Sharing
Can one of these serve several people instead of one?
Fewer objects, more use per object. Someone else still made the object, and sharing it does not change how it was made.
Nine requirements, four modes
Three ways of judging production you do not control, and one way of taking it on.
Compiled 4 September 2026. 29 of 36 cells carry a mechanism. 7 are deliberately empty.
There are nine things a human body materially needs. There are four ways of relating to any one of them. This page crosses the two, and the useful result is not the grid itself. It is which cells refuse to fill, and why the fourth column turns out not to be the same kind of thing as the other three.
Sharing, ideal consumption and reuse all take the same position. Something exists, somebody else already decided how it was made, and you are working out how to relate to it well: use fewer of them, pick the better one, keep it going longer. All three are worth doing. None of them moves the production decision.
The instruction that produced this page put the objection plainly.
Such that we are not just talking about how other people should produce things and then we judge it, which is arguably relatively easy. But we instead try ourselves to create these things in the manner that we find correct.
The four modes, and why the fourth is not a fourth
Judging production you do not control
Ideal consumption
Of the things on offer, which is least bad, and by which measure?
The scoring mode. It presumes a shelf, a set of options, and a producer who decided everything before you arrived.
Reuse
Can this keep going, and reach the next person still working?
Extends the life of what already exists. Still downstream of a production decision that was taken without you.
Taking production on
Cosmolocal production
Could we make it ourselves, in the manner we find correct?
The design is held globally as a commons, the making happens locally. This is the mode where the grading stops and the responsibility starts.
The matrix
Nine rows, four columns, and no obligation to fill them. A cell either states one concrete mechanism or states why there is none. An empty cell is the finding rather than an omission, so the empty ones are marked and reasoned instead of padded out for symmetry.
The fourth column is set apart on purpose. It is not a fourth option standing beside the other three. It is what the other three get measured against.
| Requirement | Sharing somebody else made it | Ideal consumption somebody else made it | Reuse somebody else made it | Cosmolocal production you make it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Water Hydrological Full page | A public drinking fountain fed by the municipal supply is the shared form: the tap is common property, free at the point of use, and nobody meters your sip. SourceStadt Wien [A]ORF Wien [B] | does not apply The only consumer choice on offer is bottled against tap, and where the tap is safe the bottle loses on every axis at once. Scoring bottled brands against each other would be grading carefully inside a failure mode. | does not apply Greywater and rainwater recovery are real, but they are plumbing built into a structure and decided by whoever owns it. The loop closes inside production, so it sits in the fourth column instead. | Keeping the utility in public hands is itself a production decision. Vienna's city constitution requires a two-thirds council majority before any part of the supply could be sold, and Austria added national constitutional protection for public drinking water in 2019. SourceStadt Wien [A]Parlament Österreich [A] |
| 2. Food Nutritional | A Fair-Teiler, the public fridge where surplus is put out for whoever needs it, moves food that already exists instead of scoring the next purchase. Sourcefoodsharing [C]weakly supported | Ideal Groceries scores a shelf item against climate, fairness, health, price and ownership, and marks every link in the provenance chain that could not be established rather than guessing it. | does not apply Food is consumed and gone. What remains is nutrients, and returning those to soil as compost is an input to next season rather than a reuse of the item. The loop closes inside production. | Solidarische Landwirtschaft puts members on the risk side of one farm, an open-source seed licence keeps a variety legally re-sowable, and L'Atelier Paysan publishes farm machines as buildable plans, though its cooperative went into liquidation in April 2026 and the plans now sit with successor associations. SourceBIO AUSTRIA [B]OpenSourceSeeds, Agrecol e.V. [B]Farm Hack, Bangor Daily News [B]weakly supportedL’Atelier Paysan, corroborated by Vitisphere [B] |
| 3. Shelter Structural | Living in community rather than one household per dwelling: one workshop, one guest room and one good kitchen serving nine households instead of nine of each. | A dwelling can be scored, but the axes that carry weight are tenure security, ownership form and landlord rather than the finish of the kitchen, and those are set by policy before any viewing. | Refurbishing a building instead of demolishing it keeps the embodied carbon a new build would spend again, and selective dismantling recovers components from the buildings that do come down. Sourcea3BAU [B] | WikiHouse publishes a structural system as an open design that a local CNC shop cuts from local sheet material, and a Baugruppe commissions its own building rather than buying whatever a developer chose to build. SourceOpen Systems Lab, ArchDaily [B]weakly supportedaspern Seestadt, wohnfonds_wien [A] |
