Even the most ardent free marketer would not go so far as to say that Bill Gates or T. Boone Pickens has the right to own the oxygen we breathe or the words we use. Although some forms of water privatization and genetic patenting have become issues, popular opinion still demands the fundamentals of life should be shielded somewhat from the realm of buying and selling. (That’s why prostitution and the selling of organs for transplant are illegal most places.)

With one notable exception: food. As essential to our lives as air or water, food nonetheless has been widely accepted as a private commodity. It is grown, processed, packaged and sold for a profit, usually by large corporations. Few look upon it as a commons, of which everyone rightly deserves a share.

But for more than 35 years, one woman has courageously carried the message that food is more than simply another consumer product.

She is Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, who overturned the conventional wisdom that hunger and starvation are caused by a shortage of food. She has patiently but forcefully made the case that people go hungry because of inequality and greed in the distribution of food.

Lappé’s influence has been immense—in promoting vegetarian and whole grains diets, in broadening the scope of democracy, in opening up thinking about international food production and marketing systems. Yet she’s not convinced everyone.

A lot of news coverage on the recent food shortages around the world did not discuss agriculture, trade and social policies that keeps food out of the hands of people, but rather blamed the crisis on “not enough food to feed empty stomachs.”

That phrase came from a reporter for National Public Radio, who in a 4-part series championed pesticides, artificial fertilizer and genetically-modified seeds as the solution to food shortages and the impoverishment of small farmers around the world.

“NPR misses the real story,” Lappé writes in a blog on the Huffington Post. “On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They’re succeeding. The largest overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in 57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100 million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79 percent.

“All over the world,” she continues, “poor farming communities are discovering their own power to work with each other and with nature to build healthier, more secure, and more democratic lives.”

Although Lappé doesn’t use the c-word, that sounds like a good working definition for an international food commons.

For more information see the Small Planet Institute

So it is refreshing to encounter an artist who is courageously and opening using fair use to build an unusual career. D.J. Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis, who only recently quite his day job as a biomedical engineer) has become a hot performer by sampling dozens of music snippets and blending them into his distinctive sound collages. He doesn’t ask permission; he doesn’t make any payments. Girl Talk just takes whatever samples he finds interesting — more than 300 on his latest album, “Feed the Animals” – and claims protection under the fair use doctrine.

Girl Talk, photo by Ezalis, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

At one time, bands like the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy freely sampled other artists and became sensations. In fact, sampling was a key element enabling hip-hop to be invented in the first place. But then the record labels and attorneys got into the act, each trying to claim broad protections for “its” musical property.

The big blow came in 2004 when George Clinton’s group, Funkadelic, won a lawsuit against the rap group N.W.A. for using a nearly inaudible sample of a three-note, two-second clip from “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” – the notorious Bridgeport v. Dimension Films case. Now – fair use be damned – it is generally illegal to sample any identifiable sound snippet without first obtaining permission and making a payment to the artist’s record label and/or publisher.

This sweeping legal standard has had a profoundly negative effect on creativity, say culture scholars like Siva Vaidhyanathan, Donna Demers and Kembrew McLeod. Excessive copyright protection has made hip-hop and other musical genres less innovative and robust. The sample-heavy recordings that made the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy so popular are all but impossible today.

Which is why Girl Talk deserves kudos for defiantly claiming fair use as his artistic right. Far from just “ripping off” the sounds, Girl Talk spends months working out ideas during his live performances, and an estimated day of work for every minute of his sound collages. His sampling and sound collages may use other people’s works, but the new songs are truly “creative transformations” within the scope of fair use jurisprudence.

Just because a sound is identifiable as someone else’s does not mean that there is no new creativity going on. In any case, how can future musicians create if they are constantly fearful of stepping on someone else’s guitar riff or melody? Not so long ago, Beatle George Harrison actually lost a lawsuit because his song “My Sweet Lord” was judged to be a ripoff of “He’s So Fine.” The spectacle of some culturally clueless judge making these determinations is at once scary and hilarious. In a recent profile of Girl Talk, The New York Times gave this evaluation of his music: “At times [Girl Talk’s] album sounds like a cleverly programmed K-tel compilation that presents catchy riffs instead of full songs, and part of the fun is recognizing familiar sounds in a new context.”

