions tools for every possible users. Creating another list of tools wouldn't be particularly interesting. What makes it interesting for me when you say what we need and then what makes it even more interesting for me is we morph the generic we into a concrete we, like either this infrastructure group for our collaboration, or more interesting if we think of how can we serve the larger community of commoners that have gathered here in Berlin. Then we think of tools in relation to a specific community. Looking into the relationship of the specific needs of the community and how they can be best served by the tools that we know. That's my sense of being a community technology steward, someone who clearly understands the potential of present and emerging technologies, also understand the community, commons need to evolve and create value for members and society. The job of the architect is how these two relate to each other. What we can get from the affordances of the tools and how these match with the needs and aspirations of the community.

Tina: Maybe we have to identify the needs of our community here today.

Eimhin: The reason I would write a list of tools is to look at how, we talk about needs of the community. You can identify the needs within the tools and where overlapping needs create different tools and where you have insularity between the different tools. The way I think about it is, no one is going to change the internet unless they're a geek. You need interoperable software that can unite the functionality. 

George: That's the holy grail, have one platform that has all the features that one can dream of and I've been chasing that dream for many years. Always wanted to have one platform instead of so many different interfaces that people have to learn, that would be kind and gentle to users. The closest I came to it for a couple of years, that was Drupal content-management system, it had indexing tagging, wiki, forum, the basic functions were all there. But since then, when there are dozens of new apps which are not tools in the classic sense, not a software program but apps that can be mashed up and integrated, I'm not trying to find a platform that has it all but all are other widgets and gadgets that can be merged on a platform that can be a backbone of a system.

Eimhin: We're talking about the same thing, in the same way that a cultural group develops. Fire-spinning community. A practice evolves its own exchanges, markets, dress and fashions, social norms. This developed in the space of 10 years, a very short space of time. Goes for any practice you want to point a finger at. I call them super-cultural ecologists, all of them have certain needs. So rather than trying to build one suite of services, you try to find the very basic, lightest things. A map is the most basic things, location, capacity for exchange. Given that you have different communities that will be using different software, you need this backbone that will be housing different apps. Apps will be 50 cents to blue-tooth a device. Testing soil quality, medical testing, rubbish disposal stuff, all of these are coming into existence. The interface between material and technological world.

George: Coherence does not come from the technology but the drive of people for coherence.

Eimhin: The values of people, yes. 

Fred: I'm a bit lost. Could be good to have this type of conversation but I just want to know if we have a more precise objective or not.

Eimhin: We were trying to define how we might start the conversation.

George: We have different starting points. Mine is how can the best combination of tools that we can put together help the commons movement.

Eimhin: That's a perfect starting question, let's start there.

George: We said earlier the different communities need different tools, not only that but every community in different stages of their life needs different tools. Like child and teenager, the toys are changing as you move from one age to the other.

Fred: For me tools and infrastructure are not the same thing. The infrastructure must be neutral, like the internet. We must have the possibility to express different opinions and ideas in an equal access to this infrastructure. I think this is somewhere different from tools. It's not only tools.

Eimhin: As far as I can see, things that happen happen because of personal connections between people, not because of reading and reading, things on the internet. I'm totally with you in terms of personalisation of processes.

George: What you just said raises two questions. What is the role of technology if any, in the life of face-to-face communities, communities that exist in real time, real life, physical commons. And what is the role of technology in knowledge commons, that obviously wouldn't exist without technology. There is not necessarily a Chinese grade wall between these two types of commons. I have many friends who became friends online after a lot of good online exchange, then we met and it became a face-to-face relationship. People who share the most my interest are not necessarily in my neighborhood, I need to reach out and connect online. How do we develop trust with people whom we have never met? How can technology help the development of trust in virtual communities? I imagine that if any of these groups that we have here in this conference continues online there will be many people who will join later because they are interested in the subject but we don't know them, so how can we create swift trust? Rapid trust? Trust of course evolves over a couple of years, I read her blog, I know she's real. Are there ways of making this shorter. If they need to act together in a situation that calls for a situation, we can't wait.

Eimhin: The same community of those firespinners, I can go anywhere in the world and do one thing, they'll take me to their house for the weekend. People will do that by virtue of the values they attach to certain practices. 

George: You just named a specific category of software that if properly designed and developed would address a lot of commons needs.

Eimhin: What a map is. Nettention is the best software I've seen that does this. The guys programming this are seriously high level people.

George: It's still in beta. It's a good concept.

Eimhin: Has four or five developers. In the last 4 weeks, Dan Robles came, someone else from Climate Viewer, swisheable glue, very important, you have to change peoples' view, not only 3D. 

George: How can we bridge the far-out dream of technologists with what communities need now, which is useable maps? Not only useable but evolveable.

Eimhin: You could start with Flapper map. OS-Ushaidi is also open source. You have your world map, you can import statistical, meteorologic data, whatever you want, it's built to be evolvable. GNU license.

George: Isn't it geographically based?

