Read it!

Introduction

This book is dedicated to overcoming an epidemic of fear with a surge of reality-based hope. As long as we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by our fears, we will never find the solutions we need to help us build a new world. Of course, we have plenty of good reasons to be fearful — the loss of our jobs, authoritarian rule, corporate abuses, racial and ethnic hatred. Looming above all else is the warming of the Earth’s climate, an existential threat to civilization itself. We watch with amazement as space probes detect water on Mars while authori- ties struggle to find drinking water for people on Earth. Technologies may soon let people edit the genes of their unborn children like text on a computer, yet the means for taking care for the sick, old, and homeless remain elusive.

Fear and despair are fueled by our sense of powerlessness, the sense that we as individuals cannot possibly alter the current trajectories of history. But our powerlessness has a lot to do with how we con- ceive of our plight — as individuals, alone and separate. Fear, and our understandable search for individual safety, are crippling our search for collective, systemic solutions — the only solutions that will truly work. We need to reframe our dilemma as What can we do together? How can we do this outside of conventional institutions that are failing us?

The good news is that countless seeds of collective transformation are already sprouting. Green shoots of hope can be seen in the agroecology farms of Cuba and community forests of India, in community Wi-Fi sys- tems in Catalonia and neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands. They are emerging in dozens of alternative local currencies, new types of web platforms for cooperation, and campaigns to reclaim cities for ordinary people. The beauty of such initiatives is that they meet needs in direct, empowering ways. People are stepping up to invent new systems that function outside of the capitalist mindset, for mutual benefit, with respect for the Earth, and with a commitment to the long term.

In 2009, a frustrated group of friends in Helsinki were watching another international climate change summit fail. They wondered what they could do themselves to change the economy. The result, after much planning, was a neighborhood “credit exchange” in which participants agree to exchange services with each other, from lan- guage translations and swimming lessons to gardening and editing. Give an hour of your expertise to a neighbor; get an hour of someone else’s talents. The Helsinki Timebank, as it was later called, has grown into a robust parallel economy of more than 3,000 members. With exchanges of tens of thousands of hours of services, it has become a socially convivial alternative to the market economy, and part of a large international network of timebanks.

In Bologna, Italy, an elderly woman wanted a simple bench in the neighborhood’s favorite gathering spot. When residents asked the city government if they could install a bench themselves, a perplexed city bureaucracy replied that there were no procedures for doing so. This triggered a long journey to create a formal system for coordinating cit- izen collaborations with the Bologna government. The city eventually created the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons to organize hundreds of citizen/government “pacts of collaboration” — to rehabilitate abandoned buildings, manage kin- dergartens, take care of urban green spaces. The effort has since spurred a Co-City movement in Italy that orchestrates similar collaborations in dozens of cities.

But in the face of climate change and economic inequality, aren’t these efforts painfully small and local? This belief is the mistake tradi- tionalists make. They are so focused on the institutions of power that have failed us, and so fixated on the global canvas, that they fail to recognize that real forces for transformational change originate in small places, with small groups of people, beneath the gaze of power. Skeptics of “the small” would scoff at farmers sowing grains of rice, corn, and beans: “You’re going to feed humanity with … seeds?!” Small gambits with adaptive capacities are in fact powerful vehicles for system change. Right now, a huge universe of bottom-up social initiatives — familiar and novel, in all realms of life, in industrialized and rural settings — are successfully addressing needs that the market economy and state power are unable to meet. Most of these initiatives remain unseen or unidentified with a larger pattern. In the public mind they are patronized, ignored, or seen as aberrational and marginal. After all, they exist outside the prevailing systems of power — the state, cap- ital, markets. Conventional minds always rely on proven things and have no courage for experiments even though the supposedly winning formulas of economic growth, market fundamentalism, and national bureaucracies have become blatantly dysfunctional. The question is not whether an idea or initiative is big or small, but whether its prem- ises contain the germ of change for the whole.

To prevent any misunderstanding: the commons is not just about small-scale projects for improving everyday life. It is a germinal vision for reimagining our future together and reinventing social organization, economics, infrastructure, politics, and state power itself. The commons is a social form that enables people to enjoy freedom without repressing others, enact fairness without bureaucratic control, foster together- ness without compulsion, and assert sovereignty without nationalism. Columnist George Monbiot has summed up the virtues of the com- mons nicely: “A commons … gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It pro- vides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a politics of belonging.”1

This is reflected in our title, which describes the foundation, structure, and vision of the commons: Free, Fair and Alive. Any eman- cipation from the existing system must honor freedom in the widest human sense, not just libertarian economic freedom of the isolated individual. It must put fairness, mutually agreed upon, at the center of any system of provisioning and governance. And it must recognize our existence as living beings on an Earth that is itself alive. Transformation cannot occur without actualizing all of these goals simultaneously. This is the agenda of the commons — to combine the grand priorities of our political culture that are regularly played off against each other — freedom, fairness, and life itself.

Far more than a messaging strategy, the commons is an insurgent worldview. That is precisely why it represents a new form of power. When people come together to pursue shared ends and constitute themselves as a commons, a new surge of coherent social power is cre- ated. When enough of these pockets of bottom-up energy converge, a new political power manifests. And because commoners are com- mitted to a broad set of philosophically integrated values, their power is less vulnerable to co-optation. The market/state has developed a rich repertoire of divide-and-conquer strategies for neutralizing social movements seeking change. It partially satisfies one set of demands, for example, but only by imposing new costs on someone else. Yes to greater racial and gender equality in law, but only within the grossly inequitable system of capitalism and weak enforcement. Or, yes to greater environmental protection, but only by charging higher prices or by ransacking the Global South for its natural resources. Or, yes to greater healthcare and family-friendly work policies, but only under rigid schemes that preserve corporate profits. Freedom is played against fairness, or vice-versa, and each in turn is played off against the needs of Mother Earth. And so the citadel of capitalism again and again thwarts demands for system change.

The great ambition of the commons is to break this endless story of co-optation and beggar-thy-neighbor manipulation. Its aim is to develop an independent, parallel social economy, outside of the market/ state system, that enacts a different logic and ethos. The Commonsverse does not pursue freedom, fairness, and eco-friendly provisioning as separate goals requiring tradeoffs among them. The commons seeks to integrate and unify these goals as coeval priorities. They constitute an indivisible agenda. Moreover, this agenda is not merely aspirational; it lies at the heart of commoning as an insurgent social practice.

Not surprisingly, the vision of the commons we set forth here is quite different from that image presented (and derided) by modern economics and the political right. For them, commons are unowned resources that are free for the taking and therefore a failed management regime — an idea popularized by Garrett Hardin’s famous essay on the “Tragedy of the Commons.” (More about this later.) We disagree. The commons is a robust class of self-organized social practices for meeting needs in fair, inclusive ways. It is a life-form. It is a framing that describes a different way of being in the world and different ways of knowing and acting.

The market/state system often talks about how it performs things for the people — or if participation is allowed, working with the people. But the commons achieves important things through the people. That is to say, ordinary people themselves provide the energy, imagination, and hard work. They do their own provisioning and governance. Commoners are the ones who dream up the systems, devise the rules, provide the expertise, perform the difficult work, monitor for compli- ance, and deal with rule-breakers.

As this implies, the commons involves an identity shift. It requires that people evolve into different roles and perspectives. It demands new ways of relating to other people. It requires that we reassess who matters in our economy and society, and how essential work gets done. Seen from the inside, the commons reveals that we can create value in new ways, and create meaning for ourselves in the process. We can escape from capitalist value chains by creating value networks of mutual commitment. It is by changing the micropatterns of social life, on the ground, with each other, that we can begin to decolonize our- selves from the history and culture into which we were born. We can escape the sense of powerless isolation that defines so much of modern life. We can develop healthier, fair alternatives.

Not surprisingly, the guardians of the prevailing order — in government, business, the media, higher education, philanthropy — prefer to work within existing institutional frameworks. They are con- tent to operate within parochial patterns of thought and puny ideas about human dignity, especially the narrative of progress through eco- nomic growth. They prefer that political power be consolidated into centralized structures, such as the nation-state, the corporation, the bureaucracy. This book aims to shatter such presumptions and open up some new vistas of realistic choices.

However, this book is not yet another critique of neoliberal capital- ism. While often valuable, even penetrating critiques do not necessarily help us imagine how to remake our institutions and build a new world. What we really need today is creative experimentation and the courage to initiate new patterns of action. We need to learn how to identify patterns of cultural life that can bring about change, notwithstanding the immense power of capital.

