David Bollier

It’s been two years since my dear friend and commons activist Jonathan Rowe went to the gym, came down with an illness and unexpectedly passed away at age 65.  Jon was one of the cofounders, in 2002, of the Tomales Bay Institute, later renamed On the Commons.  Over the course of the next ten years I learned a great deal about the commons from my many conversations with Jon and from his unfailingly beautiful essays and blog posts.  It is a bittersweet experience to re-encounter Jon’s work in all its understated glory in a new book just published. 

Our Common Wealth:  The Hidden Economy That Makes Everything Else Work (Berrett-Koehler) consists of 22 short pieces that Jon wrote for various magazines and Onthecommons.org.  The book offers a series of meditations on various aspects of the commons, markets, property and the human condition.  Each of them is brisk, passionate and lucid. 

If you’re not familiar with Jon, you may want to sample his writings at the website established in his memory after his death, www.jonathanrowe.org. You should also read the book, which will stand as an elegant, sensitive introduction to the commons for years to come. 

I’m grateful to my commons colleague and friend Peter Barnes for foraging through Jon’s eclectic and diverse writings to edit this volume.  Peter, who worked with Jon and me, is the originator of the cap-and-dividend / Sky Trust proposal for curbing climate emissions.  (See his books, Who Owns the Sky? and Capitalism 3.0.)  Peter wrote the book’s introduction, and Bill McKibben and I have small cameos as writers of the book’s foreword and afterword, respectively.

While many publishers might be wary of bringing out what might be seen as a “tribute book,” Jon’s essays shine forth as underappreciated gems that will have a timeless appeal.  He was that good a writer. 

What impressed me about Jon was how he drew upon a rich well of political activism, Washington contacts and top-flight journalists while living a fairly simple life in the rural village of Point Reyes Station, California.  It gave him time to think and reflect on contemporary political culture, and it made his commentary that much more penetrating and deep.  For a fuller account of Jon’s life and career, you may want to read the appreciation that I wrote two years ago, shortly after his death. 

Next Wednesday, March 20, a fascinating new stage in transnational cooperation will arrive when scores of commoners in twenty countries take part in a Spanish P2P Wikisprint, a coordinated effort to document and map the myriad peer to peer initiatives that exist in Latin America and Spain. 

The effort, hosted by the P2P Foundation, was originally going to be held in Spain only, but word got around in the Hispanic world, and presto, an inter-continental P2P collaboration was declared! (A Spanish-language version of the event can be found here.) 

As described by Bernardo Gutiérrez on the P2P Foundation blog, the Wikisprint will bring together an indigenous collective in Chiapas with a co-working space of Quito; a crowdfunding platform in Barcelona with the open data movement of Montevideo; a hacktivist group in Madrid with permaculturists in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas; and a community of free software developers in Buenos Aires with Lima-based city planners; among many others.  

The Wikisprint will map the various Spanish experiences around the commons, open innovation, co-creation, transparency, co-design, 3D printing, free license, p2politics, among other things.  It will also feature debates, lectures, screenings, speeches, self-media coverage, workshops, network visualizations and videos. 

Here is a list of the 20 participating cities.  Anyone can add a new node from a new city.  If you’d like to participate in the Wikisprint, check out this document on the P2P Foundation wiki to see the criteria for inclusion.  There is a special website created for the occasion -- Wikisprint.p2pf.org – and a Twitter hashgtag, # P2PWikisprint.

The entire event will be peer-to-peer, meaning communication will take place through an open network topology in which each node is connected to the other without passing through any center.  As Gutiérrez notes, “P2P – with its openness, decentralization and collective empowerment – is no longer something marginal.  P2P is a philosophy, working trend and a solid reality.  P2P is the nervous system of the new world.”

Was Mancur Olson wrong?  That is the question posed by an essayist at an unlikely website, the American Enterprise Institute.  You wouldn’t think that a conservative American think tank would wish to entertain this possibility because Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action has been a revered touchstone for free-market champions since its publication in 1965.  It's been rivaled only by similar arguments that Garrett Hardin made in his famous “tragedy of the commons" parable three years later.

Both Olson and Hardin proposed memorable theories for why it is difficult for groups of people to undertake collective action.  But recently, on the AEI website, Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch seriously considers the possibility that Olson’s analysis is wrong, or at least has been rendered weak by history.  The occasion for this reflection is the publication of a new book, Strength in Numbers:  The Political Power of Weak Interests, by Gunnar Trumbull, a Harvard business professor.

First, a quick review of Olson, who in the 1960s was an economist at the University of Maryland.  Olson pointed to the great effort that it takes to organize people with diffuse interests.  It’s hard for them to find each other, come together, and then organize themselves to advance their collective interests.  The “logic of collective action,” as Olson put it, is that individuals are so fragmented and diverse that it is difficult for their collective interests to be represented in the public policymaking.  That’s why it’s so darn hard for citizens to prevail against corporate lobbies, who tend to have the advantage in securing government favors, subsidies, legal entitlements, etc. 

It’s been a long time coming, but last week the Obama administration issued a directive ordering 19 different federal agencies to develop plans for making their research available to anyone under open-access standards, after a twelve-month embargo.  The directive applies to agencies with intramural research budgets of more than $100 million, and requires them to come up with policies and OA plans within six months.  This is a significant triumph because we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars of scientific and scholarly research.

In other words, the floodgates are opening!  U.S. taxpayers – and the rest of the world – will soon be able to read and use most federally funded research for free. They will no longer have to pay exorbitant fees to commercial publishers (who were given copyright control over the research for free) -- or to belong to the knowledge elite who have the privileged ("free") access to the research via the universities with which they are affiliated. 

This is a moment to savor.  It has been twelve years since the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a 2001 declaration that urged scholars, scientists and publishers to make their research freely available online.  And it’s been seven years since the widely emulated open access journal PLoS One (Public Library of Science), was founded, in 2006.  There have been countless other skirmishes and battles in the larger movement to make research and scholarship available under OA terms.  (Here is a nice ten-year overview of the movement written by Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute in 2012.)