The Commons -- partner to World Transport Policy and Practice -- is a shared space on the Internet, created in the early nineties 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 move to sustainability, social justice, and the critical role of individual responsibility in the making of both.

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.