### People A functioning commons furnishes subsistence and wellbeing for its members. All participants have the same rights to **enjoy** the commons - it’s fair. Indigenous commons are essential for survival. In industrial societies, ‘commoned’ global designs can mean cheap - and feasible, and lower-carbon - local production.
# Community / society The **stewarding** of commons requires people to interact, negotiate etc. - it builds community. Democracy, anti-authoritarianism, mutual regard and mutual aid are the norm. Common infrastructures can mean not everything has to be done by person-to-person communication or individual work. Common protocols can even mean that software can be allowed to control some things, and to present everyone with equivalent tools and access.
Common superstructures - of values, language, aesthetics - can mean much activity becomes unselfconscious, a kind of dance. **Curating** (producing and identifying good, proper stuff to contribute to a commons) is a powerful humane and collective vision.
# Nature Nature is largely treated as an unregulated pool to be exploited by individuals motivated by self-interest. Companies and countries compete for natural resources and ways to dump waste and ‘side effects’. The actual material world is complex and interconnected, needing to be **stewarded** in commons, **enjoyed** under common obligations and **curated** under common modes of evaluation, rather than extracted by individualist persons, corporations and nations.
Newer matter-manipulating **technologies** such as nuclear, nanotech or gene tech go beyond the scope of everyday unaided vision - just like biosphere damage has done - and potentially can deeply disrupt ‘ordinary life’. Discovering how to develop these under commons regulation is a profound challenge; the state and the market have spectacularly failed to recognise and prevent ecological damage.
However, commoning is a way of doing things that doesn’t have ‘externalities’ - by definition commons affect the life of **everyone**, and with so many kinds of stuff being brought into commons, they affect every **aspect** of life too.
Commoning is intrinsically a way to bring human need and ecosystem stability into an aware mutual relationship: living, working and dancing gracefully within Kate Raworth’s ‘doughnut’.