For those activists oriented toward political parties and elections, legislation, and policymaking, we counsel a shift to a deeper, more sig- nificant level of political life — the world of culture and social practice. Conventional modes of politics working with conventional institutions simply cannot deliver the kinds of change we need. Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has shrewdly observed, “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules.” We need to devise a new set of rules. The old system cannot be ignored, to be sure, and in fact it can often deliver necessary benefits. But we must be honest with our- selves: existing systems will not yield transformational change. That’s why we must be open to bracing winds of change from the periphery, from the unexpected, neglected places, from the zones without pedi- gree or credentials, from the people themselves.

Accordingly, we refuse to assume that the nation-state is the only realistic system of power for dealing with our fears and offering solu- tions. It isn’t. The nation-state is, rather, an expression of a fading era. It’s just that respectable circles decline to consider alternatives from the fringe lest they be seen as fuzzy-minded or crazy. But these days, the structural deficiencies of the nation-state and its alliance with cap- ital-driven markets are on vivid display, and can hardly be denied. We have no choice but to abandon our fears — and start to entertain fresh ideas from the margins.

A note of reassurance: “going beyond” the nation-state doesn’t mean “without the nation-state.” It means that we must seriously alter state power by introducing new operational logics and institutional players. Much of this book is devoted to precisely that necessity. We immodestly see commoning as a way to incubate new social practices and cultural logics that are firmly grounded in everyday experience and yet capable of federating themselves to gain strength, cross-fertilizing to grow a new culture, and reaching into the inner councils of state power. When we describe commons and commoning, we are talking about practices that go beyond the usual ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving. One could, therefore, regard this book as a learning guide. We hope to enlarge your understanding of the economy as something that goes beyond the money economy that sets my interest against our interests, and sees the state as the only alternative to the market, for example. This is no small ambition because the market/state has insin- uated its premises deep within our consciousness and culture. If we are serious about escaping the stifling logic of capitalism, however, we must probe this deeply. How else can we escape the strange logic by which we first exhaust ourselves and deplete the environment in producing things, and then have to work heroically to repair both, simply so the hamster wheel of the eternal today will continue to turn? How can politicians and citizens possibly take independent initiatives if every- thing depends on jobs, the stock market, and competition? How can we strike off in new directions when the basic patterns of capitalism constantly inhabit our lives and consciousness, eroding what we have in common? Our aim in writing this book is not just to illuminate new patterns of thought and feeling, but to offer a guide to action.

But how do you begin to approach such a profound change? Our answer is that we must first unravel our understanding of the world: our image of what it means to be a human being, our conception of own- ership, prevailing ideas about being and knowing (Chapter 2). When we learn to see the world through a new lens and describe it with new words, a compelling vision comes into focus. We can acquire a new understanding of the good life, our togetherness, the economy, and politics. A semantic revolution of new vocabularies (and the abandon- ment of old ones) is indispensable for communicating this new vision. That is why, in Chapter 3, we introduce a variety of terms to escape the trap of many misleading binaries (individual/collective, public/private, civilized/premodern) and name the experiences of commoning that currently have no name (Ubuntu rationality, freedom-in-connected- ness, value sovereignty, peer governance).

Insights are one thing, meaningful action is another. How then shall we proceed? We regard the “how to do it” section — Part II, con- sisting of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 — as the heart of the book. The Triad of Commoning, as we call it, systematically describes how the world of the commons “breathes” — how it lives, what its culture feels like. The Triad offers a new framework for understanding and analyzing the commons. The framework itself emerged through a methodology associated with “pattern languages,” in which a process of “patterns mining” is used to identify recurrent patterns of social practice that exist across cultures and history.

This is followed by Part III, which examines the embedded assump- tions of property (Chapter 7) and how a new sort of relationalized property can be developed (Chapter 8) to support commoning. We quickly realized that such visions — or other patterns of commoning — tend to run up against state power if they become successful. States are not shy about using law, property rights, state policies, alliances with capital, and coercive practices to advance their vision of the world — which generally frowns upon the realities of commoning. In light of these realities, we outline several general strategies for building the Commonsverse nonetheless (Chapter 9). And we conclude with a look at several specific approaches — commons charters, distributed ledger technologies, commons-public partnerships — that can expand the com- mons while protecting it against the market/state system (Chapter 10). As a book that seeks to reconceptualize our understanding of com- mons, we realize that we point to many new avenues of further inquiry that we simply cannot answer here. The greater the shoreline of our knowledge, the greater the oceans of our ignorance. We would have liked to explore a new theory of value to counter the unsatisfactory notions of value, the price system, used by standard economics. The long history of property law contains many fascinating legal doctrines that deserve to be excavated, along with non-Western notions of stew- ardship and control. The psychological and sociological dimensions of cooperation could illuminate our ideas about commoning with new depth. Scholars of modernity, historians of medieval commons, and anthropologists could help us better understand the social dynamics of the contemporary commons. In short, there is much more to be said about the themes we discuss.

Some of the most salient, understudied big issues involve how commons might mitigate familiar geopolitical, ecological, and human- itarian challenges. Migration, military conflict, climate change, and inequality are all affected by the prevalence of enclosures and the rel- ative strength of commoning. Commoners with stable, locally rooted means of subsistence naturally feel less pressure to flee to wealthier regions of the world. When industrial trawlers destroyed Somali fishery commons, they surely had a role in fueling piracy and terrorism in Africa. Could state protection of commons make a difference? If such provisioning could supplant global market supply chains, it could significantly reduce carbon emissions from transportation and agricul- tural chemicals. These and many other topics deserve much greater research, analysis, and theorizing.

We wish to call attention to four appendices of interest. Appendix A explains the methodology used to identify the patterns of commoning in Part II of the book. Appendix B describes the conceptualization process used by Mercè Moreno Tárres to draw the twenty-eight beau- tiful patterns images in Part II. Appendix C lists sixty-nine working commons and tools for commoning mentioned in this book. And Appendix D lists Elinor Ostrom’s eight renowned design principles for effective commons.

Part I : The Commons as a Transformative Perspective

Part I: The Commons as a Transformative Perspective

1. Commons and Commoning

Can human beings really learn to cooperate with each other in routine, large-scale ways? A great deal of evidence suggests we can. There is no innate, genetic impediment to cooperation. It’s quite the opposite. In one memorable experiment conducted by developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello, a bright-eyed tod- dler watches a man carrying an armful of books as he repeatedly bumps into a closet door. The adult can’t seem to open the closet, and the toddler is concerned. The child spontaneously walks over to the door and opens it, inviting the inept adult to put the books into the closet. In another experiment, an adult repeatedly fails to place a blue tablet on top of an existing stack of tablets. A toddler seated across from the clumsy man grabs the fallen tablets and carefully places each one neatly on the top of the stack. In yet another test, an adult who had been stapling papers in a room leaves, and upon returning with a new set of papers, finds that someone has moved his stapler. A one-year-old infant in the room immediately understands the adult’s problem, and points helpfully at the missing stapler, now on a shelf.

For Tomasello, a core insight came into focus from these and other experiments: human beings instinctively want to help others. In his painstaking attempts to understand the origins of human cooperation, Tomasello and his team have sought to isolate the workings of this human impulse and to differentiate it from the behaviors of other spe- cies, especially primates. From years of research, he has concluded that “from around their first birthdays — when they first begin to walk and talk and become truly cultural beings — human children are already cooperative and helpful in many, though obviously not all, situations. And they do not learn this from adults; it comes naturally.”1 Even infants from fourteen to eighteen months of age show the capacity to fetch out-of-reach objects, remove obstacles facing others, correct an adult’s mistake, and choose the correct behaviors for a given task.

Of course, complications arise and multiply as young children grow up. They learn that some people are not trustworthy and that others don’t reciprocate acts of kindness. Children learn to internalize social norms and ethical expectations, especially from societal institutions. As they mature, children associate schooling with economic success, learn to package personal reputation into a marketable brand, and find satisfaction in buying and selling.

While the drama of acculturation plays out in many different ways, the larger story of the human species is its versatile capacity for coop- eration. We have the unique potential to express and act upon shared intentionality. “What makes us [human beings] really different is our ability to put our heads together and to do things that none of us could do alone, to create new resources that we couldn’t create alone,” says Tomasello. “It’s really all about communicating and collaborating and working together.” We are able to do this because we can grasp that other human beings have inner lives with emotions and intentions. We become aware of a shared condition that goes beyond a narrow, self-referential identity. Any individual identity is always, also, part of collective iden- tities that guide how a person thinks, behaves, and solves problems. All of us have been indelibly shaped by our relations with peers and society, and by the language, rituals, and traditions that constitute our cultures. In other words, the conceit that we are “self-made” individuals is a delusion. There is no such thing as an isolated “I.” As we will explore later, each of us is really a Nested-I. We are not only embedded in relationships; our very identities are created through relationships. The Nested-I concept helps us deal more honestly with the encompassing reality of human identity and development. We humans truly are the “cooperative species,” as economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have put it.2 The question is whether or not this deep human instinct will be encouraged to unfold. And if cooperation is encouraged, will it aim to serve all or instead be channeled to serve individualistic, parochial ends?

