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The Commons Economy Roadmap (CER) is a Knowledge Base and Promotion Protocol to highlight and empower what we consider to be the most important 20 projects in the current economic stage: companies and ecosystems that are building open infrastructures to regenerate society, to support the struggle of citizens, farmers, activists, scientists, tech experts and entrepreneurs on the ground at the dawn of global collapse.
Knowledge Base: we have been gathering knowledge on the featured projects so that anyone interested in learning more about them can do so in an accessible way. What's more important, following a co-research approach, anybody may provide relevant knowledge (third-party sources, their own analysis, contextual information) and we'll consider adding it to the pool.
Promotion Protocol: in November and December 2023 we are planning a 6 months calendar (January-June) of social media activity about the projects to spread knowledge and update the community about them. We will publish blog articles, papers, videos and podcasts. They will be produced partly by CCA—often in collaboration with partners—and partly by sharing existing material both from third sources and the projects themselves. This will allow our trusted network of experts to participate in our curation process.
In the database below you can see which projects are going to be featured in Iteration 1 of CER.
The CER Feedback Loop
The Commons Economy Roadmap is based on a series of procedures but the main mechanism at its core is simple: a positive feedback loop between CER and the projects it features.
The core proposition here is that CER can generate tangible value for the projects it promotes, and for this reason a project should be interested in financing its operations, given this central logic:
<aside> <img src="/icons/report_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/report_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> More projects will wish to be included in CER as it becomes a known and acknowledged center of attention for the greatest initiatives in the Commons Economy, since it would mean persistent exposure to thousands of new users, funders, and collaborators.
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Being featured and promoted on CER is not something that can be bought. The criteria are set by the body behind the protocol—our team for now, a federation of experts and organizations eventually—and the projects for Iteration 1 are already decided (as seen in the table above).
By "Iterations," we mean that: for Iteration 1 (January to June 2024), we selected 20 projects and will promote them in the previously mentioned ways; for Iteration 2 (July to December 2024), we will expand both the number of projects featured and the curators of the process, in modalities that we will define with whoever is interested in supporting the project during Iteration 1 (from now on IT1) through open community calls from march 2024.
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A diverse set of benefits
A percentage of what we will publish in the six months of IT1 has already been programmed, covering all the involved projects, but a significant portion of it will be determined by how much these projects will support CER, according to the two tiers indicated in the picture: contributions of 500 or 1000 euros will grant 1 or 2 extra materials on demand, beyond the one which is granted for every project in the list regardless of contributions.
For IT1, supporting CER in this sense will be possible for projects up to the end of February 2024.
CER projects are open infrastructures that are structurally more cooperative than traditional economic participants such as firms and startups, with the same objective of creating a distributed global economy using open protocols.
We think that CER may become a beneficial collective infrastructure for such an ecosystem, and that the more projects that support it, the better the promotion effects and the lower the marginal cost for the individual project.
After 15 months of planning with our community, we concluded that the most efficient way to initiate this project is to just launch the CER experiment and see the outcome and responses, rather than waiting for complete clarity and assured midterm funding. We are thus thankful to the partners who agreed and will agree on financing IT1 activities, taking this risk and accepting the challenge, while realizing that such an experiment takes at least many months of testing to be carried out meaningfully and without profitability pressure.
What does it take for a project to be accepted and featured in the Commons Economy Roadmap?
In short, it's the combination of two elements: a strong orientation toward the Commons economy and the economic soundness of its operations.