P2P Foundation


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P2P Foundation: The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives is an organization with the aim of studying the impact of peer to peer technology and thought on society. It was founded by Michel Bauwens, James Burke and Brice Le Blévennec.[1]

The P2P Foundation is a registered institute founded in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Its local registered name is: Stichting Peer to Peer Alternatives, dossier nr: 34264847.[2]


http://www.p2pfoundation.net/

The P2P Foundation is an international organization focused on studying, researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices in a very broad sense. This wiki is our knowledge commons. Our motto is "Together we know everything, together we have everything", i.e. pooling our resources through commons, creates prosperity for all. We document thousands of initiatives going in that direction on order to create "Hope with evidence".


http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Foundation:About

Mission and Objectives

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives proposes to be a meeting place for those who can broadly agree with the following guiding ideas, principles and propositions, which are also argued in the essay or book in progress, P2P and Human Evolution:

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives addresses the following

  1. brings information together;
  2. connects people and mutually informs them
  3. strives for integrative insights coming from the many subfields;
  4. can organize events for reflection and action;
  5. can educate people about critical and creative tools for world-making

Michel Bauwens, November 29, 2005

Structure of the P2P Foundation

The P2P Foundation is a distributed organization. In order to foster its growth, it has been necessary to create some core, managed structures. The development of these is ongoing but here are some notable aspects:

The P2P Foundation has several nodes on the web: a wiki, a blog, a social network, and an email discussion list. Each has an administrator.

The Commons Transition project is the Foundation's main communications and policy hub. It has a website, online magazine and a wiki.

Read here for more on the History of the P2P Foundation.

What Other People Are Saying about Us

 

 

 

 

Evolution of the P2P Foundation

Interview of Michel Bauwens by V. Sasi Kumar:

"Michel Bauwens was in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in December 2008, to participate in the Free Software Free Society conference and talked about the work of the Foundation. In this interview, done through email after his return to Thailand, Michel speaks about how he decided to leave his job and start the P2P Foundation, what principles the Foundation is based on, what its work is, and how the work has been progressing.

 

You were an information scientist and magazine editor before you started the P2P Foundation. Can you tell us about this evolution? How did it happen?

MB: My first job (but without any formal library and information science training, as I studied political science) was nine years as reference librarian and information analyst for a centre in Brussels. In 1990, I started working as strategic business information manager at the headquarters of the agribusiness wing of British Petroleum. At that time, I reformulated the role of librarian into that of ‘cybrarian’, ie managing “just in time, just for you” information streams to senior management who were not in any real sense using the physical library resources anymore.

As the animal feed businesses were divested by 1993, I moved on to creating a Flemish magazine that was a mix of Mondo 2000 and Wired, and then became one of the Internet evangelists in my home country, leading to work as a serial Internet entrepreneur.

From my very first encounter with the Internet, ie collective mailing lists combining experts from around the world, I knew this was a technology that would change the very fabric of our world. Never before had there been such real-time possibilities for human cooperation and collective intelligence on a global scale. From now on, the privileged communication infrastructures that were only in the hands of multinationals and the State, would be distributed and democratised, a shift at least as important as the effect of the printing press.

At the same time, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the corporate world, seeing how the neoliberal system not only created increased social inequality, exacted a terrible psychic cost from even its privileged managerial layers, while also creating havoc in our natural world. I started seeing the system as a giant Ponzi scheme (a scheme in which the profit of those who invest earlier comes from those who invest later), so what surprised me was not the meltdown of 2008, but why it took so long to actually manifest itself!

At the same time, there was a revival of social resistance starting in 1995, and I was noticing, as a professional trend-watcher, that there was a common template in the new forms of social organisation, the one I now call the ‘peer to peer’ dynamic, or ‘voluntary permissionless self-aggregation around the production of common value’.

Key for me was the observation of the Internet bust in April 2000, which I witnessed from a privileged position as I was working in the same sector. As the stock market imploded, pundits were predicting the end of the Internet because no more capital was available for innovation and development. In fact the opposite happened -- rather than diminishing, innovation increased, entirely driven by the social field of aggregating geeks, giving birth to the Web 2.0, the first social model based on an interrelationship between new forms of capitalism and user-generated production of value. I knew then that I would study this phenomenon more deeply, and in particular since I consider peer aggregation to be a non-alienating form of work, how it could be leveraged as a force for social change.

So in October 2002, I decided to quit my corporate engagement, take a sabbatical to think things through, and moved to Thailand to create a global cyber-collective to research and promote P2P dynamics.

 

Is there a basic set of hypotheses from which the Foundation starts?

 

Yes, I formulated the following principles when I started the Foundation:

 

I also believe that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge-creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near-zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement; that universal common property regimes, ie modes of peer property such as the general public licence and the creative commons licences should be promoted and extended.

These principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the general public licence, and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements, provide for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life.

If we can connect this new mode of production, pioneered by knowledge workers, with the older traditions of sharing and solidarity of workers and farmers movements, then we can build a very strong contemporary social movement that can transcend the failures of socialism.

