Clay Shirky: “Cognitive surplus (…) represents the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects (…) The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. (…)

Now, that free time existed in the 20th century, but we didn’t get Ushahidi in the 20th century. (…) The media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume. (…) But now that we’ve been given media tools the Internet, mobile phones — that let us do more than consume. (…) We still like to consume, of course. But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share“.

(…) But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. And to the degree we’re going to do that, to the degree we’re able to do that, we’ll be able to change society. ”

“In many areas, people collectively develop shared representations of the quality of artefacts. Scientific communities produce collective evaluations of what counts as good research in their field. Teenagers evaluate music, fashion, and what is ‘cool’ amongst themselves. Families develop shared opinions about what is good and bad, which they transmit to their offspring. Collaborative annotation systems allow large communities of Web users to rank the quality of content in a decentralised way.”

The workshop has had pretty interesting talks, as we can see from the list of presentations, such as:

• Food quality as a public good: cooperation dynamics and economic development in a rural community
• Scientific Collaboration, Publishing and Education in the Future
• Crowdsourcing Real-Time Impact Factors and a Semantic Research Database
• Simulating cultural dynamics in peer production environment

However, there is one in particular that should be stressed over the others: Open sourcing financial functions and institutions:

“Peer-to-Peer technology has created disruptive outcomes for both media distribution (bittorrent), knowledge creation and distribution (wikipedia) and money lending (zopa). Also open source software powers the web (apache). What binds these advances together is a commitment to decentralisation and opening of the social structures that produce the quality outcomes we all benefit from. Neither capitalist monopoly practices nor socialised central control are productive and hence peer production is taking an increasing role in our lives. The question I want to ask is “can we extend these trends to provide the functions of financial institutions?”. Put simply could we envisage a P2P open source bank or money system? I would like to provoke a debate – is this a viable and desirable project and what would we need to do, now, to bring it about?”.

This full paper is available, together with the others, in the public workshop proceedings of the workshop.

This is mainly due to the fact that she is actually a political scientist, not an economist, and that her works have been focused in the management of common goods instead of the market or the corporations as in most economic studies. She successfully demonstrated that the decentralised organisation of common goods is a superior way of management, as opposed to their ‘enclosure‘, that is, when they are controlled by a single centralised organism (usually a state or a corporation). Her research strongly supports the community self-management of these common resources.

In Comunes Association we are particularly interested in the following works:

• Understanding Knowledge as Commons, con capítulos como Imagining Free, Decentralized Access to Most Cultural and Scientific Material o Free/Open-Source Software as a Framework for Establishing Commons in Science
• Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, Nueva York.
• Agent-based social simulation of Common Goods

The enclosure movement in England during the 15th and 16th centuries limited the access to land and its benefits to its owners, thus making it inaccessible to the public as it had been traditionally. This initiated the process of the privatization of common human necessities. Subsequently, the world was ruled under the logic of the capitalistic system of production, in which everything can be transformed into money, and industrialization engendered mass production. The process of privatization, linked to an unrestrained mercantilization, aggravated greed and competition.

As a result, nowadays, the human civilization is in crisis ; one that could inevitably lead to the destruction of the human species on Earth. With the endurance of the most aggressive aspects of modern societies: the growth of social inequalities, consumeristic frenzy, destruction of nature, militarization of international affairs, the confiscation of public power by the market and productivism, the violent appropriation of the natural resources, and democracy retrogress

On one hand, in the schizophrenia of our times, the production of arms is an endless source of profits; destructing the environment is how economic growth is attained; the pharmaceutical industry obtains astronomical gains by only making their products available to those who can afford to pay their exorbitant prices; the control of the production and selling of seeds is death to small farms because of the debt they incur; The creation of money as an instrument to make exchanges easier is privatized by banks that, even when showed as the heart of a casino economy, speculative and unlinked to the real economy, are reinforce by governmental medicines to the running financial crises.

On the other hand, the knowledge that would allow parcels of the population the access to solutions for their problems is not made widely; the preservation of the forest, necessary to the continuity of life on the planet, is considered an obstacle to progress; scientific research has not served in the struggle against endemic diseases that decimate entire populations; discoveries and useful advancements to human development become inaccessible, protected by blindly defended patents and author’s rights; large agricultural productions with unknown environment effects spread throughout the earth to supply enough fuel to keep the wealthy minority at their standard of living.

The World Social Forum of 2009, at Belem – Pará, Brazil, is happening at a very special moment in time. It is a time when neo-liberal globalization, boosted by financial movements, unfettered by public control and legitimized by the ideology of the free market fails spectacularly.

The moment is also very special because simultaneously, the whole world is emerging into a new consciousness built on the premise that there are resources that under no circumstances could be privatizatized and mercantilized, by the fact that they are common goods and should be available to all human beings and nature itself.

The undersigned of the present Manifest, released in the World Social Forum of 2009, call all citizens of the world and their organizations to engage in the struggle for the deprivatization and demercantilization of these goods, as a flag raised by all of Humanity.

Everyone in their various locations and on their respective battle grounds, must assume the spirit of cooperation,which is essential to human life, and mobilize themselves in order to :

• amplify and nurture the new consciousness that is emerging;
• offer support towards the efforts of the organizations that launch themselves to the defense of rivers, land, seeds, knowledge, science, forests, seas, wind, communication and intercommunication, culture, music and other forms of art, public services such as education, health, sanitation, money, ancestral wisdom;
• fortify the endeavors of their own organizations, mutually reinforcing themselves, in the campaigns and initiatives proposed and developed towards these objectives.

The undersigned of this Manifest pledge to exhaustively act to recover, for the common use of their fellow human beings, in co-responsibility and under social control, all of the goods and services necessary for life.

Source: Sergio Amadeu’s blog.