Presented at: GSEF2016 Montreal

Organisation: BarCola - Procomuns.net (Government and public agencies)

Date: September 8, 2016

Presenter: Mr. Enric Senabre Hidalgo (Dimmons - Digital Commons Research Group, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Contacts: esenabre@uoc.edu

Summary: 

New policies for Commons Collaborative Economies: the experience from Procomuns.net in Barcelona (Spain), a project for promoting digital peer production and civic alternatives to the sharing economy, inspired by the cooperative, solidarity and social economy.

Barcola is a Barcelona City Hall multi-stakeholder work group exploring Commons-Based Peer Production and the Collaborative Economy, and one of the organizing entities behind Procomuns.net., organisations like guifi.net, Fab Lab BCN, Goteo.org, Amical Wikimedia and other local initiatives.

In the last two decades, we have seen the emergence of Internet-enabled collaborative communities building shared and common resources. Commons-based Peer Production is rapidly growing, not just for the disruptive and very successful cases of software (with free and open software) and encyclopedias (Wikipedia) but also for information (OpenStreetMap, Wikihow), hardware (FabLabs, Open Source Ecology), accommodation (Couchsurfing) and finance/currency (Goteo.org, local coins). More recently, we have also seen the emergence and growth of hybrid models which retain some similar organizational logic, such as being based on collaborative principles, but privatizing others. This is the case in corporate-based peer production such as Uber or Airbnb. 

Are they truly collaborative economies? This issue opens up a series of debates and opportunities about how to retain the commons and socially transformative dimension in the collaborative economy through the recognition of the distinctive values of these modes of production, beyond value approaches which focus on monetization, and new forms of open/peer/platform cooperativism.

Main objectives of the project are:

To analyze and evaluate the situation of the commons-oriented model within the collaborative economy in the context of Barcelona.

To map the collaborative economy cases and commons-oriented models within the context of Barcelona.

To elaborate recommendations towards the planning of public policies in that field.

To enhance the dialogue between the social and solidarity economy and commons oriented production.

More info: http://procomuns.net/en/about-2/