Festival of Commoning 2026

I started October at the third Festival of Commoning, in Stroud again.  As seems to be normal now at the Festival, there was discussion about what this commoning thing actually is (I blogged them too - Commoning and Festival of Commoning take two). But this year it felt like maybe it didn't matter so much, or the tent is just tacitly agreed to be a big one. In the welcome session it was described as "a global movement, acting locally," and the poster had some examples.  

What if we had more say in the things we depend on? That's where commoning comes in. You are already commoning, whether you know it or not.

 

 

My rough notes follow - these are my attempt to capture things and so may be wrong, focussed on specific aspects that caught my attention, etc.  

 

The welcome session included some singing. We heard Maggie Holland's 1990s song A Place called England which has aged pretty well. Worth a listen.

And we all sang The Manchester Rambler together.

I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I have my freedom on Sunday. 

(Later, Griffin - who was one of the international attendees -  shared a resistance song from her home state of Oregon, Gather Your Courage (video)). 

The welcome talked about the importance of bringing people together on common ground and exercising our disagreement muscles, as part of democracy fitness.  

We are the mycelium of deliberative democracy. The Festival and other gatherings and commoning projects are like mushrooms, the visible part. 

Some of my notes from random conversations:

Ed Jarvis mentioned about the defence reports that are being suppressed. See Rupert Read on national food security, and the government's national security assessment on global ecosystems.

Louisa Burman talked about 21st century social clubs - what does bringing people together look like, now? One theme that came up in several conversations was intergenerational connection, and public space for young people outside the home, which has been so diminished in recent decades. 

A journalist working on child exploitation by corporations mentioned that Fairtrade companies use more child labour than non-Fairtrade ones; certainly Fairtrade is not as good as you might hope in this. 

I encountered the co-operative New Internationalist for the first time - a grassroots news magazine. I also learned about integral altruism - which is a kind of response to effective altruism: We're interested in frames and tools that counterbalance the blindspots of EA, like wisdom, systems thinking, metarationality, and metamodernism. Our goals are the same, to do the most good, but also to break free from the underlying implicit and explicit assumptions of the current EA movement (like classical utilitarianism, naive rationalism and techno-solutionism). So that's a thing.

Also someone mentioned the Cooperative AI Foundation, which is actually a charity. CAIF is interested in supporting differential progress on cooperative intelligence. That is, we want to support research that leads to significant progress on cooperative capabilities – capabilities that lead to increases in social welfare in a wide range of environments – relative to progress on capabilities that are dual-use (e.g., useful for deception, manipulation, disempowering other agents) and therefore may not robustly improve social welfare.

A couple of attendees mentioned that they are connected to grassroots groups of Pause AI and Pull The Plug, and that these anti-AI movements have simply not encountered anyone AI-savvy who could bring a perspective counter to the existential risk narrative from the frontier labs teams / alumni. They would love to change that. 

Anna Hyde from the Islington Climate Centre told me about a project to create a book of bedtime stories for billionaires, focussing on stories about greed. The Centre ran a Community Resilience Assembly last year which sounds super. The network of Climate Emergency Centres aims to turn vacant properties into local hubs for community resilience and climate change readiness - v cool idea.  

I talked with Joanna Macy about Heavens Valley, and the idea of a deep time perspective, drawing on my experience maintaining the Uffington White Horse. 

Several groups talked about the shocks that are coming - extreme weather, supply or food shortages, conflict. Local communities can build local resilience; what about connection to each other? At Islington they plan to use phone trees. Maybe there's radio. I mentioned mesh radio. I was interested to learn that Stroud is actually doing their own Greenfield's Life House (another echo of a previous Festival), although other communities talked more about doing things that were not quite life houses, which I confess appeals to me more. 

How do we connect the tech and the commons and the other things in more overlapping meshes? In Covid we saw the disconnect between top down and bottom up approaches. I heard about one example where specific individuals enabled the two to connect, but this seems to have been very rare. There was interest in using the method from Ruth Ben Tovin's Town Anywhere session, creative participation framed around a time travel visioning process, to imagine futures in uncertainty and build trust and agency. Maybe from there you could do assemblies... 

Imagine the idea of "asking for a friend" in 2046. How have we dealt with climate, poverty, whatever?   

These were good discussions and I only managed brief - and often not very coherent - notes afterwards.  

The reading table:

 

I started in the Transforming Neighbourhoods session, with speakers from East Marsh United & Positive Carrickfergus, which both started in 2017.

