Toolkit for Homes of Commons

Explore all the tools

Auto-assessment tool

Mobilizon

To use an event promotion and organization service that is an alternative to the commercial corporate platforms (Facebook, Meet-Up, EventBrite), that is federated, respects privacy and uses free and open source and group management software that can be adapted for specific use, but still compatible with open standards.

Zulip

To use free and open source software for persistent messaging that can be used both with we browser and mobile app, that provides features known in Slack and Microsoft teams but with options to use fine-grained discussions and ability to be visually customized and to connect to other applications/services.

Jitsi

To use free service and/or open source software for audio and video conferencing (meeting focused) with option of messaging, screen and media sharing, that can be used both with web browser and mobile app, while remaining flexible with bandwidth option, with ability to be encrypted and optionally visually customizable.

Nextcloud & Discourse (2 key tools from CommonsCloud.coop offer)

To have free, open source and consistent intranet-like service for controlled and scalable sharing, synchronizing, storing and backing-up of working information and media, but also communicating, discussing, coordinating and collaborating with coworkers/collaborators in the organization or project using web services via web browser and optionally free mobile apps.

MediaWiki (+Semantic extensions)

To establish a free and participatory web-based knowledge repository that can function both as an archive and a research, work and think space, with diverse text forms (from work notes to Wikipedia-like encyclopedic pages) hyperlinking and semantically relating (meta)information, generating multiple navigation options, data visualizations and format outputs.

Loomio

Loomio’s processes make participants discuss and collaborate to take part in shaping and sharing arguments collectively towards consensus building and decision making. Rather than counting votes to make decisions of obvious majority or average compromises between opposites, it creates legitimate overviews and histories of all participating positions, needs and changes.

Etherbox

Tool to facilitate digital file sharing, collaborative text editing and image manipulation in physical proximity (WiFi range), using self-hosted open source tools, running on a compact and portable micro-computer, with both technical documentation and a rich history of use in art and cultural projects as practical case studies.

Storytelling-based approach

The goal of the Storytelling-based approach tool is to create a better and more meaningful connection between members of organisations, communities or audiences while building shared ideas or values .

VIPP - Visualization in Participatory Programs

VIPP or visualization tool, helps individuals to better develop ideas in a team environment and opens up individuals to a broader spectrum of views, issues and points of view. This tool helps to create a more collaborative environment which encourages discussion and reflection through visual incentives. This tool is suited for peer-learning processes and collective discussions.

Hablarenarte: Cultural politics for, by, with children

Cultural policies for/by/with children require the coordination of public authorities and their institutions with civil society and independent agents, therefore Hablarenarte aims to support the creation of permanent and stable channels that guarantee the active participation of children in culture.

Virbela

Virbela is an immersive educational tool designed to create a socially connected educational world. Virbela gives users the possibility to create virtual campuses and educational spaces. This tool gives the opportunity to increase engagement, create virtual socialisation spaces, enable connections, and raise participants' interactions fostering the construction of a sense of community. Virbela engages online education for deeper learning.

Action Learning Sets

Action Learning is a learning technique that can be extended to a wide variety of diverse professional, occupational and personal problems and challenges. In Action Learning Groups or 'sets,' we meet regularly with others to discuss solutions to concrete challenges and to determine what action we want to take.

Videocall platforms (Zoom)

Zoom is tool that helps businesses and organisations to bring their teams together in a virtual meeting. It is an easy to use platform for a video, voice, content sharing, and chats. It can be used using mobile devices, desktops and telephones. Even though it is a proprietary software, in the case of peer-learning tools for commoning, this tool shows a fast learning curve, a user-friendly interphase, sustainability in time other than one last important aspect: people worldwide have become acquainted with it. It is not opensource, but offers a great deal of features useful for online and hybrid peer learning dynamics.

Gamification

The goal of the Gamification approach is to involve and engage with employees, audience, peers and partners to create collaborative workspace, which leads to better communication and transfer of knowledge in collectivities.

Kahoot!

