The Commons - An Introduction

The Commons - An Introduction

Working Structure

Is The Commons For You?

Working with the "Knowledge Layers"

Intellectual Property under The Commons

Open Systems (and Free)

Join The Commons

Contacting Us

In Brief

The Commons is a shared space on the Internet, created in the late eighties with the intention of providing a wide open, world-wide, non-government forum which could serve as a working tool and assembly area for people and groups concerned with improving our understanding and control of technology as it impacts on people in their daily lives. The three central themes of all our work here:

the much needed, much delayed move to sustainability and social justice
the critical role of individual responsibility in the making of both of these happen, and finally
The crucial role of new technology is giving us the means to make all this work in a world of people who do not want to put on four sweaters and stay in their cave.

Virtually all of the work of The Commons is carried out 'off the economy', with the support of the founders and a fast-growing band of volunteers and users. We saw the whole venture then, and continue to see it now, as a modest step in the direction of creating new forms of citizen information, debate, consensus, action and, eventually, governance. The Commons is of course not alone in this ambitious struggle to find and put to work new forms of democracy and citizen action. We are but one among a growing number of attempts to do just this, albeit in many different ways.

All that said, however, please note that The Commons is not an "anti-market forum". To the contrary we retain the words of wisdom of Arthur Okun when he wrote: "Two cheers for the market, but not three!" You will see that theme time and again in these pages and programs. The market and its handmaiden technology are terrific, even indispensable tools for achieving our ambitious objectives for society. It's just that neither is not equipped to set these objectives. Which is where community, governance and citizen participation and action come in. (For a fairly concise early statement of objectives and plans we refer you to the 1994 statement, Why the Commons?. You may also find it of some interest to have a look through the materials presented here under the Quick Tour section of the site.)

Working Structure

The Commons is organized into a flexible collection of more or less free-standing "plots" or program areas, which are put freely at the disposition of self-nominated groups of concerned individuals with a commitment to the objectives set out here. Four main components are being brought together in the continuing process to do the job:

The Gateway:
The page you are presently reading constitutes the main gateway to the content and assembled working tools of The Commons. It serves two main functions:

First, it provides the overall coordinating structure and point of departure for the many different programs and activities that are going on at any time within this virtual space we call The Commons.
Second, it offers a working and communications space of its own -- dedicated to advancing the state of thinking and practice on the broader, cross-cutting issues of sustainable development and all that must go with it.

(For more on this we invite you to consult the Quick Tour section here.)

The Programs:
The programs of The Commons are presently clustered into two main groups:

Pattern Breaks -- A more general category that is concerned with the search for innovative "pattern break" concepts in the broad area of what we call socio-technical systems, and
The New Mobility Agenda -- This second lot are giving innovative looks at a range of new "access concepts", a global category that meshes the older concepts and approaches of "transportation" or physical displacement, for whatever reasons, with the new and potentially much more effective information and communications technologies.

Each program and site is intended to function as a dedicated "group learning and interaction" support system for its topic, making use of leading edge communications technologies and organization in order to give the participants an opportunity to bridge the barriers of space and time (and even on occasion of language) in order to come together to build new ideas and get support for new initiatives.

For a first overview of the content of the current sites, link to The Programs. However if you are in a hurry and have a specific area of interest, you may prefer just to click the program cluster and link to your left and go directly to that section. If you have a minute though and are a bit curious about how all these programs and technologies can be put to work for social and community purposes, you may wish to read on.

The Tools:
Each program is supported by quite an impressive array of information and communications tools. These tools and the organization of the site more generally are the result of almost seven years of experimentation and work with these concepts, including certainly as many failures as successes. They serve to open up the site and extend its influence and richness of content in several important ways.

First, to ensure that it is fully and efficiently linked to all the many programs and activities that are being carried on in each topic area in many places around the world.
Second, to permit those who come in and wish to collaborate are able to get together to share ideas, thoughts and initiatives through the site's growing array of interactive communications tools.

Your keys to the full and easy use of these tools will be found in the Help Desk hot link just to your left. Likewise the opening page of the @Toolkit provides useful introductory materials for first time users.

The People:
The job of The Commons is to focus attention and resources on the challenges of sustainable development. The most critical of these resources is people. If you check through the various program sites, you will see the names of hundreds of people working either individually or in groups all over the world who are coming together to make all this work. Keep your eye on them and their projects. They are among the heroes who are working to make this a better and more just world for us and for future generations.

Is The Commons for you?

Hard as we have tried to make this an easy place to be and to get around in, this bit of assembled 21st century content and electronics that we call The Commons is not for everyone (at least not yet, but give technology a few years and...). On the one hand, it is likely to be useful only for people who care about the issues that we have set up to broach in good company -- which can more or less be summarized as the management of technology and its impacts as they effect people in their day to day lives. Since this is such a very wide brief, we have tightened the focus with the various programs and projects, each of which has its selected area of competence and concentration.