The Carrickfergus speaker had lived there for a while, but wasn't connected to it. She used Theory U, an awareness-based approach to systems change, as a way to connect with people and place. This lead to a year of conversations with people, where everyone ended by saying "and you should talk to X" - so she found many hidden things. 

East Marsh in 2017 had many County Lines issues. At a community and police meeting, the community didn't speak, only councillors. But the community needed to be there, and a random comment from a neighbour ("yer mam would have gone") got one guy to go.  They recognised no one was coming to help, that they needed to do stuff themselves, and had a meetup afterwards. This was the start of what became East March United. They started by making it look nicer, cleaning the streets: clean your 6ft of street outside your house. 

The discussion covered a bunch of aspects of how these two projects built community and set out to make their local areas better. Creativity can help in various ways - as a problem solving tool, as arts, as crafting. It can use the skills the community already has.  

It's taken a long time for the decline to happen; we won't turn the ship round super fast. Trust, empathy - it's totally relational. We are all in it together. Recognising some of the challenges around communities that have been neglected for generations - for instance, there were people who would say "no, I couldn't be project lead", but who were already actually doing the leadership things like getting engagement, sponsors etc. They just didn't recognise that they could be leaders, or what a project lead might look like. 

Small things like a Facebook page to gather people are helpful. Whatever you do, people will complain that your communications aren't good enough. It's hard when you start with fragmented communities - but does get better over time, over a few years. People find out after something happened and are frustrated; and they aren't looking to see what is happening, because their expectations are so low - they don't expect to find activities or expect them to be a bit shit. One approach is to plan for 2 events at a time so there's always a 'next one' you can recommend to folks who miss the first. 

You need a positive framing to counter endemic negativity. You need to break the certainty about the future, which is that everything is shit and will continue to be. It's certain, and it lets local people 'opt out', so you have to change that. You need to change the big stories that keep everyone stuck. One of the big stories is "outsiders will save us" - they won't. You need to show the local community that they can do things themselves. 

The threat of violence fragments communities. Whether it's from loyalist paramilitaries, or drug gangs, they want to keep people suppressed and depressed, as that's their pipeline.

There was a gap around town centre regeneration. The town hall was underused, at the end of the high street - this seemed like a place to start to bring people together to do positive, uplifting stuff together. A group of women were interested in organising a big meal together. Did they need a disclaimer, for a community lunch "eat at own risk"? So strange, compared to eating at a friend's. 100 people came to the town hall, which is rare for that area. You might get those numbers in a church, but that's a hard-boundaried, insular community. They opened the doors, people dropped in, and there were some local musicians. 

East Marsh got some money, and did participatory budgeting using a hall with market stalls from local people with ideas. All ages voted, from kids upwards, on how money would be spent. Everyone felt listened to, unlike in mainstream politics. 12 organisations/projects pitched, and 8 got funded. 

One speaker noted her awareness of her own power as someone who previously worked at a funder. A pattern: people spot an issue, take 6 months to set up governance, then look for money. The issue is not addressed for ages. These projects didn't want to repeat that. Positive Carrickfergus didn't constitute until 2002; they needed to morph and figure out what they should be first. The minute you formalise, you get pulled into a system. Charity networks consolidate power quickly, with no transparency; you're not sure who is on the board, same chair for 25 years. So being as open as possible for as long as possible matters.

They started having Repair Cafes. When you do stuff without inviting institutions in at the start, they are affronted that you did stuff without asking them, without asking them for 50 or 100 quid to get started. They want to be involved. Not involving them gives you power, so the conversation is on your terms. For example, the lunch didn't really need funding; they crowdfunded £300 for insurance and to pay for the hall. Taking time before formalising let them get clearer about what they wanted to do and how. 

East Marsh United wanted to ask people about their vision for the area. They took a shop, and planned to have conversations face to face, but then Covid happened. Instead they delivered postcards to thousands of houses, and got 100 back with ideas of what people wanted: more arts and music, and also more shops. The town hall used more for arts for instance. They did a community share offer for finance - they didn't ask anyone else. They aimed for £25k; no one had done this sort of thing before in the area. They raised £34k, 70% from locals, in £25 and £50 amounts. That gives the community power.

An example from East Marsh United, compared to the past: a window was smashed by a drug dealer. Tenants rallied round, got it boarded up, called the police, cleared the glass, made sure the residents were ok when they came home. Another example: drug houses causing problems. Tenants got cameras and CCTV, and kept reporting to police. In the past they would have shut their doors, hidden, and then moved out. Instead the drug house was shut down. The power of community trusting one another; networks of care.  

