1. The Copenhagen Climate Change Protests

On October 24, 2009, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe came together for the 350 Day of International Climate Action, asking their governments and nations to embrace a more sustainable way of life. They shared the same purpose, but interpreted it in their own locally relevant way all around the world, from Sydney to Hanoi to Mumbai.

Then in December, thousands of individuals and groups converged on Copenhagen for the UN’s Climate Change Conference, meeting each other again or for the first time, engaging in conversations and debates that are unprecedented in human history.

The event made it clear that we still have a ways to go: the social movements that came to Copenhagen don’t yet have a unified or coherent alternative to present, except for a generalized devolution to re-localized economies, and a demand for “system change, not climate change.”

And yet these days of action gave a global voice to tens of thousands of local efforts that have had a hard time being seen or heard, but are unmistakably giving shape to a new, shareable way of organizing both society and daily life.

2. Facebook Membership Exceeds Population of the United States

When Shareable first launched in October 2009, Facebook had roughly 300 million members, equivalent to the population of the United States. By December, that number reached 350 million-if Facebook were a country, it would be third in population, right behind China and India. That same month, the number of tweets passed 6.8 billion, exceeding the world population.

Why does the rise of social media matter?

Let’s start with concrete examples. Social media helped get President Obama elected, and in 2009 politicians started announcing their candidacies to their “friends” and followers over Twitter and Facebook first, in advance of news conferences. In Iran, social media enabled anti-government activists to bypass state-controlled media and speak to the world; indeed, mainstream media around the world relied on Twitter and Facebook as sources, and the U.S. State Department actually asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled service outage so that Iranian voices could continue to be heard.

The democratic possibilities suggested by social media are influencing the possibilities we see in other spheres of life. “The people who create Facebook not only believe in what they’re doing but are on the leading edge of Generation Open,” writes open source activist Chris Messina in Shareable.net.

“It’s about having all your references come from the land of the internet rather than TV and becoming accustomed to-and taking for granted-bilateral communications in place of unidirectional broadcast forms. But it’s not just that the means of publishing have been democratized and the new medium is being mastered; change is flowing from the events that have shaped my generation’s understanding of economics, identity, and freedom.”

3. The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive

In recent years, the Government 2.0 movement has advocated for local, state, and federal agencies to adopt social media and open source technologies.

The movement’s ideas didn’t get much traction with the Bush administration. Then the new Obama administration appointed Vivek Kundra as the White House’s first information chief.

“My first approach coming into the public sector here in D.C. was to take as much data and put it out in the public domain as possible,” said Kundra. “I had three goals in mind: No. 1 was to drive transparency; No. 2 was to engage citizens; No. 3 was to ensure that we were lowering the cost of government operations.”

Under Kundra’s leadership, the White House took small steps like putting 216 real-time feeds on its website and switching to open-source platform Drupal.

But on December 8, 2009, the administration took a giant leap, issuing the “Open Government Directive,” which ordered executive departments and agencies to identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets; create an Open Government web page, and respond to public input received via that page; and to develop and publish an Open Government Plan that will describe how they will improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration into its activities.

Will the directive be followed and its promise fulfilled? It’s certainly a step in the right direction.

4. The Pirate Party Emerges in Europe

The Swedish Pirate Party was founded in 2006. Its goals: to open up copyright and patent laws, strengthen the right to privacy on both the Internet and in everyday life, and foster transparency in government.

By May 2009, its membership surpassed those of the Green Party, the Left Party, the Liberal Party, the Christian Democrats, and the Centre Party, making it the third largest political party in Sweden. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the Pirate Party received over seven percent of the total Swedish votes, which gave it 18 seats in the Swedish parliament and two seats, filled by Christian Engstrom and Amelia Andersdotter , in the European parliament.

“We are very strong among those under 30,” said Engstrom. “They are the ones who understand the new world the best. And they have now signaled they don’t like how the big parties deal with these issues”-meaning issues of Internet sharing and privacy.

Pirate Parties have emerged in 33 other countries-including the United States-cooperating through the Pirate Party International.

Outside of Europe and North America, citizens voted decisively for a shareable society in Bolivia, where “buen vivir,” or well being, has been enshrined in the new constitution; battled to “Leave the Oil in the Soil” in Ecuador; and advanced “free culture” politics in Brazil.

Even if every one of these efforts ultimately fades away, they have already succeeded in pushing twenty-first-century ideas of transparency and sharing into their governments.

5. The Complete Streets Movement

For most of human history, everyone shared the streets. They were a commons where kids played and neighbors chatted.

Today, legally speaking, the streets still belong to us all; but in reality they have become the exclusive property of motorists. And when traffic proliferates, streetlife disappears and our lives suffer, too-crime rises, pollution increases, social connections decline and we have fewer transportation options.

