When citizens spring

Leen Schelfhout and Xavier Damman, May 2022

What happens when citizens do participate?

Story commissioned by the Green European Foundation

In a world that is globally connected, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the reality humanity is facing: a system failure that has an immense social and ecological impact. We often feel powerless. We ask our governments to take action but experience deeply that they are failing. At best they are trying, but we need all hands on deck.

What can give us hope are small actions that we can take at our doorstep, a place where we can have an immediate impact. In a world that is globally connected, those small actions can have a ripple effect. It took one month for the Occupy Movement from occupying Zuccotti Park in NYC in 2011 to having more than 3000 occupations all around the world. That was 10 years ago. What if we could start a new movement to occupy the public space, not to protest, but to rebuild community, rebuild commons and start new institutions where citizens can participate and contribute?

In this article, we walk you through our journey as citizens who freshly moved to Brussels, the capital of Europe and the second most diverse city in the world (after Dubai) and started solving problems for the neighbourhood, one initiative at a time.

Start at your doorstep

In February 2020, just a month before the lockdown, we moved into a house in Schaarbeek, Brussels, that had a garage but no garden. Watching the empty 10 square metres of grey asphalt in front of our house, as we don’t have a car, and nobody is allowed to park in front of a garage, an idea emerged. Why not put a tiny community garden on that spot? Wood crates, some soil, flowers and a bench would create an incentive for us, newcomers in Brussels, to connect with the neighbourhood and keep some green fingers busy.

And so we did. In no time, the tiny garden attracted kids planting pumpkins and mysterious flowers, postcards and tiny gifts, bees and butterflies. The garden flourished and brought happiness while we had to stay at home during the pandemic. We had created a space for a mini commons in the street.

We found messages of strangers, tiny statues and gifts, bees, butterflies and bugs. Our daily lunch coffee outside invited people for some small talk and we integrated in the street. When the lockdown hit, we danced every night for 10 minutes outside with the whole street, blocking the traffic, taking the space to build a community feeling. We started a WhatsApp group for the street, we started sharing our empty garage with neighbours to safely store their bicycles. A community was born.

With the kind messages of neighbours, the messages of the commune started arriving via mail. “What you are doing is not allowed, you are privatising the public space.” Our attempts to prove otherwise, it was a community garden after all, one that had a positive impact on the street, were met with incomprehension and fines. The garden had to go. With support from the neighbours, we decided to keep it anyway.

On June 17th, the unthinkable happened. When we woke up in the morning the garden had simply disappeared. We put posters all around the neighbourhood: Nature Missing: have you seen the community garden?

Two days later we found out it had been taken by the commune and put at the waste disposal, 1,5 km away from our house. The reaction of the community was heartwarming. Neighbours brought new plants and flowers and soon enough, a new Citizen Garden emerged on the street within a week.

One bright citizen took another approach and turned to the law, discovering a loophole that would give the story an amazing twist. If we would put the garden on a handcart (not a trailer!), and register it, it would be allowed to be parked in the street. And so we did. The garden is still there today, on a handcart, attracting butterflies and neighbours.

The mini garden project showed us the power generated by a community that gets behind an idea as small as a tiny community garden. We built connections, and we learnt how to work together on a project, sharing responsibilities and feeling the immediate impact. We were hungry for more. We wanted a real common in the street.

Starting to common

The small act of putting a garden in front of our house generated a public debate over the use of public space far beyond the city-borders of Brussels. The story was covered by many local and national newspapers, such as L’Avenir, BX1 and The Bulletin. The lovely act of civil disobedience challenged in a very effective way the rules and boundaries the current governments are putting on the use of the public space. These rules clearly favour cars over people, a legacy of decades of policies favouring economic benefits over building social foundations. Times have changed though, needs have shifted. The needs of the local street community, looking for social connections, are not met with these rules.

Three needs were very present in the street, and became clearer during the Covid-pandemic:

• space for kids to play safely: we experienced in the lockdown every day what it means to keep kids inside, not being allowed to play on the street because we have privatised it for car drivers.
• bike storage: there are more than 6000 people on the waiting list to get access to one of those “velo boxes” that replace one parking spot with a box that can securely fit 5 bikes. It’s safer to park a car on the street than a bike.
• and more community green in the street: we had experienced ourselves the immense positive effect of a tiny community garden in the street.

