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  • Note - Draft, prototype status
  • Note - Licensing, quoting
  • Meet meet.coop
    • The online meeting coop - meet.coop
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  • 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

Spaces stewarded as commons

We described meet.coop as provisioning spaces under commons stewardship. Here we develop the description of commoning as a regime of multiple contributions, including contributions in stewarding.

PreviousCommoningNextCommoning - Three moments

Last updated 3 years ago

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Earlier, in , we described meet.coop as provisioning spaces under commons stewardship. Here we develop the description of commoning, as an approach to what is more often called governance. Governance is typically understood in terms of ’decision making’, and there’s then a rush into formal, legalistic specifications of how decisions may legitimately be made, and by whom.

Here, however, we present the practice of commoning as being essentially about an ecology of contributions in-and-to practice - plural, recognised, valued contributions, in commons of several kinds - and about the kinds of valuing and contributing involved. Governance in this frame is understood as the practice of stewarding of commons, including contributions in practices of . . valuing, curating, steering, applying and policing sanctions, assigning privileges and obligations, establishing protocols, mobilising and enjoying commoned means, etc.

Commoning has three constituent modes, to be described, within each of which particular kinds of contributions are made by commoners. Stewarding is one of these three, but contributions are made by commoners in all of them, and it’s the totality of contributions across all of them - the ‘dance of commoning’ - that constitutes the political economy of a commons. In a sense, governance is distributed across the entire span of contributions of all kinds, and resides in the aesthetic frame that informs the 'dance'.

A commons is not a commons without being actively stewarded and otherwise contributed-in. Any constellation of resources or means that is not stewarded and actively contributed-in is not a commons, it’s an unregulated common pool - the faux-commons of Garrett Hardin’s notorious and ill-informed, liberal-individualist narrative of 'the tragedy of the commons'.

On this basis, governance as 'decision-making' gives way in a commons to the skilful placement and enactment or performing of contributions, continuously, in all spheres, including many mundane and operational actions in everyday locations, as well as in some (influential, longer-reach, steering, shaping) decision-actions, allocation-actions, assessment-actions, infrastructuring-actions, sanctioning-actions; and so on, conducted in formal stewarding venues.

Governance in a commons is contributed to - enacted - mundanely by worker-producer, user-mobilisers (commoners), and not simply by nominal 'stewards' in specialised stewardship venues. This is the aesthetic care work that makes a commons out of a common pool.

In this section we discuss:

Although commons have ‘courts’, parliaments and governing assemblies of various kinds (see ), governance is not a separated sphere of juridical practice or - as in the government of a state or the governance of a corporation, for example - of executive decision-making removed from the operational, everyday practice of actively participating in a commons. The dance of commoning is as much an aesthetic practice as a juridical one. However, value(ing) - prior to ‘decision making', and the basis of judgement in a juridical sense - is deeply embedded in the full range of commoner-actions.

- Four governance traditions

- Producer-, consumer-, multi-stakeholder

4 Assemblies and deliberations
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 . .
spaces
At the core of meet.coop - Spaces stewarded as commons