From the Founder:
About the Commons Communities Project

I'm Michael Jensen. I've been doing Internet stuff for 35+ years, since before the World Wide Web, mostly in the scholarly book publishing world. In Q3 2022, I was able to "retire" to build projects close to my heart, ones that were unlikely to be built otherwise: low-profit or no-profit projects which might be useful in our world.

And alas, our world is burning. As I wrote in an essay at mwmwm.com (the parent corporation of commoncommunities.com), we each have a responsibility to do whatever we can to add a few drops to the buckets we hope to hurl against the inferno we have created.

For most of the last fifteen years, I've lived in delightful rural Nova Scotia, including nearly a decade on a gorgeous farm on a long gravel road, a half hour drive from the nearest grocery store. In the decades before that, I'd mostly lived in Metro areas like Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC for fifteen years. So I've learned a few things about the differences between city living and rural living.

Rural = Different Communities, Different Transit, Different Rhythms
I won't wax rhapsodic about rural living -- better writers than I have done that. But there are also drawbacks. For rural folks, because of the low population density, personal cars are essential: there are no taxi services, nor Ubers, nor Lyfts, nor scheduled bus routes or trains or trams. And it's a long way to anywhere. We pretty much have to have a car.

We country folks have also lost our media in the last few decades, as small region newspapers struggled and died, taking with them a lifeline of information, interconnections, and shared experience within a small community. And we have seen the decline of other institutions (churches in particular) that helped spur shared activities, and a shared set of goals.

Originally, this project was called Rural Carpool, and was intended only to help its regional members with the "Rural Transit Problem," providing tools to coordinate Trips to town, to save costs and CO2. However, it became clear (and that's another, longer story) that we had to get both smaller and bigger. We needed to focus on a "microregion" (a small town or village, and its near hamlets), as well as broadening our tools to help that community in other ways. And thus Commons Community model was begun.

We integrated Communications, Classified Ads, and a local Business directory with the local Carpool options, to create a hyperlocal infrastructure for self-organization by small communities to save money, time, and CO2.

Enabling Technology
We are engineering this system so that we could fairly easily have hundreds, even thousands of locally-designed and locally-maintained Commons Communities, in which a leader or two, with some online savvy, could set up a local Commons Community in a handful of hours, gather some like-minded folks as the Advisory Board, promote it locally, and then invest a few hours a week in maintenance and promotion -- in order to provide their community with a Commons site tailored to their needs.

What's in it for Michael?
The Commons Community system cannot, by its nature and design, be a gigantic moneymaker for a bunch of stockholders, no matter how many Commons Communities get created. No venture capitalist would underwrite it, nor do I want them to. The system doesn't require (or even accept) money directly from its Member users. Trip costs are shared between the Riders and the Driver. Coordination is self-directed and self-organized. So how does a Commons survive financially?

A Commons Community is a niche product that works only in a cooperative mode. We hope to have our salaries (and the part-time income of each local Admin) funded by a mixture of local sponsorships, advertising, and foundation support of local initiatives paying small site fees, and other non-intrusive methods. It's not a model that prioritizes capital, monetization, or "enhanced shareholder value," but should sustain both growth and continued improvement. The appropriate mix of support will depend on the region and its community character.

Each Commons Community has its own database and domain website, and leans toward local control whenever possible. Each will have its own internal governance and self-definition flavors. This decentralized model is designed to do one complicated but simple thing: to help connect people with similar needs, and then let the humans work out the details of their own cooperation.

Finally,
For me, this decentralized, distributed model of self-organization and shared support means that the Commons Communities can both grow and be sustainable, without charging the actual Members, without requiring venture capitalists, and without being driven by profit maximization. The Commons can just do its job, of helping people self-organize to improve their lives.

We shall see where the Commons Community model goes. To me, this isn't a business, but rather a personal mission, and I'll keep improving the system as I get feedback. If we do things right, I might be able to a) help make rural transportation more effective and efficient, b) save a lot of people a lot of money, and c) save a LOT of CO2 and other pollutants. Sweet!

--Michael