| 4. Energy Energetic Full page | An Austrian renewable energy community lets neighbours allocate locally generated electricity between their own meters instead of each buying separately from a national supplier. Sourceenergiegemeinschaften.gv.at [A] | Choosing a supplier is a real choice, but guarantees of origin trade separately from the electricity itself, so a green tariff is a statement about certificates before it is a statement about generation. SourceDirective (EU) 2018/2001, Article 19 [A]weakly supported | does not apply Energy that has been used is degraded to low-grade heat. Waste-heat recovery is real, but it is designed into the plant or the building and cannot be done afterwards by whoever used the energy. The loop closes inside production. | Plug-in balcony solar turns a tenant into a generator with no building works and no installer. Austria dropped the approval process for units up to 800 watts in September 2024, though registration with the grid operator still applies. SourceEWW [B] |
| 5. Transportation Kinetic | Cars shared with people who would stop being trusted if they misused them. That is the ordinary way humans already lend things, made legible to a machine rather than replaced by a score. | Mode choice is the decision that actually moves the number, and the night train is the concrete European instance of the good option being available rather than theoretical. SourceMeinBezirk [B] | A second-hand bicycle is the same bicycle. Self-help repair workshops, where you use the tools and the help is free, keep frames in service long past the point where a shop would write them off. SourceRadlobby Wien [C] | Thinner than the rest of this column. XYZ Cargo publishes a licensed build manual for its simplest one-seater, but the cargo-capable models have no public plans at all, so this cell names a gap as much as a practice. SourceN55 [C] |
| 6. Clothing Thermic | A clothing library circulates a garment without transferring ownership, which fits exactly the items worn a handful of times and then resented. The standing libraries that could be confirmed are German. Austria has recurring swap events and no permanent library that this pass could find. SourceKleiderei [C]weakly supported | Ideal Clothes Shopping scores fit, colour and fabric quality from physical measurement rather than from seller claims, with the standard held open so the score does not belong to the shop. | The doorstep loop: a box on the step, collected by the postal service that already passes, listed with measured dimensions and a fabric score, with a cut back to the seller so the effort is worth it. | Open sewing patterns generated to your own measurements under a free licence, and regional fibre-to-garment chains that keep the wool, the spinning and the sewing inside one region. SourceFreesewing [A]Fibershed [C] |
| 7. Hygiene and Healthcare Medical Full page | Equipment lending. Crutches, wheelchairs and care beds are needed for weeks and last for years, which is precisely the profile that rewards a lending pool over a purchase. SourceÖsterreichisches Rotes Kreuz [A] | Toiletries and cosmetics are an ordinary shelf decision and score like groceries. Care itself does not: you get the health system your polity funds, and no amount of shopping changes it. | Durable substitutes for single-use items on the household side, and refurbished and recertified equipment on the clinical side, where a device outlasts several of its owners. | The clearest case anywhere for the fourth mode: where a device is unaffordable or simply unavailable, a published design plus a local fabricator beats waiting for a supplier who is not coming. SourceGlia, 3D Printing Industry [B]e-NABLE [C]Open Insulin Project [C] |
| 8. Security Protective Full page | does not apply Security is not an object that can be lent. What looks like shared security is either a public institution or a private contract, and neither is sharing in the sense every other row uses the word. | does not apply There is no shelf. Policing, courts, defence and diplomacy are not bought by an individual. The lever is political rather than consumer, and pretending otherwise is how security gets sold back to people as a product. | does not apply Nothing material is reused. The nearest analogue, keeping institutions rather than founding new ones, is an argument about governance and not about consumption. | The only mode that applies here, which is the whole argument in one row. A community can build its own trust infrastructure: standing vouched for by people who know you, over protocols whose specification is public and whose instances run locally. SourceElement, Sifted [B]Signal [A] |
| 9. Digital and Connectivity Informational Full page | A community mesh network: neighbours put antennas on roofs and carry each other's traffic, so the connection is jointly held rather than resold separately to each household. SourceFunkfeuer [C]weakly supportedFreifunk [C]weakly supported | Choosing where a service is hosted and under whose jurisdiction, and buying a device against its repairability class rather than its spec sheet. SourceEUR-Lex, European Commission [A] | Refurbished devices, and buying the devices that are designed to stay supported long enough for refurbishing them to be worth somebody's while. SourceFairphone [C] | Free software is the purest cosmolocal case in existence: the design is a global commons, the running instance is yours and local, and the copy you run needs no permission from whoever wrote it. |
What the empty cells say
7 of 36 cells are empty, and they are not scattered evenly. Water and Security have no consumer-choice story at all: there is no shelf to grade. Security is the requirement where every judging mode fails and only production is left, which is the argument on this page reduced to a single row. All four modes apply to Shelter, Transportation, Clothing, Hygiene and Healthcare, Digital and Connectivity.
Three of the empty cells share one shape. Water, food and energy each have a real circular loop, and in each case the loop closes inside production rather than inside consumption: greywater plumbing, compost as next season's input, waste heat designed into a building. Reuse as a consumer act simply does not reach them.
The nine, one at a time
Each entry states the requirement, which modes apply to it, what exists in the EvoBioSys portfolio today, and what is missing. The list itself is a working hypothesis at v0.3 on the 9EPhR page, open to refinement, and nothing here treats it as settled.