To address those needs, we started two new projects in the summer of 2020: a series of playstreets in the neighbourhood that required blocking the streets for cars and a ‘Citizen Bike Garden’, a shared bike shed with a garden on top that would be constructed on a parking spot in the street.

We focused on involving more people from the start, building a collective for each project and organising several open brainstorms to mine ideas and dreams. With a clear set of goals, we applied for funding with the regional government, hoping to work with the administration more constructively. Only then we started executing, defining clear roles, and rotating responsibilities. The funding we received, for both projects, gave us the opportunity to learn how to manage a budget transparently together, taking into account all needs, dreams and values.

The playstreets were an overall success, bringing joy and smiles to the streets in the neighbourhood, creating ample opportunities for kids and adults to meet and create new connections. Because blocking the streets was limited in time, and over the weekend, the impact on traffic was low. They showed neighbours how different the street could feel once we block transit traffic to give priority to the locals/residents. The funds we received made it possible to pay local artists to support them and we could buy some common furniture for the neighbourhood: a tent, picnic tables and a trampoline.

The Citizen Bike Garden on the other hand, was a more complex project. The construction itself could house 12 bikes, had a big garden on top, and had a blackboard for exchanging messages with passersby. The building process was an amazing example of spontaneous contributions, attracting creative and handy neighbours from the whole area. Once you create a canvas for citizens to contribute, they do. The Citizen Bike Garden was a clear example of that.

To gather feedback from the neighbours, involve them as much as possible in the project, and collect opinions and ideas, we distributed a feedback form. The results showed that while most people loved the project, they also found the construction to be too big. Only two people complained about having to give up a parking spot. We took that feedback into account and reduced the size by half. We called it the “Citizen Bike Garden Mini” and it could still house 6 bikes.

Sadly, once again the commune decided the construction had to leave the public space. In the beginning of February 2021, they removed it permanently from our street, replacing it three weeks later by a metal bike shed that can house 5 bikes, owned and managed by a private company. Their biggest argument was safety. They could not afford the risk of an experiential bottom-up project causing potential danger to passers-by and users. In Belgian law, the mayor has full responsibility when an issue arises.This very law prevents citizens from self organising around the needs and dreams of people in the street. We have built institutions to take care of our commons on our behalf. As a result we have lost the ability to care for our community.

The Citizen Bike Garden left us puzzled and disappointed, experiencing the value of the new connections it had built in the neighbourhood and working with direct feedback.

There is hardly any space for experimenting. Commons and community projects, especially when they suddenly emerge answering a need, physical or digital, are often perceived as a threat and treated as such. However, this experiment has shown that when one-size-fits-all official rules do not meet the needs of the people, local people can rise up, take responsibility and grow together through the process of building, whether concretely or metaphorically.

The Citizen Corner

At the end of our street is an empty building. When you are left with some common neighbourhood furniture like tables, pingpong tables and trampolines from previous initiatives, and there is an empty building, you put one and one together. What about we put this common furniture in that building, for everybody in the community  to use? A post-it with our phone number on the door led us to the owner, a project developer who had bought the old warehouse to build lofts and apartments. It took us a couple of coffees and smiles, but after a few months, he gave us the key, promising us we could use it until he had permission to start with the construction works.

It was immediately clear that the building with its 1000m2 had a lot more to offer than storage space. We summoned  the neighbourhood for a collective imagination exercise, we mined ideas and dreams and got ourselves organised. It was clear from the start: this building would be our common neighbourhood resource for anyone in need of space. If the future of this building was private, we better make use of it while we could to create some beautiful memories for everyone. A new common was born.

Having learnt from previous experiences we levelled up our organising.

Setting rules, values and boundaries

We created a participatory process to define values and principles for the building, on how to govern the space and on which events we wanted to attract. We held several meetings, before we drafted a framework that would guide us in governing and holding the space.

Key value for everyone was organising in a non-hierarchical, participatory way. Nobody would ‘run’ the building, we were a collective of citizens holding an open and welcoming space for running experiments, for building connections, for celebration, for art and last but not least, for kids. With that, bottom up self organising would be the default. The answer to any idea or question would be ‘yes’, if two more people agreed to help execute it. All ideas had to be self executed. Regular general assemblies would help us deal with conflicts and issues. And we also agreed that everyone could step out or take a break at any time, realising fully that we were all volunteers.

