How to do curating - Basic literacy in commoning

Very interesting @mikeh8 , thanks! Maybe time to bring in Denis Postle and his Psycommons (on P2PF; his blog) and my intrapersonal commons

This is getting really interesting. Let's talk with Michel if we can, for sure, but also more with each other!

I was recently 'talking' with Dennis Postle. He seems to have cooled off a bit on psycommons. For him, it was basically an anti-professioanlism thing, and an assertion that most people manage to be sane without professional intervention. I'm not sure how 'sane' that is, myself ;-) Will check out your interpersonal commons. My own way of framing this is 'emotional institutions' and emotional landscape; and the commons of liberated non-Othering 'self' that the dhamma is aiming at. No use being post-capitalist, if we don't get to be post-greed and post-hatred and post-stupidity as well? Raising the stakes rather!

Off-topic? I don't think so, this is basic literacy in creating a world that is a commons of commons. But quite a step from wikis!

@mikeh8 I'm thinking "it takes a village to raise a child" and similarly "it takes a village to manage a commons". A person (including a child) is a commons (intrapersonal). Distributed curation of each other. Do I make sense to you?

@mikeh8 nice analysis. I miss the ecosystemic dimension: P2PF has been focusing a lot lately on carrying capacity or biophysical limits of bioregions. You might consider adding it.

@asimong Going along with the spirit of this, I would say that the grandchildren are a commons - material, cultural and emotional. The work is stewarding as well as curating - the tougher half of the job, maybe?

Please note: I updated the "Platforms in a pluriverse" piece with a reference to Bollier on "pluriverse".

@mikeh8 I wonder how you distinguish curation from stewardship? I haven't personally made that distinction yet. I don't think that any attempted distinction between caring for the needs of something and caring for the resources inherent in something would make much sense to me. Though with grandchildren, their potential contribution to the world is much less knowable, so maybe there we are left with simply loving them as themselves, as that's all we can do? No doubt we have all noticed a parental tendency (conscious, or more often not) to try to have their children live out their unlived lives, thereby treating them as a kind of resource, perhaps with some similarities to the "human resources" attitude. So I'm guessing (wildly) that your mention of grandchildren hooks in that perspective?

Our relationship with our grandchildren is different than with our kids - we can be more selflessly generous and less possessive or anxious toward them. But whatever the psychology may be, the historical perspective starts to be present with grandchildren, we're aware of how much the world changes, how long the journey is, how much freedom a person has, how much learning each person has to do in their own skin.

I think a distinction between curating and stewarding (note: both transitive verbs, no abstract nouns) is simple. Curating is cultivating the resource base: deciding what's good or necessary and why, getting additional stuff made and added, hunting things down, deciding what's not valuable, assessing tradition in relation to present-day consciousness. Generally becoming attuned to the nature of its resource 'suchness' and our own relationship with that; and cultivating both with an aesthetic sense. Whereas stewarding is about the economic life of the resource: who can use it, under what terms, under what obligations, for what purpose, in what way does it need defending, avoiding depleting or polluting, enforcing sanctions for improper use. Generally what we tend to call governance. Stewarding is 'political' rather than aesthetic. I see curating and stewarding as two legs that commoning walks on.

Connecting the two topics, IMHO we can see the 'suchness' in grandchildren more easily than we can in our direct offspring. Of course, the village can have that orientation toward all children (some of the members do in fact bring grandparent experience). But depending on how the particular commons ('culture') works, parents may exercise ownership over kids and treat them as investments.

@michelbauwens1 could you provide links for P2PF current focus on carrying capacity or biophysical limits of bioregions?

Pointing out that this is absent from my sketch above of "platforms in a pluriverse"@bobhaugen mentioned J.B. Quiligan and Paul B. Hartzog http://globalcommonstrust.org/?page_id=22
https://medium.com/panarchy-101-or-how
Hartzog has biog notes in P2PF wiki but Quiligan is absent.

couldn't access your document Mike,

but noted the pluriverse

just to add then that the existing p2p wiki is not npov, but a pluralistic perspectopedia, based on 'opportunistic updating', i.e. so far articles are created not by original writing but by excerpting pluralistic excerpts that bring various visions to bear on a topic,

Michel