Commoning Is Everywhere, but Widely Misunderstood

In our previous books The Wealth of the Commons (2012) and Patterns of Commoning (2015), we documented dozens of notable commons, suggesting that the actual scope and impact of commoning in today’s world is quite large. Our capacity to self-organize to address needs, independent of the state or market, can be seen in community forests, cooperatively run farms and fisheries, open source design and manufac- turing communities with global reach, local and regional currencies, and myriad other examples in all realms of life. The elemental human impulse that we are born with — to help others, to improve existing practices — ripens into a stable social form with countless variations: a commons. The impulse to common plays out in the most varied circumstances — impoverished urban neighborhoods, landscapes hit by natural disas- ters, subsistence farms in the heart of Africa, social networks that come together in cyberspace. And yet, strangely, the commons paradigm is rarely seen as a pervasive social form, perhaps because it so often lives in the shadows of state and market power. It is not recognized as a pow- erful social force and institutional form in its own right. For us, to talk about the commons is to talk about freedom-in-connectedness — a social space in which we can rediscover and remake ourselves as whole human beings and enjoy some serious measure of self-determination. The discourse around commons and commoning helps us see that indi- viduals working together can bring forth more humane, ethical, and ecologically responsible societies. It is plausible to imagine a stable, sup- portive post-capitalist order. The very act of commoning, as it expands and registers on the larger culture, catalyzes new political and economic possibilities.

Let us be clear: the commons is not a utopian fantasy. It is some- thing that is happening right now. It can be seen in countless villages and cities, in the Global South and the industrial North, in open source software communities and global cyber-networks. Our first challenge is to name the many acts of commoning in our midst and make them culturally legible. They must be perceived and understood if they are going to be nourished, protected, and expanded. That is the burden of the following chapters and the reason why we propose a new, general framework for understanding commons and commoning.

The commons is not simply about “sharing,” as it happens in count- less areas of life. It is about sharing and bringing into being durable social systems for producing shareable things and activities. Nor is the commons about the misleading idea of the “tragedy of the commons.”

This term was popularized by a famous essay by biologist Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which appeared in the influ- ential journal Science in 1968.3 Paul Ehrlich had just published The Population Bomb, a Malthusian account of a world overwhelmed by sheer numbers of people. In this context, Hardin told a fictional par- able of a shared pasture on which no herdsman has a rational incentive to limit the grazing of his cattle. The inevitable result, said Hardin, is that each herdsman will selfishly use as much of the common resource as possible, which will inevitably result in its overuse and ruin — the so-called tragedy of the commons. Possible solutions, Hardin argued, are to grant private property rights to the resource in question, or have the government administer it as public property or on a first-come, first-served basis.

Hardin’s article went on to become the most-cited article in the history of the journal Science, and the phrase “tragedy of the commons” became a cultural buzzword. His fanciful story, endlessly repeated by economists, social scientists, and politicians, has persuaded most people that the commons is a failed management regime. And yet Hardin’s anal- ysis has some remarkable flaws. Most importantly, he was not describing a commons! He was describing a free-for-all in which nothing is owned and everything is free for the taking — an “unmanaged common pool resource,” as some would say. As commons scholar Lewis Hyde has puckishly suggested, Hardin’s “tragedy” thesis ought to be renamed “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Commons-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Non-Communicating, Self-Interested Individuals.”

In an actual commons, things are different. A distinct community governs a shared resource and its usage. Users negotiate their own rules, assign responsibilities and entitlements, and set up monitoring systems to identify and penalize free riders. To be sure, finite resources can be overexploited, but that outcome is more associated with free markets than with commons. It is no coincidence that our current period of history, in which capitalist markets and private property rights prevail in most places, has produced the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s his- tory, an unprecedented loss of fertile soil, disruptions in the hydrologic cycle, and a dangerously warming atmosphere.

As we will see in this book, the commons has so many rich facets that it cannot be easily contained within a single definition. But it helps to clarify how certain terms often associated with the commons are not, in fact, the same as a commons.

What Is and Is Not a Commons:
Some Clarifications

Commons are living social systems through which people to address their shared problems in self-organized ways. Unfortunately, some people incorrectly use the term to describe unowned things such as oceans, space, and the moon, or collectively owned resources such as water, forests, and land. As a result, the term commons is frequently conflated with economic concepts that express a very different worl- dview. Terms such as common goods, common-pool resources, and common property misrepresent the commons because they empha- size objects and individuals, not relationships and systems. Here are some of the misleading terms associated with commons.

Common goods: A term used in neoclassical economy to distin- guish among certain types of goods — common goods, club goods, public goods, and private goods. Common goods are said to be diffi- cult to fence off (in economic jargon, they are “nonexcludable”) and susceptible to being used up (“rivalrous”). In other words, common goods tend to get depleted when we share them. Conventional eco- nomics presumes that the excludability and depletability of a common good are inherent in the good itself, but this is mistaken. It is not the good that is excludable or not, it’s people who are being excluded or not. A social choice is being made. Similarly, the depletability of a common good has little to do with the good itself, and everything to do with how we choose to make use of water, land, space, or for- ests. By calling the land, water, or forest a “good,” economists are in fact making a social judgment: they are presuming that something is a resource suitable for market valuation and trade — a presumption that a different culture may wish to reject.

Common-pool resources or CPRs: This term is used by com- mons scholars, mostly in the tradition of Elinor Ostrom, to analyze how shared resources such as fishing grounds, groundwater basins or grazing areas can be managed. Common-pool resources are regarded as common goods, and in fact usage of the terms is very similar. However, the term common-pool resource is generally invoked to explore how people can use, but not overuse, a shared resource.

Common property: While a CPR refers to a resource as such, common property refers to a system of law that grants formal rights to access or use it. The terms CPR and common good point to a resource itself, for example, whereas common property points to the legal system that regulates how people may use it. Talking about prop- erty regimes is thus a very different register of representation than references to water, land, fishing grounds, or software code. Each of these can be managed by any number of different legal regimes; the resource and the legal regime are distinct. Commoners may choose to use a common property regime, but that regime does not constitute the commons.

Common (noun). While some traditionalists use the term “the common” instead of “commons” to refer to shared land or water, cul- tural theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt introduced a new spin to the term “common” in their 2009 book Commonwealth. They speak of the common to emphasize the social processes that people engage in when cooperating, and to distinguish this idea from the commons as a physical resource. Hardt and Negri note that “the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships” constitute the common. For them, the common is a form of “biopolitical production” that points to a realm beyond property that exists alongside the private and the public, but which unfolds by engaging our affective selves. While this is similar to our use of the term commoning — commons as a verb — the Hardt/ Negri uses of the term “common” would seem to include all forms of cooperation, without regard for purpose, and thus could include gangs and the mafia.

The common good: The term, used since the ancient Greeks, refers to positive outcomes for everyone in a society. It is a glittering gener- ality with no clear meaning because virtually all political and economic systems claim that they produce the most benefits for everyone.

Commons in Real Life

The best way to become acquainted with the commons is by learning about a few real-life examples. Therefore, we offer below five short pro- files to give a better feel for the contexts of commoning, their specific realities, and their sheer diversity. The examples can help us understand the commons as both a general paradigm of governance, provisioning, and social practice — a worldview and ethic, one might say — and a highly particular phenomenon. Each commons is one of a kind. There are no all-purpose models or “best practices” that define commons and commoning — only suggestive experiences and instructive patterns.

Zaatari Refugee Camp

The Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan is a settlement of 78,000 dis- placed Syrians who began to arrive in 2012. The camp may seem like an unlikely illustration of the ideas of this book. Yet in the middle of a desolate landscape, people have devised large and elaborate sys- tems of shelters, neighborhoods, roads, and even a system of addresses. According to Kilian Kleinschmidt, a United Nations official once in charge of the camp, the Zaatari camp in 2015 had “14,000 house- holds, 10,000 sewage pots and private toilets, 3,000 washing machines, 150 private gardens, 3,500 new businesses and shops.”A reporter vis- iting the camp noted that some of the most elaborate houses there are “cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and shipping con- tainers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and jerry-built sewers.” The settlement has a barbershop, a pet store, a flower shop and a home- made ice cream business. There is a pizza delivery service and a travel agency that provides a pickup service at the airport. Zaatari’s main drag is called the Champs-Élysées.5

Of course, Zaatari remains a troubled place with many problems, and the Jordanian state and United Nations remain in charge. But what makes it so notable as a refugee camp is the significant role that self-organized, bottom-up participation has played in building an improvised yet stable city. It is not simply a makeshift survival camp where wretched populations queue up for food, administrators deliver services, and people are treated as helpless victims. It is a place where refugees have been able to apply their own energies and imagina- tions in building the settlement. They have been able to take some responsibility for self-governance and owning their lives, earning a wel- come measure of dignity. You might say that Zaatari administrators and residents, in however partial a way, have recognized the virtues of commoning. The Zaatari experience tells us something about the power of self-organization, a core concept in the commons.