We set some clear boundaries as well. Being located in a residential area, we decided to not host noisy parties. Secondly, this project was not an act of civil disobedience, but a legal occupation of an empty building by and for citizens. We negotiated with the owner to only pay for the utilities and split the revenue if we get to subrent some of the space. We took a fire insurance policy, applied for subsidies and informed the commune about our activities.

Optimising for self organisation: picking the right tools

Accessibility and self organisation were highly valued by the collective. The tools we picked and the structure we set up were optimised for living these values. Our motto: what will you organise?

We set up a Discord server for two reasons. Discord is an application that is built for collaborating in communities. It enables you to create channels per topic, which keeps online communication tidy. It runs on your phone and laptop, which means that people without a smartphone would also be able to access it, whenever they wanted to and without continuous notifications. And it is friendly for people who do not like the mainstream social media platforms like Facebook groups. Discord was the most accessible tool to bridge people who are digitally hyperconnected and those who prefer to stay offline most of the time.

For external communication about events, we created a shared, public Google calendar for everyone to add their events, a website that was easy to edit, a Facebook page. A collective with the Open Collective platform took care of transparent bookkeeping and managing donations and expenses. Admin rights were given to everyone needing them, to avoid bottlenecks and to organise flows easily.

Dealing with money

Running a building like this comes with costs. When we started, we didn’t have any funding. We filed for subsidies but we had to deal with the uncertainty of when we might receive them, if at all. We experimented with various business plans to rent out the space and create membership fees to cover the general costs of water, electricity, wifi and heating.

To close the gap, we asked the people most engaged in the community if they would be willing to lend €100 to €500 to the collective to pay for the heating for the winter, with the promise that they will be reimbursed as soon as we have enough money.  We defined a very basic rental plan for people who wanted to use the space and we created a membership fee for people using the space on a regular basis. Last not but least, we set up a bar to sell drinks at various events and we had a donation box at all times.

This basic business plan helped us to be financially sustainable within 6 months, only including the costs for running the building. It ruled out  paying rent to the owner or paying people who put their time and energy in the project. When the subsidies arrived in January, those conversations caused trouble in the group dynamics (see chapter Common(s) challenges).

As we are writing this article, the building is still our common place of meeting. Numerous birthday parties, concerts, flea markets, cryptocurrency meetups, roller disco events for kids, and yoga classes have taken place in the building. A kitchen was installed and a neighbour started cooking weekly for homeless people, and another to house a few refugees from Ukraine. Our neighbourhood has a flourishing community building.

Common(s) challenges

Creating and maintaining a common like a community building is not without challenges. It takes time and a lot of continuous care and work. Here are some of the challenges that we face:

The place of community work in our society

A short reminder to the context we are working in: we are in the midst of an ecological and social crisis, and on the verge of collapse. While we might not have all the answers, experts such as Kate Raworth and her concept of doughnut economics as well as other researchers and indigenous cultures, have shown us some thriving models for commons, some of which have been working for centuries. Commoning needs to find back a central place in our lives and in society, to restore social foundations. Yet, we experience closely that many citizens find it hard to make different choices, to change careers, organise local solutions and rebuild commons. Most active citizens that put time into community work do this as volunteers. This is not enough for the crisis we are facing, and not sustainable for the people doing the work. We fall into the same trap of extracting people’s energy instead of integrating it into a regenerative economy.

The Citizen Corner is running into this problem in many ways. We are relying deeply on the energy of volunteering neighbours, and the coreteam is shrinking, tapping even more into the energy of a few people holding on strong. When the subsidies arrived in January, we had to reinvent ourselves. Who can be paid for running the place? And what does that mean for the dynamic of very bottom-up and non-hierarchical organising? We also ran into the simple fact that only two people in the team had the status of being self employed. The others had full time contracts or had an unemployment status, which simply blocked them from getting paid for their contributions. In short, even when you want to, the systems we are tight to, is holding us back in many ways to do what is needed to restore what is broken.

These issues show us the cracks in how our society is built up. We have outsourced taking care of public goods and the collective budget, and put it in the hands of institutions and governments, who often do not live in our neighbourhoods. We no longer have direct access to managing our commons, nor access to setting the values and defining the rules that impact us directly.  With that we gave away our abilities to coordinate, stay on top of the needs and dreams of people in our streets, deal with conflict as humans and take responsibility. This system error blocks us from doing what is needed at this time in history: to turn citizens from consumers into creators and contributors.

