Patterns of
COMMONING
PART II. Notable Acts of Commoning Across Cultures and Centuries
“When offered a choice between A and B, remember there’s a whole alphabet out there …”
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David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson (USA) is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton New York, President of the Evolution Institute, and Editor in Chief of the online magazine This View of Life.
Jacques Paysan
Jacques Paysan (Germany) holds a PhD in Neurobiology, and is a commons fan and SPIM Expert. He lives in the Jagst-Valley in Baden-Württemberg.
Cameron Neylon
Cameron Neylon (USA) is former Advocacy Director at PLOS, a role he moved to from a career as a researcher. He has an interest in how to make the Internet more effective as a tool for science and writes and speaks regularly on scholarly communication.
Andrea Mura
Andrea Mura (Italy) is a Lecturer in Middle East Politics and Political Thought at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He has published widely in the fields of political philosophy, psychoanalysis and comparative political thought.
Martin Hollinetz
Martin Hollinetz (Germany) is a social pedagogue, vocational educator and regional developer. An Ashoka Fellow since 2013, he is a lecturer at the University of Art and Design Linz and was elected Austrian of the Year in the field of creative industries in 2013.
Hannelore Hollinetz
Hannelore Hollinetz (Germany) is a musician and educator. She works as an actress, project developer and facilitator for projects for children and youths, and is a cofounder, with Martin Hollinetz, of the Otelo network and Otelo eGen.
San Hoerth
San Hoerth is a developer and hacktivist in free culture, free software and commons, and founder and coordinator of the Latin American collective Código Sur. He is also cofounder and editor of the Pillku Magazine on commons and free culture.
Dorn Cox
Dorn Cox is a founding member of Farm Hack and a farmer in Lee, New Hampshire (US), where he continues to develop and refine open source agricultural research and development systems to improve farm productivity and resilience.
Mike Linksvayer
Mike Linksvayer (USA) serves on the boards of Software Freedom Conservancy, OpenHatch, and AcaWiki. From 2003 to 2012 he served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Creative Commons.
Andreas Weber
Andreas Weber (Germany) is a biologist, philosopher and book and magazine writer based in Berlin. His longstanding interest is how human feeling, subjectivity and social identity are related to biological worldmaking and cognition.
Ruby van der Wekken
Ruby van der Wekken (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity Economy collective.
Julio Sanchez Onofre
Julio Sanchez Onofre (Mexico) is a tech journalist for the newspaper El Economista in Mexico City.
Enric Senabre Hidalgo
Enric Senabre Hidalgo (Spain) is a member of the Platoniq collective and cofounder and content coordinator at Goteo.org. He is also vice president of the Observatory for CyberSociety and teaches at the Open University of Catalonia.
Ale Fernandez
Ale Fernandez (Spain) works in the CIC’s housing commission and with Guerrilla Translation. He helped with the English language translation of this essay and with various edits and corrections.
Richa Audichya
Richa Audichya (India) is director of Jan Chetna Sansthan, an NGO that works with a women-centered approach to adivasi people’s rights and leadership development – the focus of her work for more than twenty years.
Ellen Friedman
Ellen Friedman (USA) is a commons activist and behavioral sleep medicine practitioner. She is a founding member of CommonSpark.
Monica Vasile
Monica Vasile (Romania) is a visiting fellow at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she researches issues of environmental and economic anthropology.
Salvatore Iaconesi
Salvatore Iaconesi (Italy) is a robotic engineer, philosopher, artist and hacker who teaches Digital Design and Near Future Design at La Sapienza University in Rome and at ISIA School of Design in Florence. He is the founder of Art is Open Source, an international network of researchers, artists and designers.
Zelealem Tefera Ashenafi
Zelealem Tefera Ashenafi (Ethiopia) works as country representative of the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Ethiopia overseeing ecological monitoring, community-based conservation, community-based tourism and rural development activities.
Claudia Gómez-Portugal M.
Claudia Gómez-Portugal M. is a Mexican activist promoter of the transition agenda and founder of the organization SAKBE Commons for Change and the Free Learning Communities for Life initiative.
Soma KP
Soma KP (India) is a researcher, policy analyst and support person to community based institution-building initiatives, with a focus on gender, development and natural resource based livelihoods.
Will Ruddick
Will Ruddick has been a community development specialist in Kenya since 2009 where he facilitated the development of the commons-based currency Bangla-Pesa.
