Michel Bauwens

Congratulations to my colleagues at the Peer to Peer Foundation, and especially founder Michel Bauwens, for winning the 2016 Golden Nica for Digital Communities from Prix Arts Electronica!  This is a great and well-deserved honor.  There were a total of 3,159 entries from 84 countries for this venerable prize this year. 

In the prize citation, the jury wrote: 

“The P2P Foundation is a new generation of communities that help to build communities.  It is dedicated to advocacy and research of peer to peer dynamics in society. Established ten years ago, it evolved into one of the main drivers of the ‘commons transition’.

“As a decentralized and self-organized non-profit organization, the P2P Foundation analyzes, documents and promotes peer-to-peer strategies that seem to be well-suited to facing the challenges and problems of our times in ways that display great future promise. The focus is on three key traits: sustainability, openness and solidarity. Since its inception, the community of the P2P Foundation has input over 30,000 entries that document the history and development of the peer-to-peer movement. The P2P Foundation Wiki has been accessed more than 27 million times, and is thus the platform that has assembled the world’s most massive collection of knowledge about P2P.”

A shout-out to the P2P Foundation core team, consisting of James Burke, Bill Niaros, Vasilis Kostakis, Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso, and of course, Michel – my dear friend and colleague on the Commons Strategies Group.  Michel, it is so heartening to see your years of toil, tenacity and leadership in building this global community receive this recognition.