E: Ushaidi yes, Nettention no. Ushaidi is a flatland version something that you can use to map now, then you can import the data to Nettention when Nettention is ready. I've been trying to get them to work together. 

Where are they based? Ushaidi?

Eimhin: Bay area. There was a use-instance that was in Kenya and it became very popular. Nettention, one developer is in Pittsburgh, one in LA, on in the East Coast, two in Europe and now Dan Robles have joined them as well. Post Growth Institute in Australia is interested. 

George: I collected a couple of mapping tools that I'd like to share with you guys. Are you familiar with a concept map? I can e-mail you the URL. Concept Map exist in iCohere and compendium development guys in London. A couple of things of potential interest. Strategic mapping for networks, inter-organisation, social network analysis, a variation of social network analysis is value network analysis map. These are not just software tools, they're process tools. 

Narrative Fractals, this is a very interesting one. There are three elements of the story. Attractor (interest-generating opener), challenger (disruptor of settled understanding), opportunity (vision of a desired outcome), strategy (path to realise vision), test (trial to confirm strategy), decision (implement strategy, reframe.reloop). Around that is built a piece of software called a network, like Nettention and other visionary ideas, is not implemented.

Eimhin: I think the thing about Nettention is that its implementation will be use-base. It has to be what it becomes. Sorry, that sounds silly but it's not. 

George: The problem is not that we don't have enough tools but what you said. What makes tools evolves is their use. They need to be used. One great service that any community technology steward can do is feed the commons with tools that meet the present needs and aspirations, have the commoners how to make the best use of it. There's a dynamic between the use system and the tool system. New needs create new tools, new tools create new needs.

Eimhin: There has to be a feedback system. One aspect of Nettention, the fact that you can pick a hashtag on Twitter, it'll take geolocation and plot it on a map. So you can go to your place of work and tweet that hashtag and all of a sudden you're compiling these global maps.

George: Let's do a couple of tweets using the #4thecommons hashtags. Marc can pick the twitter widget and then everyone visiting the platform can see the #4thecommons hashtag tweetstream. It's a small step but it's fun why don't we do it.

Tina: We have about fifteen minutes left. We got a lot of good discussion and questions.

Eimhin: Our culture is moving to a point where it needs to do things that aren't serviced by current technologies. New suites of functionality. When people realise, wow, I can do all this stuff with just these tools.

Eimhin: Links between phrases?

Tina: Text mining is a great idea, create links between ideas/bubbles. I think they're doing this already with bubble proximity. Will have to check.

George: Those interested in this technology use the platform that Franco has set up. If we would push the edge of what can be done with it would be the way that we can get furthest. It's an open source platform based on wordpress and buddypress with literally thousands of plugins. We can do whatever we want to do. We can start building on the existing platform starting tomorrow, metaphorically speaking, then we can create user involvement. 

Eimhin: I think the commons as a movement are trying to do something that is very, very, very large. Most people try to do something that's very, very small. 

George: You have more affinity with those cultures

Eimhin: They want to do things that they can achieve, pay this money, get into that event, it's not something they have to plan years in advance. Tailoring these tools to accommodate those types of practices as well as these type of practices, that's the kind of umbrella you have to fit. And then once you show the instances of its use in certain niches, places, then it becomes quite easy to promote. There's a website for those firespinning guys, there are 150,000 on that website. They create these festivals and events all over the place. They buy these products and services but they have the potential for their own networked market and economy, they just don't use it. They could just get a space, stick up a tent and create a whole alternative life for themselves.

Franco - wordpress, communication platform
Tweet 4thecommons hashtag

George: Last time I counted there were 80 people registered on the communications platform. I think after the conference there will be more people.

Tina: We built communication platforms and tools in Occupy, no one used them.

Eimhin: They'll be used when the time is right.

Tina: Maybe. Maybe too we have to ask the right, interesting questions.

George: This conference will certainly raise a lot of food for thought. Basically it's bridging the light event, exchange and content that's happening here on the ground, with the online space by articulating, enticing, interesting questions that we want to deepen the line of thinking and action. 

[end of discussion]

Samantha: For now, the three words that come to your mind, no censoring, who want to start.

Neal: We are awesome.

Franco: Tired. Future. Success.

Fred: Connection. Discovering people.

Nancy: Life-generating. Humanity.

Tina: Playing, discovering, bonding.

Tim: Sleep, food and drink.

Marcelo: essential discussion

Samantha: Fuzzy and beer.

George: Motel Hub. Taxi. Anybody?

Free open mind.

Passo y luego

Max: Thank you all

Values becoming change

conversation big connection

Sharing learning connect

Ruby: lots in common, beer

Abdou: good inspiration, nice atmosphere

Alain: congratulations to everybody

Birte: Tired, excited, grateful.

Helene: Exchange constructive thank you

That's four words.

Tina: You can use merci, one word.

Wolfgang: Productive chaos, only two words, I'm compensating.

Inspiring stories

Joao: Big love babies

Grateful for conversations

Mayo: Open diversity woman

Wouter: Self-organising community

??: Inspiring place and country.

