Commons Transition: Policy Proposals for an Open Knowledge Commons Society

by Stacco Troncoso (Editor), Ann Marie Utratel (Editor), Guy James (Editors)

Genres: Economics

202 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Cy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inspiring treatise laying out a practical blueprint of how to transform politics, society, and economy to one based on openness, inclusion, and equity. As another reviewer has mentioned, it’s quite ambitious, as it is proposing the implementation of a paradigm shift; moving beyond the false notion of a binary choice between more state or more market. It lays out the problems with both, the capitalist system and that of the welfare state, and the solution, the open-commons based knowledge economy. The basis of this system is declaring knowledge as a ‘commons’ and making it the basis for a massively inclusive society growing within a steady state economy. The ideas seemed to be thoroughly researched and though I would have liked to have seen more case studies and the reasoning for some of the authors’ policy proposals, I found myself taking away many salient messages: the foremost of which being that we need to transition from privately realized profit towards socially realized profit. Models of accumulating capitals which benefit not only the individual, but inherently the society. I appreciated this because the current environment of crypto currency which I have great interest, though having value in decentralizing exchange, still tends to concentrate and consolidate wealth. While this book doesn’t explicitly cover the topic of using distributed blockchains to decentralize decision making, an enthusiast in this sector will certainly gain inspiration from reading this book into how the technology may be applied to be strengthen and enrich the global family.

[Daniel Riveong · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dense, if not wildly ambitious, set of policy proposals for a post-capitalist system Commons Society. An intriguing read as the various policy proposals are based on the same team involved with Ecuadorian government's centerpiece nation plan called Buen Vivir ("Good Living") and the FLOK Society Project(Free/Libre Open Knowledge).