About The Working Commons
The Working Commons is a small English-language publication about cooperation without hierarchy: the volunteer networks, wikis, community centres and open-hardware projects through which people pool time and knowledge. It is written for organisers, volunteers, librarians, researchers and anyone curious about how such groups actually function.
What we cover
- Collaboration: how loose networks launch projects, state their values, use live chat and keep a memory of their work.
- Access and offline: the intermediaries, portable tools and local centres that bring people with little or no internet into online communities.
- Crisis response: what citizen and online volunteer efforts did, and could not do, during episodes such as Kenya's post-election violence of 2007–2008.
- Open hardware: machines whose designs are published for anyone to build and improve.
How we work
- Sources listed. Each article ends with the reports, books, standards and websites it relies on.
- Claims attributed. When a fact comes only from the person or group concerned, the text says so rather than presenting it as established.
- Collective writing. Articles are written and revised by the editors and appear under the publication's name, without individual bylines.
- Real people, carefully. We mention individuals only in their public role and on the basis of published information, never speak on their behalf and invent no quotations or testimonies.
- Corrections. Errors pointed out to us are fixed, and significant changes are dated.
What we are not
The Working Commons is not a network, an association or a campaign. It has no members, runs no projects, collects no donations and carries no advertising or sponsored content. It is not connected with any of the organisations, projects or people it writes about.
About this domain
For a long period, worknets.org was home to a different project: a personal and community wiki run by other people. That project is not involved in The Working Commons in any way. After the domain lapsed, we registered it to host a new publication of our own. We do not reuse the earlier site's writing, name or design, and we do not present ourselves as its continuation. Because many pages elsewhere still link to old addresses here, we have written new articles on the subjects those addresses dealt with, and the old links now lead to them. The wiki address page lists where each subject is covered.
Images and legal details
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain or under free licences; each is credited in its caption and on the credits page. Publisher, hosting and privacy information is in the legal notice.