On 15 February Kristel Maasen, sociologist at Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) presented a summary of her PhD dissertation in our Open Seminar. Drawing from the theory of the commons and commoning, Maasen shows how worker-organized cooperatives are organized in commons. Workers invest in creating and maintaining a we-relation through task selection, sharing of organisational power, commitment to the project and a focus on direct communication. Distinct from a managerial logic, the principles used by workers correspond to the logic of commons organising in that they produce and reproduce community. 

On Tuesday 8 February, Dr. Camille Meyer (University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business) presented a seminar on the ownership of biological knowledge originally held by indigenous communities. After demonstrating that such knowledge was released to the public domain by colonial botanists, he presented three case studies showing that international, national and local efforts have been made for such resources to be “recommonized” by local communities. In such cases, indigenous communities reclaim ownership of their traditional knowledge by establishing intellectual property rights on biological knowledge.

Dr. Francesco Pasimeni is an industrial engineer and he was the guest speaker of Research Team Social Enterprise and Institutions for Collective Action on 25 January. Dr. Pasimeni holds a PhD in Science and Technology Policy Studies from SPRU (University of Sussex). He presented parts of his thesis about Modelling Fractional Ownership in the Sharing Economy and more specifically about the diffusion of shared goods in consumer coalitions. Pasimeni explained the model he has built to calculate where there is a niche in the economy for shared goods, with the eventual goal to obtain more sustainable consumption patterns.