P2P Lab

03/06/2026

Την Κυριακή 24 Μαΐου βρεθήκαμε στο Δεμάτι Ζαγορίου, στο παλιό σχολείο του χωριού, για την πρώτη Συνάντηση Κοινότητας του έργου Interreg-RISTOR - Rural Innovation Centers for Sustainable and Inclusive Tourism.

Μαζί με επαγγελματίες του τουρισμού, μέλη πολιτιστικών συλλόγων, εκπροσώπους του Δήμου Ζαγορίου και ανθρώπους της περιοχής, συζητήσαμε τι σημαίνει στην πράξη βιώσιμος και συμπεριληπτικός τουρισμός στα ορεινά χωριά.

Η συζήτηση ανέδειξε την ανάγκη για τουρισμό όλο τον χρόνο, καλύτερη συνεργασία και δικτύωση, ανάδειξη της τοπικής γνώσης, των παραδόσεων, της γαστρονομίας και των προϊόντων του τόπου, αλλά και μεγαλύτερη έμφαση στην προσβασιμότητα και τη συμπερίληψη.

Ευχαριστούμε θερμά Τα Ψηλά Βουνά ΚοινΣΕπ - The High Mountains Coop ως ανάδοχο για τη διοργάνωση και τη φιλοξενία, το Impact Hub Athens για τον συντονισμό της εκδήλωσης, τον Δήμος Ζαγορίου για τη συνεργασία, καθώς και όλες και όλους τους συμμετέχοντες για την παρουσία και τη συμβολή τους.

Το RISTOR υλοποιείται στο πλαίσιο του Interreg VI-A IPA Greece–Albania 2021–2027, με τη συνεργασία εταίρων από την Ελλάδα και την Αλβανία.

Διαβάστε περισσότερα για το έργο στο άρθρο που θα βρείτε στα σχόλια.

Interreg Greece - Albania

27/04/2026

📢 New publication in Globalizations

We’re excited to share a new article co-authored by Vasilis Kostakis: “Design global, manufacture local: Operationalising post-growth industrial policy through cosmolocalism.”

At a time when industrial policy is back at the center of global debates, this article asks: how can post-growth ideas actually be implemented?

👉 The answer we explore is cosmolocalism: global knowledge commons + local production.

The article shows how this approach can:
• enable innovation without monopoly
• reduce resource dependencies and ecological pressures
• support more democratic and locally grounded production systems.

Drawing on real-world cases, it highlights how commons-based, distributed production is already pointing toward viable alternatives.

The paper also reflects on how grassroots initiatives like those studied and supported by the P2P Lab can interact with (and reshape) industrial policy.

📄 Read the open-access article and let us know what you think! Link in the first comment.

22/04/2026

P2P Research of the Week #5

We continue with our P2P trilogy (of four) on value(s) with a “speaking out” article revisiting a story of the early days of the Internet. That is about a wager, placed in 2006, between technology writer and former editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr, and Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, Yochai Benkler on one provocative question:

🌐Are the most influential websites peer-produced or price-incentivized? Organizing value in the digital economy, by Alex Pazaitis & Vasilis Kostakis

The article breaks down the question and the arguments by each side (spoiler alert: both declared to be the winner!) to dive into a deeper inquiry on who creates value in the digital economy and, most importantly, who calls the shots. 20 years after the wager and with the emergence of ever more powerful digital technologies gradually infiltrating all domains of our cognitive and social lives, these questions feel more relevant than ever - and, arguably, so do the alternatives of the commons.

💻Open access link in the first comment🪕

16/04/2026

P2P Research of the Week #4

After a short break of roughly a month, due to research proposal season, P2P Research of the Week is back! To make this up for the hordes of our followers, who have been waiting for our next post holding their breaths (after all, more than 15 read our posts - us included!), this week, we are launching a series of posts on the P2P trilogy (of four) on value(s)!

First up:
⛓️1. Blockchain and value systems in the sharing economy: The illustrative case of Backfeed, By Alex Pazaitis, Primavera De Filippi, & Vasilis Kostakis

Value has been a truly inspiring topic for us, as something so abstract that few people can provide a comprehensive definition, and simultaneously so mundane that it appears on everything from value packs of 12 beer cans to endless value toilet paper!

This article jumps onto the (at the time) hot bandwagon of Blockchain technology to dive deep into the rabbithole of theory of value, starting with a genealogical journey on scholarly discourse from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution, before fast-forwarding to the rise (and demise) of the Internet as a space of free value creation and how scholars tried to make sense of it back in 2017 - which somehow feels like a century ago!