I think it also offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values.

I call the new peer to peer mode a ‘total social fact’, because it integratively combines subjectivity (new values), inter-subjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and inter-objectivity (new forms of organisation) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.

 

Was this mostly your work, or were others involved in formulating these principles?

I formulated the principles on my own, but also after at least two years of reading, and of being attuned with the zeitgeist (zeitgeist describes the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambience and morals of an era). Others were formulating similar ideas, though in different ways. So as usual we should not claim too much personal merit; we are standing on the shoulders of the giants of the past, and are simply lucky to accompany a deep shift in human consciousness that would be taking place without us just as well. At the most, we can try to put some extra grease in the machine.

 

What exactly does the Foundation do?

We want to be an interconnecting platform for people involved in realising the new open and free, participatory and commons-oriented paradigms in every social field. So, we are monitoring and describing real-world initiatives, theoretical efforts, creating a library of primary and secondary material, and trying to make sense of that aggregation by developing a coherent set of concepts and principles. We do this with a wiki, with nearly 8,000 pages of information, which have been viewed over 5 million times; through a blog reaching about 35,000 unique users last year, a Ning community with a few hundred members, and a number of mailing lists. The most active is the peer to peer research list, where academics and non-academics can collaboratively reach understandings. We also had two annual physical meet-ups in Belgium and the UK, and have some national groups such as in the Netherlands and Greece. There’s a lot of hidden activity acting as connectors between various initiatives, which, despite the global Internet, often don’t know they are working on very similar projects that could reinforce each other.

Peer to peer happens without us, but we want to add a little interconnecting grease to the system. My ultimate aim is to create a powerful social movement that can support the necessary reforms for social justice, sustainability of the natural world, and opening up science and culture to open and free sharing and collaboration, so that the whole weight of the collective intelligence of humanity can be brought to bear on the grave challenges we are facing.

 

How do you see the work that has already been done? Is it progressing according to your expectations?

I’m pleased on some levels, frustrated at others. In three years, we have constructed a sizeable amount of interrelated information and knowledge, and a ‘community of understanding’. I think we have a ‘really existing virtual community’ that cares about the ideals that we formulated. Each of these people are themselves active in their own real-world projects, some of which will be crucial change agents in the near future. Undoubtedly, the P2P Foundation is a global brand at least on the level of Internet users, as we have not crossed the boundary to mass media reporting. Our growth seems slow, but organic and rather strong, with not so much turnover and a lot of loyalty. Our internal culture of civil discourse seems very strong. On a personal level, I have a little more social and reputational capital, and have been privileged to explain P2P in several countries on four continents, which has allowed me to relate physical presence with the virtual network -- a strong combination.

My big frustration is that I failed to develop a ‘business model’ to sustain myself and my family, so I’m returning to paid employment in a few weeks, which will necessarily diminish my engagement, which has been full-time for the last three years, with the P2P Foundation’s work." (http://infochangeindia.org/200907137829/Technology/Features/Dreaming-of-a-peer-to-peer-world.html)

 

Key Theses on P2P Politics

Michel Bauwens:

Written in 2007:

"1. Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization:

a) it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines of finite resources

b) it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation through copyright, patents, etc ...

2. Therefore, the number one priority for a sustainable civilization is overturning these principles into their opposite:

a) we need to base our physical economy on a recognition of the finitude of natural resources, and achieve a sustainable steady-state economy

b) we need to facilitate free and creative cooperation and lower the barriers to such exchange by reforming the copyright and other restrictive regimes

3. Hierarchy, markets, and even democracy are means to allocate scarce resources through authority, pricing, and negotiation; they are not necessary in the realm of the creation and free exchange of immaterial value, which will be marked by bottom-up forms of peer governance

4. Markets, as means to to manage scarce physical resources, are but one of the means to achieve such allocation, and need to be divorced from the idea of capitalism, which is a system of infinite growth.

5. The creation of immaterial value, which again needs to become dominant in a post-material world which recognized the finiteness of the material world, will be characterized by the further emergence of non-reciprocal peer production.

6. Peer production is a more productive system for producing immaterial value than the for-profit mode, and in cases of the asymmetric competition between for-profit companies and for-benefit institutions and communities, the latter will tend to emerge

7. Peer production produces more social happiness, because 1) it is based on the highest from of individual motivation, nl. intrinsic positive motivation; 2) it is based on the highest form of collective cooperation, nl. synergistic cooperation characterized by four wins (the participants x2, the community, the universal system)

8. Peer governance, the bottom-up mode of participative decision-making (only those who participate get to decide) which emerges in peer projects is politically more productive than representative democracy, and will tend to emerge in immaterial production. However, it can only replace representative modes in the realm of non-scarcity, and will be a complementary mode in the political realm. What we need are political structures that create a convergence between individual and collective interests.

9. Peer property, the legal and institutional means for the social reproduction of peer projects, are inherently more distributive than both public property and private exclusionary property; it will tend to become the dominant form in the world of immaterial production (which includes all design of physical products).