Buurtzorg Nederland

In the Dutch city of Almelo, nurse Jos de Blok was distressed at the steady decline of home care: “Quality was getting worse and worse, the clients’ satisfaction was decreasing, and the expenses were increasing,” he said. De Blok and a small team of professional nurses decided to form a new homecare organization, Buurtzorg Nederland.6 Rather than structure patient care on the model of a factory conveyor belt, delivering measurable units of market services with strict divisions of labor, the home care company relies on small, self-guided teams of highly trained nurses who serve fifty to sixty people in the same neighborhood. (The organization’s name, “Buurtzorg,” is Dutch for “neighborhood care.”) Care is holistic, focusing on a patient’s many personal needs, social circumstances, and long-term condition.

The first thing a nurse usually does when visiting a new patient is to sit down and have a chat and a cup of coffee. As de Blok put it, “People are not bicycles who can be organized according to an organizational chart.” In this respect, Buurtzorg nurses are carrying out the logic of “spending time” (in a commons) as opposed to “saving time” to be more efficient competitors. Interestingly, the emphasis on spending more time with patients results in them needing less professional care- time. If one thinks about it, this is not really a surprise: care-givers basically try to make themselves irrelevant in patients’ lives as quickly as possible, which encourages patients to become more independent. A 2009 study showed that Buurtzorg’s patients get released from care twice as fast as competitors’ clients, and they end up claiming only 50 percent of the prescribed hours of care.7

Nurses provide a full range of assistance to patients, from med- ical procedures to support services such as bathing. They also identify networks of informal care in a person’s neighborhood, support his or her social life, and promote self-care and independence.8 Buurtzorg is self-managed by nurses. The process is facilitated through a simple, flat organizational structure and information technology, including the use of inspirational blog posts by de Blok. Buurtzorg operates effectively at a large scale without the need for either hierarchy or consensus. In 2017 Buurtzorg employed about 9,000 nurses, who take care of 100,000 patients throughout the Netherlands, with new transnational initiatives underway in the US and Europe.9

It turns out Buurtzorg’s reconceptualization of home healthcare produces high-quality, humane treatment at relatively low costs. By 2015, Buurtzorg care had reduced emergency room visits by 30 percent, according to a KPMG study, and has reduced taxpayer expen- ditures on home care.10 Buurtzorg also has the most satisfied workforce of any Dutch company with more than 1,000 employees, according to an Ernst & Young study.11

WikiHouse

In 2011, two recent architectural graduates, Alastair Parvin and Nicholas Ierodiaconou, joined a London design practice called Zero Zero Architecture, where they were able to experiment with their ideas about open design. They wondered: What if architects, instead of cre- ating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, helped regular citizens design and build their own houses? This simple idea is at the heart of an astonishing open source construction kit for housing. Parvin and Ierodiaconou learned that a familiar technology known as CNC — computer numerical control fabrication — would enable them to make digital designs that could be used to fabricate large flat pieces from plywood or other material. This led them to develop the idea of publishing open source files for houses, which would let many people modify and improve the designs for different circumstances. It would also allow unskilled labor to quickly and inexpensively erect the structural shell of a home. They called the new design and construction system WikiHouse.12

Since its modest beginnings, WikiHouse has blossomed into a global design community. In 2017 it had eleven chapters in countries around the world, each of which works independently of the original WikiHouse, now a nonprofit foundation that shares the same mission. Simply put, WikiHouse participants want to “put the design solutions for building low-cost, low-energy, high-performance homes into the hands of every citizen and business on earth.” They want to encourage people to Produce Cosmo-Locally, a pattern described in Chapter 6 And they want to “grow a new, distributed housing industry, com- prised of many citizens, communities and small businesses developing homes and neighborhoods for themselves, reducing our dependence on top-down, debt-heavy mass housing systems.”

The WikiHouse Charter, a series of fifteen principles, sets forth the basic elements of the technologies, economics, and processes of open source house building. The Charter is one of many examples of how commoners Declare Shared Purpose & Values in developing Peer Governance (see Chapter 5). It includes core ideas such as design stan- dards to lower the thresholds of time, cost, skill, and energy needed to build a house; open standards and open source ShareAlike licenses for design elements; and empowering users to repair and modify features of their homes. By inviting users to adapt designs and tools to serve their own needs, WikiHouse seeks to provide a rich set of “convivial tools,” as described by social critic Ivan Illich. Tools should not attempt to control humans by prescribing narrow ways of doing things. Software should not be burdened with encryption and barriers to repair. Convivial tools are designed to unleash personal creativity and autonomy.13

Community Supported Agriculture

On any Saturday morning in the quiet Massachusetts town of Hadley, you will find families arriving at Next Barn Over farm to pick beans and strawberries from the fields, cut fresh herbs and flowers, and gather their weekly shares of potatoes, kale, onions, radishes, tomatoes, and other produce. Next Barn Over is a CSA farm — Community Supported Agriculture — which means that people buy upfront shares in the farm’s seasonal harvest and then pick up fresh produce weekly from April to November. In other words, CSA members pool the money, before production, and divide up the harvest among all members. This practice, used in thousands of CSAs around the world, inspired us to identify “Pool, Cap & Divide Up” as an important fea- ture of a commons economy (see Chapter 6).

A small share for two people in Next Barn Over costs US$415 while a large share suitable for six people costs US$725. By purchasing shares in the harvest at the beginning of the season, members give farmers the working capital they need and share the risks of production — bad weather, crop diseases, equipment issues. One could say they finance commons provisioning.

A CSA is not primarily a business model, however, because chasing profits is not the point. The point is for families and farmers to mutually support each other in growing healthy food in ecologically responsible ways. All the crops grown on Next Barn Over’s thirty-four acres are organic. Soil fertility is improved through the use of cover crops, organic fertilizers, compost, and manure, with regular crop rota- tion to reduce pests and disease. The farm uses solar panels from the barn roof. Drip irrigation systems minimize water usage. Next Barn Over also hosts periodic dinners at which families can socialize, dance to local bands’ music, and learn more about the realities of farming in the local ecosystem.

Since the founding of the first CSA in 1986, the idea has grown into an international movement, with more than 1,700 CSAs in the United States alone (2018) and hundreds of others worldwide. While some American CSAs behave almost like businesses, the original phi- losophy behind CSAs remains strong — to try to develop new forms of cooperation between farmers, workers, and members who are basically consumers. Some are inspired by teikei, a similar model that has been widely used in Japan since the 1970s (The word means “cooperation” or “joint business.”). Here, too, the focus is on smallholder agricul- ture, organic farming, and direct partnerships between farmers and consumer. One of the founding players in teikei, the Japan Association for Organic Agriculture, has stated its desire “to develop an alternative distribution system that does not depend on conventional markets.”14 The CSA experience is now inspiring a variety of regional agriculture and food distribution projects around the world, with the same end — to empower farmers and ordinary people, strengthen local economies, and avoid the problems caused by Big Agriculture (pesticides, GMOs, additives, processed foods, transport costs). The socio-economic model for CSAs is so solid that the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which helped incubate the first CSA, is now developing the idea of “community supported industry” for local production. The idea is to use the principles of community mutualization to start and support local businesses — a furniture factory, an applesauce cannery, a humane slaughterhouse — in order to increase local self-reliance.

Guifi.net

Most people assume that only a large cable or telecommunications cor- poration with political connections and lots of capital can build the infrastructure for Wi-Fi service. The scrappy cooperative Guifi.net of Catalonia has proven that wrong. The enterprise has shown that it is entirely possible for commoners to build and maintain high-quality, affordable internet connections for everyone. By committing itself to principles of mutual ownership, net neutrality, and community con- trol, Guifi.net has grown from a single Wi-Fi node in 2004 to more than 35,000 nodes and 63,000 kilometers of wireless connectivity in July 2018, particularly in rural Catalonia.

