Most Important P2P-Related Projects and Trends of 2013

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Please not that 'most important' does not mean any blanket endorsement, nor 'best'. It just means that it is an important project.

Open value accounting, open book accounting and open supply chains

  • check out Curto Cafe in Nitteroi, Brazil, to see a fundamental re-organisation of the coffee supply chain using p2p/commons/sharing principles, combining open research, crowdfunded retail expansion and many other interesting innovations


New open manufacturing methodologies


Policy initiatives at city, regional and national scale

On the city level,

2013 was also the year of big and substantive urban revolts in Istanbul, Turkey and Sao Paolo, Brazil; like the 15M and Occupy movements they may leave in its wake revitalized activist and constructive networks (such as the movement against expulsion that came out of 15M in Spain and initiatives like the Rolling Jubilee which came out of Occupy).


  • On the regional level, after the pioneering Open Commons Region Linz, it is now the French territory of Bordeaux which is launching a process to make the sharing economy the central plank of its regional development [2]
  • But the big news is definitely that for the first time in history, a nation-state has legitimized the p2p/commons social transition, by asking FLOKSociety.org to prepare a transition plan and legal framework.

Open technology cooperatives

  • Las Indias and its work on Phyles, global community-supportive business coalitions


Developments in open agriculture, farmer to farmer cooperation and open agriculture machining designs

Commons-oriented cloudfunding and crowdfunding and other funding innovations

  • the Goteo commons oriented cloudfunding system is going beyond the merely 'reverse market' crowdfunding market model directed at individuals


Multiple currency innovations

  • Following the innovative block chain model of the Bitcoin Protocol which should be distinguished from the problematic first currency that it produced, many new forks are pushing forward the frontier of more community-oriented cryptocurrencies, such as the demurrage-based Freicoin. See the update [[5]] by Jem Bendell on the 15 weaknesses of Bitcoin and how they are being addressed.
  • Watch out for projects like FAZ and OpenUDC for experimental systems that integrate the Basic Income in their provision.

Critical and constructive voices on the sharing economy, and its legal empowerment

Business models for open culture

  • AMACCA in France applies the models pioneered in community-supported agriculture to the field of cultural production

Research hubs and massive open mapping for P2P practices and theory

  • The creation of P2P Lab, an independent media lab with a physical space consisted of a fab lab, a library, a meeting space and a guest room. P2P Lab (can be seen as an informal "p2p university") is interested in interdisciplinary research focused solely on free/open source technologies and practices. One of the aims of this initiative is to help communities or individuals who want to build a P2P Lab in their city inspired by the idea of solidarity franchising.
  • A new type of action and research communities such as Edgeryders and their ability to start a new type of global cooperations such as the Unmonastery project. video
  • In march 2013, the global hispanic wikisprint [6] took place, which participants from over 60 cities, in 23 countries and 500+ registered individuals and groups.

P2P open technical infrastructures

  • Initiatives such as Libre-Mesh and the Gordon Cook's Global Survey of Free Networks (which focuses on successful projects like the Catalonian Guifi.net) show the growing maturity of user-built and owned wireless commons

Recommended by Adam Scislowicz:

  1. Commotion: commotion wireless is a p2p mesh stack available as an image for wireless routers, cell phones, or any linux system
  2. Twister (p2p microblogging platform taking ideas and code from bitcoin & bittorrent). The whitepaper is very good [7]

New Political Parties and Movements

A new breed of political movements is emerging which want to more directly express popular opinion, see Partido X in Spain.