Thankfully, the Complete Streets movement has emerged to reclaim America’s roads for everyone: pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, the disabled, old people and children, as well as drivers.

Local organizations and the National Complete the Streets Coalition are pushing for new policies that make streets safe, accessible and convenient for all. The Complete Streets Act is now before Congress, and nine states and many localities have recently enacted complete streets legislation. Meanwhile, in 2009 the Obama administration quietly infused cities with funds for public transit, green building and retrofitting, inter-agency sharing, and education, creating new possibilities for renewing the urban commons.

6. Rise of a Sharing Industry

This year saw the founding of services like Rentalic, Share Some Sugar, and Neighborgoods-all of which rely on the web and mobile technologies to facilitate neighborhood-level sharing. In 2009, the ridesharing service Zimride allied itself with the carsharing service Zipcar, both making extensive use of social media and mobile technologies.

Similar synergies emerged in citywide bikesharing programs: The Spanish company Onroll, for example, runs bike rental and return in 28 cities through text messaging. A company called PlanetMetrics created software that allows “retailers, product manufacturers, and consumer packaging manufacturers to see their supply chain carbon emissions and easily identify ways to reduce the footprint of their products or services”-often by sharing resources.

Meanwhile, architects, urban planners, and real estate agents are starting to talk about “open source” homes and streets, and they’re using social media tools to open up planning processes. Writers and publishers are experimenting with a range of shareable platforms, from Cory Doctorow’s Creative Commons book launches to one project (launched this year by former Punk Planet editor Dan Sinker) that shares short stories on cell phones.

Zipcar founder Robin Chase sees cross-platform, cross-industry sharing as the wave of the future. “Thanks to technology, sharing transactions are easy and low cost,” says Chase in a Shareable.net Q&A.

And the demand for sharing is rising as prices go up and budgets fall or stagnate. Innovators are working every day at exploiting the possibilities offered by mobile technologies to meet the needs and solve the problems of the market.

7. Elinor Ostrom Wins the Nobel Prize in Economics

Sharing is widely seen as a virtuous trait on the personal level, but naive and impractical on the larger scale of economics. For decades, the most influential economists have championed private property and the individualized pursuit of wealth as the path to progress.

So it came as a shock this year when Elinor Ostrom-a political science professor at Indiana University whose work examines how people collectively manage natural resources-shared the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Her research refutes the long-held theory (“The Tragedy of the Commons”) that private property is the only way to protect finite natural resources such as grazing lands, water resources or forests from overuse and degradation. Ostrom’s field work in Switzerland, Nepal, Kenya, and Guatemala proves that communities routinely create their own systems to preserve common resources.

Her prize is a ringing endorsement that cooperation for the common good is a legitimate economic strategy.

8. The Emergence of an Equally Shared Parenting Movement

Most items on this list involve governments, technology, business: big-picture, traditionally male domains.

What about sharing at home? The idea of shared parenting is not new; for decades, feminism has pushed men to do more around the house.

But Father’s Day 2009 saw the emergence of a new generation of fathers promoting the shared parenting ideal along with women. Through a blizzard of media coverage in outlets that ranged from USA Today to NBC News to NPR, male writers and activists asked other men to share the joys and burdens of parenting with the women in their lives-not out of guilt, but because they have found sharing at home to be a more meaningful and healthier way of life.

The number of 2009 books that tackle this topic from both male and female perspectives is staggering: Manhood for Amateurs, Bad Mother, The Daddy Shift, DadLabs: Pregnancy and Year One, Home Game, One Big Happy Family, Men and Feminism, and Getting to 50/50, to name a few. And the shared parenting ‘zine Rad Dad won Utne Reader’s 2009 Independent Press Award for best ‘zine. (Coming next month: Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents, by Shareable.net contributors Marc and Amy Vachon.)

This was also the year that social scientists (such as Steven Greene and Laurel Elder) discovered new links between sharing at home and shareable social attitudes, suggesting that how we structure our family lives and raise our kids might be key to gradually building a more shareable society.

9. The Health Care Debate

Everyone agrees that the health care situation in America is a mess. Among industrialized nations, we rank at the top of wealthy nations for health care costs and near the bottom for health care quality.

But the 2009 debate about health care reform revealed deep fissures in American ethics and morality, pitting shareable, commons-based thinking against its opposite. In our view, it was an uneven debate-Republicans articulated a clear philosophical vision of heath care as privilege that each individual is responsible for obtaining, while Democrats were too often muddled in saying why we should expand health care to include the approximately 46 million Americans who don’t have it.

