Reclaiming the Commons

MODELS & BEST PRACTICES

Creative Commons (San Francisco, CA)
www.creativecommons.org
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has developed “creative commons” licenses to provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. The group has built upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach. All of the group's tools are free.

Internet Archive (San Francisco, CA)
www.archive.org
The Internet Archive is a non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the organization has since grown to include texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.

Ithaca Hours (Ithaca, NY)
www.ithacahours.org
Ithaca Hours is a local currency system that promotes local economic strength and community self-reliance to support economic and social justice, ecology, community participation and human aspirations in and around Ithaca, New York. Ithaca Hours help to keep money local, building the Ithaca economy. It also builds community pride and connections. Over 900 participants publicly accept Ithaca HOURS for goods and services.

Practical Farmers of Iowa (Ames, IA)
www.practicalfarmers.org
Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) is a non-profit, educational organization that began in 1985 and now has over 700 members in Iowa and neighboring states. The group works to research, develop and promote profitable, ecologically sound and community-enhancing approaches to agriculture. We carry out diverse programs to assist farmers with both production and marketing needs, to raise public awareness of where food comes from and how it is grown, and to educate youth about agriculture and the environment.

Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA)
www.plos.org
The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. All material on the site, whether submitted to or created by the Public Library of Science, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Software in the Public Interest (Indianapolis, IN)
www.spi-inc.org
SPI is a non-profit organization founded in 1997 to help groups develop and distribute open hardware and software. SPI encourages programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software, and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product.

Texas Permanent School Fund
www.tea.state.tx.us/psf
The PSF was created in 1854, through a $2,000,000 appropriation by the Texas legislature for the benefit of the public schools of Texas. The State Constitution of 1876 stipulated that certain lands and all proceeds from the sale of these lands should also constitute the PSF. The proceeds from the sale and the mineral-related rental of these lands including, bonuses, delay rentals and royalty payments, become the corpus of the Fund, providing a permanent source of funding to support public schools. Today, the value of the fund is approximately $5.5 billion.

Wikimedia Foundation (St. Petersburg, FL)
www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/home
The Wikimedia Foundation maintains and develops free-content, multiple-author projects and makes the contents available to the public free of charge. In addition to its encyclopedia, Wikipedia, there is a multi-language dictionary/thesaurus (Wiktionary), a collection of e-book resources for students such as textbooks and annotated public domain books (Wikibooks). a repository for other forms of free media, Wikimedia Commons, that contains (as of 2009) over 4.5 million images, videos, and sound files.

Whidbey Institute-Leadership for the New Commons initiative (Clinton, WA)
www.whidbeyinstitute.org/initiatives_lnc.html
For over 30 years, the nonprofit Whidbey Institute has held leadership retreats on sustainability issues. This initiative, begun in 2000, promotes the idea of the public good by helping participants gain a more reflective understanding of the commons. More broadly, through its retreats, the Institute works to develop leadership capable of meeting today's economic, ecological, and cultural challenges.

WorldChanging.Com (Seattle, WA)
www.worldchanging.com
WorldChanging.com, begun in 2003, is a web-based discussion forum platform of social change activists. The site works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us and plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. The group pays special attention to tools, ideas and models that may have been overlooked in the mass media and aims to show ways in which seemingly unconnected resources link together to form a toolkit for changing the world.

Xigi.net (San Francisco, CA)
www.xigi.net
Founded in 2006 by social enterprise and socially responsible investment leaders, xigi.net is designed to serve as the creative commons where people who want to be involved or learn more about investing for good come together to share their collective market intelligence and thinking.