Review of CommonsFest 2014

Details: Sarantaporo.gr; 05 June 2014

The Festival of Commons was held for the second consecutive year in Heraklion, Crete on May 9 - 11. This celebration of co-op, offer, solidarity and sharing was attended by community members and growers, seed preservationists, solidarity cooperatives and productive venture partners, free software / gaming users, copyright holders, and gamers, legal, sociologists and political economists, scientists and academics, social activists and ordinary citizens who are interested in sustainable management of the commons.

This year's agenda formed followed an open call, included 24 lectures, 9 seminars, an exhibition, as well as a first meeting of the participating groups on building an Alliance for the Communities.

The festival featured projects ranging in a wide range of needs and management, both digital commodities and natural resources, projects dealing with sustainable forms of farming, preserving rural biodiversity, free broadband, solidarity networks offering primary health services, physical building methods, self-sufficiency through home economics, alternative governance models, cultural assurance, open source software for secure and effective information management, new forms of collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing, citizen journalism, open source school projects, socially supported agriculture networks, initiatives for digital freedoms, new forms of funding, autonomous renewable electricity and open source licenses for creators.

Through presentations, debates and workshops, it has become apparent that the Commons constitute a realm of human activity characterized by the ability of people to manage resources within a framework of collective relationships and arrangements, and aiming at fair and equitable benefit from managing common resources through the widest possible participation and self-government.

People and groups from different backgrounds and different occupations met in the search for:

meeting basic human needs such as education, health and everyone's access to food, water, seeds, housing, transport and communication
shielding the common goods and the natural environment to ensure their sustainability
access to information and human knowledge by recognizing them as fundamental human rights, the essential prerequisite of which is universal access to the internet and the fight against digital literacy
access to sources of knowledge and culture through the reform of socially obsolete copyright law while respecting the rights of authors
the efforts to reform patent law to free creativity, accelerate progress and equitably distribute its benefits to all of humanity
recognizing that cultural content, scientific knowledge and data generated by the public sector and funded by the whole of society through the budget must be a shared wealth, freely accessible to citizens
the use of free software in all public and private infrastructures, openly designed telecommunications devices, wireless community networks, free broadband, including the release of spectrum segments for sharing and avoiding
the risk of the Internet being a universal surveillance device
civil society access to public digital networking infrastructures (eg optical fibers), which are funded by public national or Community resources.

The combination of the above can be a comprehensive proposal for decentralized models of local community organization, which will help their members devise their own sustainable management of natural resources as common goods, through a recast of a quality we have always had, but we have forgotten along the way: the ability to create, but also to share this knowledge of creation.

However, the most important part of the festival was the presence of those involved, who turned the organizational difficulties of this effort into a real celebration, in a promise that meeting our needs can be a process of companionship, inspiration and creativity, on a planet where if there was no concept of cooperation there simply would be no life.

The participants: