COMMONS MAGAZINE
What country is the world leader in the commons?
It’s a question that can’t be easily answered. It all depends on what indicators you use to measure the commons.
Wealthy societies with strong government services and highly developed civic institutions—the social democracies of Scandinavia, say—might top the list in some people’s calculations. Other folks might give the nod to nations of the developing world, where centuries-old informal commons traditions still shape daily life.
For years, the free culture world was resolutely focused on building its eclectic array of commons projects — free software, open-access journals, wikis, and pools of creative works using Creative Commons licenses. History may record that the free culture reached a turning point in Barcelona, Spain, in November 2009. At the Free Culture Forum, a conference that just concluded this week, free culture activists from about twenty countries came together to assert a shared political and policy agenda.
The saga of the battling McCourts, Frank and Jamie, will be played out in court. Whether or not one of them is able to hold onto the Los Angeles Dodgers will be determined by a judge. Whatever the result, the future success of the team on the field could be imperiled. If either Frank or Jamie becomes the controlling owner, the other will be entitled to a king’s ransom in return. That may mean unloading promising young stars such as Andre Ethier or Matt Kemp in an effort to shave the team’s payroll.
It was a lovely Indian summer afternoon in Minnesota, and I enjoyed an invigorating bike ride from my home in Minneapolis to the public library in the nearby suburb of Edina where I talked about the commons to a group of senior citizens studying environmental sustainability as part of a lifelong learning program through the University of Minnesota.
It is customary to refer to America’s commercial processes as an “economy.” But what it really has is an appetite, programmed into the machinery of commercial life. This machinery demands more, and then more again, ad infinitum. There is no cessation, no capacity to say “enough” — and thus no economy in any sane sense. The process serves no end other than its own increase.
These remarks were given by David Bollier at the Free Culture Forum [www.fcforum.net] in Barcelona, Spain, on October 30.
This conference takes place at a time of great promise and great peril. Great promise, because we have the opportunity to secure what I call the Digital Republic. And great peril, because the 20th Century content industries show few signs of recognizing the legitimacy and value of the digital commons and its principles of openness, participation and decentralized control.
Good magazine—a hip, savvy publication aimed at younger “green” readers—has discovered the commons.
A sizable share of the Good 100, their signature list of “the most important, exciting and innovative people, ideas, and projects making our world better” point to commons-based solutions to the world’s problems.
Among the ideas celebrated in their Fall issue are:
In his opening remarks at the launch of the national Slow Money Alliance in Santa Fe this past September, socially responsible business activistWoody Tasch used the startling phrase “completing capitalism” to refer to the way in which Slow Money is meant to complement and transform rather than do away with current economic practices.
For me this phrase evokes a sense that the evils of capitalism are not caused by anything inherent in capital itself, but rather by the primitive means and structures that govern how capital is created, distributed and manipulated in our current system.
Across the Andean region of South America and stretching up through central America into the American Southwest, the system of commons-based management of irrigation systems known as the “acequia” has been in place for hundreds of years. Acequias are rooted in centuries, if not millennia, of shared and preserved knowledge adapted to specific climatic conditions. Often, such systems reflect completely different notions of water than those reflected in Northern cultures with capitalist economies.
October 19 to 23, marked the first international Open Access Week, a time for university campuses to learn about the various ways of accessing and sharing academic research more freely.
On more than 100 campuses, students and faculty heard talks about copyright issues for instructors, open access journal publishing, graduate student publishing, finding copyright-free images, and using open educational resources in the classroom.
Jack Wolfskin, a British maker of outdoor equipment, owns a trademark on its logo, a wolf-paw print. It arrogantly thought that it could have absolute, exclusive control over an image that has been known to humankind for millennia. And now it is reaping the whirlwind for its hubris.
From the New York Times, October 12, 2009
The Nobel in economic science was awarded to Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the prize, and to Oliver E. Williamson on Monday.
They share the prize for their separate work on economic governance, organization, cooperation, relationships and nonmarket institutions.
Last weekend I traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to speak at a community-organized conference on the commons. As I got up to speak, I paused and gulped: there in the audience was the pioneering scholar of the commons, Elinor Ostrom.
It was not an academic conference, but rather a gathering of 125 regular citizens at the local Unitarian-Universalist Church. Several slides in my presentation drew upon her work or mentioned her. Would she agree with my interpretations? Would I get something wrong?
“If you’ve got a job, hang on to it. Forget about how little you are paid or how you are overworked. Stick your elbows out and make sure that you are not the next one to be laid off. Just remember how many people are looking for work and how few job openings are available, and hang on.” That’s the message offered at a recent Minneapolis forum for people in mid-life transition by the head of the local workforce system. Most of the people who were listening no longer have a job to hang on to.
One of the strongest pro-commons laws on the books in the U.S. is the estate tax??“a sensible measure that redirects a share of the inheritance for the wealthiest 0.5 percent of U.S. households toward the common good.
Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft founder, praises the estate tax as “mechanism for wealthy people to pay back the society that created the fertile ground for wealth creation.”
The blog post is re-published from Silke Helfrich’s German-language CommonsBlog.
Access to Pathology Expertise: How can we turn this luxury into a global commons? This is the question asked by Jacques Paysan from Carl Zeiss MicroImaging GmbH during the World Commons Forum held in Salzburg on September 29-30.
On the Commons worked with Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, to publish a recent report outlining the commons as a new strategy in the campaign for water justice around the world. The report “Our Water Commons” can be downloaded: here.
William Patry has written the kind of book on copyright law that we have sorely needed for a long time. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (Oxford University Press) is a trenchant yet highly readable political history of copyright and the deceptive language tricks that gives it so much power today.
The coming threat of both global warming and diminishing oil supplies has spurred more than 150 communities to begin seeking solutions on their own. The transition towns movement began three years ago in Totnes, England, and is now spreading globally as citizens take a close look at issues like energy, transportation, food, development, jobs and social solidarity in their own backyard.
What if government were treated as an open platform available to everyone — much like the Web — rather than as a closed, semi-proprietary platform that serves those private interests with the money or insider access? That was the premise behind a major conference in Washington, D.C., on September 9-10 hosted by open-source champion and book publisher Tim O’Reilly and Richard O’Neill of the Highlands Group.