Now there's an East Marsh community plan, and they're doing one for West Marsh, and one for Cleethorpes. People have a voice and can see things happening. Trust building and the conditions of operating mean you need to look them in the eye when saying what you will do. And you never know what people will want. People wanted to grow flowers - to give to others, this was unexpected. They also change their minds about what they want.

Buying property and turning it into community stuff, with a structured plan, can work, whether it's housing that gives people their first feeling of safety, or a greengrocers, or a gathering space. Carrickfergus has Northern Ireland's first co-op greengrocers. The greengrocers was a climate crisis response, but they did not brand it as that.  Talking about something to do with people's everyday essentials is better than inviting people to a workshop. A shop is great for that - conversations. There's a frame, and the same in a repair cafe or food store: the frame makes it possible to have the conversation about, for example, planned obsolescence. A place to counter, for example, conspiracy theories: "I think we are living in a time of collapse too, but I think we can do things, and there's amazing people around, including here". People want a carrot that tastes of something - and that is an opening to talk about the state of the food system.

They have been trading for 3 years and learning a lot, and turning the community plan into a reality of delivery.

There's more from these two projects on the Screw this... Let's try something else podcast from Matt Golding. Interestingly both projects are mostly lead by women. Maybe it's harder for men in these areas to do this sort of thing. Some places, such as Grimsby, were built on strong women.  The closing messages were to keep telling the stories, being creative. That in itself is an act of grassroots power, because the people in charge don't want creative people. 

I was looking forward to the session on Conflict, Collaboration & Collective Power with Paul Kahawatte from Navigate. Handling conflict came up this year (and last Festival) as a critical skill for bringing together the diverse folks needed to, for instance, tackle local challenges. 

What is conflict?

Conflict could be understood as a sign, a signal or a form of feedback within a living system. It may be signalling unmet or undernourished needs, issues with relationships and power, or a potential need for change and evolution. Conflict can weaken or strengthen collective power. By not engaging with conflict, you can miss important signals.

How does morality fit with this framework? A moral position is about values or needs that someone has. For example, migration could fit across all the conflict elements.

Part of the narrative of why the commons is thought not to work is about conflict. We need to get clear on how we make decisions and how we handle conflict, how we attend to relationships, levels of trust and community. We need to organise at a larger scale than tiny local units that don't talk to each other, to tackle the challenges we want to address. 

Why not call a mediator? Maybe because our worst traumas are connected with conflict, of different sorts.

Do both sides need to be willing to resolve the conflict? Yes. Saying no to mediation is for a reason - maybe he's protecting something. Maybe a conversation to explore the reason, with no pressure, can help. Maybe people don't know what mediation would do for them.

Living systems have a regular life rhythm, so you have, for example, a kitchen and a bedroom, already built because you have to keep doing those things. You don't want to need to build a bed at bedtime. You make sure the bed is already there. Conflict also has a rhythm. Conflict is coming, if it's not here already. If you don't set up your bed before you are tired, you have to set it up when you are tired, which is the worst. So create conflict spaces and systems before you need them, because when you are in conflict your capacity to communicate and trust goes down.

You also have a decision making system, even if you don't realise you do. This applies to all communities and groups. It may not appear as a system until you bump into it, or maybe after you bump into it. The system is a living system: dynamic, 3D.

When you are playing Werewolf, you do your best to lie, even if you would never lie at other times. What are the incentives, the rules of the game, the purpose, that shape behaviour? If you are playing basketball you won't share the ball, regardless of whether you are offered training in sharing etc. The rules of the game cannot be ignored.

Before I come and stay with you: "how will I know if I do something that pisses you off?" Say this upfront. Agree how to communicate. Get really clear.

What works and what doesn't, in ways of interacting with conflict, in terms of bringing about what you want? Our suggestions:

• practising
• creating space or an invitation to discuss
• recognising context
• recognising cultural ways to navigate conflict
• recognising power
• acknowledging different cultural 'baggage' - stories, ideas etc around conflict and conflict resolution
• acknowledging the qualities of each person; the positives
• taking time in advance to build human connection
• not trying to problem solve in high emotion times

So there are 7 systems related to conflict - and then there's the whole system. Every project or relationship has some version of all of these, and power runs through all of them:

• decision making
• conflict engagement/transformation
• support and care
• resource distribution
• feedback
• connection and community
• information flow

It can be useful to recognise the timelines of conflict. Over time, when there's conflict, pain and mistrust increase; willingness and capacity to engage decrease.