Could Girl Talk’s brave invocation of fair use signal a turn of the tide for that beleaguered legal doctrine? Perhaps. Not only is fair use being thrown back at copyright industries with increasing frequency and success – evidenced by cases brought by fair use legal clinics at Stanford Law School and American University – Girl Talk actually has the public support of his Pennsylvania congressman, Mike Doyle. Also amazing is the fact that Girl Talk has not yet been sued. Apparently the record labels are fearful of the bad publicity that any litigation would bring as well as a potentially adverse judgment that could set a lasting precedent.

It’s been a long time coming — years of civil disobedience by artists; a number of lawsuits upholding fair use; the publication of new “best practices” norms for fair use in certain creative sectors; the growing use of Creative Commons licenses as a workaround – but if only as a cultural matter, I think fair use may be regaining its mojo.

People’s economic well-being can be held hostage by oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, HMOs, and other powerful multinational corporations, yet in political debates independence generally mean just one thing: the absence of government regulation, or any kind of joint citizen effort.

CC license By Marion Doss from Flickr Thomas Jefferson. Copy of painting by Rembrandt Peale, circa 1805. Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001

I was reminded of this by a headline in the New York Times citing the “independent streak” of Houston residents for the city’s miserably low recycling rate: 2.6 percent, worst in the country, four times less than some others at the bottom of the list like Dallas and Detroit.

“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” declared Mayor Bill White, a Democrat who favors expanded recycling in the city. (Actually there’s no law in Houston or anywhere else in the U.S. forcing people to recycle—although San Francisco, ranked at top with 68 percent recycling, is considering one.)

This is surely not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he penned the word “independence” in his immortal Declaration. Jefferson embodied a true “independent streak”, working collectively with other American dissidents to “rebel” against the tyranny of the British crown.

Jefferson and his compatriots would be amused (or more likely dismayed) to see that what passes for independence today is a peevish resistance against “trendy and hyped up” chores that might result in a tiny bit more work on trash day. Independence for them did not mean a privatized, selfish focus on individual convenience over the common good.

Although influenced by John Locke and other British philosophers stressing the pursuit of property and the rights of individuals, they still understood the commons as part of the social dynamic that allowed societies to progress.

From communal cattle grazing on the Boston Common (which continued until 1830) to the community cooperation that allowed white settlers to survive on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the commons was central to American life at that time. And for anyone paying attention, the commons-based culture of Eastern Indian tribes, whose Iroquois Confederation influenced the U.S. Constitution, provided another example of the power of the collective cooperation.

No one of that era, including capitalism’s fervent champion Adam Smith, could conceive of a world where the market drove all economic, political and moral decisionmaking. Social bonds created outside the marketplace by people working together to solve common problems is what kept communities together then (and now). To refuse to join a cooperative effort to make the local environment healthier would not be seen as “independent,” but rather as foolish and lazy.

The same is true today.

The City of Sapporo, a city of two million people in northern Japan, was proud as punch to cosponsor the event. City officials threw open the doors of their beautiful convention center and hosted an evening reception at the nearby ski jump for the 1972 Olympics, complete with a performance by some fierce Ainu drummers and an exhibition of skiers who gracefully flew 140 meters onto the Astroturf-carpeted slope.

On the bus ride to an evening reception at the ski jump, I met Lucifer Chu, a mischievous, public-spirited Taiwanese man who has gained some renown for translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Chinese. As the Taipei Times tells it, , Chu struck a fantastically good deal with a publisher who was skeptical the book would sell. When the Peter Jackson trilogy of films was released, Chu ended up making a small fortune.

