Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is a Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. Michel Bauwens is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organization of researchers working in collaboration in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including his seminal thesis The Political Economy of Peer Production.

Platform cooperativism in the context of alternative infrastructures for the commons economy
The key drama of the transition of our times is that capital has understood much faster than the alternative political and economic forces that mutualization of knowledge and infrastructures was on the order of the day, and by organizing extractive activities around our commoning and peer to peer exchanges. Platform cooperatives may be an interestng social market alternative, but is it a commons-based alternatives. The latter would require ‘open cooperatives’ that innovate in significant ways the traditional cooperative practices. In this talk we contextualize the need of open cooperatives in the context of other initiatives that aim to make commoning into viable eco-systems