Andrea Germanos: Tackling ‘Urgency and Scale” of Crisis, Oakland, Calif. Declares Climate Emergency. City council passed resolution Tuesday endorsing declaration of a climate emergency and calling for just transition.

The Oakland Climate Action Coalition claimed victory Tuesday night after the California city passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and committing it to urgent action to tackle the crisis.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. In this time we must go both fast and far, together,” said Colin Cook-Miller, coordinator for the coalition. “Our movement for a rapid Just Transition mobilization must be coordinated, strategic, and unified, with leadership from the most-impacted frontline communities who are at the forefront of change.”

The “Declaration of a Climate Emergency and Requesting Regional Collaboration on an Immediate Just Transition and Emergency Mobilization Effort to Restore a Safe Climate” resolution commits the city to:  an “urgent climate mobilization” to slash emissions, moving towards zero net emissions; building resilience strategies for the coming climate impacts; a just transition, making vulnerable communities central to such a shift; and calling on other states, the federal government, and other nations to make a similar mobilization towards climate action and a just transition.

In a letter to city council members on Tuesday, local organizational leaders including Miller, as well as Greg Jackson of Sustainable Economies Law Center, Miya Yoshitani of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Bonnie Borucki of Transition Berkeley, and Kemba Shakur of Urban Releaf, noted that climate emergency resolutions have already been in the California cities of Richmond and Berkeley passed and wrote that the measure before the Oakland city council  “matches the urgency and scale of the ecological, economic and climate crisis that we face.”

“At this time in history,” they wrote, “a livable future for any of our children is far from guaranteed. We must do everything in our power today to create a safe, just, and healthy world for ourselves, for our children, and for future generations.”

Photo: Takver/flickr/cc

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Who we’ve been, who we are becoming

If you’re not familiar with Guerrilla Translation (GT), here is what you should know. Founded in Madrid in 2013 and inspired by the 15M and Occupy movements, GT is a P2P and commons-oriented translation collective. It was conceived as a new kind of livelihood vehicle for activist translators that combines two compatible functions: a voluntary translation collective working for activist causes (eg. social, environmental, etc.) and an agency providing translation and general communication services on a paid contract basis. The proceeds from this paid commissioned work go, in part,  toward financing the social mission by retroactively paying translators for their voluntary (aka ‘pro-bono’) work. Sounds simple, right? But, as we soon found out, when trying to do something from scratch that’s radically new and commons-oriented, the devil is in the details.

The first thing we realized back in 2014 was that we needed a better system to organize the paid and pro-bono work.  We decided to adapt an abandoned open-source governance model and orient it towards our ideology and needs (the original had a strongly traditional “startup” flavor). We discussed it for more than a year but, due to lack of engagement, we never arrived at a final version. Meanwhile, GT was thriving: we were well regarded in our community, our translations were reaching more people than ever and we had an increasing stream of work offers. At the same time there was an imbalance between readily recognized productive labour, and all the invisible, reproductive work required to keep the project healthy.

Frustrated with this imbalance, some of us decided to take an extended sabbatical from the project. An exception to this pause was our very successful crowdfund campaign to translate and publish David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner, a Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. The campaign was important in several aspects, including the use of the Peer Production License and an innovative, distributed publishing model dubbed “Think Global, Print Local”. The lead-up to the campaign saw renewed activity on the pro-bono side, and the crowdfund succeeded in its objectives, leading to a book launch in the fall of 2016.

But after the crowdfund, GT still suffered from the same mixed condition: solid social capital, continued offers of paid work, but no clear governance structures to ensure a fair distribution of work and rewards whilst maintaining its social mission.

By 2017, the remaining team had achieved a very high level of interpersonal trust. It seemed like the right time to clarify our goals and values, revisit the unfinished governance model, and review nearly 5 years of lessons learned. To “reload” GT in an organised and sustainable way, we clearly needed an in-person meeting. We began to shape our ideal meeting, determining our goals and target invitees. Next, we got in touch with friendly experts in fields including tech, decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, and governance, inviting them to help us develop the governance model and a long-term survival strategy for GT.

For the financial support we needed to host the meeting, we turned to Fundaction, a Europe-wide participatory grantmaking platform focused on social transformation. Fundaction offers several types of grants, among them Rethink, directed at exchange — and capacity building — activities and networking. We applied for the Renew grant in November of 2017. In late December 2017, the first round of voting for Rethink proposals was closed, and in January 2018, there was an official announcement of the Rethink grant awardees, with Guerrilla Translation as one of the 8 winning applications. We felt humble and grateful to have received this support and validation (highest number of votes received!), and remain thankful to Fundaction.