Wednesday, 22nd May 2013

Franco: The plan for today was to have a showcase, present certain projects. There are some listed in the wiki. Maybe we can do two or three short presentations of around 10 minutes. The idea was to look at already existing and ongoing projects but I think that yesterday we realised that there's plenty of more stuff to discuss. My proposal at this point is to write down the already existing agreements in terms of future projects or agreements.

Samantha: Yesterday we talked of having some feedback-

George: One process point building on what Franco just said. It is my request to the facilitators that we do reserve at least 15 minutes towards the end to clarify, list what are the outputs of the different activities of today and yesterday because the value of our session besides what you get individually, is what the conference, commons movement is getting.

Helene: Coming back a little a bit on what would be good to learn from the conference that can help build up on today's output. Because some of us are going maybe with an open view of observing what's going on and what emerges.

Samantha: We also have a few new people this morning.

Denis Postal: I was signed up to this group, expected to be here yesterday but the health-care side event seemed more obviously relevant to me. 

Gyom: I'm from Montreal.

Anna: From School of Commoning.

Enric: From Spain, Barcelona, working in a crowdfunding foundation.

Samantha: Yesterday we ended the day with an open space where we spent one hour with an open session and because it was so late, we decided we'd have the reporting back the next day.

Eimhin: On 1st of June, Vinny is organising a session, in London. 

Anna: Is it the Westminster hub?

Eimhin: Not sure.

Max: We were doing the intercultural stuff, how do you translate the commons across languages whether there's some common symbolism that we can use. Wolfgang created this we kind of liked as an example of the commons. We basically started discussing the language problems, of finding a way of defining the commons and this movement across languages. Obviously the commons as a term is an English word and we had examples where it doesn't necessarily translate. Marion was talking about work she did in Senegal where there are at least 10 commonly used languages, so already there you have a difficult environment. That's one of the reasons she uses art, because it's hopefully a more universal way of getting messages across. In terms of the language difficulty we didn't find any specific solutions to that but we did note that with recent examples of social movements, the Arab spring, the Occupy movements, there seemed to be some common features that emerged of self-organising, even though these movements occurred in very different language and other environments, so this made us optimistic that many of these difficulties of translation would be bridged without us having to impose commonalities from the outside. On the other hand, Wolfgang made the point that urban culture might have more in common with other urban cultures than with rural cultures. We noted that the common features of these recent movements might reflect that, being part of a networked culture, something perhaps common across nations. Then we talked about Ostrom's work and the fact that even though she was looking at many different cultures and language groups across national boundaries there were enough universal features of commons' related issues for her to be able to map out the 8 features of successful commoning. So we decided that even across languages there are some universal, almost human conditions to tackling commons-related problems. We felt that in a sense the language and translation problem is more a problem for us, the analysts, trying to find themes to roll out across borders. In fact some of the problems on the ground are universal. When we were looking for action plans and solutions, which we remembered to do in the last couple of minutes, we moved towards an idea that for example migrant workers, whom we labeled as culture brokers, people who have a decent familiarity with the home culture and then go work somewhere else and are familiar with the host culture, are people who might be able to take this message that we're working on and translate it back into the local context. Carolina also mentioned that there are some parallels with for example the indigenous, landless peasants movement who have managed to organise themselves across cultures in recent years quite effectively using the internet and perhaps culture brokers. So language shouldn't be a barrier to a cohesive movement. 

George: Did the people in that session think of maintaining, continuing the conversation by other means when we are not here anymore?

Max: No, we didn't discuss that specifically but platforms like the one that Wolfgang mentioned yesterday, we could use that.

George: In the larger group of the conference and the even larger group of commoners around the world, 

Marion: In Dakar with Communautique we tried to experiment with this

George: One person needs to take the initiative to set up a mailing list, send out an invitation.

Wolfgang: With your work in Dakar, you also used art as a tool for social transformation.

Marion: Yes but I'm sure it's also used for intercultural work.

Wolfgang: Make this more widely known and available.

Alain: On the release the commons platform, we already have some of these pictures. The beta side of the platform is now ready. All of this will be translated into English. I'm really sorry, I missed this, I thought the two workshops would be merging. 

Samantha: Do you guys have anything to add about the drawings?

Wolfgang: On the left it shows commons as people who are sharing the same space, green lines are as they are moving around. Upper right is if you privatise the space, even if you have equal portions for each person, they are isolated, each one moving in their own circuits. And in the lower right you have privatisation, one person getting everything and all the others crowded at the edges. If you just take the purple lines, it's a total hierarchical network.

Wolfgang: I think many of us are culture brokers. Hardly any of us here live where they were born. We can act as a bridge of ideas to different places.

Eimhin: Cultural documentaries, document social conditions. Collaborative art in general can be very useful.

Samantha: Who's up next?

Helene: What's the logic of the commons and how to represent it. 