Lucifer Chu, photo by Charles Mok, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Chu started two foundations. The first, The Fantasy Foundation, promotes fantasy literature and graphic design throughout the Chinese-speaking world. A second, the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System – or “OOPS” — coordinates some 700 volunteer translators throughout Asia to translate MIT’s OpenCourseWare website into Chinese. OpenCourseWare makes MIT’s many curricular materials available to anyone for free. By making those materials available to Chinese-speaking world, Chu’s project has helped dramatically change how China teaches physics and many other subjects.

At the conference, I also caught up with David Harris, who is producing the Global Lives Project. The project is about recording and displaying 24 hours in the lives of ten people who will represent the diversity of daily life on earth. The ten lives will be featured in a video installation and also on a website that has an even larger video library of human life experience. A portable exhibition space that immerses viewers in the daily lives of the subjects will tour venues around the world starting in 2009.

Later in the afternoon, I listened to Wojciech Gryc, an international development student who works with a group called the Article 13 Initiative. The project takes computers, Linux and open-publishing software tools to villages in Kenya and Chad to teach them young people how to publish their own community magazines. The project’s tagline is “Open access. Open source. Open media.”

The best-dressed lexicographer you will ever meet is Erin McKean, who lives in Chicago and is a big fan of dictionaries. She blogs at dictionaryevangelist.com. McKean gave an amusing talk about what life would be like if language were not treated as a commons, citing how it would be impossible to curse because religious groups would have bought up all the expletives and retired them, and some big companies would buy up ownership of key letters.

Erin McKean, photo by Neil Hunt, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

On a later panel, McKean described the unusual wiki that she launched to help women find and make vintage sewing patterns. The site has become a mecca for women in search of dress patterns from the 1920s to 1970s that are no longer commercially available. What I enjoyed about the story is how the commoners are actually helping out corporate pattern makers like Simplicity, Butterick and Vogue — and other fashion fans — because the companies haven’t even maintained archives of their own patterns.

I also learned about Qwartz.org,, an electronic music awards program for indie artists. Qwartz invites Internet users to select the winners, who are then feted at an annual ceremony in Paris that attracts more than 2,000 people from 40 countries. Result: Qwartz is helping bring the best new international indie music to greater prominence.

As this brief and extremely partial review suggests, iCommons was a dizzy kaleidoscope of venturesome people dedicated to sharing information and culture. In my next post, I will discuss some specific themes at iSummit that captivated me.

Photo on homepage, “Ainu Drummers,” by Rampant Gian, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

It is tempting to dismiss locally grown food as just another elite fashion, as many people surely will. But it is also true that wealthy households are often the first to validate broader market trends.

Consider it another chapter in the ongoing dance between the commons and the market. The commons lovingly advances a new ideal – in this case, the ecological virtues, social satisfactions and great taste of locally grown food. And then, after years of hippies, homesteaders and eco-evangelists beating the drum for this new ideal below the radar screen of mainstream culture, entrepreneurs suddenly get hip to what’s going on and swoop in to make money from a grassroots trend.

Photo by asmart42, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Some things never change. We are at that special inflection point in the evolution of social attitudes that are mysteriously propelling the rise of a new market niche. Its customers, the aficionados of local food, even have a name – “locavores.” There are also novel sorts of new businesses.

As the Times reports, Trevor Paque has made a business in San Francisco planting vegetable gardens for affluent suburbanites who want to eat garden-grown food, but who don’t like to garden. So Trevor does the planting, weeding and harvesting. A company called FruitGuys will deliver boxes of locally grown, sustainably raised or organic fruit to people in San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Soon mega-millionaires like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh will rail against the trendiness of local food. That’s their schtick, after all – to invent elite foils for themselves so that they can cast themselves as Main Street populists. Real Republicans only eat red meat and potatoes, it would seem.