Kahoot! is a interaction tool that intends to increase engagement and allow for more exciting open learning dynamics using aspects of gamification in e-learning. It is a new tool to raise awareness with specific targeted content.

Notion

The notion will help to create a collaborative databases useful for knowledge collective management and collection. The tool can create a freely accessible knowledge base with a user-friendly interphase. The notion enables to share events and data such as a workshop wiki, contact lists, event calendars, brains-storm spaces and similar features. It could also be useful as a management tool with its integrated Kabana boards and third party app integrations.

The Art of Civil Action - Political Space and Cultural Dissent

Civil action as a transformative tool capable to convey cultural dissent into the political sphere aims at social change moving towards a more just and equal common environment by addressing those who are responsible (governors, politicians or administrators) to implement those rights or fulfill their obligations when those are disregarded.

Art for UBI (Manifesto) - a tool for social transformation and social equality

The elaboration of a Art for UBI Manifesto aims to mobilize the art world in favor of Universal and Unconditional Basic Income as a tool for social transformation and social equality highlighting values, needs and desires opposing the present inequalities generated by neoliberalism and the ecological unsustainability of capitalism.

Adaptation to Climate Change

The adaptation planning in the cultural field means finding creative, innovative and place-based responses to climate change impacts and equipping cultural organisations and cities with the knowledge and skills they need. There is necessary to design new models for the creative and cultural sector to tackle climate change issues.

Building a Sustainable Creative Community

Building a Sustainable Creative Community project is a model of sustainability through which a cultural NGO and, also, a social enterprise seeks to be an equal partner in the local economy and to generate an example of 'yes we can' in the local community by hosting creative and social innovators in a community space.

Green Mobility Guide for the Performing Arts

The Green Mobility Guide offers sustainable creative solutions for organisations working in the field of performing arts, respectively those responsible for organising a tour and putting on a production, and to those managing and running venues.

Communicating Sustainability Guide

Current climate change challenges ask for sustainability to become part of our cultural narrative. Talking about our organisation’s sustainability activities helps to normalise sustainability and make it part of day-to-day conversation. This guide helps communications professionals learn how to build a stronger sustainable brand by communicating their organisation’s sustainability activities. It gives the user a structure, insights and principles needed to develop external sustainability communications for the organisational specific situation.

Circular Festival Plan

DGTL Amsterdam is a living-lab for future city innovations in the field of green events planning. In 2018, DGTL Amsterdam won The Greener Festival Award. Back in 2017, the festival built on the Material Flow Analysis and later on, applied a resource plan for the first time to make the transition from waste to resources. In 2020, DGTL set the goal to become the first Circular Festival. Unfortunately, with the pandemics, the live event turned digital. On April 11th and 12th, took place the 'DIGITAL DGTL', the world's biggest living room festival.

Wheel chart of sustainability and intangible cultural heritage

The tool has been developed to discuss and analyse the different dimensions of sustainable development in relation to living heritage in a practical way. The Wheel Chart of sustainability and intangible cultural heritage is also part of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Finland.

ENCC UP Grants (an initiative within the frame of the Seeds of Sustainability-SOS Programme)

The goal of the initiative is to promote the mainstreaming of sustainability in socio-cultural organisations' development agendas, to support initiatives helping to re-imagine the way they operate on multiple levels (rethinking mobility, digitalisation, overall sustainability of cultural organisations/networks) and to collect a database of practices aiming to inspire ENCC members and other socio-cultural organisations, making them aware of challenges, but also of possible alternatives and solutions.

Climate Storytelling

Climate Storytelling’s goal is to increase the impact of the climate communication in a climate emergency time. In order to reach its full creative potential, every great story has to move beyond the mono culture climate narratives to reach a biodiversity or a diverse ecosystem of narratives. The ultimate goal is to inspire both storytellers and cultural organisations.

Storytelling-based approach

Goal of Storytelling based approach is to create a better and more meaningful connection between members of organisation, audience and build a shared idea of values .