Samantha: I think the first part was from Neil about story-telling. Neil told us about the stories of people and the resource they are managing, especially when there's a transformational experience on it, it can upend how things work. Story demonstrating another paradigm by someone's real experience.

Joao: I'll add a little bit to that. There's a kind of logical training from the testimony, that's from experience, to the possible actions that people can take. Existing P2P or commons practices that people can step in to and the importance of facilitating peoples' entry into these. So that people can see the possibility but also step into it. And then there was a more long-term vision, of what does this new world look like.

Samantha: And we talked about the importance of not getting bogged down by trying to define the commons and commoning but just to grow the domain and allow things to be fuzzy and wide, growing a domain pathway rather than get stuck trying to define things.

Joao: I liked your term action-logics.

Helene: Yes, we were wondering if there was one logic to the commons or different logics, people or preference-dependent. And that this would probably have a consequence into how we communicated the commons. I gave the example of someone who made some research work on different types and styles of action logics. Some people have more of a see-world preference, how do you put things into policies. Others were more in reaction to systems and would be more sensitive to DIY, P2P. All need to coexist so that everything can converge. So the idea is to keep the variety and different logics that all have different pathways.

Samantha: I think as far as harvesting for the collective good, this would be a good thing to have, the full list of different logics.

Helene: I worked with the person who did this research, Barrett Brown, with the plan of applying it to the commons. We actually decided we'd wait for the conference to observe what's going on before opening it up and impose whatever type of idea or structure for how to follow this through. The work has been done on sustainability and published in Kosmos magazine, there's 5 or 6 types of logic described. This person worked with one agency of the UN about how to communicate about AIDS and the differences are really incredible, how the images and the pictures came out.

Samantha: There's a whole bunch of movements out there that have at their core making the world a better place. To bridge or connect these movements to the commons.

George: But how can we do that without defining boundaries for the commons movement? All these transformation movements have a shared vision in a very vague, broad terms, that we know what's wrong with the current system, we have a broad and fuzzy shared vision, but different paths. We can add value and strength to the extent that we define more specifically what is our contribution to it. If we don't set some specification what the commons movement is about as opposed to something different, from the indignados or the transition movement, what is our contribution? We cannot neglect the responsibility of who we are?

Helene: But "we" are so diverse. Who are we? We can do it more in terms of principles. It's by aggregation towards a common attractor following commons-types ways of doing that is going to be defined by what we do at the moment we're doing it. We can't create a boundary by saying this is in or not. It's emergent.

Jose: It's diverse, organic and evolving. We can't lock it down and limit it. It's like a tree and that tree as it gets nurtured, it grows more branches and that branch leads to more. It's about the relationality and nurturing.

Denis: Definitions of the kind George seeks, aren't they a historical matter? People look back and define movements this way whereas if we're growing, you can't really do that from inside.

Wolfgang: I think it's also very important to talk with people. If we engage with people to discuss how does one make forest conservation into the commons, engage people into resource management and not exclude them. But then through conversations I think one can clarify environmentalists' perceptions about why is it better to take a commons approach to environmental conservation issues.

Marvin: About action-logics. I think it connects too to how we define the commons. In the United States the political parties have gone a long way in terms of action logics; they say different things to different groups. It's part of campaign politics. It's a very dangerous thing, you're telling groups what they want to hear. We become very good at communicating but we're not sure what we want to communicate.

Samantha: Next steps, we were overwhelmed with it. We were happy to be partaking in this conversation.

Helene: I think it's not engineering a discourse around action-logic but be aware that there are different preferences for action and angles of a definition. Allowing these voices to exist and enabling them all by eliciting the stories around them. It's more about discovering the parts and the whole. Someone said there's actually also gaining the awareness that we are part of a whole and this meets what was said on interculturality because these culture brokers are people who are grasping the existence of a whole.

Jose: If the tree grew and sucked the life out of its environment, it's a parasite. If the tree grows and nurtures the world around it, then it's commons-generating. So it's the relationship to the whole that also matters. It's not just about action-logic. So how do we have a process of distinguishing.

Samantha: We talked that most of us in this room are from a personality type that are comfortable with fuzzy definitions.

Enric: Commons are happening without the need of a definition. The issue is that this recognition and awareness that there are many similar things happening at the same time is at the battle of lots of informational input, things happening. Take the example of Anonymous, they have a very simple way of doing something that's easy to understand. It's different from commons and commoning. But I think the definition is important and very urgent thinking for education. Which are the seeds for these trees.

Helene: The idea being what are the conditions for the common to grow, and this would be the idea of defining it from the ground.

Samantha: Do we feel that we've captured this conversation?

Wolfgang: If we want to move forward with integrity but we also need to have the humility to know that any of the organisations we've built up are never perfect examples of what we're talking about. And that probably we can see some of these principles and part of the appreciative inquiry is what's working within an organisation and what's reflecting principles of commons and how can one enhance that.