This is just a shell game in the culture wars, however. I am convinced that local food is going to become a steady, long-term growth market. For its taste, cost and eco-friendliness, local food has already become a symbol of social virtue. People are starting to realize that it is not so good for the planet to haul meat from New Zealand, wheat from South Dakota and fruit from Caifornia. Social demand and sheer economics are starting to buoy local growers, and supermarkets are looking for new ways to call attention to their local produce. The trend lines are clear.

The spending of local money for local produce is surely a virtuous cycle for local economies. It is also likely to promote greater personal connections among people locally, stronger commitments to one’s local community, and a more stable and diverse local economy.

Two days after filing the local foods article, Kim Severson, the same Times reporter who wrote about the elite embrace of local foods, had another piece about the upcoming an upcoming festival called Slow Food Nation. The event, to be held in downtown San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, will feature pavilions devoted to foods like pickles, coffee and salami. A quarter-acre patch of the lawn in front of City Hall has been ripped up to grow a garden.

Slow Food Nation is an ambitious attempt by Slow Food USA, the American spinoff of the Italy-born Slow Food movement, to establish itself as a recognized political and cultural force. Organizers hope the festival will be, in the words of Severson, “the Woodstock of food, a profound event where a broad band of people will see that delicious, sustainably produced food can be a prism for social, ecological and political change.”

I am sure that certain elements of the Slow Food world will behave like effete connoisseurs and fawn over the local argula and goat cheese. But really, is that so bad? Why shouldn’t people start to express their affection and appreciation for local food? If cultural snobs and the wealthy can embrace a populist trend without coopting it – validating it with their presence and boosting it with their dollars – I say, bring ‘em on. Let everyone celebrate the taste of local food – and then move on to the political and economic realities that sustain it.

If local food is going to be a victim of identity politics, let it be a politics of localism: “We all live here together, so let’s find the way to support the farmers who are our neighbors.”

If you care to learn why cell phone service is so bad in the United States, why breakthrough medical treatments cannot be taken to market, and how holdouts can stymie valuable real estate development, The Gridlock Economy helps locate a core problem: the fragmentation of individual property rights and the paralysis that results. Though economists like to tout property rights as a wonder-cure for virtually everything that ails us, Heller explains how all sorts of innovation and market growth is killed in the cradle simply because there are too many rights-holders with too many divergent concerns.

It can be extraordinarily costly to identify all of the people with property stakes in a given field, and even if they can be found, many have no wish to sell their rights. Such “holdouts” can effectively block new research on malaria drugs, plans to consolidate an urban university campus, and attempts by mobile phone companies to build a seamless national network of service. Gridlock prevails, and we are all the worse for it.

The signal contribution of Heller’s book is his lucid popularization of legal concepts that only patent scholars, real estate lawyers and telecom policy wonks give much thought to. Heller gives us a new language for understanding an important type of enclosure: the anticommons.

Heller and a colleague, Rebecca Eisenberg, coined this term in a 1998 law review article that explained how drug patents may paradoxically deter the development of new and useful drugs. An anticommons results when too many people own property rights of a given resource – land, electro-magnetic spectrum, biomedical knowledge – resulting in an inability to initiate new creative and commercial activity. He cites one legal theorist who writes, “To simplify a little, the tragedy of the commons tells us why things are likely to fall apart, and the tragedy of the anticommons helps explain why it is often so hard to get them back together.”

Here is the essential message that Heller develops throughout the book:

“Making the tragedy of the anticommons visible upends our intuitions about private property. Private property can no longer be seen as the end point of ownership. Privatization can go too far, to the point where it destroys rather than creates wealth. Too many owners paralyze markets because everyone blocks everyone else. Well-functioning private property is a fragile balance poised between the extremes of overuse and underuse.”

While it is easy to spot a “tragedy of the commons” – a resource gets visibly ruined and people fight about it – it is much harder to identify a tragedy of the anticommons, Heller explains, because there is usually nothing to show. How does one see something that has never existed (a new drug, a new business venture)? How can the “bargaining failures” of the market be made visible and rectified?

