Intended for two to five players, the game usually lasts between 60 and 90 minutes.  It has enough of a basic storyline to be easily understood, but enough complexity and sophisticated twists to be unpredictable and interesting.  The key objective of the game is to “create a Political Arena resilient enough to defend the commons against encroaching enclosures.”  The players win when there are no more enclosure cards in the Political Arena.  They lose if there are more than five enclosures present at any one time.

The backs of the Oppressive Forces cards feature a conquistador with a spear and text reading, “I am here to take the commons.”  One of the Oppressive Force card is “Trump Elected!” which demobilizes every commons campaign underway.  Another OF card, “Old Inner Culture,” prohibits the discarding of “attitudes” cards (which might otherwise hasten commoning).  A “Fear of the Unknown” card prohibits players from drawing new cards for one cycle.

By contrast, the commoner cards feature such things as urban gardens, First Nations, degrowth and independent media.  A series of “Attitude” cards affect a player’s capacity to cooperate. 

WSF participants submitted a wild diversity of 240 cards to Rhéaume giving many perspectives on commoning and enclosure.  Rheaume used 120 of cards and his own knowledge of game design to produce the game, printing at a local printer.  He tested C@rds in Common through 25 games and four design iterations, attempting to achieve a 50% failure rate (the forces of enclosure win).  Players discovered that the complexities of cooperation grow as new enclosures introduce new variables.  A game booklet describes how players can make winning more difficult (by accelerating the rate of enclosure threats and reducing the time allowed to build civil society).

Rhéaume concedes that the first play of C@rds in Common can be challenging, but there are YouTube videos to help new players learn the game. (See this video introduction to the game as a project, and this "how to play" video tutorial.)  

Rhéaume would like to refine the game further – it still has elements of the WSF event, including some French-only cards – but he is pleased that the game helps introduce players into the commons worldview and start deeper conversations about it.  Following most games, players reflect on what happened and tell stories about the successful collaborations that emerged and enclosures that prevailed.

The game was released in February, first with a European launch overseen by Fréderic Sultan of Gazibo.  There are now more than 70 decks of C@rds in Common (in French, C@rtes en Communs) circulating there.

The Canadian launch of the game will take place in Montreal on May 11 at 17:30 to 20:30 at 5248 Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal.  To register for the (free) event, here is a link on Brown Paper Tickets.

A deck of the game can be bought directly, at cost, via a commercial distributor, Game Crafters, at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/c-rds-in-common, for $22.40.  Until May 31, Canadians can acquire the game more cheaply by signing up for a bulk order at this webpage; Rhéaume et al. will then distribute the games to individual buyers. 

Let me add a charming historical footnote that Rhéaume sahred with me. On the back of each commoner card, there is a drawing of a farmer with the text, “Give me my leather coat and my purse in a groat. That’s some habit for a husbandman.”

Those lines are from a song in a medieval mummers play, "The Seven Champions of Christendom." The lyrics are a heated discussion between a servingman to the king and a free and independent husbandman (commoner) about the merits and liabilities of their respective stations in life. (The song originated from Symondsbury, near Bridport, Dorset, in England -- so a shout-out to STIR magazine, which is based there!).

A sample exchange between the servingman and the husbandman:

[Servingman] But then we do wear the finest of grandeur, My coat is trimmed with fur all around; Our shirts as white as milk and our stockings made of silk: That's clothing for a servingman.

[Husbandman] As to thy grandeur give I the coat I wear Some bushes to ramble among;Give to me a good greatcoat and in my purse a grout [coarse meal], That's clothing for an husbandman.

The full lyrics of the song can be found here.

The Charter’s authors describe the document as “the maximum ‘commons denominator’ of mapping projects that aspire to share data for the common good.” If you follow these guidelines,” write the mappers, “you will contribute to a Global Data Commons. That is, you will govern your mapping community and manage data differently than people who centralize data control for profit.”

“The Charter does not describe the vision, scope or values of a specific mapping project.  It is rather an expression of Data Commons principles. It will help you reimagine how you protect the animating spirit of your mapping project and prevent your data from being co-opted or enclosed.”

Here is version 0.6 of the Charter, which is still a work-in-progress:

1. Reflect your ambition together.  Discuss the core of your project again and again. Everybody involved should always feel in resonance with the direction in which it’s heading.

2. Make your community thrive.  For the project to be successful, a reliable community is more important than anything else. Care for those who might support you when you need them most.

3. Separate commons and commerce.  Mapping for the commons is different from producing services or products to compete on the map-market. Make sure you don't feed power-imbalances or profit-driven agendas and learn how to systematically separate commons from commerce.

4. Design for interoperability. Think of your map as a node in a network of many maps. Talk with other contributors to the Data Commons to find out if you can use the same data model, licence and approach to mapping.

