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  • Welcome
  • Note - Draft, prototype status
  • Note - Licensing, quoting
  • Meet meet.coop
    • The online meeting coop - meet.coop
    • Contact us
  • 1 Principles
    • Principles
      • Spaces
      • The toolstack
      • Platform spaces
      • Media spaces
      • Venue spaces
      • Stack of commons
      • Privacy policy
    • Commoning
      • Spaces stewarded as commons
      • Commoning - Three moments
      • Contributing in commons - A governance hybrid
      • Classic FLOSS peer-to-peer governance
      • Classic co-op governance
      • Assemblies - Governance in ‘roots’ movement organisations
      • Full-range commoning - The contribution of care work
      • Commoning as a practice of dual power - Beyond . .
    • Principles & protocols
      • Value and value(ing)
      • Values as practices in working order
      • Coop values, DisCO
  • 2 Political economy
    • Political economy
    • Members and contributions
      • User members, user-member accounts
      • Active user members
      • Operational members
      • Register of members
      • Privileges and obligations
      • Sanctions
      • Fair use of BBB space
      • Contributions
      • Contribution accounting
        • Contribution & recognition
        • Contributions & locations of work
        • Work of valuing, and means of recording and valuing (mapping) contributions
      • Funding contributions
      • Rent
      • Contributions in kind
      • Work contributions
      • Recognition of contributions
      • Voting
    • Commons political economy
      • Ownership, assets and commons
      • Dissolving meet.coop
      • Fiat money, mutual credit, fair wage, sweat equity
      • A commons and its members - Stewarding, contributing, enjoying
      • Dependence - Livelihood, infrastructure, dual power
      • Livelihood, privilege, contribution
      • Provisioning and hosting
      • Employment, federation and voluntary contribution
      • Revenue, surplus and distribution
      • Development funding, investment
      • Value, values, value(ing) and production in-and-of commons
      • Contribution, privilege and justice - The purpose of protocols
  • 3 Social relations
    • Social relations
    • Intentions, principles
    • Actions in three landscapes
    • Dimensions of community
      • Plural community - Three sectors
      • Pluriverse
      • 1 Coop - Transformed economy, making the coop-commons
      • 2 Solidarity - Transformed silos, formación
        • Tools for conviviality
        • Formación - Learning, the dance of knowing
      • 3 Toolstack - Transformed organising capability, infrastructuring
        • Dance of knowing
        • Design justice
      • Multiple languages, plural regions, uneven development
      • Privacy
    • Seven Rs of civil-society activist commitment
      • Rescue
      • Resistance
      • Reporting, recording
      • Re-weaving the economy
      • Reparation, reconciliation, restorative justice
      • Regenerative activism
      • Regime change, revolution
  • 4 Assemblies and deliberations
    • Assemblies and deliberations
      • Circles
        • Community circle
      • Standing assembly (all-hands)
      • commons.hour
      • General assembly
      • Board of stewards
      • The forum
      • Polls
      • Protocols - Time
      • Protocols - Multiple languages
      • Protocols - Facilitation & moderation
  • 5 commons.hour
    • commons.hour - The programme
      • Basic links for commons.hour
      • commons.hour invitation
      • Programme & presenters
      • Defining what meet.coop does - A handbook and a commons
      • Prototyping and collaborating
      • Defining what meet.coop is for
      • Running list of sessions
      • Summary running list
      • Design and prototyping in commons.hour
      • commons.hour - the venue
    • commons.hour protocols
      • Session protocols
      • Session pre- and post-protocols
      • commons.hour methodology
    • Design principles
      • Design justice - note
      • Plural community
      • Coop principles
      • commons.hour ‘specials'
  • 6 Constitution
    • Constitution
      • Conventional outline of a constitution
      • A design approach to a constitution - an assemblage of protocols
      • Protocols vs rules
      • The handbook and the constitution
      • Core protocols aka principles of meet.coop
      • Draft constitution
  • 7 Code of conduct
    • Code of conduct
      • In platform spaces
      • In media spaces
      • In venue spaces
      • Operational members
      • User members
      • Making the coop-commons economy
      • Provisioning and mobilising tools and capability
      • Cultivating solidarity and mutuality
  • 8 Terminology
    • Terminology
      • BBB - Big Blue Button
      • Containers
      • Discourse
      • FLOSS - Free-libre open-source software
      • gitBook
      • Greenlight
      • Markdown
      • Matrix/Element
      • NextCloud
      • Sweat equity
      • Sysadmins aka ‘admins’
  • 9 Supporting materials
  • Supporting materials
    • meet.coop
    • Other organisations
      • Open Credit Network - Membership Agreement
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  1. 1 Principles
  2. Commoning

Commoning - Three moments

Here we present the commitment of commoning that underlies meet.coop, and specifically the practice of stewarding that constitutes a commons.

