It is essential that SoC participants feel a connection to the main ingredients that form the SoC learning environment, these are:

• Reciprocal exchange
• Experimentation
• Openness (towards one another, towards definitions of, and approaches towards learning and knowledge, towards the process of commoning)
• Conviviality
• Curiosity
• Process-centred approaches

SoC is open to all countries, backgrounds, ages, and disciplines, for applicants who are interested in the production and sharing of knowledge in the broadest sense, and who feel a desire to actively engage with, work as part of, and be in collaboration with a community of fellow thinkers and producers.

SoC has no set criteria in relation to formal or informal educational backgrounds. Previous participants have had a broad range of qualifications from non-academic to BA to PhD level, with backgrounds ranging from technical schools to art schools, to universities, as well as makers, activists, and those with lived experience and tacit knowledge. SoC has previously admitted artists, scientists, architects, geographers, designers, writers, and those who consider themselves between and outside of these categories. SoC does not select based on discipline but is instead focused on those interested in, or working with alternative methods for learning, with an emphasis on wider definitions of knowledge and experience, as well as the desire and commitment to learn with and from others, and to engage critically and thoughtfully with the wider SoC community.

The main learning agenda of SoC is to produce and share practices based around the methods of peer learning and commoning. In doing so, we aim to encourage spaces for exchange and alternative ways and workings. Overall, SoC endeavours to be a place that produces and reproduces alternative modes of thinking and doing across research, disciplines and focuses.