usama9500
commented
2 years ago The issue has been closed as the first round has concluded! Great work Chris 🙌
Closed usama9500 closed 2 years ago
usama9500
commented
2 years ago The issue has been closed as the first round has concluded! Great work Chris 🙌
Tell us about the community that you are nominating
We are a community of plant breeders, cultivators, researchers, Indigenous Peoples, educators, consumers, creators, and artists. We are especially interested in protecting plant medicine as a public good and supporting an economy and commons that can interface with the broader genomics, pharmaceutical, and food production economies. We are alarmed by the rapid decrease in biodiversity across the planet and believe that urgent intervention must be made to promote a sustainable, biodiverse, and resilient ecology.
What public goods does this community support or will they support in the future?
Our community is oriented around the protection and promotion of three public goods: plant genetics, biodiversity, and cultural autonomy. We view these public goods as intersectionality related, reifying each other and working in concert as foundational pillars to create a resilient ecology. Plant genetics are contested as public goods primarily through the dominant intellectual property system, which allows for the privatization and exclusive ownership of plant genetics under certain circumstances, but are historical public goods across nearly all cultures. Biodiversity is widely recognized as a public good, but faces a classic tragedy-of-the-commons market failure driven by a centralizing and homogenizing suite of trade rules that can be broadly characterized as neoliberal. We view cultural autonomy as connected to biodiversity, but identify it as a discrete public good because of its connection to other political public goods, such as human rights and freedom.
Our community supports each of these public goods through hacks into the intellectual property system, adopting biomimetic approaches to intellectual property licensing rooted in open-source, copyleft/patentleft, and “ethical IP” practices.
Who are the people, DAOs and other organizations already part of this community?
This current gravitational center for this community is Copyleft Cultivars, a newly formed Oregon-based non-profit organization that is developing a copyleft license for plant genetics, co-founded by Caleb DeLeeuw, Hailey Maria Salazar, Dietrich Harter, Patrick Abel, and William Mount. Copyleft Cultivars has a growing Discord community, launched through its initial Copyleft Cannabis project (~300 members), and Chris Byrnes (experienced IP attorney and Trusted Seed member) acts as General Counsel.
Other organizations in the community orbit include:
Why do you think this community needs a Commons?
Our community needs an Open Cultivars Commons because we exist transnationally and work with plant genomics that face a broad array of national regulations, often unique to the local ecologies of our community members. As such, a cyber-physical commons like that enabled through Commons Stack tooling provides an ideal and essential backbone for community scaffolding and economic exchange. Plant medicine also faces classic tragedy-of-the-commons market failures that can be remedied by integrating Ostrom’s eight principles for managing a commons, as embraced by Commons Stack tooling.
We believe that a Commons architecture will help us to flourish as a community following principles of mutual aid, open-source and copyleft publishing, open education and decentralized science including those being adopted by the broader DeSci community and those recommended by UNESCO. We also believe that a Commons can help us to create much needed liquidity in historically uncapitalized markets, allowing us to organize the value of our community to more powerfully protect plant genetics, biodiversity, and cultural autonomy. Through our initial licensing efforts, we have already begun to create a Web 1/Web 2 commons, and believe we need to create a Web 3 Commons in order to better achieve–and practice–our collective goals.
What other resources do you have that will make your Commons deployment a success?
In addition to self funding, our community has a GoFundMe page, regular donations from users at Strainly.io, a monthly contribution from crypto mining, and a newly launched website (www.copyleftcultivars.com). We are also developing a mobile app, with the phenoApp team at University of Kansas based on their previous federal-grant-supported work, for the collection of genomic data and an interface with our copyleft license. In addition to our ~300 members of the Copyleft Cannabis Discord server, several biomedical and botanical science departments have already committed to using this app. We have also recently launched a co-created bag tag for plant seeds that utilizes copyright and contract law to automatically place the genomic material for the seeds into an open-access commons.
We believe that our Commons deployment will accelerate the momentum that we’ve built thus far and expand the reach of our community by providing the community with new tools for decentralized governance and creating liquidity through token engineering.
Do you have an idea for the name of this Commons?
Open Cultivars Commons
Submitted by [Discord handle or Twitter handle]
Discord: Chris Byrnes#4168
Twitter: @reimagineIP