Denis: The AA movement, Alcoholics Anonymous, entirely consists of commons, in my experience of it. 500,000 people in the UK are in commons-type groups, no experts, not done by anyone else. Now it may have some limitations-

George: I mention AA also frequently as a perfect example of what is not a commons. We are all learners, AA are also trying to discover new ways of being, being sober. But there are two types of learning communities, one a community of learners like AA where individuals participate in the community for the individual benefit of the collective support. A community that learns is a different type of learning community, has a collective intelligence serving the larger whole. It's not only for ourselves and our members but we're in service of our larger commons. To me, it's a fundamental difference.

Denis: I would also want to argue that there are microcommons structure which are points of growth, sometimes seeds, and sometimes they take a while before they have something to say to the macro. And both are relevant.

Helene: I click on the fractal analogy. Every common is part of a wider common.

Gyom: At the same time the tomato doesn't have to think am I a fruit or a vegetable. If we just decide to be the commons, the tree that is the parasite someday will become the food for another one. The commons for me look more like the internet.

Tina: I'm one of those people who are not comfortable with fuzzy situations but that's ok, I like being outside my comfort zone. I'd like to say that the internet is built on sound engineering principles. A tree too, is generated by DNA code. So I think the commons also need to be built around some agreed-upon principles. It doesn't make sense to me otherwise.

Ruby: We talked yesterday about ethics. You mustn't be putting boundaries but what are the struggles that we are reinforcing? For instance the issue of human rights, people have been writing about, is that something in combination with the commons? A lot of movements are talking about the very concrete struggles of land and food and justice. Commons can reinforce a lot of things.

Helene: Did we really say we wouldn't have basics and principles? I said we wouldn't define the boundaries. If you define access as a principle, all kinds of different things, it's not being that way or this way.

Anna: Listening to all of it, I agree with Tina, if it's too fuzzy then it's very easy, I know people who want to set up a business according to commons principles and calling it a commons. For example ownership and the principle of stewardship, which I see as very basic parts of a commons definition, of what a commons is. This then informs governance and how people participate. It prevents people co-opting the name. I think it's important, we just can't keep it all fuzzy.

Wolfgang: One can certainly say that certain things are not commons. It's more about defining a dividing line. If one looks at any particular institutions that we call the commons we'll find some hierarchical relationships or it's not running as sustainably as it really should. If we start splitting hairs about things like that or making hard and fast decisions, then it makes it more difficult to get into more generative conversations to improve the functioning of this group.

Helene: Can I just say one thing. One thing is about being an intentional common and another is the universe, my angle, is to get more of society to adopt principles that grow the commons and are respectful of the commons. And I think it's two different things and you were talking about a core that are really being a common but then you have ways of doing business etc. that are not a commons strictly speaking but will increasingly adopt principles, movement of coalescence and convergence towards.

Samantha: And with that we're going to close that conversation.

Franco: Interface between commons and the state. It was a long political discussion. I can come out with my own personal understanding of possible outputs of that. To briefly resume some of the ideas that came out during the conversation. We had people from Latin America and Europe, did an exercise of comparing, types of states and governments found in each place. Of course we had overgeneralisation and simplification but we achieved the idea that recent experiences in past years in Latin America in a lot of areas appear commons-based solutions, people taking care of their own stuff, example education. In recent years there has been reappearance of welfare state, the state came out again and wants to take the control of that kind of developments that were commons-oriented. It's kind of a different process of enclosure that's taking place over there because there's no recognition that self-organised communities can take control of certain aspects of their life. The feeling that everything that's not a state is bad, is still strong. Result of neo-liberalism. That's a total different situation than what seems to be happening in Europe. People talked a lot about experiences in Europe being in strong crisis, like Spain or Greece. Seems to grow again this communal experience. Enric can comment on that he's involved in Goteo, emerging prototypes in the field, people doing stuff by themselves and forming communities. The different developments and policies, something to build upon, there are certain commons-based experiences that for certain reasons have to establish communication with the state, recognise their boundaries, have support. Some have some established certain strategies and negociations to not be crushed by the state. We think it would be important to document that and share the knowledge, I'll use words I don't like, these "case of success", experience of commons projects that achieved a link with the government. An example, we talked about the giffy.net, autonomous network in Barcelona controlled by the community that gives internet access, achieved the level of an ISP, same level of access as the central backbone, as Telefonica. The state, government of Spain, finally gave them that status. So this should be documented and explain how they did it. Of course these strategies cannot just be directly applied but there can be some type of learning. We can think of showcase documentation of project that have such a characteristic. 

Ruby: We talked about how in a country like Finland how difficult it can be, people are defending all the good that the state has done and stands for. Historically, this was fought for for so long. 

Enric: It's also very complex. I think that in order to talk with the state or some public or private institutions you need to adopt the shape of some legal entities, like foundations or cooperatives or associations, in the best cases a trojan attitude to certain institutions, I think it's an interesting field and has its own contradictions. But at this stage I think it makes sense to know who you're talking to. I have heard the word social innovation, some European officers that somehow it's representing a majority of attitudes in Brussels. An opportunity to take into account, how to put pressure there.