5 of the nine now carry a page of their own, linked from the entry and from the matrix row above. Four of those five follow a position Jakob stated in his own words, quoted on each page rather than paraphrased. The fifth, water, has no stated position, and its page says so instead of supplying one.
Bodily base
What a human body has always needed, in every era and every climate.
1 Water Hydrological
Safe potable water for drinking, cooking and sanitation, available as a commons rather than bottled and commodified.
2 Food Nutritional
Sufficient, diverse and nourishing food, meaning actual nutrition rather than calories. Regenerative agriculture, local food systems, living soil.
3 Shelter Structural
Safe, stable housing that keeps the weather out and holds space for rest, privacy and regeneration. A biological necessity before it is a financial asset.
Later additions
Warmth, movement and covering. Needed once people lived outside the climate they evolved in.
4 Energy Energetic
Clean, reliable energy for heating, cooling, cooking and powering tools. Energy sovereignty is a physical form of sovereignty.
5 Transportation Kinetic
The ability to move physically between places. Public transit, walkable cities, cycling infrastructure, and night trains and ships over flights.
6 Clothing Thermic
The extended skin. Appropriate covering and bodily protection for the climate you are in: temperature regulation, protection from UV, weather and occupational hazard.
Modern guarantees
Health, safety and connection. Guarantees a society can now be held to, rather than facts of biology.
7 Hygiene and Healthcare Medical
Medicine, sanitation and hygiene, preventive and restorative, for the biological instrument. Mental, dental and reproductive care included rather than bolted on.
8 Security Protective
Physical safety and the rule of law. Policing, defence and diplomacy that protect people rather than the arrangement that currently holds power.
9 Digital and Connectivity Informational
Access to communication and information infrastructure, hardware and software alike. Sovereign, privacy-first and universally available rather than rented from elsewhere.
Cosmolocal production, the fourth mode
Design global, manufacture local.
The formulation that can be cited properly is the title of the paper: design global, manufacture local. Knowledge, design and software are held as a global commons that anybody may draw on. Fabrication happens near where the thing will be used, from local material and local labour, because shipping a heavy object across the planet is the expensive half and sending a design file is not.
A second phrasing circulates widely and needs handling carefully: that what is light is global and shared, while what is heavy is local. It is attributed to the P2P Foundation and it says the same thing more memorably. Three attempts to fetch the relevant wiki page were refused, and the page that did load does not contain the words light or heavy. So this page cites the paper it could verify, and records the memorable line as attributed but unconfirmed instead of setting it in quotation marks.
What makes this a different kind of thing rather than a fourth option: every other mode on this page accepts the object as given. This one does not. It is also the only mode that can change what the other three have to work with, because the thing being shared, scored and reused was made by somebody, and that somebody could be you.
Exemplars, each checked
Each row below was checked rather than recalled. Four of them are dead, liquidated, dormant or mid-crisis, and they are listed anyway. A page that shows only the healthy examples is a marketing page, and this project does not do that elsewhere either.
| Project | What it actually does | Region | Licence | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Village Construction Set | Publishes CAD and build files for 50 industrial and agricultural machines meant to be fabricated in the field rather than bought. | United States | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Active. Not finished, and says so: the stated completion target is 2028. | Open Source Ecology [A] The machine count is from OSE own wiki. The activity and status claims are self-reported and were checked at tier C. |
| L’Atelier Paysan | Documents self-build plans and runs training for small-farm machinery and buildings, about 60 tools with 16 plans finalised. | France | CC BY-NC-SA | The cooperative was liquidated in April 2026. The commons moved to two successor associations. | L’Atelier Paysan, corroborated by Vitisphere [B] |
| Farm Hack | A wiki and event series where farmers document open small-farm tools, roughly 300 of them in the library. | United States | Creative Commons | Active, though the current maintaining body could not be established. | Farm Hack, Bangor Daily News [B] Weakly supported United States rather than European. Activity is corroborated by press, but the site refused automated fetches and the current maintaining body could not be established. |
| OpenSourceSeeds | A copyleft licence for plant varieties, so a licensed variety and everything bred from it stay legally re-sowable. | Germany | Open-source seed licence, copyleft | Active since 2017, with commercially available licensed varieties. | OpenSourceSeeds, Agrecol e.V. [B] |
| WikiHouse | A library of CNC-cuttable timber components that assemble by hand, without cranes or heavy plant. | United Kingdom | Reported as CC BY-SA, not confirmed on the current site | Built examples exist from 2015. Current activity is unconfirmed in either direction. | Open Systems Lab, ArchDaily [B] Weakly supported The built example is confirmed. The CC BY-SA licence is widely reported but not found in first-person text on the current site, and no 2025 or 2026 activity signal was found either way. |
