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 is an American author, activist and independent scholar who has studied the commons for nearly twenty years. He is cofounder of Commons Strategies Group.

Muriel Borgeat (Switzerland) is an historian and project director at the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions.

Kate Chapman (USA), a geographer by training, worked extensively in Indonesia to build an OpenStreetMap community and was Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team from its inception in 2010 until 2015.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mary Lou Forward (USA) is Executive Director of the Open Education Consortium, a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations that supports the development of open, online and digital educational projects and policies.

Ellen Friedman (USA) is a commons activist and behavioral sleep medicine practitioner. She is a founding member of CommonSpark.

Dario Gentili (Italy), a philosopher, carries out his research at Italian and European universities and institutions.

Nigel C. Gibson (USA) is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and the author of Fanonian Practices, among other books.

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.

Silke Helfrich is a German author and independent activist of the commons who blogs, and is co-founder of the Commons-Institut in Germany.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jannis Kühne (Germany) studies urbanism at Bauhaus University in Weimar where he does research on urban commons.

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.

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.

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.

Bernard Lietaer (Belgium) is the author of The Future of Money and an expert in the design and implementation of cur­rency systems

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.

Astrid Lorenzen (Germany) has been an independent industrial designer for sustain­able product design since graduating from the Muthesius University in Kiel.

Lara Mallien is editor-in-chief of Oya magazine, a German publication that focuses on alternatives to Western-style consumer culture.

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.

Eric Nanchen (Switzerland) is a geographer and director of the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions.

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 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.

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.

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.

Jukka Peltokoski (Finland) is a political researcher and pedagogue, an activist in the precarity movement, a commoner in Commons.

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.

Will Ruddick has been a community development specialist in Kenya since 2009 where he facilitated the development of the commons-based currency Bangla-Pesa.

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

Julio Sanchez Onofre (Mexico) is a tech journalist for the newspaper El Economista in Mexico City.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frédéric Sultan (France) co-facilitates the Francophone Network for the Commons, and helps people create or claim commons in their communities.

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.

Niklas Toivakainen (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity economy collective.

Tero Toivanen (Finland) is a doctoral student in World Politics at the University of Helsinki.

Ruby van der Wekken (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity Economy collective.

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.

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.

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.