What was missing in this debate? The idea that health care is commons, something all people should share, just the same as air, water or other things essential to life. Looking at the health care debate from a commons perspective would have made a number of things very clear:

1) We have a moral obligation to ensure that all citizens have access to quality health care, whether through for-profit companies, non-profit cooperatives, or government programs.

2)Government funding for health research should not become the private property of pharmaceutical and other companies; it should be offered to the public at low costs.

3)In the age of H1N1 and SARS, our health depends upon the health of everyone else, so we imperil ourselves when others can afford to see a doctor.

Looking ahead to 2010, the challenge now is to articulate the idea of health care as something that everyone should share, like police and fire protection, parks, transportation facilities, and schools. This is a slow, even glacial process, one that involves building a sharing mindset on the ground level, in our daily lives, and then works its way up, from the ways we design our streets and institutions to how we run our businesses and government.

10. The First Global Meetings for a Shareable World

Around the globe in 2009, people met to discuss how to build a culture and economy based on sharing.

In January, 2009, participants of the World Social Forum in Belem do Para, Brazil, launched “an international mobilization campaign to reclaim, protect and re-create the commons,” complete with manifesto that has been translated into seven languages (and they’re looking for more, FYI!).

The following July, leaders came together in Germany for the Crottorf Consultations on the Global Commons.

In September, the World Commons Forum met in Salzburg, Austria.

In October, participants at the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona created the “Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge.”

In December, James Quilligan and Lisinka Ulatowska initiated the creation of a UN lobby for global governance of the commons, a which they intend to repeat May 3-14 in 2010.

And at a conference in Manchester, England, on November 3, participants discussed new distributed infrastructures for manufacturing, based on shared designs.

Will all these meetings add up to a new global movement for sharing and the commons? It’s too early to say, but we hope so.

CONTRIBUTORS: Compiled with the help of Rachel Botsman, Chris Carlsson, Neal Gorenflo, Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, and Jay Walljasper.
 
 
This first appeared on the website Shareable.net

The manifesto has already garnered endorsements from thousands of people and dozens of organizations. It has also been translated into seventeen different languages, including French, Czech, Chinese Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, Serbo-Croation and Turkish. This powerful show of support is helping to mobilize the many constituencies that depend upon the public domain. It also puts the corporate armies of copyright maximalists on notice that their attempts to enclose the public domain will be actively resisted.

At one time the public domain was regarded as a wasteland for dusty government documents and cultural curiosities from the 1920s and 1930s — a place of virtually worthless junk. Now that the Internet and digital technologies enable us to build our own commons and therefore share and re-use the music, images, writing and other works that we make, the public domain is properly seen as a rich cultural legacy and reservoir of shared value. It is a vital foundation for civic life, education and culture. We actively need to protect it.

As James Boyle put it in his 2008 book, The Public Domain, “Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture.”

It’s nice to be reminded: Just because are no price tags associated with the public domain does not mean it’s worthless. In this sense, understanding the public domain means developing a deeper insight into the serious limits of “market valuation.”

The manifesto is no windy set of platitudes, but rather a substantive statement about why the public domain matters. I liked the five key principles of the public domain cited by the document:

1. The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.

2. Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. From neither the perspective of the author nor the general public do any valid arguments exist (whether historical, economic, social or otherwise) in support of an exceedingly long term of copyright protection. While the author should be able to reap the fruits of his intellectual labour, the general public should not be deprived for an overly long period of time of the benefits of freely using those works.

3. What is in the Public Domain must remain in the Public Domain. Exclusive control over Public Domain works must not be reestablished by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or using technical protection measures to limit access to technical reproductions of such works.

4. The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-)use, copy and modify such work. The Public Domain status of a work does not necessarily mean that it must be made accessible to the public. The owners of physical works that are in the Public Domain are free to restrict access to such works. However once access to a work has been granted then there ought not be legal restrictions on the re-use, modification or reproduction of these works.

5. Contracts or technical protection measures that restrict access to and re-use of Public Domain works must not be enforced. The Public Domain status of a work guarantees the right to re-use, modify and reproduce. This also includes user prerogatives arising from exceptions and limitations, fair use and fair dealing, ensuring that these cannot be limited by contractual or technological means.

Please consider adding your name and/or organization to the list of endorsers. The website can be found here. You may also be interested to learn that there is now a Public Domain Day every year, on New Year’s Day. The site helpfully identifies hundreds of authors who died 70 years ago (in 1939) whose works are therefore expected to enter the public domain in 2010. (Copyright terms for individual authors are the lifetime of the author plus 70 years.)

It will take some time before the public domain is given its full due as a matter of law, but it is encouraging to see vigorous new types of support for the public domain.