How to reward people for contributing?

Each community, local or global, has commons and public goods. But not all communities have a currency and governing body that can allocate resources to maintain those commons, to create a resilient, democratic and proactive community around the common and to become sustainable.

In the everyday management in our commons, the Citizen Corner, we struggled with asking for money to locals, very often contributors, for using the community building place. Yet, we had to pay the bills for running the building. It is hard to make a community project sustainable, financially and also on the human level. How do you reward contributing citizens? How could we use the Citizen Corner as a place to experiment finding solutions for this?

Our first attempt was an experiment with developing our own currency, the Citizen Coin. You could earn the token in two ways: contributing to the project as part of the organising team, or paying with Euros. With this coin you were part of the community, and it could be used to pay for drinks and use of the space. For the first group, the contributors who gave their time and energy, we created a system to claim tokens whenever an hour of work was spent on the Citizen Corner. A simple spreadsheet helped us keep track of that. For the second group, contributors in Euros, we created a ‘Citizen Card’ to top up the personal Citizen Coin balance, that would then enable you to spend money in the Citizen Corner.  Each paper card had a QR code that we could easily top up or charge.

While the concept sounded like it would create clarity around contributions, it added friction in the checkout process. Most visitors don’t come regularly enough to justify topping up such a card. It simply made no sense for visitors to buy citizen coins and we cancelled that part of the idea. We ended up using Sum Up devices so that people could use their phone or their credit card to pay at the bar. Then we add the proceeds to our open collective balance for transparency.

The other part, where contributors claim coins for contributions and pay with coins for a drink at the bar or use of the space, is still in place. We have enough money flowing in so contributors don’t have to pay for using the building, and at the same time it is clear who is part of the organisers’ community and who is not.

What is not that practical though is the spreadsheet to keep track of contributions and claim and pay for tokens. We had to look elsewhere for a solution to that problem.

Is the answer in web3 tools and DAO’s?

What is a DAO?

A DAO, short for ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation,’ is an internet native collective of people that organise around a common project without central leadership and often without legal structure. The common resource is a shared, crowdfunded, treasury that is managed and owned by all members of the community. Think of it as a shared bank account where adding and removing people only takes a few clicks instead of having to show up at a local bank branch. Now the community has an address where they can receive donations or raise money with crowdfunding. Unlike a bank account, such a crypto wallet is programmable, meaning that the community can set rules to approve transactions (e.g. every transaction needs to be approved by at least 3 people).

We shape tools then the tools shape us

When a community has to create a bank account or a non-profit, it has to nominate an administrator that has signature power and access to the account. It creates a hierarchy  and a bottleneck, since not everyone has access and decisions always need to go through the same person.

By creating a crypto wallet that requires, for example, 2 out of 6 people to approve transactions, it creates de facto a flat organisation where any 2 of the 6 people can approve. Decisions become decentralised. Everyone now has access to the account and more than one leader can emerge. Everyone is invited to participate.

Beyond offering a shared and transparent crypto bank account (known as a wallet), a DAO also enables a community to issue its own token. You can think of it as shares of a company, or as a currency within the community. It’s a powerful tool to reward positive contributions to the community and decentralise the decision making process, as any holder of such a token is free to give them to anyone.

DAOs are like super cooperatives that use the full potential of the Internet. They open a new era of (digital) commons where, like on Wikipedia, everyone is invited to contribute, but where anybody can get rewarded for their contribution.

DAOs only exist on the blockchain, in the same way that a company or a cooperative only exists in the official book of your country. A new paradigm is emerging, a new Internet country, where we can not only cooperate to share knowledge, but where we can start working together and manage commons together, in a transparent and borderless way.

It’s still very much a mystery for a lot of people, exactly like the Internet in the 90’. But for the ones that spend time learning and practising, it’s already clear that this new Internet will change society like the first one did.

DAOs can take many shapes and forms. In their simplest form it’s a group of people in a Facebook or WhatsApp group that manage a pool of money together to achieve a common purpose. In their most complex form, it’s a community of thousands -sometimes millions- of people that contribute to a common goal and receive tokens for their contribution.

