Peer2Politics

Decentralizing the commons is a key requisite for their protection and evolution.

We’ve recently featured Coopfunding, an Open-Sourced crowdfunding platform designed to “…promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.”  Today we present a guest article by Enric Duran, one of the developers behind Coopfunding and its parent-project, the Catalan Integral Cooperative, explaining the reasons that led to the creation of Coopfunding. This article was originally published inRadi.MS

It’s probably too late for most of us to attend, but this Friday through Sunday, June 6-8,Pixelache Helsinki 2014 will host an international two-day trans-disciplinary event on “The Commons.”

The Commons is under fire in Madrid, and we need help. To give you some context to understand what’s happening right now, we’re reposting this article written by Bernardo Gutiérrez, which originally appeared at Guerrilla Translation.

Help our friends at the Mutual Aid Network (MAN) build local, resilient, peer to peer economic networks through their crowdfunding campaign.

Here’s a very special treat. Originally published on Guerrilla Translation, Movimiento por la Democracia´s “Charter for Democracy” stands out as premier example of citizen-led solution making to the various crises we face. It is a constitution for the commons written by commons.

Governments have the ability to regulate the way Telecomms and Internet companies operate within their countries, indeed, the government is no stranger to creating regulation. Government regulation ensures buildings are built correctly, structurally sound, follow the fire code, etc. Governments create rules that make sure highways, roads, and sidewalks are used safely. Governments pass laws to prevent consumers from being defrauded, create statuary warranties, labour standards, regulate broadcast media, etc. Governments can pass regulations to protect the right to privacy. The idea that the Governments such as Brazil, Germany and the others participating in NETMundial need reforms to IANA and friends before they can work towards guaranteeing their own citizens’ right to privacy is absurd.

I really love Loomio. It’s an exceptional, well-developed collaborative tool that mimics general assembly-style consensus decision making and scales it up for asynchronous web usage. Additionally, it was originally developed by activists in New Zealand during Occupy Wellington, who collaborated with local, social enterprises and formed a co-op. This is precisely the sort of initiative we catalogue and promote at the P2P Foundation so, now that Loomio are running a crowdfunding campaign to make their technology even more useful, we’d like to give them our full support.