Guifi.net got its start when Ramon Roca, a Spanish engineer at Oracle, hacked some off-the-shelf routers. The hack made the routers work as nodes in a mesh network-like system while connected to a single DSL line owned by Telefonica serving municipal governments. This jerry-rigged system enabled people to send and receive internet data using other, similarly hacked routers. As word spread, Roca’s innovation to deal with scarce internet access quickly caught on. As recounted by Wired magazine, Guifi.net grew its system through a kind of improvised crowdfunding system: “‘It was about announcing a plan, describing the cost, and asking for contributions,’ Roca says. The payments weren’t going to Guifi.net, but to the suppliers of gear and ISP [Internet Service Provider] network services. All of these initiatives laid the groundwork not just for building out the overall network, but also creating the array of ISPs.” What Guifi.net did was simply to Pool & Share (see Chapter 6 — it pooled resources and shared internet)

In 2008 Guifi.net established an affiliated foundation to help oversee volunteers, network operations, and governance of the entire system. As Wired described it, the foundation “handled network traffic to and among the providers; connected to the major data ‘interchange’ providing vast amounts of bandwidth between southern Spain and the rest of the world; planned deployment of fiber; and, crucially, devel- oped systems to ensure that the ISPs were paying their fair share of the overall data and network-management costs.”15

Guiding the entire project is a Compact for a Free, Open and Neutral Network, a charter that sets forth the key principles of the Guifi.net commons and the rights and freedoms of users:

You have the freedom to use the network for any purpose as long as you don’t harm the operation of the network itself, the rights of other users, or the principles of neutrality that allow contents and services to flow without deliberate
You have the right to understand the network and its components, and to share knowledge of its mechanisms and
You have the right to offer services and content to the network on your own
You have the right to join the network, and the obligation to extend this set of rights to anyone according to these same

Anyone who uses the Guifi.net infrastructure in Catalonia — indi- vidual internet users, small businesses, government, dozens of small internet service providers — is committed to “the development of a commons-based, free, open and neutral telecommunications network.” This has resulted in Guifi.net providing far better broadband service at cheaper prices than, say, Americans receive, who pay very high prices to a broadband oligopoly (a median of US$80 month in 2017) for slower connectivity and poor customer service. ISPs using Guifi.net were charging 18 to 35 euros a month in 2016 (roughly US$20–$37) for one gigabit fiber connections, and much lower prices for Wi-Fi. Commons are highly money efficient, as Wolfgang Sachs once pointed out. They enable us to become less reliant on money, and therefore more free from the structural coercion of markets.

Moreover, the Guifi.net experience shows that it is entirely possible to build “large-scale, locally owned, broadband infrastructure in more locations than telco [telephone company] incumbents,” as open tech- nology advocate Sascha Meinrath put it.16 The mutualizing of costs and benefits in a commons regime has a lot to do with this success.

Understanding Commons Holistically in the Wild

How to make sense of these very different commons? Newcomers to the topic often throw up their hands in confusion because they cannot readily see the deeper patterns that make a commons a commons. They find it perplexing that so many diverse phenomena can be described by the same term. This problem is really a matter of training one’s perception. Everyone is familiar with the “free market” even though its variations — stock markets, grocery stores, filmmaking, mining, personal services, labor — are at least as eclectic as the commons. But culturally, we regard the diversity of markets as normal whereas com- mons are nearly invisible.

The strange truth is that a popular language for understanding contemporary commons is almost entirely absent. Social science schol- arship on the topic is often obscure and highly specialized, and the economic literature tends to treat commons as physical resources, not as social systems. But rather than focus on the resource that each depends on, it makes more sense to focus on the ways in which each is similar. Each commons depends on social processes, the sharing of knowledge, and physical resources. Each shares challenges in bringing together the social, the political (governance), and the economic (pro- visioning) into an integrated whole.

Every commons is based on natural resources. Every commons is a knowledge commons. Every commons depends on a social process.

So a big part of our challenge is to recover the neglected social history of commons and learn how it applies to contemporary cir- cumstances. This requires a conceptual framework, new language, and stories that anyone can understand. Explaining the commons with the vocabulary of capital, business, and standard economics cannot work. It is like using the metaphors of clockworks and machines to explain complex living systems. To learn how commons actually work, we need to escape deeply rooted habits of thought and cultivate some fresh perspectives.

This task becomes easier once we realize that there is no single, universal template for assessing a commons. Each bears the distinctive marks of its own special origins, culture, people, and context. Yet there are also many deep, recurrent patterns of commoning that allow us to make some careful generalizations. Commons that superficially appear quite different often have remarkable similarities in how they govern themselves, divide up resources, protect themselves against enclosure, and cultivate shared intentionality. In other words, commons are not standardized machines that can be built from the same blueprint. They are living systems that evolve, adapt over time, and surprise us with their creativity and scope.

The word “patterns” as we use it here deserves a bit of explanation. Our usage derives from the ideas developed by architect and philos- opher Christopher Alexander in his celebrated 1977 book A Pattern Language — ideas that are further elaborated on in his four-volume masterwork, The Nature of Order, the result of twenty-seven years of research and original thinking. Alexander and his co-authors brilliantly blend an empirical scientific perspective with ideas about the formative role of beauty and grace in everyday life and design, resulting in what we would call “enlivenment.”17

In Alexander’s view, a pattern describes “a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solu- tion a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”18 In other words, patterns-thinking and solutions based on it are never decontextualized, nor disconnected from what we think and feel. We suggest looking closely at the underlying patterns of thriving social pro- cesses for inspiration while keeping in mind that a successful commons cannot be copied and pasted. Each must develop its own appropriate localized, context-specific solutions. Each must satisfy practical needs and deeper human aspirations and interests.

In this volume, we attempt to identify the patterns that are building a growing constellation of commons around the world — the Commonsverse. In our account of this realm, we are both descrip- tive and aspirational — descriptive in assessing how diverse commons function, and aspirational in trying to imagine how the known com- moning dynamics could plausibly grow and become a distinct sector of the political economy and culture. We draw on the social sciences to discuss important aspects of the commons. But we also draw upon our own extensive firsthand experiences in talking with commoners and learning about their remarkable communities. We wish to describe a rich, textured field of human creativity and social organization that has been overlooked for too long, while reassuring the reader that commons are not so complicated and obscure that only professionals can grasp them. In fact, they arise from common people doing fairly common things that only seem uncommon in market-oriented societies.

In the course of our travels, we have been astonished at the remark- able range of circumstances in which commoning occurs. This has led us to wonder: Why do so many discussions about commons rely on economic categories of analysis (“types of goods,” “resource allocation,” “productivity,” “transaction costs”) when commons are primarily social systems for meeting shared needs? This question propelled us on a pro- cess to reconceptualize in its fullest sense what it means to engage in commoning.

We think that such a perspective contributes to a broader para- digm shift. It helps us to redefine the very idea of the economy and enlarge the functional scope of democratic action. Commons meet real needs while changing culture and identity. They influence our social practices, ethics, and worldviews and in so doing change the very char- acter of politics. To understand these deeper currents, we need a richer framework for making sense of the commons. We need it to better explain the internal dynamics of peer governance and provisioning — and also the ways in which commoning connects the larger political economy and our inner lives. In short, we must see that the commons requires a new worldview.

1. Commons and Commoning

Part I: The Commons as a Transformative Perspective

1. Commons and Commoning

Commoning Is Everywhere, but Widely Misunderstood

What Is and Is Not a Commons:
Some Clarifications

Commons in Real Life

Zaatari Refugee Camp

Buurtzorg Nederland

WikiHouse

Community Supported Agriculture

Guifi.net

Guiding the entire project is a Compact for a Free, Open and Neutral Network, a charter that sets forth the key principles of the Guifi.net commons and the rights and freedoms of users:

You have the freedom to use the network for any purpose as long as you don’t harm the operation of the network itself, the rights of other users, or the principles of neutrality that allow contents and services to flow without deliberate
You have the right to understand the network and its components, and to share knowledge of its mechanisms and
You have the right to offer services and content to the network on your own
You have the right to join the network, and the obligation to extend this set of rights to anyone according to these same

Understanding Commons Holistically in the Wild

Every commons is based on natural resources. Every commons is a knowledge commons. Every commons depends on a social process.

2. The OntoShift to the Commons

3. Language and the Creation of Commons

Part II: The Triad of Commoning

Introduction

Principles and Patterns

A Word on Methodology

4. The Social Life of Commoning

5. Peer Governance Through Commoning

6. Provisioning Through Commons

Part III: Growing the Commonsverse

Introduction

7. Rethink Property

8. Relationalize Property

9. State Power and Commoning

10. Take Commoning to Scale

Background Materials

Acknowledgments

No book is a solitary achievement because it can only grow from within a rich network of friends and colleagues, benefactors, critics, advisors, test readers, research sources, and indulgent family members. In a sense, a virtual commons must arise. That’s what enabled the research, reflection, debate, writing, and revision that produced this book. One of the joys of finishing a book is saluting the many people who were indispensable in making it happen.

