Credit: CCG21
Expository note from the author Dr. Sarah Grace Manski: As a leading blockchain scholar, P2P Foundation Fellow and author on the Technological Commonwealth, I was invited by the organizers to participate in the Crypto Commons Gathering 2021 (CCG21). I’m a political economist, ethicist, global technologist, entrepreneur, and professor at George Mason University. For the past 25 years I have been involved with projects empowering workers as an activist, labor organizer, journalist, researcher and Business/Global Affairs professor.
My research is situated at the intersection of global business, new technologies, and social enterprise concerning commons-based peer production, self-sovereign identity, generative value accounting, supply chain transparency, and strategic approaches for a 21st century technological commonwealth. I’m a widely cited academic author, speaker at technology conferences globally, advisor at VERSES.io and the Civana Foundation, affiliate researcher with the P2P Foundation and the George Mason University Center for Social Science Research (CSSR), and an Expert Reviewer for the NSF’s SBIR program.
Crypto is moving into American’s lives and it won’t be long before it’s everywhere. With each passing month new applications are introduced, bringing blockchain technology mainstream. While you have likely heard of Bitcoin, buying and using this cryptocurrency is still a tricky process. That’s soon to change as for the first time, members at hundreds of U.S. banks will soon be able to buy, hold and sell the cryptocurrency through their existing accounts. Bitcoin is only the most visible application of a massive global movement converging around multiple technologies that include:
- Distributed ledgers
- Open innovation ecosystems
- Social enterprises
- Platform cooperatives
- Decentralized data management infrastructures
- Local innovators and peer-to-peer networks
- Marketspace and rural labs
- Bio-hacklabs
- Token economies and
- New value systems with the goal of constructing a commons-based global political economy
This diverse emergent community is experimenting with using technology to create alternative forms of production, relationships, and ownership, with radically new and different logics beyond capitalist extraction, exploitation, market competition, and private ownership. The digital commons movement is building systems incentivizing sharing, decentralization and cooperation based on a global commons of knowledge, data, and the environment for the collective good.
Against this backdrop, the technologists calling themselves the CryptoCommoners gathered in a small inn in the Austrian Alps. Their mission? To build the foundations for a global movement, bringing practitioners and academics working to grow the Crypto Commons. The combination of exploratory practice and academic research was designed to be mutually beneficial: Crypto Commons project leaders were invited to flag problems they encounter with Commons Practice and theory early on in order to shape the event according to their needs.