[Section still under construction]
Acequias: The historic communal irrigation systems that protect water as a community resource in New Mexico and strengthen the farming and ranching traditions of thousands of families.
Alternative currencies. A growing field of experimentation that seeks to establish a sustainable medium of exchange that either substitutes or complements the "fiat" national or multinational currencies. Leading examples: Bitcoin, Flattr, Ithaca Hours, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems), Metacurrency and Open Bank Project, WIR Bank.
Anduino: An open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software that lets anyone create less expensive, customized computer systems. All designs are freely shareable and modifiable.
Appropedia: A wiki for collaborative approaches to sustainability, poverty reduction and international development through the use of sound principles, appropriate technology and the sharing of wisdom and project information.
Blender Institute (Amsterdam): Nonprofit that orchestrates a global network of open-source enthusiasts to create HD and 3D films, videos games and visual effects.
Book Mooch: A web-based social exchange system for giving away books one doesn't want and obtaining books one does want. The system functions in six different languages.
Common Good Bank: A community-based bank that "combines the spirit of a credit union with the power and growth potential of a stock savings bank." Deposits, investments, and profits are tracked separately for each community, and members decide how to allocate profits to schools and other nonprofits.
Connexions: A content commons of free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology.
Couchsurfing: An international "gift exchange" hosting of travelers in one's home, with an accent on interesting social encounters and conviviality.
CrisisCommons: A "global network of hybrid barcamp/hackathon events which bring together people and communities who innovate crisis response and global development through technology tools, expertise and problem solving."
Defective by Design: A broad-based campaign that seeks to discourage Big Media and electronics manufacturers and distributors from bringing "digital rights management" (DRM) systems to market -- because DRM intentionally limits user freedoms and therefore are "defective by design."
Digital Library on the Commons: A gateway to the international literature on the commons that provides free and open access to full-text articles, papers, and dissertations.
Do-it-Yourself Book Scanner: A site dedicated to book scanning, open source software and DIY digitatization.
FedFlix: A project of the Internet Archive that features the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history to national parks. All are available for reuse without any restrictions whatsoever.
Flickr Commons: A collection of "hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives" that invites Internet users to tag and contribute information about the photos.
Freedom Box. A collaborative design project of the Debian software community to build a small, portable, open-source platform for distributed applications -- one that could bypass any centralized chokepoints or censorship on the Internet. (Blog post.)
Global Innovation Commons: an international database of patent-free, energy-saving technologies that can be used by entrepreneurs and national governments to make the technologies more readily available at lower costs. (Blog post.)
Health Commons: A work-in-progress virtual marketplace / ecosystem where participants share data, knowledge, materials and services to accelerate medical research. Project is a collaboration of Creative Commons Public LIbrary of Science, Collabrx and Commercenet.
Heritable Innovation Trust: An innovative scheme that enables indigenous peoples to retain control over their knowledge and culture, selectively granting access through enduring relationships.
History Commons: An experiment in open-content civic journalism that enables grassroots-level investigations on any issue and a tool for oversight of government and private sector entities.
International Amateur Scanning League: A volunteer organization made up of citizens dedicated to increasing public access to public domain and government materials.
International Music Score Library Project: A wiki-style collaborative library of music scores available for free downloads via the Internet. (See also Musopen, below.)
Jamendo: Luxembourg-based music site of more than 270,000 tracks and 20,000 albums that can be copied and shared for free.
Microbial Commons: An international conference in 2006 that explored how to create a viable, sustainable commons for microbial research, including MTAs (materials transfer agreements).
Mozilla Project
Musopen: A collaborative and crowdsourcing website that compiles music recordings, sheet music, and textbooks for free public use, without copyright restrictions.
MyOpenArchive: An international nonprofit that "advocates open access for never-before-published research papers on the web and provides self-archiving platform to enable better knowledge sharing in a way that's easy to publish."
NeuroCommons Project: This initiative seeks to make diverse scientific research materials (articles, knowledge bases, data, physical materials) as available and usable as possible by rendering information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents.
Ogallala Commons (US. Midwest): a nonprofit community development network that seeks to reinvigorate the commonwealth that forms the basis of all communities, both human and natural.
Open Architecture Network: An online, open source community of architectural designers dedicated to bringing collaborative architectural design and services to communities in need, particularly during humanitarian crises.
OpenCourseWare: Open, web-based publication of virtually college and university course materials that is available to anyone for free. Pioneered by M.I.T. but now with more than 250 universities and associated institutions providing their own OpenCourseWare.
Open Data Commons: A project launched by the Open Knowledge Foundation in March 2008 to provide an open data license, the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL).
Participatory Sensing projects -- Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count .... World Water Monitoring Day .... the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research's Project BudBurst (plant fruiting & climate change) .... WeTap (Android app on sources of free public drinking water).... and a study center, Center for Embedded Network Sensing.
Peer-to-Patent Project: A US Patent and Trademark Office project that invites citizen-experts to improve patent quality by helping identify prior art relevant to pending patent applications.
Potato Trust (Peru): [pdf file] innovative project that assigns stewardship rights over genetically interesting Peruvian potatoes to indigenous tribe.
Project Gutenberg: The first and largest single repository of public-domain e-books, available for download for free to computers and various electronic book-readers. Started by Michael Hart in 1971.
PublicResource.org: Rhe scrappy guerilla activist group and archive led by Carl Malamud that prods the U.S. Government to make government information more accessible.
Reclaim the Commons manifesto, World Social Forum statement about the need for global commoners to understand and reclaim various common resources.
Remix the Commons: A collaborative multimedia project that aims to document and illustrate the key ideas and practices of the commons movement.
Spot.us: An experimental “community powered reporting” project that invites the public to suggest and participate in reporting on "important and perhaps overlooked topics," often in partnership with news organizations, and to crowd-source the funding of the journalism.
Svaalbard Global Seed Vault: A vast collection of seeds from seed collections around the globe that are intended as backup resources in the event of major natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources. See also Global Crop Diversity Trust and Wikipedia entry.
TimeBanks: A time-exchange program using "Time Dollar" credits that are earned for volunteering to help someone else, which can then be "spent" for needs of one's own. A social network system that helps build community, redefine work and engender respect.
Traditional Knowledge Commons: A "biocultural community protocol" that provides clear terms and conditions for people's access to collectively held traditional knowledge (developed via the South African NGO Natural Justice).
Traditional Knowledge Digital Library: An Indian database of traditional knowledge that is intended to document existing public-domain medical knowledge (e.g., remedies and treatments) in order to prevent biopiracy and inappropriate patents.
VODO: A project to help creators promote and distribute their freely shareable independent films, music and books using peer-to-peer technology, a "Distribution Coalition" of partner-websites -- DISCO -- and an internal currency known as DO (as in Homer Simpson's "Doh!").
Wikileaks: A nonprofit media organization that provides "an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists, ... thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices."
Wikipedia: The free, user-generated online encyclopedia that has millions of entries in dozens of languages.
Wikitravel: A free, user-generated collection of travel guides to over 24,000 locations around the world.
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