Sitting down with a scotch tonight, I wanted to answer the question of why I called this site Climate Commons. I think the first word is obvious, but what is this notion of the commons? I went through my writing on it, and then starting surfing around the various sites I have found that use it as their central tenet. Daunted, I decided to collect phrases that seem to point at its varied form:

a public sphere in which community values are expressed

a collaborative working space

distributed problem solving

a public library

an invisible college

a space for community owned assets

a piece of land over which other people—often neighbouring landowners—could exercise one of a number of traditional rights, such as allowing their cattle to graze upon it

any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community

the tangible and intangible aspects of the environment that no-one owns but everybody enjoys

shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest

something that is used together, always changes but remains one

a shared social-ecological system

This project lies within a few different commons: an environmental commons (our environmental heritage - planet, water, air, biodiversity, and genetic variability), a Knowledge commons (knowledge incubated and maintained through social communities), a cultural commons, a science commons, and a technology commons. Each of these communities creates enclosures around their resources, and a project like Climate commons seeks to create porous networks between these different commons.

-- JaneMarsching