Christian Siefkes, 33, born in Southern Germany, lives in Berlin, Germany. Holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin; works as a freelance software engineer and author. Homepage: siefkes.net.
He is especially interested in studying and advancing the practices of commons-based peer production, a decentralized and participatory way of production which is giving us large online knowledge sources such as the Wikipedia as well as innumerable free software programs such as GNU/Linux and Firefox. He explores how peer production works and how its current limitations can be overcome, opening the way to a society where peer production will be the primary mode of production, freeing people from the need to "make money" or the necessity to follow orders. Siefkes has written a book about his findings: "From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World" (Berlin, 2007), German translation: "Beitragen statt tauschen" (Neu-Ulm, 2008). He is a co-founder of the Keimform-Blog, a bilingual blog discussing the potential of peer production and other seed forms of a future, post-capitalist society.
He hopes that the Reimagining Society Project will rekindle discussions about how a post-capitalist society might look like and how we can get there. His own contributions to the project will be aimed at deepening the interconnections between the theory and practice of commons-based peer production and other leftist, emancipatory approaches.