Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production and commons-centric economics. He is also a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group and has (co-)published various books and reports, such as ‘Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy’, and more recently ‘Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto’ (Westminster Un. Pr. 2019). In 2014, Michel crafted a Commons Transition Plan for government institutions in Ecuador, and in 2017, for the city of Ghent in Belgium. He is currently engaged in studying the impact of the acceleration of global catastrophic risks and its intersection with civilizational transitions, by focusing on the underestimated importance of commons-based institutions. In a separate inquiry he focuses on the optimal forms of mutual coordination for translocal economic networks, and how these capacities intersect with market and state dynamics. From 2018 to 2022, Bauwens was also adviser to SMart.coop, a fast growing European labor mutual, looking in the types of welfare reform (commonfare), that can benefit the growing number of autonomous workers, including the 34 million digital nomads. He also contributed to the commons strategy of the One Project NGO. His report, P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival, examines how the shared accounting systems developed by open source and blockchain-based Coordi-Nations, can contribute to the coordination of production within planetary boundaries. He studied the emergence of cosmo-local forms of productive organization, in the Cosmo-Local Reader. Post-Covid, Michel Bauwens is doing 'civilizational transition' research for the Civilization Research Institute, and functions as research coordinator for the Global Chinese Commons, a crypto-nomadic community. He is also listed at #82 on the Post Growth Institute (En)Rich list, a list which is meant to convey a selection of the people who have contributed to the world.