Can technology be used to build commons, rather than to concentrate power? Founder of the P2P Foundation, Bauwens has spent two decades studying how people produce value together beyond both market and state, through commons-based peer production: communities that create shared resources — from open software to open design — and govern them collectively. He is best known for "cosmo-localism," the principle that what is light (knowledge, design) can be shared globally, while what is heavy (fabrication, production) is best made locally. His contribution puts forward an affirmative case — technology not as market disruption or hype, but as infrastructure for cooperation — while leaving open how far such models can scale, and where they run into their limits.

Can technology be held in common, rather than extracted as a resource? Hosted by Trust and the Cybernetics Library in Berlin, this node asks what it actually takes to build and maintain digital tools, infrastructures, and knowledge as shared goods — from questions of governance, rights, and ethics to the ordinary, ongoing labour of keeping shared systems alive over time. Drawing on Trust's practice as a cooperative community and on the Cybernetics Library as an open knowledge infrastructure, the discussion tests whether cybernetic and speculative approaches can help imagine technologies that are collectively governed and non-extractive by design — and where those models run into their limits.

The session takes place at Trust, Kluckstraße 25, 10785 Berlin.

Stavrides has long worked on thresholds — those in-between spaces, neither fully open nor closed, where a community decides who may cross, on what terms, and how they will belong. Here he stands at the opening threshold of the Governance theme, reasoning on what governance means for a cultural commons: not the ownership of a resource, but the ongoing question of who decides how it is used, who gets to enter, and who sets the rules — and how firmly those rules should hold. Giving everyone access is not yet giving everyone a say: many "participatory" gestures stop at access and leave power where it was. So how much structure does a cultural commons need to hold together, and how much before it hardens into a new hierarchy?

What can a feminist reading of the commons teach us about cooperation today? Scholar, activist, and one of the most influential theorists of the commons, Federici has spent decades tracing how care, reproduction, and collective life have been enclosed by capitalism — and how they might be reclaimed. Her contribution opens the Forum's inquiry from this vantage point: not the commons as an abstract ideal, but commoning as a lived, precarious, and continually contested practice, rooted in the everyday work of sustaining people and relationships.

The session takes place at Prime Produce, 424 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019. For those joining in person, the event begins with Silvia Federici's lecture at 11 AM and continues with a shared lunch and an in-person discussion session through the end of the @New York slot.

How — and where — does it actually make sense for small cultural organisations to hold more in common? Hosted in New York across Prime Produce, the Cybernetics Library, and Wikimedia NYC, this node gathers artists, thinkers, and cultural practitioners for a relaxed but active working session on the structure and governance of commons. The format is convivial by design: following a lecture by Silvia Federici, a shared lunch invites everyone to think together around roundtables, and a smaller streamed conversation then brings table representatives together to report the discussion back to the online audience. Bringing together some of the small, independent associations and institutions that make up New York's cultural fabric, the session asks not whether commoning is desirable in the abstract, but under what concrete conditions — and between whom — it can meaningfully grow.

The session takes place at Prime Produce, 424 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019. For those joining in person, the event begins with Silvia Federici's lecture at 11 AM and continues through the end of the slot.

What can centuries of Indigenous communal government teach us about holding land, work, and decisions in common? A Maya K'iche' sociologist from Guatemala, Tzul Tzul is among the sharpest theorists of communal systems in the Americas, tracing how Indigenous communities self-govern through kinship webs, rotating responsibility, and the collective administration of shared goods. Her contribution grounds the Forum's inquiry in a living, centuries-old practice: not the commons as a new proposal, but communal government as an existing, contested, and continually reproduced way of organising life together.

Why open the Japanese node in a bathhouse? Denkiyu is a sentō — a traditional public bathhouse — in Tokyo's Kyojima neighbourhood, and a place that makes something visible: that collaboration is not only active and organised, but also a quiet, reciprocal form of care that holds people together almost without ever being named. Starting from here, the session brings Katsuhito Okubo, who runs Denkiyu, into conversation with scholars of the commons to reflect on the specifically Japanese sense of collaboration and commoning — and on the role cultural institutions can play in relation to it: whether they can help preserve it, let it grow, or set it in motion, without imposing and without deciding in its place.