The new tools DAOs and web3, the new rising version of the internet, enable us to start imagining a new generation of cooperatives that invite everyone to contribute in various ways. Once people have some tokens from a DAO, they are free to do whatever they want with them. They can hold on to them and participate in governance but they can also transfer them or sell them. The allocation of resources is now by design decentralised to the members of the community. There is no President, no hierarchy in charge of allocating resources. The age of free workers and creators is here.

In the same way that the invention of the LLC –privately owned companies with limited liability– contributed to the launch of the Industrial Era, the invention of DAOs could contribute to advancing humanity to a new era of cooperation where communities would be able to create and maintain new commons. It could become the new dominant form of organising, one where all stakeholders are shareholders. One that would enable us to grow from consumers to contributors and creators.

The Internet of commons

The Internet can enable communities to create their own media to tell their own story. A new version of the Internet is coming up, web3, and it could enable communities to now also have their own governance and their own economy. This has the potential to have a revolutionary impact, because it could mean that each community would be able to allocate resources to maintain their commons. Some governments may lose their monopoly on the management of the commons in the same way that mainstream media have lost their monopoly on the stories being told.

“The Internet enabled communities to have their own media

DAOs enable communities to have their own economy”

As a result, decision making will be less centralised, less top down and more decentralised and more bottom up. This means taking decisions closer to the reality on the ground of a given community. This means more opportunities for the members of a community to take ownership and participate in the decision making process.

Let’s not rush though, we are at a very early stage in web3 and DAOs in general. We first need to bridge the gap and show more citizens about this new Internet of DAOs. That’s why we created DAO.brussels

DAO.Brussels

DAO.brussels is the community of the crypto citizens of Brussels. We meet every first Wednesday of the month at the Citizen Corner for “Crypto Wednesday”. We start with conversation tables where people can chat about various topics related to the world of crypto: crypto 101 (how to get started?), why crypto?, DeFI (decentralised finance), ReFI (decentralised finance applied to projects to regenerate communities and the environment), NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens, digital assets that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos), cryptogames, DAOs, etc. What matters here is to make fellow citizens meet and build new relationships. It’s only once you’ve established trust that you can start talking about new ideas, new ways of doing things that at first take you out of your comfort zone.

Different people will resonate with different messages. Some are there to make money, others to trade art, others to rebuild communities. There is no right and wrong reason because they all eventually lead to the same outcome: they all contribute to bringing more people into this new decentralised world where more citizens can participate in the decision making process, where more citizens can reclaim ownership over the commons, where competition is outcompeted by collaboration. Yes, even the people there “just for the money” (we call them “Degens”): They help increase the security of the network, provide liquidity, develop new mechanisms that are all open source and that we can all learn from (for example to create new “ReFI” projects).

Through this, we have already onboarded 5 neighbours to crypto. They now have their wallet and they start receiving universal basic income (UBI) tokens every hour, which would come from the Proof of Humanity DAO. We also organised an NFT contest to invite local artists to reimagine the streets of Brussels (https://imagine.brussels) and in the process, we helped 25 local artists create a crypto wallet and mint their first NFT on the blockchain (i.e. create a certificate of authenticity that can be traded online). The contest was inspired by an art and literary movement called solarpunk, in which artists envision a future where all major contemporary challenges have been faced. We raised €5000 in crypto currencies to buy the newly created NFTs by local artists in Brussels. The Citizen Corner served as a beautiful space to expose all the artwork and make visitors dream about a solarpunk city (dao.brussels/solarpunk-nft-contest…).

Winner of the Solarpunk NFT contest to reimagine the streets of Brussels.
By Tavub and Philip Stessens (NFT on OpenSea).

Rooted locally, connected globally

DAOs share infrastructure globally and they are all open source and open data by design, unlike many institutions. This new way of organising is like the difference between locking software on a CD-ROM and a website in the Web Browser where anyone can look at the source code. Open and transparent organising enables a Cambrian explosion of innovation. Whether you are in Cape Town, Taiwan or Brussels, if you work for a DAO, identify a pain point, and start building a solution for it, that solution can be reused anywhere in the world. By design, by virtue of sharing the same global infrastructure, we are all collaborating to make better human organisations.

That’s what happens with Fabien, a French developer that used to work for the Balancer DAO. They needed a web interface to make it easy for people to vote on proposals. So he built one and made it available for any other DAO to use. Today there are more than 6800 DAOs around the world that use his tool Snapshot.

