Reclaiming the Commons

RESEARCH RESOURCES

Alternative Farming Systems Information Center
http://afsic.nal.usda.gov
The Alternative Farming Systems Information Center (AFSIC) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture specializes in identifying resources about sustainable food systems and practices. This website has links to directories of communities with community supported agriculture systems in place, as well as links to a number of studies.

Alternative Law Forum
www.altlawforum.org
The Alternative Law Forum was started in March 2000 by a collective of lawyers with the belief that there was a need for an alternative practice of law. Their website contains a wide range of publications on issues regarding the digital commons and intellectual property issues.

Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University)
www.cyber.law.harvard.edu
The Berkman Center engages in the study of a wide range of Net issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control and electronic commerce. The Center understands the Internet as a social and political space where constraints upon inhabitants are determined not only just through the law, but, more subtly, through technical architecture ("code"). The website contains a considerable number of publications on these topics.

Community Solution
www.communitysolution.org
The Community Solution program, started in 2003, is a national resource for knowledge and practices on low-energy living and self-reliant communities. Community Solution’s website contains a number of reports on these topics, with a focus on small community-scale housing, transportation, and food production policies and practices.
www.community-wealth.org/strategies/panel/coops/models.html

Conference on the Public Domain (Duke Law School)
www.law.duke.edu/pd
This website contains a collection of papers from a November 2001 conference, which center on the study of the concept of the “public domain”—its importance, its history, its role in science, art, and in the building of the Internet, as well as how it is similar to and different from the idea of a commons. Topics covered include the human genome, appropriationist art (such as hip-hop), the production of scientific data, and the architecture of communications networks.

Digital Library of the Commons
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu
The Digital Library of the Commons is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.

Free Expression Policy Project (Brennan School, New York University)
www.fepproject.org
The Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP), founded in 2000, provides research and advocacy on free speech, copyright, and media democracy issues. The website contains a wide range of reports on the information commons and related issues, as well as policy reports, press releases, fact sheets, and legal briefs.

International Association for the Study of Common Property
www.indiana.edu/~iascp
The International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), founded in 1989, is a nonprofit association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively by communities in developing or developed countries.

Natural Assets Project, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
www.peri.umass.edu/296/
The Natural Assets Project examines the scope for reducing poverty through asset building in the form of natural capital. Natural assets include both environmental sources and sinks. "Sources"ù include raw materials, renewable and non-renewable, such as forests, fisheries, soil, and minerals. ù "Sinks" are the capacities of media such as air and water to absorb and decompose the wastes from production and consumption. The institute aims to design Pro-poor natural asset building strategies to further its goals of both conversation and environmental justice or equity.

Public Trust Doctrine on Natural and Cultural Resources Page
www.braypapers.com/PTD.html
The Public Trust Doctrine Page, maintained by the Albany, New York-based law firm of P.M.Bray LLC provides a range of information about public trust law, with a focus on public policy, research and application in natural and cultural resources planning and management.

Robyn Van En Center (Wilson College-Chambersville, PA)
www.wilson.edu/wilson/asp/content.asp?id=804
The Robyn Van En Center provides a national resource center about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) for people across the nation and around the world. The Robyn Van En Center also offers outreach and works to gain publicity about CSA farms in order to benefit community farmers and consumers everywhere.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter
www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos
The SPARC Open Access Newsletter is a monthly newsletter by Peter Suber, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Earlham University, offering news and analysis of the open-access movement —the worldwide movement to disseminate scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions. The SPARC newsleter was launched in July 2003 to continue Peter's Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter (March 2001 - September 2002). Back issues, as well as Peter Suber’s blog, are available on this website.

Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu
Founded by law professor Lawrence Lessig (author of Free Culture), The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program THAT brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.

Team Works (Los Altos, CA)
www.teamworks.coop
Founded in 2004, TeamWorks is a worker-owned cooperative business. Every permanent worker in the company is an owner-member with a financial stake in the business’ success and its decision-making. TeamWorks consists of two business, one of which provides house cleaning and concierge services on the San Francisco peninsula while the other provides business support services and is involved in starting new TeamWorks sites.

Who Owns Native Culture?
www.williams.edu/go/native
This website, designed as a supplement to the book of the same name (published by Harvard Press, 2003), also provides a wide range of resources for understanding current debates about the legal status of indigenous art, music, folklore, biological knowledge, and sacred places, as well as the ways those issues intersect with current debates regarding the commons, the public domain and intellectual property.

Yes! Magazine—Reclaiming the Commons issue (summer 2001)
www.yesmagazine.org/default.asp?id=77
This issue explores the commons from a variety of perspectives. As one of the articles’ authors, Jonathan Rowe, notes, “It is the vast realm that is the shared heritage of all of us that we typically use without toll or price. The atmosphere and oceans, languages and cultures, the stores of human knowledge and wisdom, the informal support systems of community, the peace and quiet that we crave, the genetic building blocks of life — these are all aspects of the commons.”