This is Lowimpact’s final blog post, that I’m sending out to our mailing list of 10,000 people. Many of you will have attended courses with us, back when we were known as LILI (Low-impact Living Initiative), or purchased books, online courses, talked with us at events, bought from our online shop or just browsed our huge knowledge base and blog archive, and maybe asked questions or got stuck into debates in the comments. I hope you found useful things to incorporate into your life.
I co-founded Lowimpact in 2001, when I was a member of Redfield Community (where LILI was born), and it’s been a really interesting journey since then, meeting lots of great people doing wonderful things. My articles and interviews on Lowimpact allowed me to contact, meet and start collaborating with several key people, some of whom are now heavily involved in building the new commons movement:
- The late, great Tom Greco, whose book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilisation introduced me to the problems associated with the money system, and how mutual credit solutions can replace it.
- Tom suggested that I read Matthew Slater’s Credit Commons White Paper, which I did, and invited him to stay. He came, he explained more, and introduced me to Dil Green, who lived close to me in South London. Dil and I, with Oli Sylvester Bradley of Open.coop, built a national mutual credit network – the Open Credit Network.
- But as Tom Greco explained, mutual credit networks and commons groups have to be established in communities and federated together to get to the national scale. So now Dil is building a credit clearing / mutual credit network for Liverpool, that can be replicated in any city and federated.
- Dil saw that Chris Cook’s ideas around building energy commons via vouchers (use-credit obligations) could be adapted to work in any sector, and so I moved to Stroud, as a likely town for building those models. I met Chikara (Chik) Shimasaki, who was central in building a climbing commons in Stroud – a community-owned climbing gym.
- We also have a budding housing and land commons in Stroud, plus a Stroud Commons website and an annual Festival of Commoning (happening in Stroud this weekend – tickets still available).
- My articles attracted Tom Woodroof, who’s now working with Dil at Local Loop Merseyside, and Michel Rauchs, who’s working with Chik to build a Commons Lab, researching and developing commons models, and producing playbooks to help anyone to build commons in their town.
- And finally, Lowimpact helped me to meet and collaborate with a group of great people to build a knowledge commons – Growing the Commons (GtC), which incorporates a knowledge base, blog and forum.
All the information on Lowimpact.org is moving to the GtC knowledge base, where we’ll be adding more and more topics, with information provided and updated by teams of specialist advisors, and all owned and governed as a commons by the advisors, users, stewards (who administer and maintain the site), and ‘custodians’ – respected commoners or organisations, that ensure the knowledge commons remains in common ownership in perpetuity.
I’ll move the Lowimpact mailing list to the GtC blog mailing list (you can unsubscribe at any time), as that’s where I’ll be blogging from now on, along with Dil, Matthew, Chik, Michel, Katja from Bristol Commons, Otto (PhD, focusing on agroecology) and others. I’m writing a book (provisionally titled The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism), based on a series of articles I’m writing for GtC.
I hope you’ll like and support what we’re doing at Growing the Commons. Do introduce yourself on the forum, comment on the articles and contact us if you’d like to get involved in any way – maybe as an advisor for one or more topics. And maybe we’ll see you at the festival? There are still weekend, day and half-day tickets available.
Thanks very much for your support over the years. Hopefully we can continue the good work at GtC, and help grow the commons to ultimately replace the absolute shitshow we’ve got at the moment.
Cheers folks,
Dave