| Precious Plastic | Four open machines, shredder, extrusion, injection and compression, that turn waste plastic into usable stock. | Netherlands | Unresolved. Both CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA are cited by live sources. | Restructuring. The founder returned in 2024 and a Version 5 relaunch is under way. | Precious Plastic, One Army [C] Weakly supported The machines and the restructuring are confirmed from the project own posts. The current licence could not be resolved: both CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY-NC-SA are cited by live sources, so no licence is asserted here. |
| RepRap | The self-replicating 3D printer whose open designs seeded the entire desktop printing industry. | United Kingdom | GNU GPL v2 or later | Dormant. Recent wiki edits are spam only. The energy moved to derivatives. | RepRap [A] Dormancy is a direct observation: recent changes on the project own wiki are spam account creation rather than content. The ecosystem moved to derivatives such as Prusa and Marlin. |
| Open Source Circular Economy Days | Ran city-level sprints where people opened up circular-economy problems and published what they built. | Germany | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Ended. Four editions between 2015 and 2018, and the site says so itself. | OSCEdays [A] |
| Fab City | Cities sign a pledge to produce locally what they consume, backed by a fab lab and an institutional consortium, against a 2054 horizon. | Spain and international, including Linz and Suedburgenland | A pledge rather than a licence | Active. Linz joined in 2020 and Suedburgenland around 2022. No evidence Vienna or Graz have signed. | Fab City Global Initiative, Ars Electronica [C] Weakly supported The 2054 horizon and the Austrian memberships are corroborated. The total signatory count is reported inconsistently across sources, from 28 to 56 or more, so no figure is printed. No evidence was found that Vienna or Graz have signed, which is a failed search rather than a confirmed absence. |
| Freesewing | Drafts sewing patterns to your own measurements from parametric designs, so the pattern fits the body rather than a size chart. | Netherlands and international | Code GPL-3.0, pattern documentation CC-BY | Active. | Freesewing [A] |
| Glia | Publishes 3D-printable medical hardware including a tourniquet, and manufactures under a real medical device establishment licence. | Canada, deployed in conflict zones | GPL-3.0 | Active. Repository updated June 2026. | Glia, 3D Printing Industry [B] |
| Otelo | A network of roughly 36 open technology labs, each run by a local association under one shared charter. | Austria, Upper Austria and Carinthia | Association charter | Active since 2010. | Otelo, Springer Nature [B] |
| Die Grand Garage | A 2,000 square metre open workshop in the Tabakfabrik with more than 40 machines and around-the-clock member access. | Austria, Linz | Membership | Active. Consolidated under TGW Future Wings in July 2026. | Die Grand Garage, TGW [B] |
| Happylab Wien | A 900 square metre membership makerspace with 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC, woodworking, textile and electronics equipment. | Austria, Vienna | Membership | Active. | Happylab [C] |
Which of the nine EvoBioSys could plausibly produce for
Being concrete matters more here than the framing does. Of the nine, these are the requirements where this portfolio could realistically move from scoring to making, in roughly descending order of plausibility.
- Clothing. The nearest by a distance. The garment analysis device is already specified as a box a household prints or borrows from a neighbour, which makes it an open-hardware design before it is a product. Publishing it as one, with the fabric-score standard held by a foundation rather than a seller, is the fourth mode with no new competence required.
- Digital and Connectivity. Already happening and simply not named as such. Every piece of software here is written rather than bought, and the web of trust is infrastructure the project builds instead of renting. The gap is that none of it is currently published as a commons anybody else could run.
- Security. Only the narrow trust slice, but that slice is real, and it is the one requirement where no judging mode applies at all. A web of trust is produced, never purchased.
- Shelter. Plausible and not close. Housing work here is policy and community; construction is a different discipline carrying different liabilities. WikiHouse already exists, so the honest move would be adopting an open system rather than starting one.
- Food. Unlikely, and worth saying rather than implying. Ideal Groceries scores a shelf. Growing food is a full occupation, and the useful contribution is probably pointing at Solidarische Landwirtschaft rather than becoming a farm.
What this portfolio actually is today
Counted honestly, almost everything this project has built or specified sits in the first three columns. Ideal Groceries scores. Ideal Clothes Shopping scores. The prior-art survey scores other people work. The doorstep handoff is reuse. The web of trust is the one piece that is production, and what it produces is trust rather than an object.
That is not a failure and it is not nothing. Scoring honestly is harder than it looks, and the discipline of marking a gap instead of filling it with a plausible number is genuinely uncommon. But it is the easy half, in exactly the sense the objection at the top of this page names. Grading a supply chain costs research. Making the thing costs a workshop, a liability, a decade, and the standing possibility of being wrong in public and expensive.
The fourth column is not on this page as a claim. It is here so the first three stop looking complete.
What the Valley of the Commons notes actually contain
The brief for this page said to read Jakob's own notes from Valley of the Commons before writing the cosmolocal framing, and to report back rather than reconstruct something plausible if they turned out not to hold one. They were read. They do not hold one.