VIPP - Visualization in Participatory Programs

VIPP or visualization tool, helps individuals to better develop ideas in a team environment and opens up individuals to a broader spectrum of views, issues and points of view. This tool helps to create a more collaborative environment which encourages discussion and reflection through visual incentives. This tool is suited for peer-learning processes and collective discussions.

Assembly

Assembly is a decision-making body that serves as a self-managing tool for defining rules and deliberate on current issues and strategic topics.

Public-civic partnership

Public-civic partnership represents an alternative to public-private partnership and a new institutional design wherein the democratic agency of citizens is coupled with the institutional stability of public administration. These partnerships hold transformative power as they emerge as attempts of commoning and demands to democratize urban governance regimes.

Hybrid participatory governance

This tool opens up new opportunities for citizens engagement and experimentation with the new formats of governance over resources. It calls for reconsideration of existing legal formats that do not ensure democratic cultural policy and sites of new cultural typologies.

Community ownership

Community ownership is a form of property ownership and use beyond the exploitative logics of public and private domains. This type of ownership is more immune and resilient to real-estate speculations and private profit-seeking.

Art in public space

The goal of using art in public space was twofold. On the one hand, the intention was to draw attention to a public space that can be other than commercialized. While on other to investigate new exhibiting practices, but moreover a new form of socializing in the public space.

Community Gardening

Community gardening is collectively-operated use of outdoor public or private spaces to cultivate gardens. The goal is to turn a previously disused lot, through community gardening, into a land with environmental, social and health benefits.

Temporary Use

Temporary use is a tool to enable the use of vacant spaces in urban areas, especially neglected and decaying buildings. It allows various community members to obtain the space for their social, cultural, or other needs, under often more favorable terms, than in the case of a regular/commercial lease.

Open calendar

Open calendar tool allows all users unhindered access to a shared resources and equal conditions for work and production of programs.

Rails Girls

“Learn sketching, prototyping, basic programming and get introduced to the world of technology. Our aim is to give tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas. We do this by providing a great experience on building things and by making technology more approachable.” From the Rails Girls website

You Should See The Other Guy theatre

You Should See the Other Guy Theatre aims to raise awareness of and change the specific ways in which female and non-binary persons are affected by housing injustice. They want to offer paid employment and support networks to mothers and women in marginalised housing situations and create tools for housing injustice resistance and radical housing solutions.

Choice for Youth - Youth Do It

By raising awareness of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Choice for Youth goal is to improve human rights and gender equality. In spreading knowledge, producing resources for young people, and making youth advocates key to their organisation, Choice For Youth aims to inform young people and make them SRHR advocates in their respective communities.

Mz* Balthasar's Laboratory

Mz* Balthasars Laboratory’s goal is to have a community of female and non-binary makers and hackers in Vienna, creating a safe space for informal education on art, craft and technology. Furthermore Mz* Balthasar’s Laboratory enables artists to continue making art, by offering a support network and a space for solo shows, group exhibitions, and workshops.

FRIDA -The Young Feminist Fund

FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund, aims to fund and support young feminist organisations internationally, and has produced various resources for empowering young women and girls to become activists leaders. The grantee organisations share their knowledge and experience with the FRIDA network, learning from older generations and from peers around the world. The goal is to create and fund a learning loop to empower young feminist leaders to take the stand.

Period. - It's Not That Grey

By analysing and contextuatlising first hand accounts of sexual harassment Period’s ‘ It’s Not That Grey’ guide aims to identify typical patterns of harassment behaviour and circumstances, and use the findings to help individuals set their own boundaries and preventative red flag system.

Future Feminism

The goal of Future Feminism is to make people think and talk about the future of feminism and planet earth, and how by using equality and inclusive feminist thinking as a guiding ideal we can better take care of our world and each other.

female:pressure

Female:pressure is an international DIY network of 2600+ women and non-binary artists and activists from 80 countries. The network aims to make under represented artist demographics visible, and to create a starting point for connections and opportunities for it’s users and this way further female and non-binary participation in electronic music and arts as well as numerous other subsections.

