Our first group of guests at the pre-festival event of CommonsFest 2015 which will take place in Heraklion-Crete on April 17-18 comes from Ecuador’s FLOK Society Project.

FLOK Society project (aka Proyecto Buen Conocer) is a research-activist project which begun in 2013 upon the initiative of an open group of activists and academics with the aim of developing a set of public policy proposals for the transformation of Ecuador into a social economy based on the principles of the Commons, of peer production and governance and of free access to knowledge.

With the support of the Ecuadorian Government and the active participation of an international network of academics, hackers, practitioners, activists and social movements, the FLOK project has developed a set of policy papers spanning the spheres of traditional and ancestral knowledge, education, science, culture, biodiversity, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, software, hardware, Internet connectivity, open data and open government, the urban commons, the role of civil society and the legislative/institutional framework for the social and solidarity economy.

The following short video describes the goals of the project:

In specific, we will be joined by Nikos Anastasopoulos (FLOK researcher in the field of urban commons), George Dafermos (coordinator of the research of FLOK and of the development of its public policy proposals on the transformation of the primary and secondary sectors of the economy), Ioannis Margaris (member of the research group which developed the public policy proposal for the transformation of the energy sector) and John Restakis (coordinator of the research of FLOK and of the development of its public policy proposals in the area of the social-solidarity economy and institutional innovation).

In the coming days we will publish a series of articles in which FLOK researchers delve more deeply into the areas of their work.