📖 Open-access link in the first comment.

🧘 Let us know what you think! What do you think will be the second part of this saga?

24/03/2026

Min(d)ing the commons!

Wikipedia was built by volunteers who believed knowledge should be shared freely. Now, AI companies are scraping it at massive scale to train proprietary models, without giving anything back to the community that built it.

The article unpacks the Wikimedia Foundation's recent deals with Big Tech and argues for a multi-stakeholder settlement: one where large-scale commercial users of the commons take on real, structured obligations to sustain it.

Because the question isn't whether the digital commons needs funding; it's how and by whom.

Open access link in the first comment 👇

19/03/2026

Many thanks to the RISTOR team for highlighting our work!

We’re glad to be part of this collaboration towards more sustainable and inclusive tourism.

Partner Spotlight | P2P Lab - Greece

P2P Lab leads the design and integration of accessibility features for both Centres, ensuring that the spaces are inclusive and responsive to diverse user needs. It develops and delivers tailored training and support on inclusivity and accessibility for the local SMEs and initiatives participating in the project.

Drawing on its strong local presence and expertise in community-based innovation, P2P Lab ensures that sustainability and social equity are embedded in both the infrastructure and the services developed through RISTOR.

Follow our Partner Spotlight series to get to know the organisations behind the RISTOR project and their work on sustainable and inclusive tourism.

17/03/2026

P2P Research of the Week #3

The world enters another full-fledged crisis, the worst implications of which are bound to affect the lives of millions of people worldwide, threatening to bring the global economy to its knees. Yet this so-called energy crisis is almost exclusively related to oil and it is fueled by the same patterns of unsolicited aggression against people and ecosystems that the fuel industries have themselves fueled, both literally and figuratively.

To make sense of the ongoing havoc, this week, we seek commons alternatives in the energy field:

Energy governance as a commons: Engineering alternative socio-technical configurations, by Chris Giotitsas et al. (2022).

Instead of treating the current crisis triggered by oil prices as merely a karmic irony, we critically address it as the endgame of a system of governance premised on violence. At the heart of it is energy, otherwise a physical necessity for all living systems, seen as a commodity, which is the means for hiding “the fact that energy production exists at the expense of other humans and local environments elsewhere in the global economy.”

Conversely, energy as a is proposed an alternative concept, grounded on millennials of human experience, that may engage diverse expertise from engineering to social sciences and humanities “to empower communities to shift their mode of energy production away from the dominant socioeconomic configuration based on the profit motive and propelled by fossil fuels.”

Open access link in the first comment 👇

11/03/2026

P2P Research of the Week #2

This week, since life got in the way of our regular posting schedule, we thought we'd feature an essay questioning the concept of time altogether:

Right Here, Right Now: Rapid avocados, gig work and temporal justice
by our own Maro Pantazidou (2022)

Inter-disciplinary engagements with space abound, but the dimension of time seems to be very much taken for granted in social sciences. A deep dive into the ways we talk about time, the language we use, and how we organize ourselves within it unveils so many of the power relations and exploitation dynamics that are often left unquestioned.

As Maro writes: “The meaning we assign to time matters greatly – it opens certain questions and forecloses or undermines others. Perceiving time as a collective creation rather than an individual resource moves us from asking ‘How do I manage my time?’ to ‘Who maintains me in time? What architectures create time for me?’”

Time is yet another field of social struggle. And one for which P2P and the commons may provide a new vocabulary and everyday tools to live and speak time as something other than a resource to be owned. Otherwise, we risk someone owning our future, too.

Open access link in the first comment 👇

02/03/2026

P2P Research of the Week #1

We’re launching a weekly series of posts, featuring research curated by the P2P Lab that shapes how we think about the world through the commons and peer-to-peer transformation: from fresh articles we deem worth your attention to older pieces worth being explored anew.

First up - one of our “all time classics”:
Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy
by Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens (2014).

In under 100 pages, the book maps early attempts to understand how digital networks reshape value. Building upon Carlotta Perez’s seminal work on techno-economic paradigm shifts the book guides us through concepts such as Netarchical and Distributed capitalism, before formulating early proposals toward a -centric economy, including the idea of .

Twelve years later, some proposals may read as naive in the era of Big Tech and Internet “ .”
Yet the analytical tools and the political imagination remain highly relevant, bold testimonies to alternative trajectories that largely remain an untapped potential.

📖 Open access link in the first comment 👇

We’ll (hopefully!) be sharing one piece every week.

Let us know what you think…
…or leave us more suggestions!