5. Care for a living vocabulary. Vocabularies as entry points to complex social worlds are always incomplete. Learn from other mappers' vocabularies. Make sure your vocabulary can be adjusted. Make it explicit and publish it openly, so that others can learn from it too.

6. Document transparently.  Sharing your working process, learnings and failures allow others to replicate, join and contribute. Don't leave documentation for after. Do it often and make it understandable. Use technologies designed for open cooperation.

7. Crowdsource what you can. Sustain your project whenever possible with money, time, knowledge, storing space, hardware or monitoring from your community or public support. Stay independent!

8. Use FLOSS tools. It gives you the freedom to further develop your own project and software according to your needs. And it enables you to contribute to the development of these tools.

9. Build upon the open web platform. Open web standards ensure your map, its data and associated applications cannot be enclosed and are prepared for later remixing and integration with other sources.

10. Own your data. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing or copying what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent you from being sued or your data being enclosed. Ban Google.

11. Protect your data. To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. Use appropriate licenses to protect your collective work!

12. Archive your project. When it doesn’t work anymore for you, others still might want to build on it in the future.

(Earlier versions of the document can be found here and here. If you have comments or new points to add to the Charter, here is a hackpad for new contributions.) 

These twelve principles represent a lot of hard-won wisdom into the functioning of data commons!  

Families organize tables of children’s clothes to share for free, helping them to clear out outgrown clothing and avoid waste. There is a small community garden. Neighbors have even organized a project to monitor city pollution and traffic.

One might wonder how a few acres of prime urban space could possibly become a commons. The answer has a lot to do with the self-reliant, enterprising character of the neighborhood. 

Dogged citizen-historians in the neighborhood pored through legal records and discovered a document showing that the land did not really belong to the city.  The American Red Cross had given funds in 1920, following WWI, to “an Entity” which “should deal with popular instruction and education, with special attention to children.”  But city authorities had allowed the land to fall into the hands of real estate speculators, who then tried to build luxury apartments and a parking lot on the site.  (A short history of the Nidiaci garden describes it as an urban commons and a site for commoning.)  

It took many public protests, petitions and demonstrations by the families of the San Frediano district to finally persuade the mayor of Florence in 2011 to relent, and allow the site to be used as a children’s park. Even with that concession, it took further pressure from residents to obtain the keys to the part of the garden still in public hands.  Then the commoning began – and continues today.

There is no tragedy of a commons here; residents understand that they must take care of their garden. The site occupies a protected, walled nook of the bustling downtown area, and is conscientiously locked every evening at twilight. But the site is also a rare platform for an urban neighborhood to express itself and be itself.

The garden is no mere “resource.” It is a cherished place for connecting with neighbors and nourishing a sense of community amidst the grandeur and tumult of a downtown tourist district. What could be more enlivening than children making their own fun in the heart of a city, with amiable friends and families enjoying themselves?

Here is the Contents page from the report:

Introduction

I.  THE VALUE QUESTION 

            A.  Why “Value” Lies at the Heart of Politics

            B.  Should We Even Use the Word “Value”?

II.  TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF VALUE

III.  KEY CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING A NEW THEORY OF VALUE 

            A.  Can Abstract Metrics Help Build a New Value Regime?

            B.  How Shall We Value “Nature”? 

            C.  Should We De-Monetize Everyday Life?

IV.  COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION: A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT IN UNDERSTANDING VALUE?                       

            A.  Practical Strategies for Building New Systems of Value

            B.  The Dangers of Co-optation and Wishful Thinking

            C.  But Peer Production Still Relies Upon (Unpaid) Care Work and Nature!

V.  NOTES TOWARD A COMMONS THEORY OF VALUE 

CONCLUSION 

Appendix A:  Participants  

Appendix B:  A Commons Theory of Value

Appendix C:  Readings for Value Deep Dive

Below, some excerpts from the report:

The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today.  There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives.  Especially since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of “rational” free markets as a fair system for allocating material wealth has become something of a joke in some quarters.  Similarly, the idea of government serving as an honest broker dedicated to meeting people’s basic needs, assuring fairness, providing ecological stewardship and advancing the public interest, is also in tatters.

“We cannot do without a value regime,” said Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group.  “Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live.”  Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes, he said:  A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value-creating – a contributor to Gross Domestic Product.  But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as “an expense, not a value-creator,” said Bauwens.  The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system.

Bauwens said that his work in fostering peer production communities is an exploratory project in creating a new type of “value sovereignty” based on mutualism and caring.  An important aspect of this work is protecting the respective community’s value sovereignty through defensive accommodations with the market system.  “The peer production system lives a dichotomy,” explained Bauwens.  “It is based on contributions for which we don’t get paid.  We therefore have to interact with the market so that we can earn a living and get paid for what we have to do.”  Maintaining a peer community within a hostile capitalist order requires that the community “create membranes to capture value from the dominant system, but then to filter it and use it in different ways” – i.e., through collective decisionmaking and social solidarity, not through the market logic of money-based, individual exchange.

