Encouraging the Commons
Free/libre tools for a collaborative world
Comunes is a non-profit collective that provides free/libre web tools and resources to collectives and activists, to protect and expand the Commons.
The Commons are the resources we hold in common: from Free Software — which quietly runs much of the Internet — to Wikipedia, and from seeds and water to language and the streets.
Encourage
We encourage the protection and expansion of the Commons through our actions.
Support
We support non-profit grassroots initiatives and the informal network among them.
Facilitate
We facilitate their work by providing free/libre web tools and resources, such as ourproject.org.
From Free Software to Free Culture
Comunes began with a question: if Free Software proved that thousands of people can create together over the net, why not bring that same philosophy to other fields? Since 2002 we have built free spaces and tools — ourproject.org and, later, kune — hosting projects from the most diverse areas (art, ecology, education, science…) in exchange for sharing their work under free licenses.
The Comunes Association is the non-profit that sustains all this. Like a lightweight umbrella — in the spirit of SPI, which shelters Debian, PostgreSQL or OpenStreetMap — we give legal, technical and economic cover to those projects and to other initiatives that foster the Commons, both digital and material (seed-exchange networks, communal forests…).