Commons: FLOK Society | STIR

"With the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society project, peer-to-peer commons-based economics have a good chance of being institutionalised in Ecuador, or in other words, of entering at a nation-state level through the front door. This would be a world first. Ecuador may not be particularly advanced as far as urban P2P dynamics are concerned, but its indigenous and rural communities have a long history of sharing knowledge. And since the election of a progressive government in 2007, the country is politically ahead in its determination to continue developing an economy based on the creativity of its citizens and on the sustainable leverage of its internal resources. The focus here is to transition away from cognitive capitalism where value is commonly extracted via technology transfers through intellectual property rights mostly held by large foreign companies, generating dependencies on the global north and increasing the internal social divide. The goal is to shift towards a ‘social knowledge economy’ where knowledge is freely accessible, produced and shared through co-operative and open processes, and where the resulting knowledge commons can be built upon to accelerate innovation and the distribution of wealth ... The FLOK Society thrives on the interactions between a civil society empowered by peer learning and open education, a partner state that provides the institutional support and infrastructures required, and a commons based ethical market. This is a model developed by FLOK Society’s research team lead by P2P foundation founder Michel Bauwens ... The key element of the framework is the introduction of the Peer Production License, a copyfarleft type of reciprocity-based license by which commons are freely accessible to those who contribute to create them, while companies generating profits from them without contributing are charged license fees. Revenues returned to value creators allow co-operative accumulation and the constitution of community-managed commons funds and community investment funds ... This empowers a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy, where commoners can develop their commons for wider use including the creation of market value on top of them, encouraged by legal frameworks that support the organisation and operations of co-operative entities ..."