Comunes is a non-profit collective dedicated to facilitating the use of free/libre web tools and resources to collectives and activists alike, with the hopes of encouraging the Commons.

We encourage you to check our Manifesto which explains our approach.

A quick summary of our initiatives is as follows:

Web Tools & Services

Ourproject.org is a web-based collaborative free content repository. It acts as a central location for offering web space and tools for projects of any topic, focusing on free knowledge. It aims to extend the ideas and methodology of free software to social areas and free culture in general. Thus, it provides multiple web services (hosting, mailing lists, wiki, ftp, forums…) to social/cultural/artistic projects as long as they share their contents with Creative Commons licenses (or other free/libre licenses). Active since 2002, nowadays it hosts 1,000 projects and its services receive around 1,000,000 monthly visits.

Kune is a platform for encouraging collaboration, content sharing & free culture. It aims to improve/modernize/replicate the labor of what ourproject.org does, but in an easier manner and expanding on its features for community-building. It allows for the creation of online spaces of collaborative work, where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings and join people/orgs with similar interests. It sums up the characteristics of online social networks with collaborative software, aimed at groups and boosting the sharing of contents among orgs/peers. It is still under development, with the support of the IEPALA Foundation. You can check our demo.

Move Commons (MC) is a simple web tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare and visualize the core principles they are committed to. The idea behind MC follows the same mechanics of Creative Commons tagging cultural works, providing a user-friendly, bottom-up, labeling system for each initiative with 4 meaningful icons and some keywords. It aims to boost the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, building a network among related initiatives/collectives across the world and allowing mutual discovery. Thus, it can facilitate the climb up to critical mass. Added to which, newcomers could easily understand the collective approach in their website, and/or discover collectives matching their field/location/interests with a simple search. Although there are a few initiatives already with their MC, it is still a beta-version under development, with the support of the Medialab-Prado Commons Lab .

Other projects

• Alerta! is a community-driven alert system
• Plantaré is a community currency for seed exchange
• The World of Alternatives is a proof-of-concept initiative that aims to classify and document collectively alternatives of our “Another World is Possible” in Wikipedia
• Karma is a proof-of-concept gadget for a decentralized reputation rating system
• Massmob is a proof-of-concept gadget for calling and organizing meetings and smart mobs
• Troco is a proof-of-concept gadget of a peer-to-peer currency
• Brick (temporal nickname) is a forthcoming initiative for guiding student assignments towards the solution of real problems and the sharing of their results for reusing/replicating/adapting the solutions
• Ideas (temporal nickname) is a forthcoming initiative for brainstorming ideas of possible social projects related to the Commons

If you found interesting any of our projects, you should have a look at our Join page… who knows? Maybe you would like to join any of our activities! On the other hand, you might be a FLOSS geek: then this is your corner.

• Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, Nov 3-5, Barcelona
• Medialab-Prado, Nov 25, Madrid
• Chaos Communication Congress, Dec 27-30, Berlin

“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.

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.