Patterns of Commoning

David Bollier · Silke Helfrich

Nov 2015 · Commons Strategy Group and Off the Common Press

About this ebook

What accounts for the persistence and spread of "commoning," the irrepressible desire of people to collaborate and share to meet everyday needs? How are the more successful projects governed? And why are so many people embracing the commons as a powerful strategy for building a fair, humane and Earth-respecting social order? In more than fifty original essays, Patterns of Commoning addresses these questions and probes the inner complexities of this timeless social paradigm. The book surveys some of the most notable, inspiring commons around the world, from alternative currencies and open design and manufacturing, to centuries-old community forests and co-learning commons - and dozens of others. David Bollier (www.bollier.org) is an American author, activist and independent scholar who has studied the commons for nearly twenty years. Silke Helfrich (commonsblog.wordpress.com) is a German author and independent activist of the commons who blogs at www.commonsblog.de, and cofounder of the Commons-Institut in Germany. With Michel Bauwens, Bollier and Helfrich are cofounders of the Common Strategies Group. For more information, go to the book's website, Patterns of Commoning (www.patternsofcommoning.org)

About the author

David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and independent scholar who writes about the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He is co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, a consulting project that assists the international commons movement; and co-director of the Commons Law Project, which is seeking to regenerate the legal traditions for protecting the commons. Bollier is also Editor at the Institute for Data-Driven Design, ID3, a Boston-based research nonprofit that is helping design new digital institutions to let people assert greater control over their data, online identities and authentication.

Bollier in 2001 co-founded Public Knowledge, a Washington advocacy organization for the public's stake in the Internet, telecom and copyright policy. From 1985 to 2010, Bollier collaborated with television producer/writer Norman Lear in a variety of non-television related public affairs and political projects. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism since 2002.

Silke Helfrich (Jena, Germany) has studied romance languages and pedagogy at the Karl-Marx-University in Leipzig. Since mid of the 1990s activities in the field of development politics, from 1996 to 1998 head of Heinrich Böll Foundation Thuringia and from 1999 to 2007 head of the regional office of Heinrich Böll Foundation in San Salvador and Mexico City for Mexico/Central America/Cuba, focusing on globalisation, gender and human rights.

Since 2007 she works as independent author, activist and scholar, with a variety of international and domestic partners. Helfrich is the editor and co-author of several books on the Commons, among them: Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, Munich 2009 (in Spanish: Genes, Bytes y Emisiones. Bienes Comunes y Ciudadania, Mexico-City 2008), editor of Elinor Ostrom: Was mehr wird, wenn wir teilen, Munich 2011. With Heinrich-Böll-Foundation: Commons. Für eine neue Politik jenseits von Markt und Staat, Bielefeld 2012 (together with David Bollier: The Wealth of the Commons beyond Market and State, Amherst/MA, 2012) and most recently with David Bollier and Heinrich-Böll-Foundation: Die Welt der Commons. Muster Gemeinsamen Handelns, 2015 (engl: The Patterns of Commoning, Amherst/MA). She is cofounder of Commons Strategies Group and the Commons-Institut e.V. and the primary author of the German speaking CommonsBlog."