Wolfgang: And we want the state to recognise some kinds of practices as legal.

George: Some interesting resources, legal tools for recognising commons and commons-like formations by the state. One of them is the social charter that James Quilligan developed. You can find a detailed description of this charter at globalcommonstrust.org. Another resource about what is happening in Spain, in particular in Catalunia, a document by Manuel Castels, "Catalunia tu" and "Aftermath". Do you guys plan to start a group or public space to continue this conversation? It would be a shame not to do this, there's so much happening. The concept of the partner state, Michel ?? has written so much. We need a space, container to continue.

Ruby: What you said about collecting these experiences.

Franco: It's not exactly a mapping, maybe we'll have to clarify a good, successful relationship of commons to the state, what we're looking for and maybe we can have a P2P wiki. P2P foundation already has a lot of cases documented but we can reuse the code for wiki spring(?). Invite each person here in the conference to provide a case with a short description.

Helene: And a question, what are the conditions needed and how can the law help and how it's been done on the ground.

Franco: To prepare this kind of small mapping exercise we may need to form a kind of group, what are the criteria for preparing this kind of mapping. 

Helene: Isn't it something that can be discussed at the infrastructure stream?

Wolfgang: Discussion of particular cases would fit perfectly in our Nora wiki, what resources are being used in this process.

Franco: OK, there are plenty of ideas around, we can continue this conversation. 

George: That's different from what I suggested. Lists are of course important but the dynamic, evolving, unfolding conversation, learning together is more important.

Eimhin: Mumble sounds better for that conversation. Feedback on second session of tools to serve the commons. It was very meta from the start.

Tina: We started talking about the needs and aspirations of the commons, looked at Silke's reexpression of Ostrom's principles: when you take something give something back; collective ownership; inbuilt protection of commons in a resource (i.e. making sure it stays a commons), the Ubuntu principle etc. Then we discussed the role of tech in physical versus digital communities, how to quickly build trust and so on.

George: The relationship between the needs and aspirations of a community and the tools supporting them, it's a dynamic relationship, there are more tools to choose and start using. But as we use, even by accident, we discover new uses and capabilities of these tools. We couldn't have done this before having a communication platform and as we start using this we'll rapidly run into the limitations of it, so we ask for better tools or improvement or adding plug-ins which in turns gives us new evolution. So it's a dynamic spiral, the relationship between our aspirations and the tools. What we are missing today is not as much tools but people using those tools to push the edge of what is possible. I gave the example that here we are at the conference, this is a subset, side-event of the conference, there are plenty of tools at the disposal of conference attendees. The question can become which tool should I use, so many platforms kind of competing for attention, what do we do when we face a situation of choosing. I'm always thinking a meta perspective, not my individual preference and priorities but what is the larger picture within the ecosystem of tools and what I see is that commoners are developing and going to develop even more different, new platforms more or less serving the same or similar objectives. There is no way to prevent that and it would be very harmful to prevent that. What will attract the most people will be the platforms that have the best functionalities for a given purpose of a given community. Having said that, I see that hopefully in the future there will be some integration or interoperability of different platforms, but that's really a question about the future. Individual perspective, what can we do as individuals, what I suggest is take good, informed decisions about what are the features of platforms available today. What will they enable you to do. What will they let your community to do and to become. Ask these questions from yourselves as you're taking a look at the platforms. Finally a private, a characteristic to my world view and values, what is the criterion based on which I'm choosing a platform, when there are two or three platforms that do more or less the same thing, then the differentiator is not a technical one but a community one, where is the critical momentum, where can my joining add momentum to strengthen the movement. To my surprise, people keep adding content [to this conference's platform] as we speak, because when people meet face-to-face they don't usually add online content. 

Samantha: It's eleven o'clock. I see the sign for a break.

[15 minutes]

Samantha: We have two new speakers. Can you introduce yourselves.

Roberto Verzola: I'm from the Phillippines. I do research on the economics of abundance like Wolfgang here and also coordinate a network in the Philippines that does training for farmers.

Michael: I'm from the Netherlands. Was here for coffee, saw people with name tags and thought I'd come up. I study free technology for the internet.

Samantha: Proposals for the final sprints is two presentations 8-10 minutes max, after which we can have a 10-minute dialogue.

Wolfgang: I'll start without Helene. A year ago I was in the Netherlands along with several other people and we thought of this idea of creating better networks among commons-oriented groups in order to promote abundance and that's how the name Commons Abundance Network was coined. This led to further conversations via e-mail and Skype that led to the CAN website which we got started in February. It's about the commons, helping to coalesce the commons and recognising that there is just an incredible number of different initiatives that we recognise as commons even if they don't necessarily classify themselves with that term. Even though there are so many of these initiatives, many of the people who are involved in them feel isolated. They will usually know some other people involved in some of these things in some other places but it still seems very small-scale compared to The Economy, this massive thing out there. So we thought we'd create a network so people can see how big this movement is and how comprehensive and how it addresses everything that we need, if we're thinking of a needs-based economy. Whatever resource that we can think of, managing crops sustainably, or air, or wildlife populations, fish etc., there are commons-based ways of doing these things but you have to find the organisational forms that are appropriate to managing the resource sustainably but also addressing the needs of both humans and other living beings.

