Comunes: Sharing Economy And Free Culture

The Comunes Convention 4-7 May, 2016 is dedicated to Sharing Economy and Free Culture. With the support of Goethe-Institut this year it takes place in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The conference aims to bring together researchers and entrepreneurs to discuss and expand the ways of transforming and challenging modern goods production, distribution, and consumption systems.

One of the purposes of the Comunes Convention is the discussion of sharing economy best practices and examples from the entire world. Some of the addressed topics include new rights, collaborative culture, citizens’ participation and Internet freedom.

Dr. André Gaul, member of Freifunk and Co-Founder of PaperHive, is a featured keynote speaker at the three-days-convention in Latin America. Within the debate Free Culture and Open Everything he introduced Freifunk and a vision of a truly decentralized and community-based Internet.

Freifunk is a non-commercial initiative for free wireless networks, where Every user in the free wireless network provides his or her wireless LAN router for data transfer to other participants. In return, he or she can also transmit data, such as text, music and movies through a free internal network or use services setup by participants to chat, call or play online games (Source: https://freifunk.net/en/). 

Dr. Gaul is also a member of the Chaos Computer Club and frequent visitor of the notorious C-Base in Berlin. Embedded in the free software and hacker community, he has contributed to a number of large software projects and led a web development company for several years. 

He started working on PaperHive in the end of 2014, still as a researcher at the mathematical department at the Techincal University of Berlin. PaperHive transforms reading into an active process of collaboration. It is for researchers working across borders and disciplines, for transparent post-publication peer review, for students in seminars and reading groups. By helping each other with explanations, code, data, and forward references, readers develop a web of interconnected and enriched knowledge. Experts are brought closer together and can benefit from each others’ insights and results.