Deep Dive Workshops

Exploring new frontiers in commoning

Our deep dive workshops are two or three day meetups with smaller group of participants who are active contributors in a certain area of commons engagement, in which we talk and exchange in-depth experiences and insights, exploring a new frontier of commoning.

Typically, a deep dive brings together activists, scholars and commoners from different backgrounds, for example, convening cooperativists and commoners, or ethical financiers and sustainable manufacturing pioneers, with the aim of finding bridges and creating synergies and convergences. For most deep dives, we produce in-depth reports reflecting the collective dialogue and the emergence of common insights. Scroll down to see the reports.

Ontology as a Hidden Driven of Politics and Policy: Commoning and Relational Approaches to Governance

The ecological crisis is a very intimate, as well as being a political and institutional crisis, because addressing it requires us to question the established mindsets within which society operates. Established paradigms of thought and being are extremely hard to recognize and transform. This report explores the importance of ontological perspectives in thinking about system change.

Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature

What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. This report explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things – and the political agendas we pursue.

State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship

Can commons and the state fruitfully co-exist – and if so, how? Can commoners re-imagine “the state” from a commons perspective so that its powers could be used to affirmatively support commoning and a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance?

DEMOCRATIC MONEY AND CAPITAL FOR THE COMMONS

One of the more complicated, mostly unresolved issues facing most commons is how to assure the independence of commons when the dominant systems of finance, banking and money are so hostile to commoning. How can commoners meet their needs without replicating (perhaps in only modestly less harmful ways) the structural problems of the dominant money system?

A New Alignment of Movements? Part I: The General Challenge

The topic of the "deep dive": Can leading alt-economic and social movements find ways to work more closely together? Can there be a greater convergence and collaboration in fighting the pathologies of neoliberalism?

A New Alignment of Movements? Part II: Strategies for a Convergence of Movements

In September 2014, the Commons Strategies Group convened a three-day workshop in Meissen, Germany, of 25 policy advocates and activists from a variety of different economic and social movements. Part two of two.

Toward an Open Co-Operativism:

The P2P economy needs bridges between cooperative culture and the organizational forms that can sustain it and advance the general well-being of society.

European Deep Dive on the Commons

At a small workshop outside of Paris, France, twenty-two of us – mostly Europeans except for two of us – got together to discuss the economics of the commons from an on-the-ground perspective.

Asian Deep Dive on Economics and the Commons

In 2012 a group of seventeen commons activists from throughout Asia – India, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand and other countries – met in Bangkok to have a wide-ranging discussion about the future of the commons, especially in fighting neoliberal economics and policy.

Latin American Deep Dive on the Commons

The Latin America Deep Dive on the Commons was held in Mexico DF in November 2012. The event gathered a variety of researches and civil society organizers from various parts of the South American sub-continent to reflect on the Commons in everyday practice.