Heller demonstrates the ubiquity of the anticommons effect by taking the reader on a tour of oyster beds in Maryland, storefronts in Moscow, pharmaceutical labs, the Manhattan real estate market and robber barons of the Rhine River after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. The stories make clear that the anticommons is not some contrived abstraction, but a name for a phenomena that is widespread but largely overlooked.

The tolls levied along the Rhine River is a particularly helpful example. During the 13th Century, all sorts of barons built castles along the Rhine to forcibly extract tolls from merchant ships trying to bring their goods to market. As hundreds of castles sprang up to demand tolls, it became impossible to carry on commercial trade via the Rhine. Trade collapsed in the region for hundreds of years, and everyone was worse off.

Today, there are countless “phantom tollbooths” that use property rights to extract tribute from the stream of commerce while contributing very little in return. For example, “patent trolls” are companies that amass portfolios of patents simply to use them as bartering chits to extract money from companies doing genuine innovation. Now that companies can actually own “gene fragments,” the profusion of individual property rights is making it difficult for biotech companies to develop new therapeutic proteins and genetic diagnostic tests. There are too many bundles of patents spread among too many owners.

It is a heartening sign that many large research-intensive companies understand the anticommons problem. Many are in fact taking the initiative to combat it, if only to protect their own long-term strategic self-interests. Alarmed at the privatization of gene sequences, which are basic building blocks for drug research, Merck created a public database of gene sequences, the Gene Index, and contributed nearly a million of its own sequences. Some telecom companies have entered into patent pools so that they can share patented inventions among each other without the fear and expense of litigation. Innovation can proceed.

Yet there is only so much that individual players in a given market can do to combat gridlock. In most cases, the anticommons must be solved through government interventions such as regulation or eminent domain. Sometimes voluntary cooperation can devise solutions, but much depends upon the particular resource and community involved.

The Gridlock Economy is a refreshing book because it draws upon the deep knowledge and authority of legal scholarship without getting mired in pedantic, inside debates. It speaks to the concerned citizen and policymaker, and grounds its arguments in vivid, concrete stories that anyone can relate to. After going through so many examples, Heller makes a compelling case that the tragedy of underuse, a function of an anticommons of property rights, needs to be named in order to be recognized and then addressed. He is also astute about the neglected potential of the commons: “Cooperative solutions are often small-scale, context-specific, local and not reliant on legal structures – thus hidden,” he writes.

I do have some quibbles with The Gridlock Society. In his zeal to point out the tragedies of the anticommons, I think Heller could do a better job of recognizing that some anticommons can be worth keeping. I disagree with the presumption that consolidating market activity to make it more efficient is necessarily the highest virtue. As one reviewer of The Gridlock Economy pointed out, thank God urban critic Jane Jacobs was able to help prevent Robert Moses from turning lower Manhattan into a highway. Keeping the anticommons of Soho and Greenwich Village wasn’t such a bad outcome.

Heller bemoans the fact that political factors have thwarted the expansion of high-traffic airports around the nation. Building just 25 more runways could eliminate most air-travel delays in the United States, he writes, eliminating gridlock. Yet should the demands of an ever-burgeoning market sector and the nation’s frequent flyers be presumed to be more important than the desires of homeowners who live near airports? This strikes me as an inherently political question, one that economics cannot summarily resolve.

Localism, the diversity that comes with it, and a wide array of non-market values (history, culture, personal dignity) deserve respect, too. If they contribute to “gridlock” in some instances, the outcome may be worth it. There are likely to be many circumstances in which an anticommons is not such a bad thing.

This point should not detract from Heller’s larger accomplishment. The Gridlock Society skillfully draws together many diverse strands of scholarship and weaves them into a cogent analysis and highly readable story. He brings a penetrating eye to the limitations of traditional property rights theory, and clearly explains how many social, technological and economic problems stem from the anticommons. Heller concludes by offering an array of strategies for overcoming gridlock. It will be a difficult, long-term challenge to bring the commons and the market back into a more wholesome alignment, but The Gridlock Society gives us a new vocabulary and mental concepts for making serious progress.

