HELFRICH Silke/BIO

EN

Since 2007 I work as independent author, activist and scholar, with a variety of international and domestic partners; I do quite a bit of networking (f.i. in the context of the World Social Forum, of Thematic Fora; international Conferences both in social and academic contexts or framed by what we call TAPAS = There Are Plenty of AlternativeS). I've been editing and co-authoring several books on the Commons, among them: Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, Munich 2009 (in Spanish: Genes, Bytes y Emisiones. Bienes Comunes y Ciudadania, Mexico-City 2008), have been editing articles of Elinor Ostrom and translated them into German, f.i. Was mehr wird, wenn wir teilen",2011.

And worked with my colleague BOLLIER David and the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation on two pretty international anthologies on the Commons: Commons. Für eine neue Politik jenseits von Markt und Staat, Bielefeld 2012 (English version The Wealth of the Commons beyond Market and State, Amherst/MA, 2012) and most recently Die Welt der Commons. Muster Gemeinsamen Handelns -http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3245-3/die-welt-der-commons , 2015 (engl: The Patterns of Commoning, Amherst/MA).

I am cofounder of Commons Strategies Group and the Commons-Institut e.V. and blog (mainly in German, sometimes in English) on CommonsBlog.

My new passion is to integrate the approach and thinking of Christopher Alexander as a philosopher of wholeness and enlivenment with the socio-economic and political rethinking and reshaping of the world. I.e. I plan to work on a Patterns Language of Commoning.

Michel Bauwens just did an interview with me on this and my collaboration with David Bollier on Patterns of Commoning. It might give you a good idea about what we are working on and how we try to conceptualize our work.

Here: https://commonsblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/patterns-of-commoning/ or here: http://commonstransition.org/silke-helfrich-patterns-commoning/ (with some more bio-information at the end).