10. Peer to peer as the relational dynamic of free agents in distributed networks will likely become the dominant mode for the production of immaterial value; however, in the realm of scarcity, the peer to peer logic will tend to reinforce peer-informed market modes, such as fair trade; and in the realm of the scarcity based politics of group negotiation, will lead to reinforce the peer-informed state forms such as multistakeholdership forms of governance.

11. The role of the state must evolve from the protector of dominant interests and arbiter between public regulation and privatized corporate modes (an eternal and improductive binary choice), towards being the arbiter between a triarchy of public regulation, private markets, and the direct social production of value. In the latter capacity, it must evolve from the welfare state model, to the partner state model, as involved in enabling and empowering the direct social creation of value.

12. The world of physical production needs to be characterized by:

a) sustainable forms of peer-informed market exchange (fair trade, etc..);

b) reinvigorated forms of reciprocity and the gift economy;

c) a world based on social innovation and open designs, available for physical production anywhere in the world.

13. The best guarantor of the spread of the peer to peer logic to the world of physical production, is the distribution of everything, i.e. of the means of production in the hands of individuals and communities, so that they can engage in social cooperation. While the immaterial world will be characterized by a peer to peer logic on non-reciprocal generalized exchange, the peer informed world of material exchange will be characterized by evolving forms of reciprocity and neutral exchange.

14. We need to move from empty and ineffective anti-capitalist rhetoric, to constructive post-capitalist construction. Peer to peer theory, as the attempt to create a theory to understand peer production, governance and property, and the attendant paradigms and value systems of the open/free, participatory, and commons oriented social movements, is in a unique position to marry the priority values of the right, individual freedom, and the priority values of the left, equality. In the peer to peer logic, one is the condition of the other, and cooperative individualism marries equipotentiality and freedom in a context of non-coercion.

15. We need to become politically sensitive to invisible architectures of power. In distributed systems, where there is no overt hierarchy, power is a function of design. One such system, perhaps the most important of all, is the monetary system, whose interest-bearing design requires the market to be linked to a system of infinite growth, and this link needs to be broken. A global reform of the monetary system, or the spread of new means of direct social production of money, are necessary conditions for such a break.

16. This is the truth of the peer to peer logical of social relationships: 1) together we have everything; 2) together we know everything. Therefore, the conditions for dignified material and spiritual living are in our hands, bound with our capacity to relate and form community. The emancipatory peer to peer theory does not offer new solutions for global problems, but most of all new means to tackle them, by relying on the collective intelligence of humankind. We are witnessing the rapid emergence of peer to peer toolboxes for the virtual world, and facilitation techniques of the physical world of face to face encounters, both are needed to assist in the necessary change of consciousness that needs to be midwifed. It is up to us to use them.

17. At present, the world of corporate production is benefiting from the positive externalities of widespread social innovation (innovation as an emerging property of the network itself, not as an internal characteristic of any entity), but there is no return mecachism, leading to the problem of precarity. Now that the productivity of the social is beyond doubt, we need solutions that allow the state and for-profit corporation to create return mechanisms, such as forms of income that are no longer directly related to the private production of wealth, but reward the social production of wealth."

See Also

 


Links  

http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Foundation

This category holds documents related to the P2P Foundation including the functioning of the various networks and workgroups.

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`F

A

`    ► About the P2P Foundation (16 P)

`M

`P

`    ► P2P Foundation Knowledge Commons (5 C)

    ► P2P Foundation Network (1 C, 3 P)

    ► P2P Foundation Operations (2 C)

`R

`T

`W

`    ► Working with the P2P Foundation (2 C, 1 P)

Pages

A

`    Alliances of the P2P Foundation

    Assembly of the Commons

`B

`    Blaqswan's Collective

`C

`    Combined Category Searching

    Commons Transition and P2P Primer

    Commons-Based Publishing and Distribution Models

`I

`    P2P Foundation:Incorporating Documents

    Introduction to the P2P Foundation's P2P Thinking

`M

Michel Bauwens

`N

`    New Member Questionnaire

`O

`    Overview of P2P Foundation Proposals

`P

`    P2P Foundation Global Network

    P2P Foundation Participation in Scientific Symposia

    P2P Foundation Project on the Thermo-Dynamic Efficiences of Commons-Based Peer Production

    P2P Lab

    P2P Public Intellectuals

    P2P Seminars

    Peer to Peer Syllabus

    Phygital Research Project

`R

`    Reach of P2P Foundation Twitter Accounts

    Recommended Guidelines and Good Practices

    Research Projects of the P2P Foundation

`S

`    Screencast with an Overview of the Transformative Proposals of the P2P Foundation

    Stacco Troncoso Presenting the P2P Foundation's Community Orientation at Prix Ars 2016

    Strategies for Outreach

`T

`    Think Global, Print Local

    Towards a Coalition of Commons-Oriented Entrepreneurial Coalitions

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`    P2P Foundation:Visual Identity

`W

`    What is the P2P Foundation and Its Role in Research

    With P2P Towards a Post-Capitalist Society

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