A search across the whole workspace for cosmolocal and cosmo-local returned nothing. Of the five nodes named in the brief, two carry only a title, one carries two lines about a different conversation, and one is audience segmentation for a presentation. The fifth is substantial and covers the Hubs Network, community facilitation, an ideal-restaurants quest and sources for curation. None of it is about production.
One near miss is worth recording rather than smoothing over. Jakob did speak with Michel Bauwens at Valley of the Commons on 24 August 2026, and Bauwens is the person the cosmolocal formulation belongs to. The note filed under that conversation places him under other meta-curators, next to an LLM wiki and curated multiple perspectives. What was written down is about curation, not about making things.
So the framing below is sourced to the P2P Foundation rather than to Jakob's notes, and whether the two say the same thing is his call, not this page. This section exists so nobody later mistakes a reconstruction for a record.
-WPbxSwD0u0VValley of the Commons, 2 September 2026 Title only. No children.JTKPVUTmR7lyfirst day at valley of the commons, 24 August 2026 Substantial. Hubs Network, community facilitation, an ideal-restaurants quest, sources for curation. No cosmolocal content.7ESGZG81F3Oeat Valley of the Commons, 7 September 2026 Two lines, about Artizen.Ik68qAYf_9VDvalley of the commons, event node in the Library Tag node with no body.CPpWaK23z6jKprep a presentation for the valley of the commons Three lines of audience segmentation. No cosmolocal content.gcirO6hlo_5Efrom conversation with Michael Bauwens, 24 August 2026 The near miss, and the node title is reproduced as the workspace holds it, spelling included; the author of the cosmolocal literature writes his name Michel. Filed under sources for curation, about meta-curation and transparent perspectives rather than production.
Sources
Tier A is a legal, governmental or scientific primary source, B is journalism or trade press, C is a community or vendor describing itself. Confidence below 0.7 is flagged, and where a figure could not be established it is named as unestablished rather than replaced with a plausible one.
| Claim | Publisher | Date | Tier | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vienna requires a two-thirds council majority before its water supply could be sold, and Austria added constitutional protection for public drinking water in 2019 | Parlament Österreich | 2 July 2019 | [A] | 0.9 |
| Vienna spring water is supplied by the municipality through Wiener Wasser (MA 31) | Stadt Wien | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.9 |
| Vienna operates roughly 1,800 public drinking fountains | ORF Wien | April 2026 | [B] | 0.8 |
| foodsharing lists 37 Fair-Teiler in Vienna, of which only three are freely accessible around the clock | foodsharing | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.65 The mechanism is confirmed active. The count of 37 carries no clear as-of date on the source, so treat the number as indicative. |
| A national CSA network coordinates Austrian farms; GeLa Ochsenherz near Vienna has run as a CSA since 2011 with over 300 members | BIO AUSTRIA | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 |
| The open-source seed licence is a working copyleft licence published by Agrecol in 2017; the tomato Sunviva is released under it | OpenSourceSeeds, Agrecol e.V. | 2017, accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.85 |
| BauKarussell reports over 1,330 tonnes recovered through selective dismantling, 580 tonnes of it resold for reuse | a3BAU | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 The tonnage is BauKarussell reporting on itself and is not independently audited. |
| wohnfonds_wien supports Baugruppen in Seestadt Aspern through the Bauträgerwettbewerb; JAspern and LiSA are built examples | aspern Seestadt, wohnfonds_wien | 2018, accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.85 |
| The EAG 2021 created renewable energy communities in Austria; 5,590 were counted at the end of 2025, up from about 1,170 in early 2024 | energiegemeinschaften.gv.at | 2025 | [A] | 0.85 |
| Guarantees of origin are tradable separately from the electricity they describe, so a green tariff is a claim about certificates before it is a claim about generation | Directive (EU) 2018/2001, Article 19 | 11 December 2018 | [A] | Weakly supported: 0.65 Stated from the structure of the directive rather than re-verified against the article text in this pass. Flagged rather than dropped, because the point it supports is a caution and not a claim of fact about any supplier. |
| Austria dropped the approval process for plug-in balcony solar up to 800 watts in September 2024; registration with the grid operator still applies | EWW | September 2024, accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 The 800 watt figure is consistent across independent trade sources but was not traced to the Bundesgesetzblatt text in this pass. |
| ÖBB is expanding Nightjet toward 24 new-generation trainsets and has committed publicly to not shrinking the network | MeinBezirk | 2026 | [B] | 0.75 |
| Vienna has several self-help bicycle workshops, including the Bikekitchen and the WUK workshop running since 1983, where tools and help are free | Radlobby Wien | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.85 |
| XYZ Cargo publishes a build manual under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 for its one-seater only; the cargo-capable models have no public plans and require a paid workshop | N55 | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.8 |
| Clothing libraries operate in Berlin and Hamburg. No standing Austrian clothing library was found, only recurring swap events | Kleiderei | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.55 Flagged. The German libraries are confirmed. The Austrian absence is what one research pass failed to find, which is weaker than a proven absence. |
| Freesewing drafts sewing patterns to your own measurements; the code is GPL-3.0 and the pattern documentation is CC-BY | Freesewing | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.9 |
