Towards a P2P Seed Bank?

[Michel Bauwens]

Via Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado:

Hi there,

First of all, we would like to thank you indeed for your hard work
promoting the Commons and P2P forms of production and organisation. We
are the group behind ourproject.org and we would like to give some
diffusion to some of our P2P initiatives. We believe that the P2P
Foundation Wiki is the appropriate forum to do so.

In the first place, we launched an organic seed bank where we would like
to encourage the decentralised exchange of seeds. We have designed the
website

http://plantare.ourproject.org/en/

an initiative inspired in peer-to-peer, copyleft and the Wat System.
Following our web, our goals are:

* Encouraging, spreading and formalising the decentralised and
autonomous exchange of seeds between individuals and collectives
* Circulate our store of seeds
* Creating a mechanism by which other people/collectives can also
obtain and exchange seeds
* Possibility of exchanging seeds with people you don’t know
directly or who live far away
* Possibility of more enriching exchanges (e.g. different seed
varieties, sharing work experiences, etc)
* Boosting biodiversity

Besides, we seek to allow any person/collective to adapt it:

http://plantare.ourproject.org/en/adaptar/

and use our seed currency in a decentralised way (such as the Wat System
does).

Looking to the future, we have been also experimenting with a digital
version of this promissory note, building an implementation using the
new Google Wave platform:

http://troco.ourproject.org

Troco attempts to encourage the exchange of any goods, taking benefit of
digital cryptography tools. Moreover, in order to support it we have
developed:

http://karma.ourproject.org/

to allow ratings of participants. Thus, individuals have a public
trust/reputation rating: everybody can know what others think about any
participant in the exchange network (especially useful considering debt
circulation).

On the other hand, personally I participated as speaker in the seminar
on P2P:

http://medialab-prado.es/article/programa_del_seminario_4_encuentro_inclusiva-net_redes_y_procesos_p2p

http://medialab-prado.es/article/mesa_redonda_redes_p2p_derecho_filosofia_tecnologia_politica

Finally, I would like to point out that we have an association promoting
The Commons:

http://comunes.org/en/