From P2P Foundation

Can we invent new corporate formats for P2P and commons-friendly market approaches?

Contents 1 The context 2 What we like 3 Visualisations 4 Related Sections

The context

While markets are an acceptable mechanism to regulate supply and demand for certain scarce goods, capitalism is an infinite-growth, scarcity engineering mechanism, which is incompatible with the long-term survival of humanity and the biosphere. More specifically, profit-maximising companies are engineered to ignore natural and social externalities, are legally obligated to maximally enrich their shareholders, and can only be regulated from the outside, and when this outside is weak, lacks self-regulating mechanism to respect natural limits and social justice.

However, open design communities have no compulsion to create artificial scarcity, and enterpreneurial coalitions that align themselves to such commons, will have more sustainable practices. This sustainable practice can be strengthened even more through the choice of legal and institutional formats that regulate corporate entities 'from the inside', by creating a social and natural context for eventual profit making (and not 'profit-maximising'). Ideally, peer producers and contributors to commons of knowledge, software and design, could create their own ethical structures and network each other in ecologies of solidarity around the commons from which they derive their value.

So, at the core we have shared innovation commons, and the for-benefit associations which maintain them, and these commons are surrounded by an enterpreneurial coalition of ethical companies, who use relocalized open and distributed manufacturing, but are organized in global material coalitions that are specifically designed to sustain their commons, i.e. Phyles.

What we like

• The concept of Phyles, global, mission-oriented, community-supportive market entities

• A license to support the Commons and the Solidarity Economy: the Peer Production License

• Growing in solidarity: Solidarity Franchising

• Intro to For-Benefit Corporations‎ and other Fourth Sector Organizations

• The Entrepreneur Commons

Visualisations

Solidarity Economy visualisation

Related Sections

• Information on licenses
• Information on open business models
• Information on cooperatives
• Information on p2p-friendly market approaches
• Information on p2p-friendly property formats