Commons Engine

Author: Mahima Gupta

Short Summary

By assisting partner initiatives that develop technology to be shared and connecting them through theme cohorts, Commons Engine serves as an "engine" for the commons. They describe these social and economic strategies so that groups can establish themselves more confidently by connecting to pre-existing professional networks and employing tried-and-true procedures.

Website address: https://commonsengine.org/

Creator and Director: Ferananda Ibarra

Logo. source

Profile

The “Commons” or “commoning” is a social system for the stewardship of natural resources (like water and land) and shared assets (knowledge artifacts). Commoning expressly focuses on the dynamics of aligning resources, community, governance, and stewardship. Commons Engine attends to each of these ingredients, manifesting a fundamental change in thinking that reinvigorates work, politics, production, and care for each other and the Earth.

The Commons Engine can be thought of as a Holochain project incubator that specializes in bootstrapping a variety of Holochain applications: asset-backed currencies, complex open value flow designs for the material and knowledge commons, and tools for democratic governance of organizations and common-pool resources. Holochain is a secure, dependable, and quick framework for building peer-to-peer applications. Holochain applications connect user devices directly to one another in secure networks rather than relying on servers. The autonomy and accessibility of locally installed software is combined with the strength and redundancy of cloud software, giving users the best of both worlds. In turn, application developers are freed from having to manage and pay for cloud hosting.

Ferananda Ibarra, Director of the Commons Engine, believes that nature shows us the most powerful keys to wholeness. She works with Holo and Holochain in the space of distributed applications, decentralization, distributed ledger systems, and crypto-economies. Holo finished a successful Initial Community Offering (ethical ICO) and is creating a Distributed App and hosting Ecosystem.

The Commons Engine envisions healthy financial exchange that lends the power of networks to values and goals that serve its participants rather than just platform owners, designers, and first-comers. Above all, they want the structures that come to replace centralized systems to better account for how they interact which will make them more accountable.

In this way, they envision the countering of rising monetary inequality with systems of deeper wealth. They will also redirect social power away from profiteering institutions that do not deeply honor their relationships to the planet and to each other.

By dispersing asset-backed and mutual-credit currencies where they are most needed, Commons Engine will help the hApps ecosystem expand significantly. One of the few projects positioned to integrate cryptocurrency with collective credit, Holochain was mentioned by Brett Scott among other monetary rebels. In actuality, Holochain is a bridge between cryptocurrency crusaders, financial theorists, and localists. Creators of regional, complementary, and cooperative currencies (and the media they rely on) can considerably expand and strengthen the resilience and utility of the instruments they create by taking advantage of the full interoperability of Holochain-based currencies and applications.

Models that control code changes and versioning are simple to add into Holochain applications, which are executed by its users. Markets honoring the viewpoint of all stakeholders are what Commons Engine seeks to promote. This entails, on the one hand, abandoning the naive notion that the design of decentralized technology can naturally build relationships of trust, and, on the other, pursuing forms of crowdfunding that openly reject the dubious methods that have given ICOs a bad name.

YOUTUBE hWKBXTaYXU0 Jean Russell discussing Holochain, the Commons Engine, P2P governance, business models and more.

YOUTUBE 0x_svbEVudw Ferananda Ibarra, the Director of Commons Engine, discussing Commons Engine and Holochain.

Governance

If software mediates and thus engineers our collective action, Common Engine’s governance is like an ongoing experiment in calling forth and implementing agreements that reflect a general will. Common Engine gives a deep and thorough support through select partnerships to provide self-paced, low-cost access to education on currency design.

Projects

Friends & Partners

Holochain: Holochain is an open-source framework for creating peer-to-peer applications that are secure, reliable, and fast. Instead of depending on servers, Holochain applications connect user devices directly to each other in secure networks.
JustOne Organics: JustOne Organics is a global mission and regenerative food systems brand Conventina Foundation : The Foundation invests in the Holocahin ecosystem to create innovations in communal intelligence using open source software that promotes ecological and human flourishing.
The Metacurrency Project: Commons Engine is partnering with them to create a series of currency design masterclasses aimed towards change agents, blockchain enthusiasts and systems thinkers. They will offer video materials, case studies, practical exercises, and learning materials for the public.

Finances

Short description of some aspects of funding

Origin Story

Commons Engine is a sister project of Holochain, an end-to-end, open source, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) app framework, established in 2009. Commons Engine was created “because crowdfunding the development of Holochain taught us that the social labor required for cohering value-creating ecosystems cannot be underestimated. The organization educates, and in some cases, supplies the network forming around Holochain technology with the social, emotional, educational, and advocacy tools required for bootstrapping currencies” (source).