Connecting the visionaries pointing to the commons

The Commons Journal: A Network Strategy in Plain Sight

On validators, lonely visionaries, and the mycelial logic of a movement that needs to see itself

There’s a pattern I keep bumping into in the commons space.

Someone — let’s call her Marge — is doing something remarkable. She’s tracking the emergence of shared-resource governance across a watershed in the Pacific Northwest, or pooling investment into a cooperatively-owned building on Main Street, or documenting how a city is using wetlands as its water filtration system. And she’s writing about it. On Substack, mostly. Pointing to examples. “Look at this. And this. And this. Don’t you see it?”

Marge isn’t writing long essays. She’s aggregating. She’s a trend-spotter pointing to other people’s work and saying: “this is a pattern, not an anomaly.” The commons is real. It’s growing. You just have to learn to see it.

Here’s the problem: Marge is doing this largely alone.

She has a modest subscriber list. She’s not getting paid much. And the hardest part isn’t the writing — it’s the isolation. The feeling that what she’s documenting is obvious to her and invisible to almost everyone else.

I’ve been there. Most of the most important thinkers I know have been there. The loneliness of early market conviction is a tax that gets paid disproportionately by people doing the work that matters most.

The Commons Journal isn’t going to solve this by writing better articles about the commons.

That’s what I told Peter Block when he asked me to help design it. Peter is one of the most influential community-building thinkers alive — author of Community: The Structure of Belonging, mentor to practitioners across four decades, and the kind of person who, when he asks you to help figure something out, you take seriously.

His instinct was to create a journal of the commons. My instinct was to ask: “who’s already doing that, and what do they actually need?”

The answer pointed somewhere more interesting than content production.

Aggregate the aggregators.

There are already people on Substack pointing to the commons as a movement. They’re not writing manifestos — they’re curating evidence. “Here’s a commons in Vermont. Here’s one in Petaluma. Here’s the Walla Walla watershed teaching farmers to see deep water and surface water as the same shared resource.” They’re doing the slow, patient work of making a pattern visible. They are not just on substack, but that a place to start and a medium where internal communication between writers is built into how it works.

What they need is not competition. What they need is:

• Validation. Someone credible saying: “yes, what you’re doing matters.”

• Connection. A way to find the other people doing what they’re doing.

• A little money. Not a salary — a micro-grant. $250 to say: “we see you, and we think you’re right.”

The Commons Journal’s first job is to be a “first follower” — to borrow Derek Sivers’ language — to several of these lonely visionaries at once. Not to create a readership, but to augment the ones these aggregators are already building. That’s our hypothesis. We are going to test with our target audience, the aggregators already spotting the trend, and telling people look, it’s happening here and here and here. Seeing it multiple places helps you believe it’s real and big and growing, in the early days.

This is the minimum effective intervention. The lightest possible hand that generates the most downstream momentum. Thats what we think, anyway.

Here’s the network logic.

When we put a commoner’s Substack on our website — with a badge, a profile, a link — we do several things simultaneously:

• We validate them (externally, which matters far more than self-validation)

• We connect them to other commoners doing similar work (the isolation cracks)

• We improve their PageRank (inbound links still matter, even inside Substack)

• We create a digest of their best work (a Reader’s Digest of a growing trend)

• We pay them a small amount for doing what they’re already doing

And what do we get? We get momentum that is generated mostly by other people, with us serving as connective tissue — mycelium, if you like. In a forest ecosystem, the mycelium doesn’t compete with trees. It connects them. It unlocks the transfer of nutrients between organisms that couldn’t reach each other otherwise. It takes a small protein in exchange for making the whole system more alive.

And we will have an digest of aggregators that we create on substack, ourselves

That’s what a Commons Journal could be.

A note on what this is not.

It’s not solutions journalism. There are people doing that well — highlighting producers, telling individual stories of community problem-solving. That’s a noble and different project.

It’s not a magazine about common good in the broad civic sense. The commons has a specific meaning: shared and pooled resources, governed by the people who depend on them. Eleanor Ostrom spent a career proving that the commons doesn’t have to be a tragedy if it’s managed with intention and trust. That’s the territory.

It’s not trying to grow by accumulating its own audience from scratch. That’s backwards. Our readership grows when our commoners’ readership grows. We’re in service to them.

The hypothesis we’re testing.

Is there a sufficient ecosystem of commons-focused aggregators — people who are trend-spotting, not writing their own content — who would value validation, connection, and modest payment enough to participate actively?

I believe yes. But I’m treating it as a hypothesis, not a certainty. The first step is interviews — talking to the folks we’d serve and asking: “Would this be useful to you? Would finding the other people doing what you’re doing, and being paid to connect, matter?”

If the answer is yes from enough of them, the network builds itself.

If the answer is no — well, then we’ve learned something important before spending Peter’s money.

Why this model, why now.

The commons is not a niche. It’s the emerging governance logic for everything the market can’t or won’t manage: water, air, local investment ecosystems, indigenous land stewardship, community real estate. The tragedy of the commons only happens when there’s no governance. With governance — with the eight protocols Ostrom identified, with the trust-building that Peter Block has spent decades cultivating — the commons thrives.

We’re at a moment when a lot of people are separately noticing this. They’re writing about it, aggregating evidence for it, trying to make it legible. They’re doing this without knowing about each other.

The Commons Journal is the thing that helps them see each other.

That’s a small thing. It might be the most useful thing.

The Commons Journal is a project convened by Peter Block, with contributions from practitioners in the commons, community development, and solutions media spaces. If you’re writing about the commons — and especially if you’re aggregating evidence that it’s a growing movement — we want to hear from you.