The Heinrich Böll Stiftung (hbs) is clearly our closest, most enduring partner. The earliest commitment to exploring the com- mons came from Barbara Unmussig, president of hbs, and Heike Löschmann, then head of the Department of International Politics, in 2009. Both of them have been steadfast champions of the commons and our work. Since this book got underway in 2016, we have been blessed by the intense care and support of Joanna Barelkowska at hbs, who kept everything on track, including our spirits, and by Jörg Haas, the incoming head of the Department of International Politics, who has been a strong champion of this book.

David Bollier is grateful to Peter Buffett and Jennifer Buffett, co-presidents of the NoVo Foundation, for their stalwart support of work on the commons, including this book. He also wishes to thank Susan Witt, Director of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, for her collegiality, advice, and enthusiastic commitment to reinventing the commons. Once again, David wishes to thank Norman Lear for his steadfast, inspirational role over many years in supporting his research and activism on the commons.

Silke Helfrich is deeply grateful to colleagues at the Institute of Advanced Studies on Sustainability (IASS) in Potsdam, for providing a caring, co-creative environment for several weeks in 2018. She especially wishes to thank the AMA team (A Mindset for the Anthropocene), Jessica Böhme, Man Fang, Carolin Fraude, Zachary Walsh, and ftomas Bruhn, who opened up a space to discuss how the commons might be at the center of creating a better mindset for the Anthropocene, and suggested improvements in the German version of the manuscript.

Because so much of our thinking about the commons strikes off in new directions, we have relied upon the insights and wisdom of a diverse array of test readers — practitioners, academics, activists, and others with a deep familiarity with various dimensions of commoning. ftree especially dedicated, conscientious readers — Joanna Barelkowska, Julia Petzold, and Wolfgang Sachs — read most of the manuscript in advance, rooting out errors and gently urging us to reconsider this thought and that wording. In similar ways, we also benefited from thoughtful comments by Saki Bailey, Adelheid Biesecker, Bruce Caron, Jonathan Dawson, Gustavo Esteva Figueroa, Sheila Foster, Claudia Gómez- Portugal M., Samar Hassan, Bob Jessop, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Kris Krois, Miguel Martinez, Silvia Maria Díaz Molina, Janelle Orsi, Jorge Rath, David Rozas, Neera Singh, Johann Steudle, Orsan Senalp, Simon Sutterlütti, John Thackara, Stacco Troncoso, Carlos Uriona, Ann Marie Utratel, and Andreas Weber.

Because so much of the commons remains underexplored in the academic literature, we often turned to people with personal experi- ence in one or another specific topic, context, or commons. We are grateful to Laura Valentukeviciute and Katrin Kusche for sharing their knowledge on public-private partnerships and helping to imagine alternatives. Paula Segal’s personal tour of the Park Slope Food Coop, including its General Assembly, helped us understand that venture with greater insight. Dina Hestad shared with us many hard-won nug- gets of wisdom about transformational movements. We also learned a great deal about the messy realities and the solutions commoners come up with when interviewing Rainer Kippe on the SSM organization in Cologne; Peter Kolbe on Klimaschutz+; Amanda Huron, Sara Mewes, Johannes Euler, and Jochen Schmidt on housing commons; Siri and Oscar Kjellberg on Baskemölla Ekoby; Natalia-Rozalia Avlona on the Sarantoporo Community Network; Bettina Weber and Tom Hansing on Offene Werkstätten (Open Workshops); and Izabela Glowinska and Paul Adrian Schulz on Vivihouse.

On many occasions, our self-education about the commons was greatly advanced simply by being in the presence of active communities of practice. Ward Cunningham, Jon Richter, and the Federated Wiki community opened our eyes to the enormous possibilities of that tech platform. Similarly, Eric Harris-Braun, Ferananda Ibarra, and Jean Russell were patient and brilliant in explaining the Holochain protocols for commoning. Over the years, the Commons Strategies Group (of which we are cofounders) hosted a number of Deep Dive workshops that exposed us to some remarkable thinkers, activists, and fields of experimentation. We are grateful to Michel Bauwens for his invaluable collaboration and insights in these many discussions. A big thanks, too, to the dozens of participants in those gatherings for so freely sharing their knowledge and helping us think through vexing questions involving the commons.

The German Commons Summer School, and especially Heike Pourian, were among the first group of commoners to react to early versions of our patterns of commoning. They helped us confirm that we were on the right track, prodded us to clarify the field of inquiry for each pattern, and helped refine the names for many of our final patterns of commoning in German (especially Julia Petzold and Sandra Lustig). Needless to say, none of these people bear any responsibility for any errors or misinterpretations that may have crept into the text.

Because Silke lives in Germany and David in the US, we had to find creative ways to orchestrate in-person meetings to make sense of our research and develop our ideas. Fortunately, we had a number of gracious friends and colleagues who helped us find, or actually offered, wonderful spaces in which to work. At a critical stage in our thinking, Tilman Santarius and his family lent us their gracious house in Berlin as a hothouse for a week-long discussion. In Florence, Jason Nardi arranged for a lovely hillside retreat for us to work in while hosting us at several wonderful meals as well. Carlos Uriona and Matthew Glassman offered space and rich discussion at Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

A small team of talented artists and designers were responsible for the beautiful appearance of this book and its illustrations. Two design students at Bozen University — Chiara Rovescala and Federica di Pietro, guided by their professors, Kris Krois and Lisa Borgenheimer — came up with some graphic illustrations of our early patterns. Some of those ideas later germinated and found richer development in the illustrations made by Mercè M. Tarrés, who gave the various patterns stunning, intuitive interpretations. The cover design, by Mireia Juan Cuco, conveys the spirit of our book with great elegance and energy as well. Overseeing the entire design work has been Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel of the Guerrilla Media Collective, which will also manage the forthcoming Spanish translation of Free, Fair, and Alive. Their steadfast, supportive presence has meant so much to us over the past several years!

Readers of this English edition of Free, Fair, and Alive may not be aware that a German translation was produced immediately as we com- pleted each chapter of the book. For this remarkable achievement, we thank our dedicated translator Sandra Lustig, whose painstaking transla- tion of our manuscript was quite an accomplishment in light of the many novel terms we invented. Insights derived from the translation often fed back into improvements in the English manuscript. (The German translation was published by transcript Verlag in spring 2019.)

Finding a publisher who understands the commons and is willing to walk the talk by using a Creative Commons license, is difficult. We feel lucky to have found transcript Verlag in Germany and New Society Publishers in British Columbia, Canada, each committed to greater access to knowledge in a challenging commercial context.

Finally, we each have debts to acknowledge to our loved ones.

Silke: Jacques, throughout the long marathon of this book, when diving into deep intellectual waters or exhausted by too many hours in front of my computer screen, you have always been there with patience and encouragement to get me back on track, as only you can. You have allowed me to watch what happens when a person discovers “the commoner in oneself.”

David: Thanks once again, dear Ellen, for your unstinting support during my many travels, research benders, and the prolonged writing marathon that was necessary to produce this book!

David Bollier, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

Silke Helfrich, Neudenau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

January 2019

Acknowledgments

Finally, we each have debts to acknowledge to our loved ones.

David: Thanks once again, dear Ellen, for your unstinting support during my many travels, research benders, and the prolonged writing marathon that was necessary to produce this book!

David Bollier, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

Silke Helfrich, Neudenau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

January 2019

Appendix A: Notes on the Methodology Used for Identifying Patterns of Commoning

Appendix A: Notes on the Methodology for Identifying Patterns of Commoning

We have been conducting research on commons for years outside the confines of academia, so in this section, we will out-line how we developed our framework — the Triad of Commoning.1 You will recall that our purpose is not to define commons. That would not do justice to the topic or our concept of research. Because commons are living systems, they are not fixed entities that can simply be nailed down. Our purpose therefore has been to describe more pre- cisely the dynamics of commons as a specific kind of behavior, and a way to satisfy needs and shape one’s surroundings and society. We did so by tracking down the recurring basic features that characterize behaviors in different commons. In other words, we posed the question whether logics of action exist that are typical of commoning.

The starting point is the idea that the order of the world is reflected in patterns, a philosophical and empirical concept developed by mathema- tician, architect, and philosopher Christopher Alexander in his famous pattern theory and methodology. These ideas are described in detail in his four-volume work The Nature of Order.2 We applied the patterns approach to commons in our 2015 anthology Patterns of Commoning.3 Patterns are identified, not invented. Identifying them is meant to make something latent visible. This is an important insight from patterns research. Pattern-mining requires patient observation, prac- tice, and a combination of various steps. Methodologically, when attempting to make living processes comprehensible, one must not sep- arate rationality from emotion or cognitive insights based on concrete experiences.4 Patterning avoids these problems by assessing phenomena holistically. It recognizes that pure abstraction does not do justice to the rich complexity of life. Patterning is valuable, too, because it is capable of taking full measure of a layperson’s tacit knowledge, which is often patronized or ignored by “experts.”5 In developing the patterns of commoning, therefore, we could Trust Situated Knowledge.