 

Productive responses: set up systems; call mediators early; get support; sense signals early, as early as possible.

Silent support can be useful: untrained mediators can be actively problematic. Instead, get a third party just to sit in silence whilst the conversation happens between the parties.

Conflict cover is an idea in development at Navigate: get a mediator team, like the AA, with a regular check, and call when needed. It's like breakdown cover.

Connecting with needs: you can translate people's stated needs into something more grounded, non-controversial and relatable. That makes it easier to discuss. 

For example, Katy plays her music loudly at night. She needs to have fun; Paul needs to sleep. If we can make it about rest and fun, maybe there's more flex and empathy, by making it about needs rather than other things. Sleep and fun are not mutually exclusive.

What if you cannot get people to let go of the manifestation of the need, for example wanting to play music? Often it's not because of the position, but something else that this position is trying to take care of at the level of needs.

An exercise: think about a time when you were told something uncomfortable. Play it back, and think about how it relates to your needs, the needs of the person who said it, etc.

Stay curious. It helps the other person, and it also helps you. Keep wondering about it all...

There is a free course on living systems on navigate.org.uk.

(I'd hoped we would do more practical work but this session was mostly a lecture.) 

My next session was on Assembly Culture: Finding common ground in a polarised world, and it was about Humanity Project. (We heard about the early stages of this from Claire Farrell at the 2024 Festival.)

The Humanity Project is about: Giving voice to people who otherwise are not heard. Shining a light on people making spaces great. Enabling people to talk face to face, with food. Participatory, neighbourhood-level democracy. Resilience, to keep trying, to improve their place and build community. Find power through love.

Humanity Project people are listening practitioners; facilitators of community organising. Training in community organising, with a focus on listening, to connect. When you come together and listen, you need to translate that into action.

One of the speakers had a focus on protecting community assets in Haringey.  The other was from Marsh Farm, in Luton, and I failed to note their names. 

Community assemblies to deliberate on burning questions, and to do something about it. Poverty and insecurity, and how people can come together. The action might be disrupting power systems, or coming together to campaign for change. Connecting people, understanding resources, bringing people together to support communities. They did it with food banks in Covid; then the council came to say "you are doing things we cannot do, we need to work together".

We have the power if we organise it. Assemblies are the missing link in why democracy isn't working in the UK. Ask: what do you love, and not love, about living here? Do you think we have power? Do you think we should have power?

A 'popular assembly' is coming... the more of us there are, the louder our choir. "The power of we."

Assemblies are not a one-off talking shop. Instead they're quarterly - both sides have to keep coming back - so promises made by, for example, the council have to be answered for in 3 months. Without the recall it's fruitless. MPs would act differently if they had to come to assemblies each quarter, not just face a vote every 5 years.

They measured the income and spend of the community in Marsh Farm, and found it was actually not that deprived - there were millions running through the estate community.

A success, for example: Luton market coming back after closure. The council then said it would take 18 months for procurement... the assembly asked if the council wanted to say that at the next assembly, and the procurement got revisited and became 4 weeks. 

How do you reach people? A multifunction community hub... then street by street. 1/3 of households represented, including on Zoom etc.

How do you scale? You have the hundred or so regulars. You have others feeding in online, and maybe via other assemblies, and people don't all come to the same events. You also train more community people in facilitation, so it spreads. The same old faces who always show up need to see themselves as catalysts to unlock wider communities. Wards: one popular assembly per ward per quarter, then wards could come together. People won't show up every Monday night; every 3 months is more attractive.

How do you devise the topics of assemblies? From listening interviews with residents, as per the questions above (what do you love, what don't you love, and what idea have you got for making it better?). The popular responses then become the subject matter. That helps encourage involvement.

A question from someone who was involved in the Humanity Project early on but left: how do you handle polarisation, if those topics come up? How does deliberative democracy work if it has the language and iconography of the left? It comes mostly from the left. This was a good question. There were several responses:

• Bringing information to people who were annoyed: for example, bringing information about the actual local situation to a conversation about migrants. Both the householder and the Humanity Project person ended up angry with Thatcher together.
• Considering characters such as Andrew Tate and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon: "There are more of us than them" 
• Start with art, music, food - people connect more on a fundamental level. Start from what you have in common. 

Trainers should avoid jargon and use people's own language.

