Global Credit Commons track

hi @davedarby Many commons - the most profoundly essential - cannot conceivable be owned: oceans, air, a bioregion's energy pool, the emotional commons, the collective labour-power of a community, etc. Such commons are however open to curating (contributing), stewarding and enjoying - this is what commoning is/does?

A bid for ownership is simply enclosure, commons-prevention, denial of the-right-to-common . . to de facto participants (who are now made illegitimate or illegal) for whom it is in fact equally necessary, making it subject to (legal or legitimated but not fair) rent and extraction. Ownership is no part of commoning? Anyway, isn't curating/stewarding/enjoying so much sounder, as an intrinsically mutualist vision of relationship? Applied to anything, let alone to necessary means of subsistence, wellbeing and commerce? In the historical world we inhabit, 'owning' does not mean the same as holding-in-common (land, credit, air, the biosphere. collective labour, an aesthetic, etc) - quite the contrary?

Days are gone when cooperation could just be applied to specific moveable assets or the distribution of specific assignable benefits. We must now cooperate over the welfare and justice of planet, global civil society, collective grandchildren? Isn't it mutual aid rather than mutual ownership that must be the root? Considering a global credit commons makes this perspective inescapable?

This is why I find myself mobilising the ungainly term 'post-propertarian', sorry :slight_frown:

My new site is www.nondominium.co.uk

I coined Nondominium a few years ago to describe consensual multi-stakeholder agreement (NOT legal person) between individuals in respect of use, fruits of use & control over productive assets, where no stakeholder has dominant rights over another.

Nondominium frames Property as the relationship it is (as Jeremy Bentham pointed out) rather than as a thing or object to be commoditised and transacted.

That's interesting @chriscook1 thanks, will read. Making commodification illegitimate is a good move for sure, replacing it with consensual, contextual agreement. I recall that Guild Socialism/Tawney had a spectrum of property classes with something like the same intent, taken up for example in Distributivism? But way too weak in the face of rapacious early C20 Fordist Capital and its enclosure of personal life!

Seems to me, 'stakeholder' has nothing like the power of 'commoner’/ing (verb preferred). The latter ascribes particular kinds of legitimate and desirable 'stakeholding', defined in relation to a whole, associative, collectively-held social-whole, which I feel is necessary in our present compromised world. No room any more for laissez faire, except in the very smallest things?

Multiplicity of stakeholdings translates to pluriverse of commons, requiring commons-of-commons. But seems to me the intrinsic valuing of 'commoning' is called for in our present world, rather than the liberal-agnostic 'stakeholding'? So I remain with 'post-propertarian'.

@dilgreen Do fork this to a new thread if it's straying from the software architecture topic too much? But IMHO the basic issues of ¿legal individualism? vs commoning, and software for ¿commons governance? or mere transaction-admin, are architecture questions.

Hi Mike. I'll email you - I'd like to talk with you more about commons.
Credit commons stresses the fact that it's the members who decide who gets credit, not the banks. The ability to provide credit is a common resource. No? (plus I think mutualism is all about ownership - taking the means of production back via a decentralised, non-state route - from each according to ability etc. can come later, but not in one step from here).

Mike,
The issue here is important. Your points make it clear that commons is used, generally these days, in far too loose a way (privatisers just push and push on the idea that "commons" means anything that hasn't yet been defined as ownable/saleable private property, using Hardin as their battering ram).

The Credit Commons is the right term - since the credit promises made within networks are not individual, but social promises, regulated in a way that is defined by free agreement among the peers that constitute the network.

The language is mostly as it is because it is being framed in a software development use-case mode - without consideration as to public communication. Which is no reason not to challenge and question it - since such framings have impact on design outcomes.

But I don't think that individuals can be dismissed.

Individuals and commoning is a relation that must be squarely faced - we must understand and accept the reality of the modern individual, taken in contrast with the pre-modern person - and understand that new commons will not be old commons.

For the pre-modern person, the fundamentality, organic wholeness and ubiquity of the society within which they have their existence is an unassailable given. Their personhood has meaning primarily as an instantiation of the possibilities of that society.

Whatever we think of it, modernity is now the condition. Of course 'modernity' is too large a subject to be defined, but it has certainly been smashing away at one social structure after another for centuries: commons, religion, public morality, free association, deference, gender - leaving us shorn of even the language, let alone the habits of socially effective conviviality. in short, as Sartre said; "God is dead - the bastard!'

So our new commons - the ones we need to be 'becommoning', cannot reject the modern individual - atomised as s/he is, aware of an aching hollowness for what has been destroyed, while simultaneously mistrustful / dangerously seduced by nostalgic remembrances of the wholeness of the past.

Deep water here Dil! Thanks for stepping in. I’ll just skim something off the top.

I acknowledge what you say about the individualisation of existence in modern times, with modernity ‘smashing away at one social structure after another for centuries’, and how it’s not possible to take for granted any simple kind of commons ethos, sensibility or sense of wholeness. In a sense, I feel this is the mission of C21commoning: to furnish a sound operational basis in the real economy and in culture, in which (trans) modern experiences of integrity, common concern and mutuality can be solidly founded. Trust, founded in operational capability and scope.

