<div dir="ltr"><h1 class="">The ten commandments of peer production and
commons economics</h1>
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<p><font style="font-size:15pt"><i><b>For a mode of
production and value creation that is free, fair and sustainable!</b></i></font></p>
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<p>Michel Bauwens, Berlin, October 23, 2015, for the Uncommons
conference</p>
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<p>As we have tried to show elsewhere, the emergence of
commons-oriented peer production has generated the emergence of a new
logic of collaboration between open productive communities who
created shared resources (commons) through contributions, and those
market-oriented entities that created added value on top or along
these shared commons.</p>
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</p>
<p>This article addresses the emerging practices that should inspire
these entities of the 'ethical' economy. The main aim it to create
new forms that go beyond the traditional corporate form and its
extractive profit-maximizing practices of value extraction. Instead
of extractive forms of capital, we need generative forms, that
co-create value with and for the commoners.</p>
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<p>I am using the form of commandments to explain the new practices.
All of them have already emerged in various forms, but need to be
generalized and integrated.</p>
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<p>What the world and humanity, and all those beings that are
affected by our activities require is a mode of production, and
relations of production, that are “free, fair and sustainable' at
the same time.</p>
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<p><font style="font-size:16pt"><b>OPEN AND FREE</b></font></p>
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<h2 class="">1. Thou shall practice open business models based
on shared knowledge</h2>
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<p>Closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Though
knowledge is a non- or anti-rival good that gains in use value the
more it is shared, and though it can be shared easily and at very low
marginal cost when it is in digital form, many extractive firms still
use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of
digitized knowledge. Through legal repression or technological
sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce, so
that extra profits can be generated. This is particularly galling in
the context of life-saving or planet-regenerating technological
knowledge. The first commandment is therefore the ethical commandment
of sharing what can be shared, and of only creating market value from
resources that are scarce and create added value on top or along
these commons. Open business models are market strategies that are
based on the recognition of natural abundance and the refusal to
generate income and profits by making them artificially scarce.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this here at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Business_Models">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Business_Models</a>
</p>
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<p><font style="font-size:16pt"><b>FAIR</b></font></p>
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<h2 class="">2. Thou shall practice open cooperativism</h2>
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<p>Many new more ethical and generative forms are being created, that
have a higher level of harmony with the contributory commons. The key
here is to choose post-corporate forms that are able to generate
livelihoods for the contributing commoners.
</p>
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<p>Open cooperatives in particular would be cooperatives that share
the following characteristics:</p>
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<ol>
<li><p>they are mission-oriented and have a social goal that is
related to the creation of shared resources</p>
</li><li><p>they are multi-stakeholder governed, and include all those
that are affected by or contributing to the particular activity</p>
</li><li><p>they constitutionally, in their own rules, commit to
co-create commons with the productive communities</p>
</li></ol>
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<p>I often add the fourth condition that they should be global in
organisational scope in order to create counter-power to extractive
multinational corporations.</p>
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<p>Cooperatives are one of the potential forms that commons-friendly
market entitities could take. We see the emergence of more open forms
such as neo-tribes (think of the workings of the Ouishare community),
or more tightly organized neo-builds, such as Enspiral.org, Las
Indias or the Ethos Foundation. Yet more open is the network form
chose by the Sensorica open scientific hardware community, which
wants to more tightly couple contributions with generated income, by
allowing all microtasked contributions in the reward system, through
open value or contributory accounting (more below).</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open_Company_Formats">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open_Company_Formats</a>
</p>
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<h2 class="">3. Though shall practice open value or
contributory accounting</h2>
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<p>Peer production is based on distributed tasks, freely contributed
by a open community-driven collaborative infrastructure. The
tradition of salaries based on fixed job description may not be the
most appropriate way to reward those that contribute to such
processes. Hence the emergence of open value accounting or
contributory accounting. As practiced already by Sensorica, this
means that any contributor may add contributions, log them according
to project number, and after peer evaluation is assigned 'karma
points'. When income is generated, it flows into these weighted
contributions, so that every contributor is fairly rewarded.
