La Comunificadora (second edition) takes off in Barcelona

(subtitle: if you want a Comunificadora in your own town, ask FKI and its partners)

Last week, following the success of the first edition, the second edition of La Comunificadora took off in Barcelona. Comunificadora is the “Barcelona Activa” impulse or support programme for Commons and Collaborative Economy projects. The program, developed by FKI and LabCoop with support from Dimmons and Fundación Goteo, targets new, or already existing projects and organisations that need help to (convert themselves to) produce and manage Commons organisation forms of all kinds:

• in an economically sustainable manner
• managed with open and democratic governance models by all interested parties
• following existing traditions and best practices of social and solidarity economy, and fully exploiting free and open digital technologies, platforms and data.

Why Comunificadora

The Commons become more relevant every year, in spite of the famous 1968 article titled “Tragedy of the Commons”. The proofs go from the works of Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences Elinor Ostrom to many successful and enduring projects. With FKI we have been observing, promotging and participating in particular in digital commons such as GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Arduino, RepRap etc.

Commons, and the collaborative economy based on them, are inclusive, participated and built on sharing of “Free as in Freedom” resources, knowledge and technologies, digital and not. Thanks to these features, this economic model also has (or can have) a smaller environmental impact and is more resilient, that is resistent to delocalisation and other external “attacks” often caused by globalisation. It is for these reasons that, in recent years, approaches like this have been widely adopted, often, but not only, in the digital realm, as viable alternatives to other, more mainstream ones. However, launching projects of this kind, and above all making and keeping them economically self-sustainable in the long term, requires knowledge and procedures that are not widely known yet.

The first goal of Comunificadora (and FKI in general) is to provide relevant tools and methodologies, which in the program are organised in four main categories: licensing models to protect the sharing of knowledge, revenue generation models, modes of production and governance models. The other fundamental goal of Comunificadora is to facilitate contacs among everybody using those tools, wherever they are, to help them cooperate more effectively.

Synthesis of the first day of Comunificadora 2

(full report, in Catalan, available here)