 Luton-wide assemblies might cost £5m over 5 years. That's not big money; it's a cruise missile. £7.5k for 5 people, 6 weeks, 20 hours, to train and prep - we pay council officers more. More ground-up local money: can on on things like food, musicians. You need to show the benefit in one place.

The assembly model needs action groups at the end, where people commit. Those people meet again the next week, and move to action. Train people to understand their power. Maybe train to support people to consider becoming councillors. 

How do you manage conflict? Create safe space. Create the conditions to have a debate without having a go at each other. Maybe you don't get consensus at first. Have a heated debate without being cross. That's the skill and quality of the facilitator. Disagreement is valuable, if you can channel it to some kind of positivity. There can be wisdom in chaos. Change only happens if there's managed chaos; each side has to let go of one thing. 

We then did our own assembly - very much a speedrun and leaning into the fact that the audience was probably more familiar with assemblies and other forms of collective or community gathering and discussion. The framing question was a big one and especially tough since around each table we had people from very different local communities!

What is the one thing we could change in our community that would make the biggest difference to people's lives?

And what could we, as residents, do together to make that change happen?

There were many ideas and we did a dotvote. One frequent theme was the importance of connecting across generations.   

The idea from my table was so cool it merits its own blog post (watch this space). We focussed on time rather than place, and imagined a new ritual, where you get to know your neighbours. Maybe a time when, a bit like on Halloween, it's OK to knock on anyone's door, but you are there to say hi, have a chat.  I think we should do this. If you want to help, drop me a line!  

 

 

The final afternoon was an open space, which was a great way to surface topics that otherwise weren't addressed at the event. It was as usual a bit tricky to balance hosting topics and going to other topics, and there wasn't really enough time.  

Matt Golding's storytelling session was great. We need positive messages, not trauma-negative ones. People need to feel like it will make a difference: demonstrable results. Not all examples of collective action are going to work, so they won't land.  

Antidote has a filter to help you find good stories, and an action content template for how to build a narrative that will work. Check out the deck for lots of info.  

You need examples of communities of lower than average means - middle class stories don't inspire action. 

No story you cannot participate in yourself as a regular person.

No stories not about communities working together on regular, monthly essential needs - for example food, housing, energy, decision making... (but not water, because you cannot come off the mains sewage).

 

For example, the right wing front end is compassionate: "we all care about safety, right?" So, copy Farage. Pitch stuff as new and cool, even if ideas such as co-op energy are ancient. Use the collapse of systems to bring people together around shared needs. Where it started and how; what the country looks like; how you can do it; how many other examples there are.  (One early backer of Fordhall Farm was backing it even though she thought it was doomed. Show it's not; it's not one example against the world, it's lots of other examples.)

The real story is a power shift. Not that we wait for permission, but fuck it, we're just doing it. Punk. People want power. That's how the far right wins people over. We need to show the communities building power. Make it awesome: we're going to blow the doors off.

We need to get rid of the hero's journey as a key narrative frame - it's extractive, toxic. But we still like a person we can identify with, so keep saying it's an ordinary, not unique, person. Manifest the future. Keep saying Yes We Can until we change the world. Hold each other up on the less good days.

A local community banned new gas boilers and built a wind turbine: Lawrence Weston. It's a great example. Show how the people who did it had no skill, no time, no money, no knowledge. That makes it relatable.

Find examples near you - an AI tool helps here. Check out antidotelive.studio, including the AI page to find them. (this is a live experiment and feedback is welcome)  

Matt's work specifically avoided using climate action as the front door - until people complained... now they're adding climate as an example too. Stories get simpler over time, because of all the stuff you don't need to say. No community collectively working on providing essential needs doesn't also do climate action by default.

Then I hosted a table about AI (and tech). What can AI bring to commoning, and what can commoning bring to AI? Quite a few people had spoken with me about AI during the weekend, and had said it felt like it was an omission somehow, when every conversation has AI somewhere in it, it seemed odd it wasn't mentioned. There was enthusiasm for the topic but not many people joined our table - the community resilience topic scheduled against it seemed much more popular, and I was sad to miss it. Anyway, we had a chat and made some notes. It turns out AI was going to be a session, but the key person was away presenting a paper at the Green Party conference this weekend. Mostly I took away that even amongst folks with interests in both AI and commoning, we had surprisingly limited overlaps in our awareness of projects and communities.

 

 

And finally, community juice. Everyone needs some of it. Great stuff.