New Visions

As a holistic approach to diversity in cultural leadership, New Visions goal is: “... cultural institutions changing to model micro societies of care and empathy and inclusive leadership. Patriarchal white supremacy of leadership has been normalised, part of our goal is to deconstruct and denormalize it, and then normalise leadership that is based on care and love. To make it normal that people care for one another.”

Galdem

Galdem aims to present and permanently implant the view point and experience of the non-male BAME/ BPOC voices in topics from current affairs, mental health, pop culture etc. The tone is welcoming, inclusive and to-the-point. Their goal is to have BIPOC/BAME voices be heard in the politics of the everyday as well as the bigger picture.

GRIDAS - Carnival of Scampia

The carnival of Scampia aims at being a tool of social critique while creating a tradition by bringing together the people in the neighbourhood of Scampia to create together.

LAB Procomum - a methodology for citizen labs

The lab aims to create a new us- a world between where the different can coexist in its singularity and where life in all its forms is important. A space that offers an infrastructure for creators, developers and citizens who want to test prototypes or develop projects with social impact and to manage, protect or create the commons. In which people are encouraged to network and collaborate, forming different communities of creation and practices.

Interweaving experiences (Mujeres Errantes)

The tool aims at making connections between diverse life experiences through a set of group activities. It aims at finding resonances between the members of a group through narration and corporal activities while overcoming linguistic barriers. It brings about a change through exchanging and appropriating life experiences and creating shared memories between persons from different places and backgrounds..

Mapping back: critical cartographies and collective mapping

Critical cartography is an opportunity to work with maps critically. Collective mapping is a tool to take a collective, critical look at a specific space. The collective design process can help us organise, network and develop emancipatory strategies taking into account the knowledge, experiences and views of everyone.

MiraDoor - Intercultural Community Space

MiraDoor aims at building an intercultural community: an open space for everyone to connect and learn from each other while shaping together a stronger, more cohesive society, together with migrants and refugees living in Hungary.

Intentional change in transformative communities

Community enabled transformative change is usually portrayed as a collective endeavor. Too many times this collective lens prevents communities from understanding that support groups are as much a platform for the collective as it is for personal transformation. This non-dual perspective can be represented by a moebiüs string in which both systems-level and personal transformations are, in effect, the same. This tool will help communities purposefully support individuals in intentional transformational processes.

Rituals and transformative experiences

Energy is a scarce and precious asset while engaged in prefigurating utopia. The deliberate design and enactment of rituals can have a huge impact on the quality and density of the social fabric woven by a group of people. The goal of rituals in this context is to formalize transformative experiences that generate shared meaning, stronger personal bondings and a higher degree of coalescence.

Legal and human rights support

The goal of legal and human rights support is to help marginalised communities, such as indigenous ones, to negotiate with public and private stakeholders regarding legal matters. This is particularly relevant in the case of the management of natural commons, which might be contested resources.

The commons as a legal category

The goal of a definition of the commons as a legal category is to ensure the acknowledgement and the legalisation of the work of grassroots organisations that manage and promote the commons. This also facilitates the long-term sustainability of organisations and their access to opportunities such as funding and awards.

Partnership

The goal of partnerships is to achieve benefits for all the parties involved, and for the communities connected to these parties. Partnerships are also instrumental in addressing legal obstacles: one partner might possess the legal status that is necessary to achieve certain goals that might otherwise be unattainable for the other.

Declaration of Urban Civic and Collective Use

The Declaration of Urban Civic and Collective use, implemented by L’Asilo (Naples) is an example of how a grassroots organisation can make a creative use of the law (see tool 4) in partnership with public authorities, and create a legal tool for self-government.

Copyleft, copyfarleft, copyfair

The goal of copyfair, copyleft and copyfarleft is, in different forms and degrees, to prevent the enclosure of intellectual property in the form of copyright and to allow more rights (that might be commercial or non-commercial) to users who have access to creative products of various kinds.

Creative Commons

The goal of Creative Commons is to ensure the recognition of authorship whilst, at the same time, allow for flexibility and creativity in non-commercial use of intellectual property. This ensures wider access to creative works and encourages imaginative forms of engagement with them.