Rethinking among mountains and rivers

Hervás is a small mountain village in Extremadura, western Spain, where Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso (Guerrilla Translation’s cofounders) reside. Declared as an anarchist canton in the 1st Spanish Revolution and surrounded by beautiful nature, it seemed like the perfect (and cheapest!) place to host an fruitful encounter among the Guerrilla Translators and friends.

Prior to the encounter, we drafted a first version ⁰ of  “The Open Cooperative Cooperative Governance model”, inspired by the original, but tailored to fit the ideals of Open Cooperativism — a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the rich social tradition of the Cooperative movement. We wanted to provide a “graspable object for the workshop participants to engage with, critique and develop.

We created a project budget and an ideal guest list, and after many conversations and calendar reviews, we invited seven people external to the collective, including:

• Sarah de Heusch (SMart)
• Emaline Friedman (Holo)
• Bronagh Gallagher (Connecting Scotland)
• Richard Bartlett (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum)
• Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum)
• Virginia Díez (Wikimedia Spain)
• Carmen Lozano Bright (Nodocomun, ex-GT)

These invited mentors were selected not only for their professional affiliation and relevant knowledge, but also for some of their personal qualities. We imagined how these people could interact as a group, and also serve as allies to the collective ongoing. The final composition of the workshop had a female-male ratio of 10 to 3, which reflects Guerrilla Translation’s own gender ratio.

Five of the six currently active members (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel) represented GT in the meeting. Finally, Lucas Tello from Zemos98 was hired for workshop methodology and facilitation.

Clockwise from the top left: Carmen Lozano Bright, Stacco Troncoso, Natalia Lombardo, Bronagh Gallagher, Lucas Tello, Susa Oñate, Virginia Díez, Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Richard D. Bartlett, Ann Marie Utratel, Lara San Mamés, Sarah De Heusch, Emaline Friedman.

A most convivial workshop

From May 22nd to 24th, 2018, we worked together on Guerrilla Translation’s goals, values and future directions, while also building connections, mutual support and a convivial atmosphere.

Zemos 98 designed a methodology, in collaboration with GT, supporting inclusive collaborative processes, trusting peer to peer knowledge and accepting diversity as an intellectual basis for collective work.

On day one, participants split into two groups and began to define GT’s values and goals. Values included peer to peer learning, clarity, diversity, resilience connected to systemic self-reflection, fairness, adaptability, commoning, equity, intimacy, high quality crafted work, and being prefigurative while aspiring to political transformation through relationships within and beyond the collective.

Some fun portmanteaus and ideas emerged out of this exercise, including “Trustparency” (blend of trust and transparency) and “Simplexity” (acknowledging the need for a balance of complexity and simplicity). Another idea which struck a chord with everyone was the idea of “Punk Elegance”. It reflects that GT comes from a non-conformist, DIY/DIWO culture but still seeks high quality, aesthetic style and communicational mastery.

“My main reflection from the event is that we went to work on one collective but in the process, it felt like we were all working on all of our collectives all at once. ” – Richard D. Bartlett

Turning to the Goals, the teams saw GT as a space to concentrate on mentorship and peer to peer learning. Obviously this applies to mentorship in creating high quality, handcrafted translations and other communication strategies, but also to fostering collaborative culture. As a project, GT demonstrates that an alternative, post-capitalist economy is possible and can thrive on several levels. A first step is to offer translators (and other media workers) a way to do paid work apart from capitalist structures, and simultaneously create a translingual knowledge commons. GT also has the potential to encourage personal transformation towards commons-oriented futures based on concrete, daily practices (not theoretical frameworks), especially with its focus on the recognition of carework and power. As such, it could be an exemplary project for Open Cooperativism, and a transnationally oriented, multi-constituent space to do socially and ecologically valuable work while also creating commons.

How could we achieve these ambitious goals and hold true to the values? Over the following two and a half days, each group developed distinct prototypes and timelines for GT’s near- and mid-term future. This would help us plan a functioning model and lived practice.

On the third day, the teams presented a summary of their discussions, and their timelines for possible futures. Each team treated the same targets (community, governance, platform and financial), and presented cohesive yet contrasting visions of suggested near-term GT actions. The differences in each team’s results indicate a fundamental balance in all commons: the dialectic between culture (that which defines the group’s shared motivations and visions for the future) and structure (that which formalizes the group culture into recognizable legal/procedural forms). Culture and structure are codependent in a commons: you can’t have one without the other, and their artful balance can create resilient, self-organized communities.

You can read our in-depth workshop report for details of each team’s prototype, but here are some of the main takeaways:

During their presentation, Group 2 (comprised of Richard D. Bartlett, Virginia Díez, Carmen Lozano Bright, Lara San Mamés, Sarah de Heusch and Ann Marie Utratel) focused on group culture, human relationships and trust. The group suggested many strategies based around designing for commitment and valuing reproductive work as equal to productive work. The group argued that a resilient, matured culture needs to be in place to design structures to augment existing, practised values, instead of enforcing them technically.

