The Commons, also known as “common goods”, are those resources which are collectively owned by everybody, without belonging exclusively to a specific person, company or institution.

The association’s aim is to encourage the commons through their creation, use, study, management, exchange, distribution, promotion, protection and preservation.

The association “Comunes” emerges as a legal space to frame our current and future activities concerning these common goods. Besides, it attempts to support and strengthen its ties with other local or international initiatives with similar aims.

In principle, we will focus on the intangible commons considered free, such as ancient wisdom and knowledge, Free Software, or more broadly Free Culture and Free Knowledge. Thus, those intangible resources that can be used, copied, studied, modified and distributed by anyone. We would like to widen our fields to include natural resources, genetics (such as seeds) or environmental issues (such as the electro-magnetic spectrum or the free communications).

We are in a context where the most extended concept of richness is based on exclusion, placing artificial limits to common spaces and knowledge. We work to defend richness as inclusion, in order to collaboratively build and maintain goods for everybody. We believe these common goods are more valuable the more people benefit from them.

We are in a context of production directed by the rules of the market, encouraging nonsenses as fictitious shortage or planned obsolescence. We aim to encourage other types of production, in which individuals could be prosumers: producers and consumers at once. Thus, our productions would be focused on our common welfare and never limiting our freedoms with artificial hindrances.

These dynamics are even more important in the current context of generalised criticism towards our model and within deep global changes. We believe such dynamics would help the collective construction of alternatives, together with the empowering and strengthening of people’s freedom.

Our first attempt to form the association of Comunes began in 2004, but till 2009 the association is not legally constituted.

It has been inspired by the organization SPI and its role in protecting important free and open source software projects such as Debian, OpenOffice or Drupal.