The Generative Commons
A core OGM-adjacent project, born in the early bootstrap discussions between OGM and Lionsberg. It's the most fully-developed concept-page area in the source: four documents totaling ~30 KB.
What it is
From The Generative Commons/The Generative Commons - Overview.md:
"In pondering Intellectual Property issues recently, we realized that something bigger than Creative Commons would be really useful."
And from the Founding Document:
How can we build an open, generative commons that protects and develops ideas, livelihoods, and positive social, economic, and environmental structures, while preventing harm and negative externalities?
The Generative Commons aims to extend the Creative Commons pattern — but cover all forms of intellectual property (copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets) and all creative work, "stewarded for the good of all."
Distinctive moves
- Stewardship over ownership. "Born in a discussion about Intellectual Property rights and responsibilities, as a way to free a growing community of sovereign individuals, organizations, and communities from the traditional language of IP clauses, which all too often involve ownership and exclusion, at the expense of stewardship and inclusion."
- All forms of property. Not just copyright. Trade secrets, patents, trademarks, real estate, capital — all the things that can be enclosed, brought instead under collaborative stewardship.
- Hypotheses, not ideologies. "All ideas are brought into the Generative Commons as hypotheses, which are available to the community to experiment and build upon, or disprove… not dominated by any a-priori ideology."
- Fractal nature. "The best designs are perfectly consistent, from highest level concept to lowest level detail. This system needs to accommodate 'marks', protections, and value exchange at every fractal level, from individual, to organizational, to community, to the global community of communities." (The fractal motif also appears in OGMing.)
- Rescue from suppression. A specific commitment to identifying and resurrecting ideas "nefariously acquired and suppressed by large corporations in order to protect their current market positions and legacy technologies."
- Meta Science. A higher-order frame: "All efforts to pursue and properly organize and apply knowledge and understanding through rigorous and systematic process can be categorized as science." The Generative Commons is positioned as part of a science of duty and right action.
Sister concepts referenced
The Founding Document and Resources page explicitly tip the hat to several adjacent frameworks — both as inspiration and as places to interoperate:
- Creative Commons — included by reference, with CC-BY 4.0 as the default license for community materials
- Chris Messina's Community Marks — a precursor to the trademark-stewarding move
- Graham Boyd's FairShares Commons — multi-stakeholder enterprise structure
- Christine McDougall's Syntropic Enterprises — 12-domain "Synergistic Accounting"
- CopyFair (P2P Foundation)
Status (as of source)
The Founding Document is substantively drafted. The Community Agreement is partial — the boilerplate CC-BY-4.0 dedication clause is there, but several sections marked "TK" (publishing, prototyping, producing, promoting) remain to be filled in. The Overview document is short and organizational.
Related
- Sovereigns — what the Commons is designed to support
- Stewardship Hub — governance threads, including OGM-Lionsberg MOU (which originated the Commons discussion)
- Knowledge Architecture — the Knowledge layer where the Commons fits
Sources:
The Generative Commons/The Generative Commons - Founding Document.md(substantive)The Generative Commons/The Generative Commons - Overview.mdThe Generative Commons/The Generative Commons - Community Agreement.md(partial)The Generative Commons/The Generative Commons - Resources.md- Cross-referenced from
OGM Stewardship/MOU documents
The Founding Document's voice is more Lionsberg-inflected than the rest of the wiki — heavy on systemic-stewardship vocabulary. Where this synthesis quotes, it preserves that voice rather than translating it.