commons.ca - for networks

Building effective networks requires clear understanding of stakeholder needs, skillful facilitation, solid planning and a keen eye for collaborative opportunities.

Commons helps emerging networks and partnerships to articulate a vision, foster collaboration, create common assets and build lasting community infrastructure.

Networks are changing our world. Crossing boundaries between organizations and sectors, those who know how to collaborate are able to build trust, gather resources, coordinate voices and make real change.

Open Sourcing Education
This paper provides an overview of the current landscape in open education, and outlines challenges and opportunities for the future. It is based on discussions during the iSummit 2007 open education track, which took place in Dubrovnik in June 2007. Article » Download 145k PDF

From VTR to Cyberspace
This is a paper that Mark Surman wrote in 1994 on the links between the public access TV movement and nascent efforts to use the Internet for activism. A great deal has changed since then, including the fact that things like YouTube basically make public access TV irrelevant. However, many of the observations in the paper remain valid today, including the fact that we actively need to actively carve out a commons where we can speak about, play with and reinvent the future. Article » 1.2MB PDF

We provide a variety of services to support networks and partnerships, including:

Partnership development: Successful partnerships require clear goals, strong relationships and solid resources. Our hands on, practical partnership development process helps with: community needs assessments; strategic planning and governance; trust building; fundraising and project start-up.

Information ecosystem design: Free-flowing information is the currency of successful networks. We design and implement collective knowledge management and web publishing systems that create powerful information ecosystems within a network..

Collaboration troubleshooting: Collaboration can be hard. Working closely with organizational leaders, we provide troubleshooting services to help partnerships through difficult collaboration challenges.

Management support: While leadership of groups should come from its members, that doesn’t mean that they need to do all the work. We provide neutral management support services, helping network leaders to raise funds, implement strategic plans and facilitate network activities.

Facilitation: Building trust and transparency doesn’t happen on its own. We design and facilitate meetings that build bridges, solve problems, avert conflicts, move things forward to create a strong foundation for ongoing collaboration.