| Fibershed DACH is a regional affiliate covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland, connecting fibre farms, mills and makers | Fibershed | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.75 |
| The Austrian Red Cross lends care aids including wheelchairs, crutches and nursing beds | Österreichisches Rotes Kreuz | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.85 The scheme is confirmed. No usage figures were obtained. |
| Glia publishes a 3D-printable tourniquet under GPL-3.0 and manufactures under a Health Canada Medical Device Establishment Licence | Glia, 3D Printing Industry | repository active June 2026 | [B] | 0.85 |
| e-NABLE volunteers print prosthetic hands under Creative Commons licences that differ per design; there is no single project licence | e-NABLE | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.75 |
| The Open Insulin Project develops open protocols for insulin analogues and has not reached approval or patient-scale production | Open Insulin Project | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 Active as research. It is not a supply mechanism today and should not be described as one. |
| Signal core protocol library libsignal is licensed AGPL-3.0-only | Signal | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.9 |
| Germany runs the Matrix-based BwMessenger for the Bundeswehr, live since November 2020, and France runs Tchap on the same protocol | Element, Sifted | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 Vendor case study and tech press. No government primary source was reached. |
| Funkfeuer Wien, an OLSR community mesh founded in 2003, shows node-database activity as recently as May 2026 | Funkfeuer | node data 12 May 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.65 Activity is evidenced only by a timestamp. Current node count and network health could not be established. |
| Freifunk self-reports around 400 communities and 41,000 access points, while its own forum discusses a decline in active communities | Freifunk | undated, accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.6 Treated as stale. The movement is real, the figures are not verified 2026 counts, and the decline thread argues against reading them as current. |
| EU Regulation 2023/1670 and the paired energy label applied from 20 June 2025, scoring repairability A to E and requiring spare parts for seven years and software updates for five | EUR-Lex, European Commission | 20 June 2025 | [A] | 0.9 |
| Fairphone 6 launched in June 2025 with at least seven Android upgrades promised and support running into 2033 | Fairphone | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.8 Company claims about its own support window, corroborated by press but not audited. |
| Design global, manufacture local: the peer-reviewed formulation of the model | Kostakis, Niaros, Dafermos and Bauwens, Futures 73, pages 126 to 135 | 2015 | [A] | 0.9 |
| The widely circulated phrasing, that what is light is global and shared while what is heavy is local, attributed to the P2P Foundation | P2P Foundation wiki | attempted 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.5 Not verified. Three fetches of the P2P Foundation wiki were refused, and the page that did load does not contain the words light or heavy. The line is printed here as attributed and unconfirmed, never as a quotation. |
| The Global Village Construction Set publishes build files for 50 industrial and agricultural machines; OSE states its own completion target as 2028 | Open Source Ecology | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.8 The machine count is from OSE own wiki. The activity and status claims are self-reported and were checked at tier C. |
| L’Atelier Paysan documents about 60 farm tools with 16 finalised plans under CC BY-NC-SA; the cooperative entered judicial liquidation on 21 April 2026 and the work continues through two successor associations | L’Atelier Paysan, corroborated by Vitisphere | 29 April 2026 | [B] | 0.85 |
| Precious Plastic publishes four machines, shredder, extrusion, injection and compression, and is mid-restructuring after a 2024 leadership and funding crisis | Precious Plastic, One Army | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.55 The machines and the restructuring are confirmed from the project own posts. The current licence could not be resolved: both CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY-NC-SA are cited by live sources, so no licence is asserted here. |
| WikiHouse publishes CNC-cuttable timber components that assemble by hand; a two-storey volunteer-built house was shown at the London Design Festival in 2015 | Open Systems Lab, ArchDaily | 2015, site accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | Weakly supported: 0.65 The built example is confirmed. The CC BY-SA licence is widely reported but not found in first-person text on the current site, and no 2025 or 2026 activity signal was found either way. |
| RepRap, the self-replicating 3D printer project begun in 2004, is licensed GNU GPL v2 or later and is now dormant as a community | RepRap | wiki checked 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.8 Dormancy is a direct observation: recent changes on the project own wiki are spam account creation rather than content. The ecosystem moved to derivatives such as Prusa and Marlin. |
| Farm Hack runs a wiki and event series where farmers document open small-farm tools, with a library of roughly 300 tools | Farm Hack, Bangor Daily News | 21 February 2025 | [B] | Weakly supported: 0.65 United States rather than European. Activity is corroborated by press, but the site refused automated fetches and the current maintaining body could not be established. |
| Open Source Circular Economy Days ran four global editions between 2015 and 2018 and has ended, which the site states itself | OSCEdays | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.85 |
| Cities signing the Fab City pledge commit to producing locally what they consume against a 2054 horizon; Linz has been a member since 2020 and Suedburgenland joined around 2022 | Fab City Global Initiative, Ars Electronica | 2014 origin, Linz meetup September 2023 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.65 The 2054 horizon and the Austrian memberships are corroborated. The total signatory count is reported inconsistently across sources, from 28 to 56 or more, so no figure is printed. No evidence was found that Vienna or Graz have signed, which is a failed search rather than a confirmed absence. |
