David Bollier

The good folks at the Tellus Institute in Boston have recently relaunched the Great Transition Initiative -- “an online forum of ideas and an international network” dedicated to developing “a new praxis for global transformation.” As part of that effort, I was invited to submit an essay on how the commons might contribute to the “Great Transition.”

In my essay, “The Commons as a Template for Transformation,” I argue that “the commons paradigm can help us imagine and implement a serious alternative—a new vision of provisioning and democratic governance that can evolve within the fragile, deteriorating edifice of existing institutions.”  My basic argument: 

The commons—a paradigm, discourse, ethic, and set of social practices—provides several benefits to those seeking to navigate a Great Transition. It offers a coherent economic and political critique of existing Market/State institutions. Its history includes many venerable legal principles that help us both to imagine new forms of law and to develop proactive political strategies for effecting change. Finally, the commons is supported by an actual transnational movement of commoners who are co-creating innovative provisioning and governance systems that work.

For readers of this blog, most of the themes in my GTI essay will be familiar.  My goal was to synthesize many disparate threads into a single, 5,000-word case for the commons. I wanted help a policy-oriented readership see how the commons paradigm could help us re-imagine and transform economics, politics, culture, and particularly ecological stewardship. 

After introducing the whole commons concept for the uninitiated, I review a sampling of commons that manage ecological resources and describe the rise of the contemporary commons movement.  I also urge that we imagine “a new architecture of commons-based law and policy,” drawing heavily on my recent book with Burns Weston, Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press).  And finally, I assess the prospects and limitations of the commons paradigm, and conclude:

Several years ago some software programmers in Berlin came up with a new software platform to let diverse groups of people self-organize themselves to make democratic decisions online.  The program, LiquidFeedback, gives everyone a chance to participate without the need for physical assemblies or in-person voting. 

The program was first used by the German Pirate Party, but it has been also been used by citizen associations, cooperatives and even corporations to elicit the collective sentiment of groups of people, including for binding votes. The idea behind the program is to avoid the classic problems of representative democracy and hierarchies.  As we all know, elected leaders are often happy to ignore or misrepresent the will of the people if it helps them stay in power.  LiquidFeedback was intended as something of an antidote.

Now, the programmers behind LiquidFeedback, the Public Software Group of Berlin, have published a book, The Principles of LiquidFeedback, describing the philosophical, political and operational details of the software system. The authors – Jan Behrens, Axel Kistner, Andreas Nitsche and Bjorn Swierczek – bill their book as “a must-read for anybody planning to make online decisions or to build online decision platforms and is also interesting for anybody interested in the future of democracy in the digital age.”

At a time when elections, legislatures and other democratic processes do a poor job at representing the will of the people, LiquidFeedback is a welcome experiment in demonstrating a better way. It is not seen as a substitute for representative democracy, but more as a complement to it.  I blogged about the program in 2012 and concluded that it “clearly shows the potential for re-imagining more open, legitimate and responsive forms of governance.” 

LiquidFeedback empowers any accredited member of a group to propose a new initiative; make suggestions about it; create alternatives to the proposed initiative; and vote on a final proposal.  Discussion generally takes place on other platforms, however, outside of LiquidFeedback. But the authors warn that "in the real world it is not possible to implement a secret electronic voting system whose functionality can be verified by the voters." Liquid Feedback uses open ballots.

I'm thrilled to announce the publication of my new book, Think Like a Commoner:  A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (New Society Publishers). Unlike so many of my previous books on the commons – which explored some specific aspect of the commons (culture, copyright, ecological commons) or were aimed at academic readers – Think Like a Commoner is a general overview of the commons written for the general reader. 

It’s my attempt to reach the not-necessarily-political layperson to introduce the commons paradigm in an accessible, non-academic way, but without dumbing things down.  The book provides a succinct overview of the great diversity of commons in the world and the many pernicious enclosures now being fought.  It describes the logic, worldview and ethics of the commons, and the burgeoning international movement of commoners, especially in Europe and the global South. 

I’ve created a special website for the book – www.Think LikeACommoner.com – for those who want to keep track of the reviews and my upcoming appearances.  I’ve also included an extensive set of citations, keyed to page numbers in the book, which amount to footnotes and recommendations for further reading.  I didn’t want to burden a book intended for general readers with all the scholarly hoohah of notes, but of course some people do want to inquire further into certain aspects of the commons. Hence the web-based notes.

At the end of the book, I include a number of short references:  the statement, "The Commons, Short and Sweet"; Silke Helfrich’s chart, “The Logic of the Commons and the Market”; a select bibliography of further readings on the commons; and a listing of leading websites on the commons.

I’m grateful for the glowing endorsements that the book has received from Bill McKibben, Ralph Nader, Maude Barlow, David Korten, Michel Bauwens and Peter Barnes.  You can read those at the book website.

If you'd prefer to read the book in French or Polish, there are translations already available.  My thanks to the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for its support for the book (and the French translation), and to FreeLab, the translators of the Polish edition, and the publisher, the social cooperative Faktoria.

For a while, Couchsurfing had an amazing run, connecting travelers with hosts and helping strangers become friends.  Until around 2011, it was a way-crazy gift-economy for hospitality on a global scale, with more than five million members (now seven million) in 90,000+ cities.  Who would have thought that a loose non-market community could ever get so big while retaining its ideals and ethical stance?

Alas, Couchsurfing’s popularity created some new problems of its own, and the site was plagued by some dubious management decisions, technical challenges, and the lack of funds.  At Medium.com, Roy Marvelous explains what happened in 2011:

Basically, Couchsurfing owed tax money (its tax-exempt status as a non-profit was not approved), it needed far more investment in servers and it needed to hire more engineers to reprogram the site to make it scalable. And apparently, the only viable solution was to become a for-profit, sell a portion to venture capitalists and have it run by professionals.

The problems were real but I’ll be blunt: Couchsurfing was stolen from its members. This was code, content & community built by the members, for the members. None of those volunteers, working for free under the false pretense that Couchsurfing would stay non-profit, received any equity in this new corporation. Why couldn’t there have been another way? I would have donated money. I would have been happy with advertising. They could have moved Couchsurfing HQ to Berlin or Chang Mai or Santiago rather than be based in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The moment Couchsurfing was sold, it stopped becoming a community and started becoming a service, not unlike Yelp or Meetup or Facebook. And herein lies the problem: Couchsurfing now has an identity-crisis.

After the Internal Revenue Service refused to grant Couchsurfing tax-exempt nonprofit status – formally known as “501(c)(3)” status under the tax code – Couchsurfing decided to become a “Certified B Company,” or “for-benefit” corporation.  As Marvelous points out, this was apparently the only way to move forward.  (But is this true?)  By 2012, Couchsurfing had raised more than $22 million in venture capital money and it was on its way to becoming another profit-oriented corporation in the “sharing economy.”  (The so-called sharing economy, it should be noted, is less about sharing than about micro-rentals of things that previously could not be marketized.)