Arturo Escobar
Arturo Escobar (Colombia/USA) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Research Associate, Grupo Nación/Cultura/ Memoria, Universidad del Valle, Cali.
Nigel Gibson
Nigel C. Gibson (USA) is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and the author of Fanonian Practices, among other books.
Bernard Lietaer
Bernard Lietaer (Belgium) is the author of The Future of Money and an expert in the design and implementation of currency systems
Tero Toivanen
Tero Toivanen (Finland) is a doctoral student in World Politics at the University of Helsinki.
Frédéric Sultan
Frédéric Sultan (France) co-facilitates the Francophone Network for the Commons, and helps people create or claim commons in their communities.
Tristan Copley-Smith
Tristan Copley-Smith (US) is a documentary filmmaker and communications expert aiming to empower positive disruptions in technology and society. He is cofounder of the Open Source Beehives citizen science project.
Véronique Rioufol
Véronique Rioufol (France) is Terre de Liens’ European Relations Coordinator. She has a background in international relations and political studies and has worked in human rights organizations.
Sjoerd Wartena
Sjoerd Wartena (France) has been active in the organic agriculture movement for decades. In 2003 he cofounded the Terre de Liens association and was president for its first ten years.
Jannis Kühne
Jannis Kühne (Germany) studies urbanism at Bauhaus University in Weimar where he does research on urban commons.
Marcela Olivera
Marcela Olivera (Bolivia) is a water commons organizer in Bolivia and Latin America. Since 2004 she has been developing an inter-American citizens’ network on water justice named Red VIDA.
Eric Nanchen
Eric Nanchen (Switzerland) is a geographer and director of the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions.
Andrea Nightingale
Andrea J. Nightingale (Sweden) is a Geographer by training and presently Chair of Rural Development in the Global South at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden.
Astrid Lorenzen
Astrid Lorenzen (Germany) has been an independent industrial designer for sustainable product design since graduating from the Muthesius University in Kiel.
Van Bo Le-Mentzel
Van Bo Le-Mentzel (Germany) has invented all kinds of useful things, among others, do-it-yourself blueprints for furniture and tiny houses. He has become known for social DIY projects such as “Hartz IV Möbel,” the Unreal Estate House, and the One-Square-Meter House.
Étienne Le Roy
Étienne Le Roy (France) is emeritus Professor of Legal Anthropology at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1 where he has directed the research Laboratory for Legal Anthropology of Paris from 1988 to 2007 and Curricula of African Studies, from 1993 to 2003.
Dario Gentili
Dario Gentili (Italy), a philosopher, carries out his research at Italian and European universities and institutions.
Muriel Borgeat
Muriel Borgeat (Switzerland) is an historian and project director at the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions.
James Stodder
James Stodder (USA) teaches economics and econometrics in the School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Management Department at the US Coast Guard Academy.
Alain Ambrosi
Alain Ambrosi (Canada) is a designer and producer of intercultural projects, independent researcher, author, videographer and producer of the Remix The Commons Project.
Ariadna Serra
Ariadna Serra (Spain) works at l’art du soleil, a travelling eco-show in a converted truck, which proposes itself as an alternative approach to the current socioeconomic situation.
Anne Salmond
Anne Salmond (New Zealand) is a Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. For many years she has worked with indigenous leaders and groups in New Zealand and the Pacific
Michael Peter Edson
Michael Peter Edson (USA) is a strategist and thought leader at the forefront of digital transformation in the cultural sector. He works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Maria Bareli-Gaglia
Maria Bareli-Gaglia (Greece) is an economist, currently pursuing her PhD in Sociology/Social Anthropology (University of Crete). Her thesis involves the study of the annual festivals (paniyiries) at Ikaria.
David Bollier
David Bollier is an American author, activist and independent scholar who has studied the commons for nearly twenty years. He is cofounder of Commons Strategies Group.
Silke Helfrich
Silke Helfrich is a German author and independent activist of the commons who blogs, and is co-founder of the Commons-Institut in Germany.
Helmut Leitner
Helmut Leitner (Austria) is a natural scientist and graduate in chemistry from the Technical University in Graz, Austria. He works as an independent software developer, systems analyst and consultant.
Erika Styger
Erika Styger, PhD (United States), is Director of Programs, SRI-Rice, Cornell University, Ithaca New York (eds8@cornell.edu), which she set up and has headed since 2010.