Commons

Up to 4.000 potato varieties are growing in Peru in a high-altitude Sacred Valley of the Incas. Six Quechua communities have been able to maintain the integrity of their biocultural traditions and fragile ecosystem.

What if a poorer community created its own currency to foster social exchange? We interviewed Ruddick, the founder of the Bangla-Pesa to learn more about his remarkable experiment in community-based money.

In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great improvements in agriculture could be achieved by reducing barriers to knowledge exchange.

Cecosesola is a network of about sixty cooperatives and grassroots organizations in Venezuela, with about 20,000 members. The cooperatives sell at weekly markets and provide community-backed loans, among many other services.

Making commons come alive again in everyday life seems like a revolution that can be interpreted through two lenses. Is it a rediscovery of precapitalist and prestate organizational principles or is it a break with the current political order?

In 2005 Black shack revolted because they felt betrayed by the government. After that they started to organize their protest. Their demand for recognition goes beyond the liberal tradition of “inclusion” in a political or legal system.

Civilization can't affort to lose archives and libraries. Free, unrestricted digital access is the key, and the creativity and action of citizens is what turns it in the lock. From the book "Patterns of Commoning"