About the Commons

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. For example, the seeds, the streets, the free/libre software or Wikipedia.

Comunes’ main aim is to encourage the protection and expansion of the Commons through our actions. Comunes approach has the Commons as central idea, using it as guidelines for its actions. It facilitates the discovery and construction of alternatives following a simple rule of three, and it encourages decentralized collaboration through the commons-based peer production.

In principle, Comunes 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 generalized 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 freedoms.