There are however three other non-trivial practical constraints that serve to keep this from being a tool set which is equally useful to everyone, and which you may wish to consider before taking this further. In the spirit of that trenchant phrase "the search fo a convivial man/machine interface", these include..

Machine: Having the right equipment and technical competence is critical. (Have a look at the Technology Checkout and System Setup just to be sure that this is the place for you.)
Link: High speed communications links are important if you are to be a comfortable and efficient user (broadband is very desirable for fluent use).
Man: Attitude, patience and a certain turn of mind are just as important as the mechanics. If you are not patient with technology, this is surely not going to be an agreeable place for you. (In fact, if you find that you are unduly impatient with technology, it may be a warning sign; perhaps you are also impatient with other people and perhaps even yourself? Or do we have that wrong?)

A quick visit to the Start Here section, as well as those pages of the Help Desk which set out the technology, software and skill requirements for full and easy participation may help you make up your mind on this. No sense on climbing on board if you are going to be unhappy and unproductive. On the other hand, if you have been waiting for an excuse to make the break into these new technologies and work methods, this may be about as good a way as you can find to negotiate the transformation. And of course if we can help... well, that's precisely what we are here for.

Working with the "Knowledge Layers"

There is a bit of a system at work here. Briefly: in any section of The Commons, we try to create an easily accessible structure that provides a useful complement to (a) your personal knowledge "reach" on any given topic (what's inside your head, in your library, somehow known to those immediately around you, etc.) on the one hand, and (b) the wide world of the Web and Internet to which you have access on the other (and to which each site here tries hard to provide a smooth and useful interface). Within this broader superstructure, The Commons tries to offer several useful layers of information and access, the raw materials which, in addition to your own thirst and energies, you can fashion your knowledge on your chosen topic.

To illustrate how we intend this process to work, let us chose one example from the site, say "carsharing" (a fast-evolving transportation technique to which there is a great deal more than one might initially think). There is thus a World Carshare site here, which incidentally represents probably the best single starting point on the subject that you can find anywhere in the world (ahem). However, if you were simply to confine your attention to that site alone, you would run the risk to miss out on some potentially important things. As carsharing is part of a much greater whole, The Commons carshare site is, similarly, one of the subsets of a broader cluster of programs here, the first of which we call the New Mobility Agenda. Thus if your interest extends beyond the raw mechanics or tabulations of the detail of carsharing per se, for example the broader issues and policy considerations which must be understood if any given project is to find its rightful place and succeed in its community, then you should find the @ccess site a more than useful complement and base of support. Likewise (and finally), we think it is important that the even broader base of information and contacts that is provided by the overall program of The Commons itself, with its emphasis on the basic issues of sustainable development and social justice (against the backdrop of insistent technology change) is also something that should be worth following.

Thus, to get full benefit of what The Commons to offer on this (or any other topic covered here), we recommend that you sign in and follow developments at all three of these layers. And bearing in mind the ever-present dangers of information overload, we make a real effort to ensure that the flow of information and materials on all the sites is an efficient one for you and your personal knowledge building system. One of the ways in which we try to ensure that this actually happens, is by our willingness to listen to what our several thousand regular visitors and partners have to say, not only on the details of any specific item or program area, but also on how we can do a better job at managing this knowledge-building system. You will note that throughout the site there are communications tools which are put there precisely to encourage this creative interaction. And we hope that you too will chose to use them form time to time, and help us do a better job not only for you but for all the others as well. That's of course why we call it The Commons.

Open Systems (and Free)

This will be so clear for anyone who has cared enough to get this far that we will just leave it here at that.

Intellectual Property under The Commons

The issue of intellectual property is up in the air and not about to settle down in the next day or so. A couple of things we can be sure about though: The first is that is that the rules are changing and the old order will never be re-established. The second is that the new order will be far looser, somber faced (the grimmer the expression, the higher the self-interest) protests notwithstanding. The third is that from the vantage of the public interest, the new scheme of things, is likely to be, not only far more open, but also more fun and more creative than the old. The fourth is that the transition is going to be a rocky one. And the last is that each of us has to figure out how to deal with all this during this period of transition. (For one good read on this have a look at John Perry Barlow's contentious but still pretty readable 1992 piece, "Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net". Today, more than 4 Moore generations later, it still poses the issues in ways which have clearly not been resolved.

Here at The Commons we have decided to treat this as a one-way street. Thus, our commitment is to honor and respect the intellectual property rights of others, but at the same time to put the materials that we develop here into the public domain for all to freely access and use as might be useful to them and, we fondly hope, the public interest..

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