Another example: Trach worked for the Yearn Finance DAO (a community owned platform to automate cryptocurrency investments) and they ran into the issue of how can we compensate all the people working for the community without a hierarchy? He went on to develop Coordinape, an intersubjective coordination tool for decentralised worker compensation, also now used by thousands of DAOs (including DAO Brussels). It enables anyone in the community to allocate tokens to the people they’ve worked with in a given period (called epoch). You don’t have anymore one boss that you need to please, you are working for the community and rewarded by the community. If your boss cannot see or cannot fully appreciate your contributions, you are out of luck to get a bonus. Not in a DAO.

For all those reasons, we decided to transition the non-profit we started in november 2019, All for Climate ASBL to a DAO. All for Climate started as an answer to a shared pain many grassroots collectives working on climate and social justice run into: administration and accounting. Being part of Extinction Rebellion and connected to a lot of other social movements, we experienced the administration pain very often. By nature, collectives of active citizens are dynamic and often temporary. Citizens organise around a project, need to raise some money to make it happen, but after that, the collective disappears or attracts other people. It makes no sense to start a legal entity or to even open up a bank account, simply because of the burden of adminstration.

With these problems in mind, we created a fiscal host for all active citizens working on projects within the climate and social justice framework. With the help of the platform Open Collective, we provide a virtual non profit, a legal entity and a shared bank account for citizens to remove any blocks that prevent them from getting started as soon as possible. Being in the middle of a climate emergency and social crisis, we need all hands on deck. Removing roadblocks from citizens to get active is where all our efforts should go.

At this moment, we host more than 150 smaller and bigger collectives all over Europe. The transition to a DAO-way of organising, with our own token as a tool to build community, reward systems and democratic governance structures, will enable us to grow into a citizen movement of the 21st century. A movement that is:

1. decentralised and rooted in the local reality, with collectives and citizens operating autonomously on projects that matter for them and make sense in their local context.
2. Connected globally to create a common infrastructure, connections, funding and tools to support those local actions.

Onboarding grassroots collectives in the Web3 space is definitely part of the work we will focus on. Ayowecca, a collective that we host in Uganda, took part in a crowdfunding via Gitcoin, a web3 project on public goods. They raised €25000 for executing their dream: planting dozens and dozens of fruit trees in schools and hospitals. By successfully connecting them to funders in the global regenerative finance space, they can now answer to a local reality in their neighbourhoods. And it is just the beginning of what is possible, bridging worlds and people globally, so they can be active locally.

Although we launched our own token in the mean time to start building a stronger community, our journey has only just begun. Our guides in the process are clear:

• Elinor Ostrom, American political economist, first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and her eight design principles to manage commons. Those principles include setting clear boundaries, conflict resolution mechanisms, procedures for making participatory rules, monitoring conditions of resources etc.
• Kate Raworth,  English economist, and her theory of the Doughnut economy, an economic model that balances between essential human needs, creating social foundations and planetary boundaries.
• Sociocracy and Frederic Laloux “Reinventing organisations” for creating collective governance structures that promote collaboration, transparency, self organising and ownership.
• Deep democracy, non violent communication, liberating structures and other human centred conversation tools to embrace conflict as an opportunity to grow and create healthy human connections
• the creative force that is hiding in all citizens, in and out of web3 to build a vibrant new society of contributors.

The next chapter in human history might just as well be summarised as a time of networked localisation (...) remembering and desiring the benefits of community and local, while recognising the importance of cooperation, interrelationship, and shared information pathways at regional and global levels (Swan, 2021). Who do we choose to be in this troubled time, what do we choose to spend our time on, what do we want to create to enter that new chapter?

The positive, global breakthrough we need to face the crisis, requires us to create alternatives, support, solutions and opportunities so millions of citizens can reorganise. We need to reclaim ownership over these solutions and the responsibility that comes with that. We need to free ourselves from the existing systems and create new ones that know no borders and that invite everyone to contribute. And we need to turn to each other, regenerate our communities.

Works Cited

Fritsch, Felix, and Jeff Emmett. Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons. 1 April 2021. Frontiers in Blockchain.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the commons. The evolution of Institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Seba, Tony, and James Arbib. Rethinking Humanity Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom. June 2020, (PDF).

Swan, Anna-Marie. Commons: The Heart of the Creation Era. 24 August 2021. (Medium).

Wheatley, Margaret J. Who do we choose to be? Facing reality, claiming leadership, restoring sanity. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2017.