Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons

This chapter argues that significant social change is required to stave off climate destruction, and it makes the case that peer production can usefully contribute to necessary processes of “relocalization” and “degrowth.” The governance of peer produced projects, one of the central aspects of the studies of peer production, aspires to the self-regulation of participants in autonomous collectives. The chapter offers guiding principles and policy proposals which should not be read as fully-formed, but as the basis for discussions, and as needing to be combined with other initiatives and proposals, such as John Restakis’ public policy proposals for a social economy, and with the Commons Transition Platform more generally. At this point in time, a realistic assessment is that peer production's collaborative methods and ethic of transparency are – with the exception of FOSS – anecdotal both in economic and ecological terms.