What if the real work of a cultural institution is to be the glue? At Julie's Bicycle, Pando looks at institutions less as buildings or programmes than as connective tissue — the quiet infrastructure that binds together subcultures, grassroots associations, and individual people who would otherwise stay scattered. Her contribution asks what institutions actually do when they hold a scene together: how they can support networks of cooperation without absorbing or flattening them, and what it means to measure their value by the relationships they sustain rather than the output they produce.

What forms of cooperation are possible between small, independent cultural spaces — and how do they hold one another up? Hosted at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center, the Shenzhen node brings together a constellation of artist-run, self-organised, and youth-led spaces from across the Pearl River Delta that sustain themselves through shared ownership, mutual support, and consensus-based practice. Rather than defining the commons in the abstract, the session looks at how these spaces actually cooperate on the ground: what they share, how they make decisions together, and what allows small, independent culture to endure and connect within its own context.

The Koutammakou Ecomuseum offers a practical African response to these questions. Rather than separating

heritage from everyday life, the ecomuseum works within the living cultural landscape of the Batammariba,

where land, architecture, knowledge and livelihoods remain deeply interconnected. Its experience offers a

grounded case study for rethinking the economics of cultural commons through circular bioeconomy,

community governance and regenerative tourism.

At the heart of this experience is a network of 15 Cooperatives of Economic and Cultural Interest (CIEC),

bringing together 373 members, predominantly women who are custodians of traditional knowledge

associated with earthen architecture and the maintenance of the sikien, the inhabited architectural units at

the centre of Batammariba cultural life. Through agriculture, livestock, non-timber forest products and food

processing, the cooperatives develop locally rooted economic activities based on circular principles: local

resources are transformed into value, waste is minimized, and economic benefits are reinvested in the cultural

landscape. Twenty percent of cooperative profits are allocated to a permanent fund dedicated to the

maintenance of the sikien. Heritage therefore becomes not simply something to be preserved, but part of a

functioning local economy that contributes directly to its own conservation.

The emerging Tourism of the Sikien takes this approach a step further. Community-based mapping and

georeferencing, initially developed to support cooperative management and heritage documentation, are now

creating the foundations for carefully designed visitor experiences. Visitors can discover the architecture,

landscape, knowledge and ways of life of Koutammakou while contributing to the local economy. The objective

is not to transform the sikien into museum objects, but to create a form of regenerative tourism in which

visitation contributes to the continued vitality of the places and communities being visited.

Structured as a causerie-débat, rather than a conventional academic panel, the session will create a circle of

dialogue inspired by the importance of collective speech and intergenerational transmission in Batammariba

society. The conversation will bring together the director and founder of the Koutammakou Ecomuseum, a

woman leader from a CIEC, the network's entrepreneurship and advisory lead, and a young graduate of the

museum's construction chantiers-écoles. Their different perspectives will reveal how cultural heritage,

women's economic empowerment, youth engagement, traditional knowledge, circular economy and

sustainable tourism can converge within a single community-based model.

The discussion ultimately asks a broader question for museums worldwide: Can museums move beyond

preserving heritage to helping communities build the economic, ecological and social conditions that allow

heritage to remain alive? The Koutammakou experience suggests that the future of sustainable museums may

lie not in owning more collections, but in strengthening the living systems, knowledge and economies that

sustain heritage in place.

Lumbung is the shared rice barn: you gather the surplus — funds, time, knowledge, networks — into a common store, and decide together how it is redistributed. ruangrupa, the Jakarta-based collective that runs this table, applied this principle experimentally to the curation of Documenta 15, turning a whole exhibition into an exercise in pooling and sharing resources. Together with Gudskul, their collective learning space, they treat generosity, friendship, and hanging out (nongkrong) as a form of economic infrastructure. From here, the Jakarta node asks what it means to sustain culture through sharing rather than competition — and how far a mutualist, surplus-sharing model can travel beyond the context that grew it.

In today's unstable economic climate, the fragility of the prevailing cultural model is felt with new force: cultural institutions largely depend on private support and national funding, and when those falter, so does their capacity to keep going. The Forum's home table in Santa Sofia gathers economists, commons researchers, ethical-finance practitioners, and voices from the art world around a mutualist question: can cultural institutions sustain themselves through cooperatives, shared funds, mutuals, and other self-organising structures, rather than through forms of dependency that leave them precarious? The discussion shifts the economic question from funding to organisation — from who pays for culture to how a community decides, together, to keep producing and maintaining it — and asks how far mutualist models can actually carry the weight of sustaining cultural life.