This massive rise in inequality has been fueled by an unprecedented plundering of the commons. Assets once commonly held by communities (such as rainforests) and nations (such as telecommunications systems) have been grabbed up by global corporations for the benefit of their rich investors.

Inequality is often justified as simply the market rewarding the most enterprising people. But as Collins and his colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies Dedrick Muhammad have pointed out, “No one builds wealth alone…private wealth (savings, homeownership, investment wealth) is derived from a combination of individual activity and the commons.”

Indeed, such a huge disparity of wealth undermines the very idea of the commons, which is based on longstanding traditions of sharing and cooperative management of the resources upon which we all depend.

The Nation’s special issue lays out the situation in vivid terms with a series of charts and features illuminating commentary from leading economic analysts Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and John Cavanagh (director of the Institute for Policy Studies).

Collins directs the Institute for Policy Studies’s Working Group on Extreme Inequality to draw attention to how the growing concentration of wealth stymies efforts to solve pressing economic and environmental problems.

Read the source

The argument goes: “We must throw open our common assets to private exploitation, no matter the cost, or gas prices will remain high, our economy will crumble, the terrorists will win, and….[supply your own apocalyptic scenario]. The point is to start a stampede of fear – a diversion that allows corporate predators to justify an enclosure of the commons that would otherwise be resisted.

When sober, responsible minds look into the claims being made by the oil industry and the Bush administration, it becomes clear that opening up offshore areas will do nothing in the near term to solve high gas prices, and little over the long term as well.

Photo by ccgd, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-ND license.

The Los Angeles Times explains:
“The vast majority of the outer continental shelf is already open to oil exploration: Areas containing an estimated 82% of all of the natural gas and 79% of the oil are today available to energy companies through existing federal leases. Federal agencies are issuing drilling permits at three times the rate they were in 1999 — but that hasn’t slowed oil prices during the climb from $19 to beyond $140 a barrel.”

The oil industry does not even have the equipment to extract oil from offshore lands. It is estimated that new and existing drilling ships and equipment won’t be available for another three to five years.

Even if offshore drilling were to commence tomorrow, its output would constitute a tiny increment of the world oil supply. The U.S. has about 3% of the world’s oil reserves, so any new oil would be quickly sopped up by world markets and have little effect on prices. Then there are the tremendous risks that offshore drilling holds for other important ocean-based industries such as tourism and fishing, not to mention personal recreation.

Never one to let facts stand in the way of his political agenda, President Bush just lifted an executive order issued by his father in 1990 that banned oil drilling on the outer continental shelf. W. fatuously claimed that allowing offshore oil drilling is “one of the most important steps we can take” to reduce high gas prices. A lie. Fortunately, Bush’s executive order is largely symbolic and not sufficient legal grounds to open the lands to drilling; that will require congressional approval to change federal law.

The real reason that Bush and the oil industry want to open up offshore drilling is the huge profits to be made. World prices for a barrel of oil stand at $145 – and offshore oil is profitable to extract at a mere $60 a barrel. So there is plenty of money to be made by tapping into the American people’s oil reserves. If only the “people’s branch” of the federal government would consent to the giveaway!

If there is any silver lining to Bush’s latest gambit, it is that the commoners have started to wise up to the administration’s habitual use of fear, bullying and lies to get its way. Protecting our oceans for the long term — and getting a fair price for any use of the public’s resources – require constant vigilance and courage. The most urgent question of the moment is whether congressional Democrats are up to this challenge.

After looking at Venture Capitol funds (VC’s), and after managing the European American Angel Club for 2 years now, I have come to the conclusion that entrepreneurs are not really being served properly when it comes to seed funding. And I would like therefore to propose the concept of an Entrepreneur Commons to help with the issue.