| Otelo is a network of roughly 36 open technology labs founded in 2010 in Voecklabruck, each run by a local association under a shared charter | Otelo, Springer Nature | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 |
| The Grand Garage in the Tabakfabrik Linz is a 2,000 square metre open workshop with more than 40 machines and around-the-clock access, consolidated under TGW Future Wings from 1 July 2026 | Die Grand Garage, TGW | 1 July 2026 | [B] | 0.8 |
| Happylab Vienna is a roughly 900 square metre membership makerspace with 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC, woodworking, textile and electronics equipment | Happylab | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.8 |
| The Open Source Pharma Foundation exists as a nonprofit working on open drug discovery, founded 2018 with Tata Trusts funding | Open Source Pharma Foundation | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.55 The organisation is real. Its own site still presents COVID-19-era activity as current, and no 2025 or 2026 output was found, so present programmatic activity could not be confirmed in either direction. |
| The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective publishes DIY pharmaceutical hardware and software, including the Apothecary MicroLab reactor and the Chemhacktica synthesis planner, and states it is winding down after ten years | Four Thieves Vinegar Collective | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.8 Described, not endorsed. This work sits outside medicines regulation in most jurisdictions and carries real chemistry and dosing risk. It is listed because a survey of open medical design that omitted it would be incomplete, not because it is a route this project recommends to anybody. |
| SOIL in Haiti runs urine-diverting EcoSan household toilets built from locally available materials, co-developed with Stanford researchers and documented in the Hesperian health guides | SOIL, Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.75 A concrete project rather than a design commons. No umbrella open sanitation commons comparable to Open Source Ecology was found. |
| Fairmined certifies gold and silver from artisanal and small-scale mines against environmental, labour and community standards, run by the Alliance for Responsible Mining and audited by SCS Global Services | Alliance for Responsible Mining | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.65 The scheme is real and independently audited, which is why it is here. The confidence is held below the floor for a narrower reason: the phrase regenerative mining appears nowhere on this certifier own site, and one verification pass found no certified category by that name anywhere, which is a failed search rather than a proven absence. |
| EU Regulation 2017/821 obliges EU importers of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold to run supply chain due diligence for conflict-affected and high-risk areas, in force since 1 January 2021 | EUR-Lex, European Union | 17 May 2017, applicable 1 January 2021 | [A] | 0.85 |
| The EU Critical Raw Materials Act sets 2030 benchmarks of at least 10 per cent of annual consumption from EU extraction, 40 per cent from EU processing and 25 per cent from recycling, with no more than 65 per cent of any strategic raw material from a single third country | European Commission | Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, adopted 2024 | [A] | 0.75 The benchmarks are confirmed from the Commission own page. The exact entry into force date was not pinned in this pass, so the year is printed and the day is not. |
| The Responsible Minerals Initiative runs an assurance process auditing smelters and refiners for tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold and cobalt | Responsible Minerals Initiative, Responsible Business Alliance | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 Industry self-governance. The Responsible Business Alliance is a trade association auditing its own sector, not an independent regulator, and this page does not present it as one. |
| Fairphone sources tin and tantalum from validated mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and buys tungsten through the Austrian smelter Wolfram Bergbau und Huetten AG, and was the first consumer electronics maker to integrate Fairtrade certified gold | Fairphone | 2021 programme statements, accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 Company claims about its own supply chain, corroborated by trade press and not independently audited in this pass. Included because the Austrian smelter link is the one concrete local anchor in this material. |
| AfB is a nonprofit IT refurbisher operating as a social enterprise across Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and Slovakia since 2004, with roughly half of about 700 staff being people with disabilities | AfB gemeinnuetzige GmbH | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.8 Staff and location figures are the company own reporting, corroborated by press coverage. |
| refurbed is a Vienna founded marketplace for refurbished electronics, started 2017 and active in twelve European countries | refurbed | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 A commercial marketplace rather than a commons. Trading volume figures are company reported and are not printed here. |
| Labdoo runs a volunteer network of hubs that refurbish donated laptops and load them with offline educational content for schools, with active hubs in Germany, Switzerland and Spain | Labdoo | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 Hub and country counts are the project own self-reporting. |
| The Restart Project runs community repair events and campaigns for a right to repair, and works with the wider European right to repair coalition | The Restart Project | accessed 4 September 2026 | [B] | 0.75 |
