The Straw Commons

The seeds of this piece were planted a few months ago when Ace, one of my co-founders at Seed Collaborative, forwarded me an essay from Growing the Commons. We have been circling the same territory while we build out the framework for a keynote that we are giving together in October at Building Energy NYC. This is an attempt to think out loud about one thread of that talk: what happens to a commons once it becomes a product.

There is a version of this piece that ends with an answer. The Seed Collaborative decides as a group, definitively, how open is open enough, publishes a guideline, and moves on with our product development. That version would be easier to write, but not entirely honest, because the question of what we owe back to the commons we came from is still very much an open conversation.

Straw construction is not new, and it is not ours in any sense. Homesteaders in Nebraska were stacking bales into load bearing walls in the 1880s because the sandhills gave them straw and little else to work with. The technique spread the way vernacular knowledge spreads: farm to farm, workshop to workshop, refined by people who never filed patents or had any expectation of intellectual property rights. Over a century of natural builders, agricultural researchers, and stubborn owner builders did the unglamorous work of figuring out what works, moisture management, wall assemblies, load paths, and shared that leaned experience and knowledge because that was the culture the practice grew up in. Chris Magwood and his colleagues at the Endeavour Centre laid the groundwork for straw insulated structural panels in the early 2010s, and instead of enclosing that knowledge, they published it. Chris shared freely with any who asked, including myself, New Frameworks, and Croft. We did not invent straw as a building material, we inherited it the way you inherit a family recipe or a well maintained tool.

What we are trying to do is turn part of that inheritance into a stable business that provides meaningful work and shelter, without becoming the type of owner that this inheritance of knowledge was never meant to have.

A commons is not the opposite of owning something

It is worth naming what kind of tension this actually is, because it gets flattened too easily into "idealism versus survival," and that framing does not describe what is happening in this cooperative. The commons tradition has never been anti property in some absolute sense. Its oldest and most practical strand, the one closest to what a small worker owned business actually is, holds that owning a thing you live in or work with is fine. What it objects to is owning a thing in order to extract value from someone else's labor on it: the landlord relationship, the boss relationship, rent for the purpose of “passive income.” A commons, in this reading, is not the absence of ownership. It is ownership arranged so that the people doing the work and the people governing the work are the same people, and so that no one gets to sit above that arrangement collecting a toll.

That is closer to what we are actually building than any version of "everything should be free." Seed Panels are a manufactured, engineered, code compliant version of an idea that used to live in barns and backyards. Prefabricated structural insulated panels with a straw core, built to tolerances a commercial builder or an architect specifying for a high level project would accept without question. That engineering work, the prototyping, the testing, the assembly details, the manufacturing process that makes straw behave like a construction material instead of a craft material, is expensive to develop and slow to get right. Someone has to pay for the research and development. Someone has to be able to retain the use of that research, or the company that funded years of prototyping has no way to survive contact with a market that will happily coopt and undercut the people who did the development work.

So we have a commons at the root, a product as the flower, and a cooperative trying to stand as the stem between those two things without either being clipped.

Deprogramming as we go

None of us walked into this thinking that money, ownership, and value were already sorted out. We were raised, like everyone, inside a set of assumptions about what a business is for, what intellectual property is owed to whoever paid for it, and what counts as a reasonable return. Working those assumptions loose is slow, and it is not something any of us can do alone, because those assumptions form the foundation of our capitalist economy. You do not notice how much of your thinking about "ours" versus "everyone's" was installed rather than chosen until you sit across from someone equally committed to the same project who has landed somewhere slightly different than you have.

So when the question of information sharing comes up, and it comes up often, it does not resolve into a fight with a winner. It is closer to a group of people who trust each other's motives completely, taking turns pushing on where the boundary of comfort actually sits, and noticing that the boundary keeps moving the more we talk about it. One person will point out that the data and the lessons from every install belong to the discipline we learned from, not to us, and that sitting on it to protect a competitive edge would betray the very inheritance this essay opened with. Someone else will point out, and they are not wrong either, that the specialized equipment we build to make that process faster, less punishing on a crew's body, and more cost effective is where the actual business lives, and that opening all of it in a market with real capital behind “conventional” building materials would not create a thriving commons so much as hand our R&D to whoever is best funded to exploit it. Both positions are trying to protect the same outcome: that this technique stays available to people who need healthy, carbon sequestering construction, rather than becoming a boutique product for people who can afford the bragging rights. Where we have landed for now: the basic process stays open source, and the equipment we develop to make it easier stays ours. Exactly where that line runs, tool by tool, is still a conversation worth having again, month after month, not one to be settled once and filed away.

Building it inside capitalism, not around it

Seed Collaborative is a for profit cooperative, as are all of the member companies, which is its own small & useful contradiction. We are not trying to build a parallel economy from scratch, immune from markets, mortgages, and payroll. We need customers who can put down a deposit, a bank that will underwrite a manufacturing line, and margins that survive a bad quarter. But there is a longer tradition, older than any of us, of cooperatives built precisely in the cracks of the dominant economy rather than in opposition to it: worker owned firms that cap their own pay differentials, that make their shares impossible to sell to an outside buyer, that treat customers, workers, and investors as members with a real say rather than as inputs and outputs. None of them abolished capitalism. They just refused, in their one corner of it, to let ownership mean what it usually means. This is how emergent systems grow in the midst of a dominant system.

The basic process is open source. We give shop tours and teach it freely. The specialized equipment we have developed to make that process easier, less laborious, and more cost effective belongs to the Collaborative, because building it was expensive and because it is, honestly, part of what makes this a viable business rather than a workshop. Beyond that equipment, the value of the collaborative is in relationships and in the testing and validation work that no single member could do alone.

We do not know yet if that is the right balance. We know it beats not thinking about it, and we know the alternative, treating "intellectual property" as a settled, neutral category instead of a choice we keep making, is how every open thing eventually closes without anyone deciding it should. Keeping the straw commons open, if we manage it, will not look like a manifesto. It will look like decisions made carefully, revisited honestly, talked through by people who trust each other enough to disagree slowly, for years.

Ace and I will be laying out a fuller version of this argument, cooperative ownership as a working blueprint for climate-healing construction, live in October at Building Energy NYC. This post is the rough draft of one piece of it.