I have seen are roughly 3 types of angels:

• The super-angel, who has enough money to be a one-man show VC playing with his own money (and maybe money from a few friends). Either he is known by the VC community, and he is treated well by them because he can source good deals for the later-stage rounds, or he has enough money within his ecosystem that he can help entrepreneurs all the way through.
• The social type, who has money and like toying with the idea that he could invest and may do so one day. He likes attending meetings and talking about it, but the reality is that he never really invests in anything.
• And then you have everybody else in between these 2 types.

This last group of angels faces a lot of issues with the model as it is today:

• Angels their put money down and they have no clue when it will come back (if ever). Typical time before a cash event is 7 to 9 years if you believe angels who have done it for a while
• When investing in early stage, they have no real data to figure out a valuation, so any equity deal is based on arbitrary valuations where somebody is getting a bad deal on one side (angel) or the other (entrepreneur)
• If the business requires additional funding, Angels are being squeezed of the deals by VCs, who impose liquidation-preference clause
• And finally because you are just an Angel after all and not a fund, you are limited in your resources and cannot really spread yourself into a number of deals that is statistically relevant.

So in the end, they are playing the lottery, and they know it. And because they are playing the lottery, they want the reward to be as big as possible if they win, so they tend to shoot for companies with a potential for return of at least 10x the investment.

From the entrepreneur side, this leaves out of the system a whole lot of very good startups with very promising businesses but not “hot” enough. This is even more critical these days when you see an emergence of “social entrepreneurs” who are interested in making money, but whose focus (and measure of success) is also to help the community one way or another. They are not really non-profit, so most of the time they do not qualify for grants, but they are not the 10x type either. Meanwhile they clearly deserve help.

The way I see out of this situation is the Entrepreneur Commons:
A not-for-profit social network of entrepreneurs providing financing for early stage company through debt guaranteed by a mutual guarantee fund. The financial risk is mitigated by the mutual guarantee fund. The risk on the “management” side is mitigated by the social network: loans are by invitation only, so you will have to be approved by your peers to get in. And the typical scalability issue faced by general partners in a VC fund (which causes the famous “funding gap”) is also resolved by the social network: the size of loans and the number of entrepreneurs involved is no longer a problem, and if anything it helps stabilize the results of the group as a whole.

The project is starting to get some traction, and we have been getting a lot of positive feedback – the recent post from my friend Jessica is a good example of the reactions I get.

The goal is now to confirm the blueprint for this model, so that it can be replicated anywhere. We have started looking for funds so that we can make loans soon. Stay tuned…

But try to define a commons and the simplicity vanishes. That’s what’s going on here in Cheltenham scholars are defining commons, trying to understand relationships vis a vis their management, and attempting to integrate custom, history, politics and other factors into their understandings.

Amadou Diop is the first person I met at the IASC conference. Originally from Senegal, he lives in Atlanta, GA and works with the National Wildlife Federation.

While the scholars debate, the commons is gaining currency in intellectual and social movement circles. It’s not that the commons weren’t always with us. It’s that more people are “seeing” commons in their lives and offering their perspectives. Indeed, the commons has become so popular that I had to choose between two major conferences this month. Shortly after this conference ends, there begins the iCommons conference in Sapporo Japan.

iCommons focuses on knowledge and culture and embraces, nay, bear hugs, technology and media. Despite my kinship with media-making, free-software loving, music-freak geek commoners, I chose the more academic conference, where I’m often the sole computer user in the room. Why?

First, because I want to bolster my understanding of commons by listening to people who have devoted their academic careers to its study. Every discipline is represented here at this decidedly interdisciplinary conference, and many have written books or papers that I’ve read. They’ve even launched an online journal. Second, I want to meet people from many countries and indigenous communities and solicit their partnership in What We Got. I hope they’ll join What We Got’s engagement campaign by attending our summits, using our transmedia tools to tell their own stories of commons, and becoming hosts of special commons screenings of What We Got prior to our theatrical and television run. In short, I came to meet the people I hope to work with in the near future and to learn something, too. This is a perfect crowd, hailing from over 70 countries.

