Commoning
Earlier in September I was in Stroud, for the first Festival of Commoning . It was a lovely event, full of people working on commons projects in different ways. What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders. (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier and others - "a pervasive, generative, and neglected social lifeform... complex, adaptive living processes that generate wealth (both tengible and intangible) through which people address their shared needs with minimal or no reliance on markets or states.") Diana Finch set out differences between co-ops and commons. Coops are businesses, in the market, based on trade or exchange, mediated by money, democratic in operation, and benefit their members. Commons are not businesses, and are based on sharing, with no money required; they are collaborative, and benefit both