| The Vienna Reparaturbon covers 50 per cent of a repair up to 100 euro; the 2026 round opened on 22 April 2026 and its funding was exhausted on 20 May 2026 | Stadt Wien | 2026 round, exhausted 20 May 2026 | [A] | 0.85 Vouchers already issued stay valid. The scheme is not currently open to new applicants, so it is listed as a real mechanism that is closed rather than as an option available today. |
| Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025, and the Windows 11 hardware floor of TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and a supported processor excludes a large installed base of working machines | End of 10, corroborated by Microsoft lifecycle documentation | 14 October 2025 | [B] | 0.75 The date and the hardware requirements are solid. The circulating figures for how many devices this affects, commonly given as 200 to 400 million, are advocacy estimates rather than an official count, so no number is printed here. |
| Europe of the Regions: an interactive map and dataset of 191 practical European regions built on Eurostat NUTS 2024 to 2027, with representation model comparisons and a methodology page | meta-democracy.org, Jakob Possert-Bienzle | v0.2.2, accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.85 This project describing its own work. Cited here as the location of a position, not as independent evidence for it. |
| UN General Assembly Resolution 64/292 recognises the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right essential for the full enjoyment of life, adopted by 122 votes to none with 41 abstentions | United Nations General Assembly | 28 July 2010 | [A] | 0.9 The resolution text was read directly. The vote split is taken from the UN library research guide rather than from the raw meeting record, which could not be reached. |
| Human Rights Council Resolution 15/9 affirms that the right to safe drinking water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living, adopted without a vote | United Nations Human Rights Council | 30 September 2010 | [A] | 0.9 The resolution derives the right from existing treaty rights. It does not use the words legally binding, and this page does not put that phrase in its mouth. |
| One person in four, about 2.1 billion people, still lacked safely managed drinking water in 2024, including 106 million drinking directly from untreated surface water | WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme | 2025 report, reference year 2024 | [A] | 0.9 |
| The recast EU Drinking Water Directive requires member states to improve access to drinking water with a focus on vulnerable and marginalised groups, and to promote tap water in public spaces | European Commission | Directive (EU) 2020/2184, in force 12 January 2021, transposition due 12 January 2023 | [A] | 0.8 The obligation and the dates come from the Commission own page. The specific article number is commonly given as Article 16 in secondary sources and was not verified against the legal text, which was unreachable, so no article number is printed. |
| Right2Water was the first European Citizens Initiative to succeed, passing the threshold in 2013 with roughly 1.86 million certified signatures across seven member states; the Commission answered with a communication of seven commitments rather than a framework directive | Right2Water campaign, Commission response COM(2014) 177 | signatures closed September 2013, Commission response 19 March 2014 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.6 Flagged. The certified count of 1,857,605 and the campaign own current figure of 1,884,790 do not agree, and the Commission response could only be reached through a tertiary source. The fact that it succeeded and that the answer fell short of legislation is solid; the precise numbers are not, so a rounded figure is printed. |
| The Public Futures database tracks 1,787 cases of services being taken back into public hands across 77 countries, across all sectors rather than water alone | Transnational Institute | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.65 An advocacy organisation counting cases it selects. Printed only as an all sectors figure: a water specific count could not be established, because the water focused reports were rate limited and unreachable in this pass. |
| Akvo applies open source software, open content and open data to water, sanitation and hygiene monitoring systems, currently working with UNICEF and several national programmes | Akvo Foundation | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | Weakly supported: 0.65 Open data tooling for governing and monitoring water, not open hardware and not a design commons for water infrastructure. Listed because it is the clearest active example found, and flagged because it is not the thing one would hope to find. |
| The Austrian coordination point for energy communities, run by the Klima- und Energiefonds, provides a founding guide, a benefits calculator, an advisory line and training | Klima- und Energiefonds, Austria | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.85 |
| REScoop.eu is the European federation of citizen energy cooperatives, established in Belgium in 2013, describing a network of about 2,500 energy communities representing over two million citizens | REScoop.eu | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 The federation counting its own membership. Not independently audited. |
| Windkraft Simonsfeld is an Austrian citizen participation company with roughly 2,700 shareholders, operating 98 installations that generated 652.8 million kilowatt hours in 2025 | Windkraft Simonsfeld AG | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 Company self-description and self-reported generation figures. |
| OpenEMS is an open source energy management system governed by an association of about 70 members including manufacturers and research institutes, with contributors from more than 50 countries | OpenEMS Association e.V. | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.75 |
| OpenEnergyMonitor publishes open source hardware and software for monitoring electricity, solar generation, storage and heat pumps | OpenEnergyMonitor | accessed 4 September 2026 | [C] | 0.7 |
| The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation, publishes renewables deployment data and the World Energy Outlook | International Energy Agency | accessed 4 September 2026 | [A] | 0.85 |