…. One participant, Ina Praetorius, a postpatriarchal thinker, author and theologian based in Switzerland, asked a provocative question:  “Do we need to use the word ‘value’ at all?”  She explained that as an ethicist she does not find the word useful.  “Value is not part of my vocabulary since writing my 2005 book, Acting Out of Abundance [in German, Handeln aus der Fülle].  It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.”  Praetorius believes the word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets.  But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

Praetorius is also suspicious of “value” as a word associated with the German philosophical tradition of idealism, which she regards as “an unreliable authority because of its strange methodological origins” – “Western bourgeois men of the 19th and 20th Centuries, who created an invisible sphere of abstract concepts meant to denote certain qualities, as a means to forget their own belonging to nature and their own basic needs, especially towards women.”

But ecophilosopher Aetzel Griffioen, based in The Netherlands, regards the word “value” as “a necessary abstraction that can be used in some places and not in others.”  In his dealing with a labor union of domestic workers, for example, Griffioen considers the word too philosophical and abstract to use.  However, “for commoners trying to tackle what so-called economists call ‘value-creation,’ it is a practical necessity to use the word in trying to create commons based on their own values.”     

Again, the value/values dichotomy cropped up.  Economics claims the word “value” for itself while everyone else, in their private and social lives, may have their own personal “values.”  This rift in thinking and vocabulary is precisely what this workshop sought to overcome.  Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money-based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience.  This conflict prompted Ina Praetorius to conclude, “Language is politics.”  For herself, she has no desire to contest with economists over control of the term.  Others, however, are determined to continue that very struggle.

Towards a Relational Theory of Value

The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of value/s.  It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision.  Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems.  It purports to precisely quantify and calculate “value” into a single plane of commensurable, tradeable units, as mediated by price.

Through discussion, workshop participants set forth a rough alternative theory of value based on a radically different ontology.  This theory sees value arising from relationships.  Value does not inhere in objects; it emerges through a process as living entities – whether human beings or the flora and fauna of ecosystems – interact with each other.  In this sense, value is not fixed and static, but something that emerges naturally as living entities interact.

“In a commons, value is an event,” said Silke Helfrich of the Commons Strategies Group.  “It is something that needs to be enacted again and again.”  The difference between the standard economic theory of value and a commons-based one is that the latter is a relational theory of value, said Helfrich.

According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, this idea aligns with Marx’s thinking.  While some observers say that a Marxist theory of value ascribes value to things, Dyer-Witheford disagreed, noting that “Marx condemned the idea of value inhering in objects as commodity fetishism.  He believed in a relational theory of value – the relations between workers and owners – even if Marx may not have considered the full range of social relationships involved in the production of commodities.”….

Everyone agreed that a relational theory of value has great appeal and far-reaching implications.  It means that the “labor” of nonhumans – the Earth, other creatures, plants – can be regarded as a source of value, and not definitionally excluded, said Neera Singh, the geographer.  Indeed, this is a point made in a John Holloway essay on Marx’s ideas about “wealth”:  the nonhuman world produces such an excess of wealth that it overflows what capitalism can capture in the commodity form, said Sian Sullivan, a co-investigator with the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value in the UK and Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University.  “This of course leads to the paradox of capitalism trying to use commodity form, an engine of accumulation, to solve ecological crises that the commodity form created in the first place.  It does not know how to protect intrinsic value.”

The report deals with a wide variety of other issues related to the “value question”:  Can abstract metrics help build a new value regime?  How shall we value “nature”?  Should we attempt to de-monetize everyday life?  The report also includes a major discussion of commons-based peer production as a fundamental shift in understanding value.  This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems such as those used by Sensorica, and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance.

While workshop participants did not come up with a new grand theory of value, they did develop many promising lines of inquiry for doing so.  Each prepared a short statement that attempted to identify essential elements for a commons theory of value.  (See Appendix B in the report.)  We hope that the record of the workshop’s discussions will help stimulate further discussion on the question of value – and perhaps bring forth some compelling new theories.

In my talk, I suggested that the Greek state might wish to re-imagine “the economy,” politics and law by considering what commons could accomplish (and are accomplishing), and how state policies might support commoning. Since the left cannot necessarily advance its larger agenda of social justice, fairness and human rights through the state – subservient as it is to neoliberal circuits of global power – it should entertain how the commons might open up some new solution-sets. 

To that end, I discussed the promise of relocalized food and agriculture systems; the potential of re-imagining city policies and programs as a commons; the advantages of academic commons to more efficiently generate and share scholarship and scientific knowledge; the power of open source software and open design and manufacturing; the ecological wisdom of traditional agricultural, forestry and fishery commons; and the ways in which law could decriminalize and support commoning, moving beyond many pathologies of bureaucracy.