I attended my first session. New Commons, led by Charlotte Hesse. Okay, so may I just say it? In commons circles, Charlotte is a star, as bright as her colleague, Elinor Ostrom. OMG! I wonder if they will autograph my copy of their book Understanding Knowledge as a Commons?. I should also mention the Digital Library of the Commons, another fine Charlotte Hess and friends production.

Anyway, session one:

I walked in to the room (a little late) and she was just asking the group whether a mall was a commons. Many are called commons and thought of as commons, but try protesting the war in one and find out how long it takes for a private owner to remove you. An old idea re-emerged for me: ask people to photograph all of the things in their communities that are called commons and share them online. If I walked down the street from my studio at home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin I’d discover that a patch of green is called Burns Commons and a little further up the road is a doctor’s office building: the Prospect Medical Commons. What a nice culture jam it would be to encourage flash mobs to claim so-called commons as true commons.

Charlotte introduced a man named Burney Fisher. He put a picture up on the screen of a tree fallen on a house and asked some questions. Street trees might be a commons, but who is responsible when they fall on your house? Turns out that there are a myriad of legal structures to deal with the tree and the house, marring any hope for an easy understanding of the street trees as a commons. I thought “what about wikipedia?” Is it a commons even though there are rules governing how entries are managed? What about the collection of historical films at the Smithsonian. James Smithson’s bequest the institution to the American people, so should we be outraged when Viacom’s Showtime network inks a first-look deal for use of the archives thereby preventing other uses? I don’t know; turns out the legality of the bequest is murky. The difficulty of defining and administering commons emerged and showed no signs of clearing anytime soon.

At one point Charlotte invited the participants to define a commons. She allowed the effort to build around her. Must it be threatened? Is it a shared resource? Can a sudden change like a flood that brings people together to sandbag and save homes be considered a temporary commons? Charlotte deftly, steadily, politely entertained every idea but refused to assign a strict definition.

She did point to common (ha, ha) confusions: namely, that commons are free or sacred or inherited or always good or shared by everyone or open access or destined for ruin. Elements may be true of some, but she worries that people try to simplify the definitions to accommodate all commons at the expense of the specific characteristics of distinct commons. She gave an example of Larry Lessig asserting that information must be free to be a commons, but will that work for an apartment building? She asked how commons can always be good if some commons are worse off when managed as commons. For instance, scale matters. In Mozambique a local community lost its forest because the entire nation understands all forests as common property and mishandled it. Her body language expressed a little uncertainty when she considered aloud whether flickr or youtube might be commons. I wonder why? Maybe because Yahoo and Google own them — they act like commons but, as Larry Lessig likes to say, they are really examples of digital sharecropping. She pointed to, alas, one of many definitions, from my good friend David Bollier and colleagues at onthecommons.org, the authors of much of what is on this site. See the homepage of this site where it defines commons as “gifts of nature and society; the wealth we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children; a sector of the economy that complements the corporate sector”. She cited “any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community”, and there are others. None seemed to capture the commons fully and clearly.

I harken back to the old Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth.

There’s something happening here.
What it is ‘ain’t exactly clear.

No wonder I long for that flush moment of exquisite joy when the commons first hit me as self-evident and useful, before the many complications bubbled up. Oh, bless blissful ignorance!

Nonetheless, it is fabulous to see 500 people at a conference struggling with the real issues of devising research, policy and legal regimes to manage and protect commons. As they say, the devil is most surely in the details, and these folks are wrestling with the devil. I realize what my contribution is. It’s helping to make the invisible commons visible. As Burney pointed out in his presentation about urban deforestation (a crisis as dire at that of tropical forests), street trees are nothing new; seeing them as commons is. That’s my job. Use media to help people see commons everywhere. I’ll happily glean from the discussion, but leave the real work of defining to the experts.