Our Origin

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

Our Vision

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.

Our Mission

To restore the balance of power, respect, and trust between individuals and the organizations that serve them, and to not take contributions from commercial entities.

Our Initiatives

Our initiatives focus on 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.) Today, we are focused on making MyTerms a reality in the world. Join Us.

MyTerms™

Our primary focus today is MyTerms. As Doc Searls said, "MyTerms is the most important digital innovation since the WWW". Customer Commons believes it's the only way to get real privacy online. We hope you'll join us.

Customer Commons coined 'MyTerms' for the "IEEE 7012-2025 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms" (just as WiFi is for IEEE 802.11) with the goal for MyTerms to be ubiquitous in the digital world.

We conceived the MyTerms Alliance to instantiate the standard into something that benefits us all. Together with MyData Global and The IEEE we are working to make it a reality. MyTerms is a registered trademark of Customer Commons. Contact us with questions.

The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)

Join us for the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), held every Spring and Fall at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Customer Commons board members were among the original founders of this unique unconference, and continue to attend and lead sessions. IIW has been finding, probing and solving identity issues twice every year since 2005, and is one of the world's most leveraged events. Each one is also preceded by VRM Day, which is held by ProjectVRM and Customer Commons. The next IIW will be on 3-5 November, 2026, and the next VRM Day will be on 2 November 2026.