Critical Commons is a new nonprofit advocacy coalition for “fair and critical participation in media culture.” Its self-stated goal is “to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.” The “tag cloud” for the site suggests the lit-crit predilections of the site’s hosts. Among the key words are “Deleuze,” “narrative structure,” “transverberation,” “ideological analysis,” “gender,” “VR “ [virtual reality”] and “TV.” [Deleuze was an influential French philosopher.]

What really caught my eye about Critical Commons, however, was its fantastic promo video on YouTube. The five-minute clip ingenious remixes scenes from Downfall, a German film about Hitler’s last days in his underground bunker, as the Allies close in on Berlin. The trailer for the film includes a clip in which Hitler’s secretary exclaims, “The Fuhrer has lost all sense of reality. He moves divisions that exist only on his map. It’s insane!”

Critical Commons makes brilliant satiric use of these scenes from the film — showing Hitler sweating and fuming at his desk, surrounded by his top generals — by overlaying English-language subtitles that transform the scene into a mad man trying to stop academic scholarship that relies on the Internet.

As a Hitler aide points to a map of Berlin and troops closing in, he says, “Digital scholarship is showing up in tenure files, not just on the Internet. Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, USC.” Hitler replies imperiously, “I want Internet access shut down immediately!” “But sir,” a German general nervously respond, “The Internet is used for research and publication. We would be cut off from the world…irrelevant.”

The rest of the video plays as a darkly hilarious tale of a madman in his bunker furiously holding out against all forms of digital scholarship. Hitler goes into a mad rant, “Blogs! And don’t tell me it enriches cultural discourse. We might as well allow them to digitize all our books…like Google! We were great once. A proud institution. We controlled knowledge; we told everyone what and how to think…” Well worth watching!

Another great new commons website, recently launched, is the Crisis Commons “an international volunteer network of professionals …[who] create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world.”

The site is a common space in which people with diverse sorts of tech expertise who want to help out in emergencies can self-select for jobs and work with others to make a difference. The website ingenious combines the principles of Meet-ups with voluntarism, crisis relief and open source and social-networking collaboration to create something new and potentially powerful.

For example, in response to the Haiti earthquake, Crisis Commons has convened a number of “Crisis Camps” in various cities or regions such as Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley, Brooklyn, Denver and London, England. Before the “camps,” the organizers ask government and relief agencies what sorts of technological needs they have — and then at the camps, people self-organize into teams to respond to those specific requests. The camps also solicit ideas from the volunteers.

When the Crisis Commons learned that Haitians could use a software application that could collect real-time data regarding capacities of local hospitals, it sent out the word to its community of tech volunteers. Another project seeks to develop a simple user interface for the Government of Haiti so that it can gather information about earthquake damage from a variety of sources — aerial photos, on-the-ground local reports, etc. — and organize them all into a single database, so that the government can made a rapid and reliable visual assessment of the situation on the ground.

“What we create is open-source,” the Crisis Commons website explains, “meaning that it’s free for anyone to use, the labor has been donated, and the user community is encouraged to take it and build on it, and to make it work for them.”

The idea for Crisis Commons got started at a March 2009 conference on Government 2.0 when attendees realized the potential of applying social networking technologies to crisis situations. Some attendees pointed out how mobile technologies were helping to deal with issues of health services and alternative power supplies in Africa. Others explained how “the cloud” (Internet based services) could help aggregate data to help people — often in other parts of the world — and to synthesize information to make it more useable to people.

The Crisis Commons website says that it

uncovered a dividing line between international humanitarian relief and domestic crisis response. We saw common themes across all efforts including: the use of mobility, the Internet as a common coordination platform, the need for volunteers and the ability to provide alternative community communications access areas. By the end of the tweet-up, we had 40 volunteers sitting around in a circle with an agreement that there should be a forum to exchange these ideas. And it was there, where a common goal brought government, NGOs, private sector, hackers and activists together to create CrisisCamp.

The Crisis Camp model suggests how centralized bureaucracies, whether in government or the nonprofit world, would do well to transform themselves and become more open, networked and flexible, along the lines of the Crisis Commons.

Finally, another clever video shows how commons-based advocacy is becoming more stylish and international in scope. Readers of this blog may recall the treachery of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is essentially a Trojan horse treaty that is being negotiated in absolutely secrecy and that would bypass national legislatures and traditional international treaty processes, to impose a regime of absolute control over intellectual property and the Internet. More on ACTA here.

The new video, Save Jim, is a clever satire about a fictional treaty negotiator, Jim, a French-speaking lawyer and schemer, who speaks frankly about his personal role in the nasty subterfuge that is ACTA. Although the video is in French, it has English subtitles, allowing the video to go viral globally. Political advocacy is moving well beyond slogans and propaganda, and into a captivating new realm of creativity and political demystification.