About

Customer Commons’ mission is to restore the balance of power, respect and trust between individuals and organizations that serve them, and does not take contributions from commercial entities.

Customer Commons is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, formed as a spin-off of ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and sharing ProjectVRM’s respect for the customer as an independent actor in the marketplace. We also shares the same founding thesis, which we aim to prove: that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the whole economy.

As a public-facing organization focused on emerging issues at the intersection of empowered individuals and the public good, Customer Commons seeks to educate and inspire change, at both local and worldwide scales.

We do this through research, activism and deployment of new technologies, all angled toward fostering development of tools and services that build community, and make good the title of Doc Searls‘ book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), and its predecessor, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Basic Books, 2000), which Doc co-wrote with Christopher Locke, Rick Levine and David Weinberger. (Doc started and still runs ProjectVRM, and is a co-founder and board member of Customer Commons.)

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