Patterning requires focusing on connections, on what things have in common, rather than focusing on differences. In the process of doing this, a phenomenon or problem is not viewed as delimited or isolated; instead, it acquires its meaning only when viewed in its full context. Accordingly, a pattern applies only in a given context or in similar circumstances. There is no such thing as a context-free pattern.6 In pat- terns of social phenomena, the purpose is to identify which behaviors (or, in more abstract terms, “logics of action”) can help interactions succeed and strengthen relationships. Since relationships are multi- directional — i.e., they can have both positive effects on one aspect of a situation and negative effects on another — formal notation of patterns requires specifying related patterns. This makes the linkages between the patterns clearer, but we decided against using formal pat- tern notation in this book; we can only hint at those formalities. In any case, readers can easily imagine how various individual patterns are connected to other ones. In all their connections, they form a (yet-to- be-formulated) pattern language.

At the epistemological level, a pattern language approach ensures that the spirit and the body remain connected as tools of cognition. In the process of coining a pattern name, as we come to understand con- cepts, deliberately and through language — as we perceive what has been obscure but not yet put into words — we simultaneously experi- ence moments of resonance in our bodies.7 We experience resonance when a special energy emerges and we reflexively nod our heads in recognition of the congruence between experiencing, sensing, and dis- cerning. When enough interviewees, workshop participants, readers, and other people experience this same resonance upon hearing a pat- tern, and their reactions align with each other, so to speak, we can feel confident that a high-quality pattern has been formulated. And still, the resulting pattern is in principle open and adaptable, if only because living systems are always changing and evolving. (See the section on validation below.) No pattern is a “once and forever” truth.

Beyond general pattern-mining methodology, we should address the methods used to construct the Triad of Commoning. They too can be presented only very briefly. Between June 2014 and December 2017, a total of nine pattern-mining workshops were held with partici- pants of ages twenty to seventy, from a variety of contexts and cultures.

The workshops themselves were structured to introduce participants to the logic of the pattern approach by inviting them to ask, for each pattern:

What is the context?
What exactly, in this context, is the essence of a recurring problem?
What solutions exist for this problem?
What is the common essence of successful solutions?
How can this common essence be put into words to form a pattern name?

A strong pattern name (in terms of accurately describing a pattern of social practices) is first of all short and succinct. It is free of punc- tuation, may use easy-to-understand abbreviations (such as FAQ, for example) and neologisms, relies on a verb to emphasize the process (or practice), and avoids vague clichés. A good pattern name is adaptable, too, meaning that it can be changed later. So exceptions from these naming criteria are commonplace.

In addition to the workshops, twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with one to four people at a time. Most of these were university graduates who have been active in commons projects for a long time — some for fifty years. Two interviews were particularly extensive. As in the workshops, the purpose was to find out to what extent various practices are present in different patterns when they are used to address similar problems and whether common patterns of behavior can be discerned in successful solutions. The setting and character of the interviews as well as the kinds of questions asked are described in detail in Silke Helfrich’s masters thesis (see note 1). Interviewees were asked what was actually done in the commons projects, not what they were thinking. After all, the purpose was to identify and document descriptions of actions, not gather opinions. The interviews were structured in advance by the three areas of our pattern-mining — social life, peer-governance, and provisioning (Chapters 4-6). Questions focused on typical problems within these areas, and were refined with each iteration. When we began to test the patterns already identified, we also asked interviewees whether the patterns felt right (resonance test).

Interview Questions

Since the purpose was to ask about behavior, not attitudes, it was important to avoid asking simple yes-no questions as well as ques- tions that would force respondents to rationalize behaviors.8 Most of the questions concerned how things were done. Questions sought to narrow down the problem area, to be as concrete as possible, and not use leading questions to suggest any particular answers. The questions referred to often-observed problems arising in social interactions in a commons context. The questions about peer governance were derived from the eight design principles developed by Elinor Ostrom as well as our own observations. When we developed the questions concerning commons provisioning, our starting point was the basic elements required for any creative/productive process (e.g., natural resources, knowledge, information, human activities, labor, etc.).

Questions About Social Interactions

How do you succeed in finding a shared purpose? What is the role of values?
How do you obtain the necessary contributions?
How do you shape the relationship between giving and taking?
How do you maintain quality in social relations? Do certain cus- toms, practices, and conventions exist?
What kinds of knowledge do you rely upon?
How do you live your relationship to nature?
How do you deal with conflicts?
ftrough which mechanisms do rules and structures remain appro- priate and adaptable?

Questions Concerning Governance

How do you negotiate the tension between the pressure to exploit all kinds of resources commercially on the one hand and commoning on the other? How do you protect commons from being entirely governed or directed by money?
How do you bring together purposes and values?
Do you set boundaries? How permeable are they?
How are your decisions made?
How do you handle information, knowledge, code, and design?
How are your organizational structures structured? Do they provide protection from abuse of power?
How is your property governed?
How do you enable that your actions are transparent?
Which forms of finance do you use? Are they themselves expressions of commoning? Do flows of money strengthen commons?
How do you monitor that rules are observed?
How do you deal with violations of rules?

Questions Concerning Commons Production

Who bears the production risk?
Is there a separation between producers and users? How are the roles defined and fulfilled?
How is that which is available allocated?
- Referring to things that increase as more people use them (e.g., knowledge, software)?
- Referring to things that are used up as more people use them (e.g., land, food, money)?

How is that which is available allocated?
- In a social context that is usually interpersonal and in which it is easy to get an overview of the situation?
- In an anonymous, transpersonal context in which it is difficult to get an overview of the situation?

Who determines the price, and on which basis, in market-like transactions?
How do you conceive of your work? How do you allocate tasks, and how do you value and appreciate all activities?
Who benefits from your tools and instruments? What purposes do they serve?
Which of the existing infrastructures do you use, and why? Do they serve your purposes?
How do you create new material and immaterial things?

Drawing on these interviews, on our prior knowledge, commons literature, and the workshops, we began to “verbalize” — to find appropriate pattern names. After that, the feedback process began. Even though this process was somewhat different for each of the generic patterns that we developed,9 there were at least six systematic rounds for each pattern. We consulted with people with different qual- ifications — from a sustainability scholar to a student working with patterns, and from an educator who herself is a driving force behind a commons community to participants in the sixth German-language Commons Summer School. The two of us also discussed the pattern names ourselves time and time again. Each round surfaced ideas about needed corrections, shifts, additions, and deletions, leading to a large number of adaptations. We believe that these iterations as well as the combination of methods have yielded robust results.

Below is an example of the typical proceeding. We wish to make clear how we combined the methods, which was somewhat different in each case, depending on the number and type of critical decision situations. To illustrate our process of work, we have selected the pat- tern Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose, which is in the sphere of Peer Governance. It is not only illustrative of the many iterations each pattern went through, it also points to the relative importance of common values, which many people might assume that commoners must share in advance of commoning. When we began to probe this topic, we were interested in the role that common goals and values actually play in successful commons, as opposed to the scenario of diverse people growing together to share outlooks (which raises ques- tions about how this is achieved).

Brief Description of the Steps.

This description reconstructs the research process used to coin the pattern name in German. It was similar but not the same as the English- language versions. You will therefore find the German pattern names in several iterations along with their respective English translations. The starting point for the German and the English process, however, was the same. We, as authors, deduced that the pattern would be:

GEMEINSAMEN ZWECK & GEMEINSAME WERTE ERKLÄREN |

DECLARE SHARED PURPOSE & VALUES

and then we went on for several rounds of testing, correction, and adaptation.

