The project provided several important contributions to the field of collective awareness platform which addressed economic, politic and social research alongside participatory design for social innovation.
The Commonfare Manifesto represented a solid ground for the development of alternative welfare systems for a more equitable European Community. The Manifesto was inspired during one of the activities of the third Design Workshop and resulted in a chapter contribution in the 2nd volume of MoneyLabReader, edited by the Institute of Net Cultures in Amsterdam, under the supervision of I. Gloerich, G. Lovink and P. De Vries. The Manifesto was authored by the General Intellect collective which included commonfare researchers from BIN and DYNE.
The basic pillars of Commonfare were integrated in commonfare.net. The platform exceeded by far all KPIs, in terms of people involved in the design, evaluation, and online activities. Commonfare.net has attracted around 30,000 visits and collected important contributions in the form of stories and comments. The quality and the quantity of these contributions witness the liberating effect of storytelling as social empowerment. The absence of hate-speech and verbal aggression, alongside the quality of well-articulated stories are probably the most relevant legacy of the project. Commonfare.net emerged and established as a “self-organised” community, populated by people who embraced aligned values and supported each other in action. Platform network dynamics monitored through a dedicated dashboard based on the Commonshare detected no collusive behaviour (e.g. currency accumulation) by Commoners.
The commoncoin architecture was used in two case studies to create the Santacoin at the Santarcangelo Festival 2018 and the Oltrino at the OltrEconomia Festival 2019. Both leveraged on concrete stakeholders’ needs and involved the entire consortium, generating an important wealth of experiences and relations, together with a sound technical test (over 3,000 transactions handled). This work was not planned and represented the most significant deviation from the DOW. It demonstrated strong technical reliability, allowed people to imagine alternative scenarios for complementary currency, and provided the tools to realise them.
The project has provided also important methodological contribution to participatory design as it addressed one of the most complex scenarios of social innovation in a transnational and multidisciplinary distributed fieldwork. The wealth of knowledge and research emerged from it will shape the future of public design in Europe and can be accessed at pieproject.eu alongside five volumes of the Commonfare Book Series.
