“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