Creative use of the law

In a context where the legal recognition of the concept of commons is complex and fragmented, organisations and communities have to innovate existing laws to make them more suitable to communities’ needs. Rather than adapting to existing frameworks, they can make a creative use of the law to generate new legal tools.

Bridge funding

This tool aims to support marginalized communities on a short-medium term whilst they pursue other projects that can ensure them financial and environmental sustainability in the long term. The goal of bridge funding is to empower communities by providing them with funding to obtain economic resilience by involving them in projects aimed at preserving the local environment.

Permanent City Observatory on the Commons - a tool for participatory democracy and “institutional creativity”

An experiment in “institutional creativity” to promote participation and develop administrative know-how on emerging commons, civic use and popular control. It involves activists as experts in a democratic body capable of implementing a process requiring constant administrative commitment, which cannot be delegated to the traditional systems of the PA.

Civic and Collective Use - a tool for the “Ecodomy” of the Common

Civic and Collective Use declines propriety as a non-exclusive right. The “ecodomy” of the common aims at building the common space of relationships and assets functional to the full development of the person in its ecological context, opposing the dominant neoliberalism tendency to isolate individuals in competition with each other.

Museo en Red - a tool for agency in public art institutions - extra disciplinary research against the interdisciplinary discourse of the global virtuosity

To disrupt the dichotomy private/public by allowing agency (inextricable from the commons) to art, activism and research through the creation of a network of networks of shared knowledge and relationships sustained over time to generate critical ideas, actions and new forms of institutionality capable of permanent commitment, questioning and negotiation.

Remix the Commons - a tool supporting the Movements for the Commons

Remixthecommons develops tools for acting, thinking, transmitting and organising together, and contributes to the development of a political agenda for the commons’ movement in the french-speaking and European contexts. It contributes to the emergence of a shared narrative and project on the commons and their role as an alternative to the neo-liberal capitalism.

CommonCoin - a tool for alternative economies, new social currencies and basic income

CommonCoin is a tool for economic empowerment and an ongoing experiment on alternative economies. The aim is to co-design a social wallet digital system to forster the cooperation within the members of the community, by sharing means of production, socialising the common profit, supporting each members’ weakness and losses.

Five Pillars Model of the Commons - a tool for sustainability towards a commons’ economy

Provide a framework of analysis of open or commons models to identify why and how a project can become sustainable. The framework became a guide for the Transition Programmes and sessions to support projects with the intention to evolve from a market economy or a solidarity economy towards a commons’ economy.

Wayfinder Mandala

Utopias are usually fueled by very invested and motivated individuals and communities. That is a space of overlap of interests, desires and longings between the personal, the comunal and the political. The Wayfinder Mandala is a meditative and introspective guided tool that allows for embodied reflection around our past, present and futures.

Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures (LS) offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of Liberating Structures (patterns) to replace or complement conventional organizational practices. They introduce tiny shifts in the way we meet, plan, decide and relate to one another. They put the innovative power once reserved for experts only in the hands of everyone.

The thing from the future

The Thing From The Future is an award-winning imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures. The object of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from different near-, medium-, and long-term futures. The game helps individuals and groups of people develop a “suspension of disbelief” around change as well as a divergent and diverse mindset about the futures.

Case clinic

This tool is intended for accessing the wisdom and experience of peers and helping a peer respond to an important and immediate leadership challenge in a better and more innovative way.

Generative decision making process

Any process of building possible futures and worlds involve an active participation in decision making. The accumulated learnings around decentralized decision making point to consent as a generally better suited approach than traditional consensus in those cases there’s no concrete mandate. Consent based decision making can be better enabled by a suitable process. Consent is one of the central pillars of practices such as Sociocracy 3.0. The Generative Decision Making process developed by Percolab is an interesting and relevant overarching methodology.

Prefigurating utopia framework

This framework formulates and synthesizes a procedural view of utopia, not only understood as a “non-yet-existent place” (U-topos) but also as a more desirable one (EU-topos). It does so by articulating a set of practices along a panarchical model.