[P2P-F] Community Commons and the Commonskeepers

Tue Jul 26 15:35:49 CEST 2011

Are you guys familiar with ³The Civic Commons: A model for social action²?
http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/385518/RSA-Civic-Commons-F
inal.pdf

For a quick glance, it seems it¹s worth our attention, but I don¹t have time
just now to dive into it. If anybody has, pls let us know what you think.

george

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 7:06 AM, Jeffrey Sterling <teleboiski at gmail.com>
wrote:
> The global economy is broken because it has evolved and mutated to serve the
> needs corporations (govt corps and fortune 1000 corps) not human beings. Many
> of the commonskeeper and caregiver roles that are a critical function for
> civil society are either considered undervalued chores or the responsibility
> of some bureaucracy. It is imperative to take back responsibility for our
> community commons and form cooperative organizations that work to reduce the
> demand for resources and services that are not local. 
> 
> We need to create a new language and toolkit for a network of community
> economies (geographical and virtual)  where people can aggregate demand for
> products/services and fulfill those needs without the middleman (aka Fortune
> 1000 corporations). As we evolve our new economy we must find ways to allow
> many kinds of public benefit organizations to flourish and collaborate by
> being compensated for overall demand reduction. As such,
> the future of resilient, eco-sustainable communities is in demand-side
> reduction cooperatives. Our ablility to set the agenda lies in our control of
> the entire demand-side of the economic equation and our ability to
> self-organize using the Internet.
> 
> Let's take a closer look at the community infrastructure from the supply-side
> and the demand-side.
> 
>>> On the supply side a community may have a electricity company, a water
>>> company, a gas company, oil companies (gasoline), and waste stream companies
>>> (sewer, trash, recycle, compost). Each company is siloed and views their job
>>> as maintaining and operating a supply chain for an ever growing demand for
>>> their service. Some pay lip service to demand reduction at times but it is a
>>> "fox in the hen house" situation.
>>>  
>>> Now suppose community members created a demand side reduction cooperative,
>>> that was funded through a performance based contract placed on each of the
>>> supply side companies, that provided demand side reduction services to it's
>>> members.
>>>  
>>> Examples:
>>>  
>>> - Catching rainwater in cisterns for graywater and freshwater supply that
>>> eliminated the need for the next groundwater well or dam.
>>>  
>>> - Superinsulating all homes in a community to reduce the number of new
>>> powerplants or a new gas pipeline.
>>>  
>>> - Creating a smart microgrid that will provide peaking power negawatts as an
>>> independent power producer and provide solar collectors for peak cooling as
>>> well as battery backup storage and essential power to computers in the home.
>>>  
>>> - Creating a community wide distributed generation system that provides
>>> essential power to the community in case of disaster plus CHP (combined heat
>>> power) to the local hospital/greenhouse/community pool.
>>>  
>>> - Creating an on demand local ridesharing and shopping delivering service
>>> using community members and their vehicles to reduce the demand for
>>> cars/roads/gasoline and providing jobs for underemployed people and reducing
>>> the demand for underfunding government services.
>>>  
>>> - Creating community reuse services that reduce the demand for recycling and
>>> waste removal that reduces the need for landfills.
>>>  
>>> The basic idea is that siloed supply side companies are not in the business
>>> of reducing demand they are in the business of increasing supply which
>>> damages the environment and is not sustainable. Creating community-run
>>> demand side reduction coops (that are voluntary) will make a community
>>> resilient, sustainable and will create work for community members. Having a
>>> community-owned cloud will make the integration of demand side reduction
>>> services into the life of a community possible. Also establishing
>>> performance based contracts where demand reductions are measured with make
>>> it possible for demand side reduction services to be cash flow positive
>>> because demand reduction decreases the need for supply which keep the money
>>> in the community.
>>>  
> 
> 
> Given a choice people are usually willing to do more with less. Integrating
> our demand-side consumption using demand-side reduction cooperatives and other
> community benefit entities wil create meaningful work within one's own
> community and make our community more resilient and eco-sustainable.
> 

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