The Emergent Report

Our proposal is that the users of the commons should be commons-friendly enterprise structures and not profit-maximising companies. These ethical companies, whose members are the commoners/contributors themselves, would be organised as global open design companies. These would be linked to networks of small factories that produce on the basis of shared values and could more easily adopt open-book management, open recruiting and open supply lines, ensuring transparency to the whole network, in order to create maximum mutual alignment between participants. This is simply an extension of the existing organisational practices of ‘immaterial commons production’, which combines full transparency of all actions with negotiated coordination. (...)

It requires distributed access to physical places for collaboration – co-working centres – as well as the widespread possibility for peer learning. Distributed access to financial capital is a further condition, notably crowd-funding, social lending and distributed, decentralised currencies such as cryptography-based digital money Bitcoin. The spread of these peer to peer forms of funding has already attracted the attention of the Bank of England executive director, Andrew Haldane, who has suggested that peer to peer finance models could sweep away the inefficient retail banks before too long.