Building Commons Collaborative Economies in Barcelona

The commons-oriented model within the collaborative economy is an emergent model based in Internet-enabled collaborative communities building shared and common resources whose ownership is accessible as a commons. The most famous examples are the open source software (that seems to be more prevalent than the proprietary one in several fields) and Wikipedia. Commons-based Peer Production is rapidly growing, not just for the disruptive and very successful cases of software, but also for hardware (FabLabs, Open Source Ecology) accommodation (couchsurfing) and currency (local coins). More recently, we have also seen the emergence and growth of hybrid models which retain some similar organizational logic, such as being based on collaborative principles, but privatizing others. This is the case in corporate-based peer production such as Uber or Airbnb.

The encounter "Commons Collaborative Economies: Policies, Technologies and City for the People", that will take place in Barcelona on March 11th, 12th and 13th, aims to highlight the relevance of the commons-oriented approach of peer production and collaborative economy, while proposing public policies and providing technical guidelines to build platforms for collaborative communities.

More concretely, the encounter aims to build policy recommendations for public administrations, specifically to be sent to the Plan of Municipal Action (PAM) for the next 4 years of the Barcelona City Council, and the consultation process of the European Commission, on public policies of promotion and regulation of the collaborative economy and the model of city.

The event includes round tables, workshops, open session within three main topics Policies, Collaborative economy and Tech.

It is organized by the Department of Alternative Economies and Proximity of Barcelona Activa and BarCola (node on collaborative economy and commons production in Barcelona), as well as the P2Pvalue European project -locally by Dimmons, Digital Commons Research at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Open University of Catalonia, and the IGOP.