This opportune initiative was the brainchild of
Medialab Prado. Basically its premise is that not everything in the world is private property, and while in recent decades the state has bent over backwards to defend and subsidize the interests of the few, there are some things that don’t have to pass through the government’s filter in order to be considered common property: in other words, belonging to you, me and anyone who needs them.
According to Antonoio Lafuente, "the Commons is the new way of expressing a very old idea: that some assets belong to everyone, and that they form a community of resources that should be actively protected and managed for the common good."
They first sought ways of meeting that were neither a conference, a seminar, nor an elitist think tank, rather groups that would allow any person to join the discussion group, in search of a committed group that would provoke certain results.
What’s it all about? "Seeing the world collectively or, in other words, choosing a world made by everyone, a common world." And working on this together are people from various fields like philosophy, ecology, activism, hacktivism, law, urban planning, art, journalism and economic politics. After this, work groups are formed to go beyond the theory and actually put things into practice.
And now that the Commons Lab in Madrid is coming up with results, other similar groups are starting up in America. For the moment, the one in
Mexico City has been operating for a couple of months already. The question that I can’t help asking is, what will happen to a lab like this, on a continent where concepts like social democracy and public affairs haven’t quite managed to land. Where dictatorships, dirty wars, the brutal exploitation of natural resources, genocide and socio-economic disparity are the order of the day. We’ll soon find out, surely the lab will provide lots to speak about.
http://medialab-prado.es/laboratorio_del_procomun
