Sustaining platforms as commons: perspectives on participation, infrastructure, and governance

Approaching the commons as a practice, as commoning, brings to the fore the concrete, historically, socially, and culturally situated mobilization of commoners around the resources they rely on or hold dear. However, the extent to which commoners are known, addressed, or even framed in relation to their engagement with and commitment to commoning still remains limited. This paper argues for the need to approach commoning through an ethos of care, which spurs us reconsidering the ‘neglected things’ and the things taken for granted in the discourses about commoners and commoning. In order to do so, this paper engages with the question how can our understanding of commoning and commoners be enriched by considering the affective dimension of engaging with such practice? As such, it focuses on the entanglement of affect, commoners, and commoning and it foregrounds commoners as subjects with their situated needs, expectations, and desires. A Spinozian-Deleuzian understanding of affect is adopted here which conceives it as a relational force that moves among bodies and enhances or diminishes their ability to act. Empirically, the paper builds on a two-year research that investigated the long-term sustainability of commoning and on the semi-structured interviews conducted therein with long-term commoners from three different practices: urban, digital, and knowledge commons. By identifying traces of affect in commoners’ narrations, the paper shows affect as a force mediating the tensions between continuing or interrupting the personal involvement in commoning; and as the indigenous’ awareness of something that keeps commoners and commoning together

Matters of concerns and user stories:ontological and methodological considerations for collaborative design processes

In this article, we lever on matters of concern (MoC) as a way to reflect on the articulation of collaborative design processes. We do this by focusing on an international project for the development of an ICT platform for energy management at the household and housing cooperative levels. We analyse retrospectively how the project development process captured and accompanied several MoC in two piloting areas, where all authors were directly involved. Our work contributes to the body of knowledge that builds on Science and Technology Studies scholarship to enrich the understanding of complex design processes. In particular, the paper goes beyond a descriptive take on MoC and provides ontological and methodological considerations on the use of user stories. Ultimately, the paper argues that scaffolding tools, such as user stories, can capture and convey MoC, and they can facilitate a transparent process of actor-networks alignment and emergence

Participatory Infrastructuring of Community Energy

Thanks to renewable energies the decentralized energy system model is becoming more relevant in the production and distribution of energy. The scenario is important in order to achieve a successful energy transition. This paper presents a reflection on the ongoing experience of infrastructuring a sociotechnical system in which local communities can manage renewable energies as a Common Pool Resources. We explore how to create a space for citizens' participation in a continuous process of design for energy management. Objectives of the paper are: i) to clarify how Participatory Design could support the sustainability and the effectiveness of an alternative, ii) to present an experimentation with renewable energy as CPR as an alternative model to the actual vision of the energy system. Preliminary results reported in this paper suggest that a Participatory Design process can be valuable for communities in order to establish new energy management models

Synergistic catalysis: Michael addition of acyl-pyridines

A new diastereo- and enantioselective strategy for the functionalization of 2-acetyl-pyridine with α,β-unsaturated aldehydes has been investigated through synergistic catalysis. In particular, the aim of the work was to use cinnamaldehydes bearing different substituents on the phenyl group and to study its effect on the yield, conversion and stereoselectivity of the reaction. The reaction mechanism involves combined iminium ion and transition metal catalysis in a synergistic fashion and proceeds with two consecutives Michael additions, followed by final intramolecular aldol condensation to yield the formation of three new stereogenic carbons, with high to excellent stereoselectivities. The structures of the molecules obtained were fully characterized by NMR spectroscopy. After having assigned the relative configuration by NOE-NMR and 2D-COSY experiments, conformational analysis was performed by DFT calculations to find the most stable molecular conformations. The absolute configuration of each diastereoisomer was then eventually assigned by quantum mechanical simulations of the Electronic and Vibrational Circular Dichroism spectra

On commoners’ daily struggles: Carving out the when/where of commoning

Following recent developments in commons studies centred on commoning as a practice, this work takes special interest in commoners’ lived experiences, desires, expectations, and struggles as they relate to sustaining a commitment to such practices over time. The article adopts a micropractice perspective focused on commoners’ privileged vantage point to observe how multiple heterogeneous practices overlap and intersect in the mundane life of commoning and how, in turn, a necessary condition to continue commoning is to unearth ways through this nexus of practices. Empirically, the article is grounded in the analysis of twenty-five semi-structured interviews with long-term commoners recruited from three different commoning realms, and it advances the concept of carving out the when/where of commoning: a situated and relational type of boundary work that commoners continuously perform and reproduce when committing (or trying to commit) to commoning. As such, the article contributes to commons studies by starting to unravel commoners’ everyday struggle to commit to and perform commoning