The individualism I was tilting at with my opening comment is the legal individualism of liberal-democratic economy and state; the determination enshrined in law, that there shall be no legitimate let alone basic form of collectivity or mutuality, and that (legal) individuals (mainly corporations) who have acquired power over assets shall be given unlimited expectations of accumulation and increased power. I don’t see this as at all the same thing as the existential individual, ‘dangerously seduced’ not by nostalgic remembrances of wholeness (cultivated as longings in the media rather than being real memories, to be satisfied by commodities - as if!) but by Fordist/modernist-capitalist myths of perfect satisfaction, perfect autonomy and ‘perfect fit’ in the sphere of consumption - all the way from the yoghurt aisle in the supermarket to the occupancy of the White House.

What we mean by ‘property’ is something to do with security of access to basic means of living (although material and legal provision may be more to the point than property) - for example, a worker’s access to tools or a person’s secure access to living space. But an important part of the new politics of commoning, I feel, is to entirely displace the propertarian-individualist-autonomist legal basis of exchange, production and access to means of subsistence and wellbeing. I feel the language of ‘ownership’ is too compromised to do useful service here, and ‘commoning’ is an opportunity to make as fresh a start as possible, on intrinsically collective and environment-aware trans-modern modes of existence.

... and now, to get back on track...

Tim Jenkin, Matthew Slater and I, as founder members of the Credit Commons Protocol Association - the seed of what will be the Credit Commons Foundation - would like to share some recent work with you.

WHAT WE'VE MADE

We have taken the vision outlined in the Credit Commons whitepaper to a new level of detail.

We worked through three tiers of elaboration:

1. a plain english, rigorous description of all the agents, interactions and tools required to implement the protocol - a setup whereby any person can join any trading network that will have them, and subsequently form a child network that is automatically federated into the whole connected trading network. The whole designed to be safe - in that each network sets credit limits for all its members, whose 'child' networks by default inherit the same settings.

2. a more specific, technical description of a particular type of software implementation of the protocol that allows for easy practical setup of technical services and federation by any new group with an absolute minimum of technical knowledge. This is very much an 'up-to-the-minute' approach, based in microservices and APIs, the basis for a simple and robust 'Minimal Viable Product' implementation and also for rapid technological innovation and improvement as we progress.

3. a set of precise specifications (swagger) for the software APIs that are required to service a user application to enable participation in the system.

Overall, through careful design, this is not a particularly complex ‘kernel’ of work.

The protocol is designed so that federation is the default. Rather than networks forming in isolation and only later applying to join larger scale networks, a promoter body (the Credit Commons Foundation) will set up some high-tier networks (a global network, then a series of continental scale networks, then some regional ones in areas where we know we are likely to have early adopters).

Something like the OCN could then join the Europe network (becoming a full member with voting rights). If the Australian guy who runs tradeswap then did his thing (which is to join every network going and act as a human 'bridge' ), he could institute a 'child network', and use his membership of other networks as nodes on that child network. This would be all that would be needed for UK OCN members to 'see' (in trading terms, not directory terms) an account on each of the networks he is a member of.

If Moxey and Sardex did something similar, then we would very speedily have achieved a trading circuit that spanned the globe - however sparsely - a new achievement that would be big news.

Each network has its own accounting unit, and can set its own exchange rate (although the default is 1:1) and transaction fees (charged in mutual credit units). Membership fees might be charged in fiat or Mutual Credit - the protocol doesn't know about membership fees, only membership status. This means that a commercial exchange that wished could federate to an appropriate tier of the network (if accepted by the membership), acting as a gateway to its existing network (which would appear as a child network), and charge whatever fees it liked to its members.

THE PLAN

The next step is to turn this specification into working code. This should be relatively straightforward, as Matthew and Tim have between them decades of experience in building such systems, and the specification has been carefully refined. Nevertheless, the devil is always in the detail, and we need additional skills in the core team to achieve this.

Code, though, is not everything: we have done some business strategy thinking too.

Clearly, it is highly important that the first implementation of this protocol be developed and nurtured by people who subscribe to the deep purpose of the project. The fashion for open source has led to an assumption that to be viable, everything like this needs to be made open-source from the outset. We disagree. A commons is not a free-for-all. It has members, with rights and obligations, non-members with fewer rights; it has a boundary.

This commons will be, for some time, a tender seedling in a forest of aggressive giants. We don't think it is safe to just let it go for anyone to use as they please, until we have established a strong cultural presence that makes it clear what it ought to be. Otherwise it could end up like libra-coin - carrying the 'mutual commons' label, but implemented in a manner that subverts our intent.

So we intend to control the protocol until we have grown something that is viable - having at the same time grown a governance platform that can manage its further development. We can't know the shape of this development at present, so we're starting small and simple. Three people committed to the vision, a simple legal identity, owning all the crucial work (both software and branding, domains etc), and with a clear intent.

This approach is also crucial for making the project a credible investment proposition.

Consequently, we are protecting the work through a simple Non Disclosure Agreement. This is not about mistrust, but is intended to convey seriousness of intent and understanding. The NDA can be read and signed here (a simple process - you can just type your name). We know that this is approach may raise some hackles, but I promise you that we are neither evil nor thoughtless in this choice - there is more detail in the preamble, which we'd be glad if you would read before reacting. We hope this makes sense to you, and look forward to hearing from you - soon, I hope.

The document repository is (for now) a private gitlab project. Once we have your agreement, we will add you to the project, and take things from there.