Jeff Emmett
Watch the livestreamPeer-to-peer means people connecting directly, with no company in the middle. Emmett notes it is over twenty years old (the P2P Foundation dates to 2005) and already built enormous value with no boss and no profit motive: Wikipedia, Linux, OpenStreetMap, and the open-source code most of the internet runs on. His starting claim is that this model works, and the next step is to extend it from talking to coordinating.
If peer-to-peer carries the message, peer-for-peer carries the record. Encrypted chat is only the tip of the iceberg. Emmett wants the same channels to track provenance: who made a tool, who used it, what value it produced. He borrows Resource-Event-Agent accounting (an agent performs an event affecting a resource) so a shared task, license, or contribution rides along with the message instead of vanishing. Communication becomes an auditable ledger of collaboration.
Emmett builds on Michel Bauwens' cosmo-localism: what is light goes global, what is heavy stays local. Ideas, designs, and code are shared freely worldwide at near-zero cost, while manufacturing, energy, and food stay local and circular. A design uploaded once may be 3D-printed in maker spaces everywhere, yet the creator never learns it mattered. P4P aims to close that feedback loop between the global light commons and its local heavy uses.
Once contribution is recorded, a community can value effort without turning everything into a salary. Emmett argues commons usually break in one of two ways: a hard worker feels unseen and leaves, or a free-rider drains the shared fabric. Making contribution legible, separate from money, addresses both. The design goal borrows from mushrooms: resilient, redundant, cooperative networks rather than the brittle, hyper-efficient monocultures of ordinary markets.
Emmett co-founded the Commons Stack to make DAO tooling (software for running a shared online organization) warmer and more human, aligned with Elinor Ostrom's rules for governing commons. Two components recur: the augmented bonding curve, an automated market that turns token buys into a shared funding pool for public goods, and conviction voting, where support for a proposal accrues the longer people back it. Both let a commons fund and steer itself.
For resourcing projects, Emmett proposes flow funding shaped like a mycelial network. Everyone draws a stream from a shared pot, and each cup has a threshold, a notion of 'enoughness'. Once you have comfortable runway, the overflow routes onward to projects you have pre-chosen. Under-resourced cups fill faster, over-resourced ones spill outward. It extends tools like Drips by adding the overflow rule, so funders back an ecosystem rather than picking single winners.
The point is not to build another product or make a million and give it away, which just plays the incumbents' game. Emmett wants communities to build their own tools better than the platform monopolies can, because those firms' business models forbid opening their data. Real risks remain: any metric will be gamed, and if everyone builds a private net there is no shared internet. His answer is a polycentric mesh of diverse, forkable tools, stress-tested in simulation before real communities depend on them.