Part of the knowledge that one needs is stuff you can put up on the website and part involves knowledge of interaction with people. You also want to talk with people who have done these kinds of things to get a feel, what does it take, as a mentoring process, as you're facing different kinds of challenges. Also, have different initiatives talk to one another, innovate and become better at what they're doing. Also, if we have a pretty comprehensive database essentially how to address needs with different resources, that can also be a tool for advocacy in support for the commons, whether at local or all the way to the United Nations level. A resource that people can point to, these are solutions.

commonsabundance.net

There are no w's. If you go there, we have a header, an About section, a NORA wiki, NORA stands for Needs Organisations forms and Resources for Abundance. A woman's name, not TINA (There Is No Alternative). We've got members. We haven't been pushing membership very much so far because we wanted to build up the functionality first before inviting members into it. Definitely people at this conference can enter. We can create groups, documents where you can have comments, forums where one can engage in discussions. There's a collaboration toolbox, Helene has been especially busy in that, with embedded titanpad for a group document. We're also pursuing added functionality in cooperation with Nettention for example and graphic interfaces to make it easier to find information. These are things we have either developed or are in the process of developing.

Helene: What's driving our technical angle here is to have conversations as productive as possible around actual things to talk about and work on. And to pull into this project-based environment the knowledge resources and datasets that will serve this conversation. We want to work on these navigation systems, I was talking about visual navigation systems, so we can navigate within wiki content that can sometimes be very difficult to fish into. And the other is how do you bring in contextualised data into these conversations. Plus if possible semantic possibilities to reprocess conversations because most of the time conversations start in informal and unstructured ways. If structure comes into a conversation too early, everyone stops participating when it becomes too rigid. It's when the momentum of the conversation has been reached and there's a will and expressed intention of getting into a project arises, that's when a structure needs to be put in place. So how can you have an a posteriori structure put in place. These are some of the things we're working on right now.

George: You mentioned visual navigation. This is so important in any complex online system. I've been researching that, found something you may be familiar with. You and Franco are using the same combination of wordpress and buddypress. Ultimate Tiny MCE, one of the options you can turn on is the Image Map Editor, is a clickable image map that you can insert in any post. You can create a map of your whole online space including any content. The drawback is that it's not automatically update it so you'll have to create is say, once a map.

Wolfgang: Is that a plugin?

George: Yes, it's one of the text editors in Wordpress.

Yves: There are other options. We can discuss them after this.

Einhin: On the 4th, 5th and 6th of June here in Berlin, there are 17 different places where this is happening, there's a government and policy hack going on.  

http://www.govjam.org/govjam13/jamsites

Bernardo: Last week of P2P foundation (March). Everything started from personal e-mail around real communities, my community, 50 organisations Mexico, Brazil, Spain. Everything was planned in an open way (Titan pad), we created a strategy for communications, everything was communicated in real time. People wrote we want a new profile in twitter, diaspora, have this network. The first rule was criteria quite strict for wiki spring, if you use copyright you're out. After that, the disorder and distribution of P2P works. A lot of people by themselves started to organise their wiki springs. We didn't try to centralise this process because if you do, you kill it. A lot of people started to do comics in Bilbao, graphic design, videos. A lot of people joining were not technological. In Mexico there was a toy museum, someone asked me if I put up pictures of children holding toys is it wiki spring? I said of course. The most important thing is to create the process. The hashtag was #globalP2P. At the same time we lost the control, I think that was fantastic, we did the most hangout in a platform called think commons, 23 countries, 14 hours of local and non-stop hangout in the internet. Education, communication, global revolution, a lot of different things happening, and people coming and leaving the hangout. At the same time it's important to be in real life, in physical spaces doing things. We have an open mailing list, P2P in Spanish, so anyone can join from the first minute it was open. So at the end of the day, we had a lot of people doing things that we didn't plan. At the end we created a process. We took all the information from twitter and created the collection, there were many local and translational connections. There's one moment where 60% of the tweets were from one country to another. Another moment where 100% of the tweets were transnational. So there were real-time conversations between many countries. Now the list is surviving, we have different projects going on around this, we want to develop different hackathons, there's a big campaign to promote copyleft licenses in Latin America. A lot of people trying to do things. The most important was to create a process, a lot of people want to do more wiki springs so maybe we'll have another in a few months. Most important was to visualise this information, also think about it, what's P2P, what's copyleft. There was also a lot of media coverage, that was fantastic.

Franco: The results was as Bernardo said was just one full day, 24 hours of mapping, 4 languages. We received 236 projects in one day. All this data is also collected in an open dataset, is already exported.

Bernardo: A lot of people are asking for this data. I think more people are trying to map now.

