What is the P2P Foundation and Its Role in Research

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What is the P2P Foundation and its role in research?


The P2P Foundation is a non-profit organization, a “Stichting”, fouded in Amsterdan in 2007, under Dutch law.

The local registered name is: Stichting Peer to Peer Alternatives, dossier nr: 34264847.

It’s legal address is -

Realengracht 196 - 1013AV Amsterdam, Netherlands.


The aims of the P2P Foundation is to act as a global community of researchers, focused on understanding the emerging impact of peer production, peer governance, and peer property. This includes associated phenomena such as open innovation, co-creation and co-design, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Of particular interest is the intersection between the newly enabled 'horizontal' social processes, with the pre-existing, more 'vertically' oriented institutions, such as corporations and governments. The P2P Foundation covers all domains of social activity, combining different experts for different projects. In our research collection we have particularly focused on the sustainability of open practices, i.e. on open business models.


The P2P Foundation maintains an ecology of open knowledge resources available over the internet; a contextualized wiki with 15,000 articles which have been consulted 17 million times; a blog that ranks as a top 2% retweeted blog worldwide, according to Topsy.com; several mailing lists for discussions; a Ning forum; and an interconnected set of social bookmarking sites carrying more than 50,000 tagged information sources. The total interconnected reach of the P2P Foundation has been calculated at two million in terms of secondary audience, during early 2010.


The P2P Foundation community consists of both academics and independent researchers, which collaborate on a number of funded research projects, such as those for the EU Commission. A provisional and incomplete list of academic collaborators can be viewed here at http://p2pfoundation.net/List_of_P2P_Researchers. A provisional collation of appreciations by the scientific community of our work and approach can be found here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Testimonials.


The P2P Foundation is a part of a number of research consortia such as the 3D Living Innovation consortium, a Living Lab research project created on the initiative of La Fabrique du Futur. It works or has worked with partner organisations such as: Appropedia ; Espians ; Fing ; Global Village Network ; Global Swadeshi ; Hipatia ; The Hub ; Institute for Distributed Creativity ; Oekonux ; Open Source Ecology ; OpenKollab ; openMaterials ; Open Manufacturing ; openp2pdesign.org ; P2P Research Group ; Platoniq ; United Diversity; Entrepreneur Commons; Re-public; Ethical Markets TV; the Transitioner.


The P2P Foundation has won research-oriented awards, such as recently the 2011 Next Idea award of Ars Electronica. (http://chokepointproject.net/2011/05/choke-point-project-has-been-selected-as-2011-winner-of-the-next-idea-as-part-of-the-prix-ars-electronica-2011/) .


The P2P Foundation participates in dozens of scientific symposiums and has itself co-organized 7 scientific conferences with different partners, about two each year. A provisional list of the last hundred invitations is here at http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Foundation_Participation_in_Scientific_Symposia.