Contributory accounting, or other similar solutions, are important to
avoid that only a few contributors more closely related to the
market, capture the value that has been co-created by a much larger
community. Open book accounting insure that the (re)distribution of
value is transparent for all contributors.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting</a>
</p>
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<h2 class="">4. Thou shall insure fair distribution and
benefit-sharing through Copyfair licensing</h2>
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<p>The copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the necessary
knowledge commons on the condition that changes and improvements are
added to that same commons. This is a great advance, but should not
be abstracted from the need for fairness. When moving to physical
production which involves findng resources for buildings, raw
materials and payments to contributors, the unfettered commercial
exploitation of such commons favours extractive models. Thus the
need to maintain the knowledge sharing, but to ask reciprocity for
the commercial exploitation of the commons, so that there is a level
playing field for the ethical economic entities that do internalize
social and environmental costs. This is achieved through copyfair
licenses which while allow full sharing of the knowledge, ask for
reciprocity in exchange for the right of commercialization.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Licensing">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Licensing</a>
</p>
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<h2 class="">5. Thou shall practice solidarity and mitigate
the risks through Commonfare practices</h2>
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<p>As one of the strong results of financial and neoliberal
globalization, the power of nation-states has gradually weakened, and
there is now a strong and integrated effort to unwind the solidarity
mechanisms that were embedded in the welfare state models. As long as
we do not have the power to reverse this slide, it is imperative that
we reconstruct solidarity mechanisms of distributed scope, a
practicde which we could call 'commonfare'. Examples such as the
Broodfonds (NL), Friendsurance (Germany) and the health sharing
ministriesj (U.S.), or cooperative entities such Coopaname in France,
show us the new forms of distributed solidarity that can be
developed to deal with the risks of life and work.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Solidarity">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Solidarity</a>
</p>
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<p><font style="font-size:16pt"><b>SUSTAINABLE</b></font></p>
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<h2 class="">6. Thou shall use open and sustainable designs
for an open source circular economy</h2>
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<p>Open productive communities insure maximum particiation through
modularity and granularity. Because they operate in a context of
shared and abundant resources, the practice of planned obsolesence,
which is not a bug but a feature for profit-maximizing corporations,
is alien to them. Ethical enterpreneurial entities will therefore use
these open and sustainable designs and produce sustainable good and
services.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design</a>
</p>
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<h2 class="">7. Thou shall move beyond an exclusive reliance
on imperfect market price signals towards mutual coordination of
production through open supply chains and open book accounting</h2>
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<p>What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the
market, mutual coordination is for the commons!</p>
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<p>We will never achieve a sustainable 'circular economy', in which
the output of one production processes is used as an input for
another, with closed value chains and which every cooperation has to
be painfully negotiated in the conditions of lack of transparency.
But enterpreneurial coalitions who are already co-dependent on a
collaborative commons can create eco-systems of collaboration through
open supply chains, in which the production processes become
transparent, in through which every participant can adapt his
behaviour based on the knowledge available in the network. There is
no need for over-production when the production realities of the
network become common knowledge.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination</a>
</p>
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<h2 class="">8. Thou shall practice cosmo-localization<a class="" name="sdfootnote1anc" href="#sdfootnote1sym"><sup>1</sup></a></h2>
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<p> “What is light is global, and what is heavy is local”: this
is the new principle animating commons-based peer production in which
knowledge is globally shared, but production can take place on demand
and based on real needs , through a network of distributed coworking
and microfactories. Certain studies have shown that up to two-thirds
of matter and energy goes not to production, but to transport, which
is clearly unsustainable. A return to relocalized production is a
since qua non for the transition towards sustainable production.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sustainable_Manufacturing">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sustainable_Manufacturing</a>
</p>
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<h2 class="">9. You shall mutualize physical infrastructures</h2>
<ol start="9">
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<p>Platform cooperatives, data cooperatives and fairshares forms of
distributed ownership can be used to co-own our infrastructures of
production.</p>
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<p>The misnamed sharing economy from AirBnB and Uber shows the
potential of matching idle resources. Co-working, skillsharing,
ridesharing are examples of the many ways in which we can re-use and
share resources to dramatically augment the thermo-dynamic
efficiencies of our consumption.
</p>
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<p>In the right context of co-ownership and co-governance, a real
sharing economy can achieve dramatic advances in reduced resource
use. Our means of production, inclusive machines, can be mutualized
and self-owned by all those that create value.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this
at<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sustainable_Manufacturing">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:</a>Sharing
</p>
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<h2 class="">10. You shall mutualize generative capital</h2>
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<p>Generative forms of capital cannot rely on a extractive money
supply that is based on compound interest that is due to extractive
banks. We have to abolish the 38% financial tax that is owed on all
goods and services and transform our monetary system, and
substantively augment the use of mutual credit systems.</p>
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<p>Thou shall find more information on this at
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Peerfunding">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Peerfunding</a>
</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p class=""><a class="" name="sdfootnote1sym" href="#sdfootnote1anc">1</a>The
concept is from Jose Ramos,
<a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Cosmo-Localization">http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Cosmo-Localization</a>
</p>
</div><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://commonstransition.org" target="_blank">http://commonstransition.org</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div></div></div></div>
</div>