Many things can be commoned, right? Why should we engage in commoning? When things are shared and used more, but not overused and managed sustainably, this delivers many benefits for the economy, society and environment. There are cases where people may prefer to retain exclusive, private ownership of things, such as a home or property. But even in these cases, there may be exceptions where sharing them can deliver benefits to the owner and the sharee ( yes, sharee is a word) or user, such as going away on a holiday. Note that it’s also helpful to use reputation as a metric (such as with Sacred Capital with reputational currencies), in order to incentivise good behaviour and disincentivise bad behaviour on the part of the sharer and sharee.
You could extend Producer’s Market beyond food to other goods.
It will also be interesting to explore commoning of capital intensive things like manufacturing plants, real estate and property of all kinds (including schools, hospitals, universities, residential, commercial, mixed use, industrial, agricultural, etc.), transportation vehicles (automotive, trains, and planes), infrastructure (roads, rail, airports, utilities—electricity, water, telecommunications, gas*), municipalities (compare e.g. with startup societies), and so on. Obviously distributed commoning of all these things would not be easy to achieve, but it can be envisaged that it will be very beneficial. And note that commoning of these things can at least initially work in cooperation with governments, and ultimately potentially replace them with distributed governance.
- Use of “natural gas” should he disincentivised due to impact on climate change; and biogas should be prioritised for aviation. Both of these priorities have been announced recently with a natural gas ban in Europe.
Okay, so I went quite broad in scope, but I originally intended to create a topic on manufacturing.
Given that the goods that are produced from manufacturing plants are what are used, then again, extending the Producer’s Market model beyond food to other goods has potential. But I would also like to see the ownership of the above capital intensive things—including manufacturing plants—to be commoned, in order to deliver more distributed empowerment of individuals and distributed governance of production and all facets of life, rather than concentration of wealth and influence in an elite class, the owners of capital.
Right now, I just want to mark this as topic to be explored.