The Working Commons — volunteer networks, offline inclusion and open collaboration
The Working Commons is an independent publication about people who work together without a boss or a budget: online volunteer networks, community wikis, local digital-help centres and open-hardware builders. We explain how such groups organise, how they reach people who are rarely online, what they did in moments of crisis and what the record shows about what works.
Featured
Crisis responseKenya 2007–2008 and online volunteers
What happened after Kenya's disputed December 2007 election, how the violence was documented, and what citizen and online volunteer efforts could and could not do.
Open hardwareOpen Source Ecology
The project that set out to publish open designs for fifty essential machines, from a compressed earth block press to a tractor: its origins, method, results and limits.
Access and offlineReaching people who are offline
Billions of people still use the internet rarely or not at all. How online communities can include them through intermediaries, text messages, radio, printed digests and shared access points.
Access and offlineA wiki on a flash drive
How a community can carry its wiki on a USB stick, let people read and edit without a connection, and merge their changes safely when they get back online.
Sections
- CollaborationHow volunteer networks organise projects, agree on values, talk in real time and keep a record of what they decide.
- Access and offlineBringing people without a reliable connection into online communities: intermediaries, portable tools and community centres.
- Crisis responseOnline volunteers in moments of political violence and emergency, set against the documented record.
- Open hardwareMachines whose designs are published for anyone to build, study and improve.
Recent articles
- UK online centres and community networks: a history of local digital help
How Britain built a network of local places where people could get online with help, what became of it, and what it taught online communities about inclusion.
- Turning chat into a knowledge base
Live chat produces answers that vanish as fast as they appear. Methods for harvesting chat into a lasting base of answers, decisions and how-tos, and the wiki habits that keep it useful.
- Reaching people who are offline
Billions of people still use the internet rarely or not at all. How online communities can include them through intermediaries, text messages, radio, printed digests and shared access points.
- Putting shared values into words
Why volunteer networks benefit from asking members what they value, how to run such an exercise, what psychology says about values, and how to turn answers into working agreements.
- Open Source Ecology: published blueprints for basic machines
The project that set out to publish open designs for fifty essential machines, from a compressed earth block press to a tractor: its origins, method, results and limits.
- Kenya, 2007–2008: online volunteers and the post-election crisis
What happened after Kenya's disputed December 2007 election, how the violence was documented, and what citizen and online volunteer efforts could and could not do.
- Endeavors: how volunteer networks turn ideas into projects
A practical look at how loose online networks launch and sustain small projects: defining an endeavor, forming a working group, sharing roles, documenting, funding and knowing when to stop.
- Chat rooms for volunteer networks: when real-time talk helps
What live chat adds to a volunteer network, from IRC to modern platforms, and how to run a chat room that welcomes newcomers, respects time zones and keeps a usable record.
- Archiving a community's conversations
How volunteer networks can preserve their mailing lists, chat logs and wikis: formats that last, the role of web archives, consent and the right to be forgotten, and a simple archiving plan.
- A wiki on a flash drive: editing offline and syncing later
How a community can carry its wiki on a USB stick, let people read and edit without a connection, and merge their changes safely when they get back online.
Our approach
Every article is written by the editors from published sources, which are listed at the end of each piece. We describe projects and events; we do not campaign, raise funds or speak for any group. Where an account comes only from the people involved, we say so. More on our method and on the history of this domain is on the about page.