Describe the problem: Identifying the roles of common purposes and
Derive a pattern name (first iteration, in this case by deduction). The goal is for the name to express that common purposes and values should be clear when people common:

DECLARE SHARED PURPOSE & VALUES

Embed the pattern name in the context; give reasons for it, using examples in order to bring to mind its practical relevance; prepare a textual description and send it to experts (test readers) and inter- Be alert to any dissonant feedback among participants in the process, and look for consensus about the pattern name.
Conduct semi-structured telephone interview with a social scientist and commons practitioner, George E. on December 4, 2017. When a conflict arises in the experience of the interviewee, common pur- poses and values cannot be presupposed. Also, for common action to work, it is not decisive that such purposes exist or are It is a social fact that any commons has to deal with a diversity of per- spectives and values. People may share motivations and reasons for coming together, but we cannot presume any long-term shared pur- poses and values. As the interviewee put it: “We may assume specific short-term goals or purposes. For example, collecting signatures for a petition […] before the second week of February. But these ‘goals’ or ‘purposes’ are not ends in themselves. We have motives, compel- ling forces pushing us in a certain direction that we can express those ‘motives’ as reasons. Instead of asking ‘What for?’ we ask ‘Why?’”
Authors jointly reflect to derive the pattern name (a second iteration) Vielfalt für Commons-Zwecke aufgreifen

BRING DIVERSITY INTO SHARED PURPOSE

Discuss with an expert and reflect on the wording (a third iteration of pattern name).

VIELFALT ZU COMMONS-ZWECKEN NUTZEN
USING DIVERSITY FOR COMMONS PURPOSES

Discuss with another expert (June 15, 2018) and resonance

A conflict arises. This version of the pattern name “doesn’t feel right” or doesn’t get to the heart of what needs to be expressed (a fourth iteration of pattern name).

VIELFALT ZUM GEMEINSAMEN VERWEBEN
INTERWEAVE DIVERSITY TO FORM WHAT IS COMMON

Review of all pattern names by an expert/social scientist (March 26, 2018)

There is feedback on other patterns, but not this one. However, step 7 points to the fact that another round of review is needed.

Collective reflection by participants in the summer school, late June 2018, about resonance of the pattern Group discussion with practitioners and theoreticians; inductive elements are strengthened (fifth iteration of pattern name).

SICH IN VIELFALT GEMEINSAM AUSRICHTEN BRING
DIVERSITY INTO SHARED PURPOSE

This fifth version of the pattern name corresponds to the knowledge and experiences brought forward in the various steps and feedback loops and feels right. The pattern name is published (cf. Chapter 5).

The processes for identifying patterns were similar in all cases. The steps and the procedures for gaining insight are shown once again in the following diagram. Let us review the procedure for the pattern Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose as an example:

Validation and Procedure for Deriving the Pattern

When people identify patterns through this process, they usually assess the accuracy and validity of the pattern name subjectively since “some are more true, more profound, more certain than others,” according to Christopher Alexander and his colleagues.11 They sought to identify the “more true” patterns by assigning two, one, or no asterisks to each pattern, indicating a ranking of likely success in identifying whether a solution names “a true invariant.” Using this process, we undertook an assessment of the pattern names identified in Chapters 4–6. You will find the result in the next table. In the case of a pattern name without an asterisk (see first column), we believe that we found something that, as Alexander put it, “summarizes a property common to all possible ways of solving the stated problem.” That means it is basically impossible to solve the stated problem properly without “shaping the environ- ment in one way” or another according to the respective pattern (ibid., emphasis in the original).

In the case of patterns with only one asterisk, we assume, with Alexander, “that we have made some progress towards identifying such an invariant: but that with careful work it will certainly be possible to improve on the solution.” (ibid., xiv). Patterns with two asterisks signify that further examination is recommended in order to improve the pattern. The second column indicates most important procedures for deriving the patterns as well as the abstract concepts from which the patterns were deduced (in those cases where deduction was the primary methodology).

The Research Process

Finally, a flow chart shows the decisions that had to be made during the research process. It begins with the identification of a recur- ring problem in a commons context and ends with an evaluation as described just above. This flowchart was prepared, once more, for the example Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose, yet its approach applies to all patterns.

Each step was documented promptly and in various forms: as com- plete documentation of workshop discussions, individual documentation of workshop results including formal notation of the patterns, documentation of the interviews (on file with the authors), and notes from workshops, expert discussions, and editorial discussions.

From an Understanding of Being to Methods

As we can see from this explanation, the entire procedure of pattern mining has a theoretical foundation that incorporates and reflects a relational and procedural ontology. The methodology therefore takes into account a phenomenon’s relationship to its context and its concrete existence in actual lifeworlds. The methodology is also open ended and adaptable, thereby enabling individual and collective self-reflection about its accuracy and further revision.

Onto-Epistemology: Differentiated relational processes, evolutionary epistemology of living, generative processes
Theories: Commons / pattern theory
Methodology: pattern mining / methodological holism
Methods: patterns workshops, semistructured interviews, peer review, “resonance test,” conversations with experts, collective reflection
Results: Patterns of Commoning

This methodology also suggests that patterns are not like Lego bricks that fit together only in predetermined ways. The ways to combine individual elements into successful solutions are not prestructured. That is why creative combinations of ideas can bring about new results that were not part of the individual solutions.

On Working with Patterns

The process of coining patterns enables one to discern order in the diversity of commoning processes, thus identifying the essential dynamics of commoning. It also provides a shared vocabulary and methodology, thereby enabling commoners to create that order. This is why linking patterns and commons is so fruitful for researchers and others in advancing both theory and practice. Practitioners can use patterns to:

find a vocabulary and philosophical rationale for the collaborations they have been doing all along
structure processes of self-reflection and identify their own strengths and weaknesses
take up good ideas and use them to solve their own problems — in other words, apply patterns in a form adapted to their own context
develop specific patterns tailored to their own context

Researchers can also use patterns to:

review and then further develop them, in order to contribute to the conceptualization of commoning
design interviews and research questions for research in the field
apply all generic patterns together as a research

The result can enable researchers to identify and analyze social, institutional, and economic processes in a concrete context from a commons perspective, similar to the way in which Elinor Ostrom’s design principles have been used to compare institutional rules.

Silke Helfrich

Neudenau, February 4, 2019

Appendix B: Visual Grammar for the Pattern Illustrations

Visual Grammar

Each illustration contains two layers of information.
The first layer is the sphere around which the dots and squares move,
representing the context of commoning.
The dynamic layer contains the dots and squares that wrap around
or move through the sphere, representing the subject/agent and
predicate/action.

Layer 1: Sphere

Action takes place inside, between, and around one or more semitrans- parent spheres.

Visual Grammar / Layer 1: Sphere Our sphere is the commons, shaped and represented by a dynamic texture of dots and squares: a diversity of realities, commoners par- ticipating in interdependent relationships with the world outside the commons.

Commons

“They are COMPLEX, ADAPTIVE, LIVING PROCESSES that gen- erate wealth and meet people’s needs.”
In contrast, the capitalist system (or its elements) is represented by squares without hue, gradient or texture.

Visual Grammar / Commons

Commoning

Visual Grammar / Commoning - Inside / Outside

Inside

People devising and enacting situation- specific systems of PROVISIONING and PEER GOVERNANCE
Within a single commons
Local

Outside

People, things, or ideas inter- acting with the outside (e.g., the market system)
Among various commons
Global / network / federation

The sphere and the dot are abstract representations of the individual and the commons. Both are dynamic (non-static) and represented as circular. Both exist in (relational) singularity and plurality.

“’I am because we are and, since we are, therefore I am.’
The individual is part of a ‘we’ — and in fact, of many ‘we’s’. The two are deeply intertwined.”

FREE, FAIR & ALIVE — Visual Grammar / Layer 1: Commoning

Layer 2: Dots and Squares, Flows and Areas

Commoners

“An identity and social role that people acquire as they practice COMMONING.”

Communion

“The process through which COMMONERS participate in interdepen- dent relationships with the more than human world.”

Visual Grammar / Layer2: Communion - Individuals / Commoners

Dots and squares come together as flows and areas, suggesting spaces inside and outside the spheres.

Visual Grammar / Layer2

Flows of dots and squares represent connections, relations, directions, concrete actions, and spaces. Flows diffuse into wider areas.

Visual Grammar / Layer2

Areas of dots and squares wrap around or move through the sphere, creating dynamic shapes.

Visual Grammar — Size = diverse realities

Size = diverse realities

The size of the elements expresses different realities. Dots and squares, flows and areas behave in different manners.

Visual Grammar — Density = power

Density = power

Density is achieved by increasing the volume of the elements, overlap- ping and reducing the space between them.

Visual Grammar — Movement/shift = aliveness

Movement/shift = aliveness

“Comets” = direction. Direction is achieved through flows of dots pro- gressively decreasing in size. The “head” of the “comet” is formed by larger dots and higher density.

Visual Grammar — Organic vs. ordered configurations = Free vs. ruled activities/relations

Organic vs. ordered configurations = Free vs. ruled activities/relations

All of these elements graphically depict relational dynamics.

“Since each is constantly evolving and affected by multiple influences, the world has no singular definition or representation … It [is] a pluriverse — a diversity of living, dynamic social organisms that are conjoined by our common humanity and interdependence on other life-forms and the Earth.”