Helene: How do you insure, an issue that Ushaiidi brought up, that the map is still accurate in a few months. Do you have a process so that people come up and amend their projects.

Franco: Ushaiidi is a system for catastrophe, what it's been mainly designed for, information that changes really quickly. The logic of P2P or Wikipedia is we created a bunch of articles in a really short period of time. The process of improving them is in the wiki sense way. Some of the articles are not really good, so this or this needs to be redone. We basically checked all these 200 or more articles one by one to see the quality, some were repeated so we merged them, all these administrative tasks, marked them, tagged them. It's a semantic metawiki. I don't want to go into technical details. Yes, people just fill out a form.

Bernardo: The most important is to keep the map alive. It was two months of work. In Brazil there was mapping 3 months before I think. I tried to put quite everything inside, quite different people, indigenous, analogic and stuff, not just digital, so we joined the most hackers and indigenous people from the Andies, and it fits. It was amazing and it's going on and there are lots of projects that are going on now, we're trying to do it again.

George: I'm totally enthused by what you did. It is an answer to something that I've been struggling for for many many years and couldn't find a solution. My struggle was how to get started with large-scale international mapping projects. There are so many challenges, like how do you define the inclusing criteria, the parameters of the forms and how do you generate the momentum for that. Your answer is focusing on real-time connection building on an existing network of friends and a movement and having a very simple step of criteria that was very simply defined and you allowed people to err slightly at the edges. That's really just a perfect answer to the question that I was seeking. The difference with what I'm focusing on is how can we go beyond the excitement of the real-time thing, creating first that but building and optimising the whole process for fundability and discoverability, so that everyone in every country can find projects that they are interested in. How to make the incentive, inspiration to keep it up to date.

Bernardo: The important thing is to create an imaginary, P2P is difficult to explain to people from indigenous communities. Create a new relationship, it's about sharing. After that, it's to loose control. It's free software, you have just 4 rules but other than that you can do anything, whatever you want. Maybe in a few months we can try and connect the Spanish and Portuguese community with the English.

Enric: The hashtag also concentrates the momentum. But I think it took a lot of people making noise, it was good, attracting more doers.

Samantha: I'm sorry, it's three minutes to twelve and I'd also like to ask a question. Is there something that each of us would like to share in a short statement, one sentence maximum, of what's my contribution to the whole, my serving, taking with me. Is that an ok check-out question for us all? I'll start. My contribution to the whole is going to be better exploring to make explicit the connection between art of hosting and the commons maybe through the expression art of commons.

Franco: Help all outputs that we will soon summarise in a documentation, move forward in the future.

George: Two-fold. An offer to be accountable to the community for holding this perspective in whatever conversation we're participating, the perspective of the next phase of the evolution of the commons movement towards a better world. The second is more specific, working on commons education, open resources for education. I apologise I have to leave now to meet with my co-presenter for the education side-event that starts in an hour.

Enric: Bring some of the discussions here and perspectives to the people I know are commoners that are doing this not necessarily digitally.

Anna: Contributing to the commons education and supporting commons initiatives and practices in the field of health.

Helene: Keep practicing in the commons and try to communicate by linking to the commons approach. Bring what we share here.

Gyom: To be a tomato to be harvested to the purpose of the commons, working specifically on collective infrastructures, management performance and if I die doing this then it will be my organs that will be shared.

Jose: Providing some capacity for strategic conversation about pathways to the futures that we want. Using the tools and perspectives of strategic foresight to help us think about the strategic issues that we face and how we might take better pathways towards a commons world.

Ruby: I'll take everything back with me, there will be many people eager to hear it. Keep working together.

Marvin: Hold the multiple understandings of the commons that have come up here, try to focus more on what is a sustainable and just economy.

Max: Help rewrite the narrative around human social capacity.

Michael: I will web technology keeping it open and part of the commons. 

Eimhin: Continue to connect people, places, facilities and functions through stories so tell me yours and I'll pass it on to the right people to hear.

Roberto Verzola: I'll be contributing case studies arising from our work with farmers, as well as protection of the seeds from enclosure. These are mostly farmers who don't have internet access but have cell phones so we have developed some low level tools that can work with this.

Tina: I'll make the effort to keep in touch with a lot of people from this meeting, and discuss platforms and serious games that we didn't have time to do yesterday. I'll also share these notes everyone. 

Helene: I'll be maintaining conversations with many people, in particular making tools to make things visible and understandable in their many dimensions

Denis: Disentangle the many human capacities that have been demeaned and damaged by enclosures, in my experience the psychological enclosures. Facilitate the power of love and interrupt the love of power.

Bernardo: Connecting people and creating these kind of open and distributed processes in order to create a new narrative and imaginary. We have to prototype things in an open way, so let's do it.

Yves: I'll probably create two new groups in the ECC platforms. Also get people interested in created a TLD for the commons. Something like a charter.

Wolfgang: Trying to contribute to better networking among people. Also education about commons and abundance.

?: I didn't participate so actively because of the language issue but what I see is that we are all working towards a common understanding and thinking commonly.