At the macro-scale, a commons-based economy could also help a country escape the massive inefficiencies, ecological costs, predatory behaviors and corruption associated with the conventional economy -- while generating new forms nonmarket provisioning and socially legitimate political power.

I was told about medical care commons that have sprung up in Athens in recent years.  Staffed by volunteers and donated/low-cost supplies, the system is a desperate social improvisation to help people meet basic medical needs at a time when public hospitals turn people away.  The system has become a respected alternative system for medical care, engaging people as real human beings and not as mere “clients” or numbers. When patients don’t use all the pills they are given, for example, they return them, so someone else can use them. A kind of social solidarity has emerged. Supplies and personnel are obviously limited, but some aspects of healthcare have been reinvented as flexible modes of human caring, escaping the economic and social logic of conventional healthcare. 

Of necessity, Greeks have established other commons as well – for food, housing and fuel.  There are active efforts to make Greek academic research and data more available as a commons, going beyond the logic of open platforms.  A Greek hacker community, the Libre Space Foundation, has even built the first open source satellite and ground station network – UPSat and SatNOGS -- from readily available and affordable tools. 

These are the sorts of initiatives that the traditional left may regard as interesting, but not politically significant. I think that is a huge mistake. In that gap of understanding lies the potential for inventing a new type of climate-friendly, socially just economy and political culture.

At this moment of transition, therefore, when the commons seems to be acquiring new traction and visibility in Greece, I am thrilled that my book Think Like a Commoner is now available there. 

I wish to thank George Papanikolaou and Andreas Karitzis for their role in organizing the translation of my book, and Efstathiou Anastasio of Angelus Novus Editions for publishing and promoting the Greek edition.  My thanks also to two commons scholars, Antonis Broumas and Stavros Stravrides, for graciously sharing their thoughts on the commons at the bookstore event.  A salute, too, to the Nicos Poulantzas Institute for hosting my talk. 

For any readers of Greek, here are a few press interviews with me and reviews of my book – in Epohi; in Avgi, a collective blog (and here); in efsyn; and in Left.

Even though it was cold and blustery -- Athens in February! -- I had a great time, including a visit to the Acropolis and Agora. Next time: longer discussions, a day at the National Museum, and a visit to Greek islands.

One of the more impressive works-in-progress that I encountered is called Reciproka, which proposes a legal, financial and governance structure for federating a network of co-ops, each of which would mutually own portions of the others through a jointly owned trust. The idea is to build a “counter-economy that is able to perpetuate itself on its own,” explained Janosch Sbeih.

To help achieve this goal, Sbeih and his partner Jérôme Birolini proposed a scheme by which aging baby boomer entrepreneurs could retire by converting their conventional businesses into employee-owned coops rooted in local communities.  Participating co-ops would band together and contribute to a common fund.  The federation would work to build a larger, diversified network of like-minded co-ops while building a pool of shared funds. All co-op members would act as voting trustees in a overarching legal structure that would eventually become the sole owner of the co-operatives. There are some refinements that need to be made to the Reciproka plan, but it gives you an idea of the bold thinking at the conference.

There were other fascinating discussions, such as a panel on “Future Makerspaces in Redistributed Manufacturing.”  The focus here was on open design and manufacturing as the core infrastructure for building a new type of circular economy.  Instead of the “extraction – use – disposal” sequence for economic activity, the goal would be to institute cycles and spirals that minimize waste and focus on local needs.  While the future business models for open manufacturing remain somewhat speculative, one idea put forward was a business that would help individuals build their own stuff at reasonable prices – in conjunction with FabLabs, for example.

Proponents of new forms of distributed manufacturing consider it a Fourth Industrial Revolution (the first ones being agriculture; the steam engine; and electronics).  Emerging trends point to a production system that will be distributed, not centralized; digital, not mechanical and electrical; oriented to direct, on-demand production; using mixed forms of intellectual property; and based on open source principles that are accessible to anyone.

There were other fascinating panels – on alternative currencies, collaborative decisionmaking, trust and reputation systems, open data, “bread funds” for the self-employed, and much else.  I participated on a panel introducing the commons and exploring the role of open co-ops (as explained by Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation) and the blending of co-operatives and commons (as described by Nicole Alix of La Coop des Communes).

There is clearly a lot of creative development still needed to actualize the ideas presented at Open Co-op.  But a big barrier, especially among traditional co-ops and trade unions, may be the skepticism or ignorance about these fresh ideas. It can be hard to embrace the unfamiliar.  Fortunately, the Open Co-op conference helped expand people’s imaginations, provide hard evidence of working models, and encourage new experiments.  May this conference become an annual affair!