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Last updated 3 years ago

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meet.coop has a core commitment to developing the coop-commons economy. Here we describe the commitment of commoning that underlies meet.coop, and specifically the practice of stewarding that constitutes a commons. Commoning is a transformational politics of , and a radical mode of provisioning means of subsistence and wellbeing in the coop-commons economy. It meshes together with, but is not identical with, the tradition of cooperation that flows from 19th-century radicals like the Rochdale Pioneers, and the widely recognised Coop Values and Principles. For example, see below.

We understand commoning to be a regime of collective practice which has three ‘moments’:

  • provisioning/curating

  • enjoying/mobilising, and

  • stewarding/defending.

This frame is derived from the research of David Bollier & Silke Helfrich. More on B&H below.

  • Provisioning - Bollier & Helfrich: provisioning through commons (pp 163-200). Involves curating the commoned means of subsistence and wellbeing; making, assembling, curating, cultivating, nurturing them. In meet.coop, this involves three kinds of digitally mediated spaces: platform spaces, media spaces, venue spaces. This is the sphere of the operational weave of material means; in meet.coop the material landscape of digital-commons provisioning - which notably includes labour hours.

  • Enjoying - Bollier & Helfrich: the social life of commoning (pp 101-118). Involves mobilising the commoned means; inhabiting, appreciating and celebrating them, weaving with them in everyday life; animating, orienting-to, recognising and acknowledging them. This is the sphere of the mundane, everyday navigating and charting of structures of feeling: the aesthetic landscape of meet.coop. This is where care work basically lives: affiliating and collaborating, mutualising and associating, emotional cadence, re-purposing and revaluing. Etc, etc.

  • Stewarding - Bollier & Helfrich: peer governance through commoning (pp 119-162). Involves visioning and steering the commons: defending and regulating, conserving and evolving, deciding and adjudicating membership and privileges; allocating and disciplining the mobilisation of the commoned means, reviewing and re-framing the practices, establishing the protocols. This is the cultural landscape of commoning: agreements and forms of organisation, frames of language and genre, communications; the ‘dance of knowing and capability’.

B&H, on the other hand, adopt commoning as an insurgent, activist politics. As researchers, their investigative perspective is participant-organiser rather than outside-observer; and hence, for example, their formulation of working insights through a somewhat complex pattern-language (and ‘a chorus of voices’), rather than a system of rules (and consensual science). Arguably this is much more systemic and, certainly, more deeply practical than ‘economic science’ can contemplate. B&H emphasise:

the importance of exploring the inner dimensions of commoning as a social form, moving beyond economistic notions of the commons as a mere resource to be managed. Commoning is an attitude, an ethic, an impulse, a need and a satisfaction . .

This is a cue to pay core attention to organising, as a skilled practice, and to care work as a contribution.

Page references below are to Bollier & Helfrich (2019), , Gabriola Island BC: New Society.

Free, fair and alive contains a pattern language at its core. It has three basic divisions (the basis of the schema above); and the pattern language section is prefaced with an aesthetic - Ubuntu - and followed-up with assessments of practical political matters: organising, alliances, etc. The book emerges from a programme of investigation that also produced two significant collections of essays: and .

B&H are way more political than . Or rather, the politics of her ground-breaking work is the politics of ‘institutional’ and ‘behavioural’ economics, within a broadly ‘Austrian’ tradition (which includes Hayek, for example). This tradition maintains ownership, exchange and individual strategy at its centre, and thus doesn't fundamentally and fully depart from liberal individualism. Ostrom’s tradition aims for a science-like conceptualisation-from-the-outside of commons-as-systems-of-behaviours (structured as an object of investigation): hence the central role of ‘rules of commons’ (as distinct, for example, from 'patterns' in Bollier & Helfrich). Within her own tradition, Ostrom’s work is radical - see eg Wall 2017 . She held that: “a resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory”. For economic science, that's a radical position!

Free, fair & alive - The resurgent power of the commons
Wealth of the commons 2012
Patterns of commoning 2015
Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom’s rules for radicals
dual power
classic coop governance
The dance of commoning - Three moments