Ongoing projects

The P2P Lab is working on the following projects: “Cosmolocalism” – A European Research Council project (site) “Exploring a post-growth political economy” (site soon) “Distributed Design Market Platform” – A Creative Europe project (site) “Centrinno” – An H2020 project (site) “Smooth” – An H2020 project (site) “T-Factor” – An H2020 project (site) “ComPra” – An Erasmus+ ...

REFLOW – Co-creating circular and regenerative resource flows in cities

How can citizens, policy-makers and businesses co-design circular and regenerative cities? Rapid urbanization and the simultaneous unsustainable consumption of resources accentuate the need to develop a new urban metabolic system. REFLOW is an EU H2020 funded project, from 2019 to 2022, that seeks to understand and transform urban material flows and to co-create and test ...

Assessing the democratization, innovation and sustainability potential of “design global, manufacture local”

Summary: The goal of this multiphase, pilot-driven project is to explore the contours of an emerging mode of production that builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies (e.g. from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts).  This convergence could play a key role in ...

Transvestment: Value and cooperation in the digital commons economy

Transvestment describes the transfer of value from capitalism to the commons. Thus transvestment strategies aim to help commoners become financially and socially sustainable and autonomous. This project includes: a research article/case study on the blockchain-based start-up, Backfeed (published); a research article/case study on the Enspiral Network (published); a chapter in T. Scholz’s and N. Schneider’s collective book on ...

Open-source technology in agricultural production

Summary: This project attempts to explore the open source technology (with a focus on hardware) for agriculture emerging from a mode of production different from the capitalist one, that of commons-based peer production. There are indeed several existing open source projects in relation to the primary sector of the economy, and particularly agriculture. This project ...

Aegean resistance net

Summary: The current project is designed jointly by the P2P Lab and the Nomads of the Sea and will take place in May of 2016. During a half a month sailing trip, a crew of eight activists and researchers will visit five selected Greek islands for one week each. Two types of workshops will be ...

P2P: The commons manifesto

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis are writing a new book  to be published by Westminster University Press (low-cost paperback, free ebook). Moreover, previous versions of it have been published in French (Manifeste pour une véritable économie collaborative, Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer editions, 2017) and Dutch (Peer-to-peer: Manifest voor een commons transitie,  Oikos, 2017). This is also ...

The potential of digital commons to spur technological advance

Summary: This project will include two in-depth case studies of prominent digital commons cases which have arguably propelled much innovation and entrepreneurial activity. First, we will study the Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) patent which expired in 2005 and has widely been used in the 3D printing industry. A comparative data analysis before and after the ...

Towards a new reconfiguration among the state, civil society and the market

This essay tries to outline the general aspects of a political agenda for a gradual transition to a commons-oriented, social knowledge economy. In doing so, we first articulate some transitional proposals concerning both the micro-economic and the macro-economic levels, shedding light on the concept of the “partner state”. Next, a discussion follows that attempts to ...

Commoning the “smart city”

Full title: “Introducing a taxonomy of the ‘smart city’: Towards a commons-oriented approach?“, written by Vasilis Niaros. Summary: During the last decade there has been considerable debate over the relatively vague concept of the “smart city”. Nowadays, the smart city has crystallised into an image of a city permeated with top-down and centrally controlled technological ...