In discussing business structures and priorities, Group 2 emphasized structural flexibility according to the collective’s needs. Concurrency was introduced, a computational principle describing work that happens not only in parallel (people doing different things), but also in different order (not a chain of dependencies). This concept would prove essential in combining both models. ¹

While Group 2 focused on culture, Group 1 (comprised of Emaline Friedman, Bronagh Gallagher, Natalia Lombardo, Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate and Stacco Troncoso) co-designed a possible structure to make GT’s community culture thrive.

The group imagined a free software digital platform to handle all accounting and transactional aspects and to clarify the governance agreements forged at the cultural layer. Similar to how a Community Land Trust perpetuates specific social values in a shared ownership structure, the platform represents the collective’s consent to a set of voluntary self-organised rules, while being responsible for overseeing and carrying them out. It transcends the role of a digital “bad cop” often seen in DAOs by functioning as an on-chain core to facilitate continual care-oriented discussions about the collective’s off-chain values. Using easily visualized value streams, Guerrilla Translators would be able to discuss and reprogram the platform to ensure that everyone is heard, and maintain fairness within the collective.

The group also envisioned GT as an educational opportunity for those interested in translation, open cooperativism and non hierarchical organising in digital spaces. The group also worked on the recognition of reproductive work and onboarding strategies for new members. ²

Each group identified qualities already present in the collective: multi-skilled team, peer recognition, established network, good reputation, offers of work, investment potential, attractive branding and an innovative economic/governance model. Historically, the collective has also had a high proportion of female members (75-85%), and has been committed to keeping real-life needs and realities in focus, creating better conditions for digital work.

The needs included a new legal structure and invoicing/payment systems compatible with the model; seed funding for two years to develop both the cultural (community/governance) and structural (platform and legal/financial) aspects of the collective (and open source them to a wider community); the need to incorporate and train new, committed members (to a total between 10 and 15); and adapting the structure to support new spin off collectives of illustrators, coders, designers, etc. Everyone agreed that the GT core team needed a follow up meeting to process the outputs of this workshop and make decisions.

“What a great personal and professional experience GT was. It really made it tangible how strong, efficient, and fun it is to collaborate with people who are professional in what they do, and have different points of view and experiences. That makes collective intelligence really work. It also made clear for me what a woman’s way of dealing with things is; that is, letting emotions and personal aspects come into consideration, in listening and not being an “authority” kind of organization. It was great.” – Sarah de Heusch

The two groups then presented their proposed timelines, and offered mutual feedback. These details aren’t described here ³, but (spoiler alert!) we will recount how the proposed timelines would eventually be merged during the follow-up meeting.

On the final day we met to hold a closing circle. Two questions were asked:

1. What are you taking home from this encounter?
2. Would you like to engage with GT ongoing (and how)?

Everyone expressed gratitude about the workshop and towards the production team, especially Lucas Tello, whose unobtrusive yet deeply effective moderation created a solid support and also allowed for plenty of space for a convivial atmosphere. Everyone felt that they had learned a lot — not just about GT or the project, but about themselves and their own groups and collectives. Some people expressed that it was the best workshop event they had ever attended. Everyone was enthusiastic about the social occasions, the sharing of food, being out and about in Hervás, as a part of the bonding and motivating experience.

Vulnerability, transparency and the willingness to explore apparent contradictions and tensions were qualities also appreciated by the group, as well as the cultivation of intimacy as a precondition for creating alternatives to more typically hierarchical or patriarchal relations. Finally, the female to male ratio was also highlighted as a unique feature of the gathering, with the three men present expressing deep gratitude for being in such a space — something they don’t often find available.

The participants agreed to help GT become a flagship project for Open Cooperativism, and the members of GT committed to a follow up meeting to treat the results of the workshop “while the iron was hot”. (This meeting would take place in Hervás in late June, exactly one month after the initial workshop).

Cultivating Culture, Building Structure

The Guerrilla Translation Reloaded workshop was acknowledged by all attendees as a success. GT members and invitees created a spectrum of possibilities, colourful yet tempered by reality and experience. But how could GT make a coherent framework of the suggestions?

To answer this, Guerrilla Translation’s core team (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel), met once more in Hervás for a three-day follow-up meeting.

After a review of the prototypes, the team decided to hold a series of thematic conversations to reach agreements in key areas. These included how to bring in new members; our community; communication rhythms and tools; our availability and chosen areas of work; how to track and value carework; ways of mentoring and mutually supporting each other; and how to publicly relaunch the project during September 2018.

The core team also agreed to adopt and develop the patterns described in Richard Bartlett’s Patterns for Decentralised Organising. Richard passionately defended the need for more intimacy and group culture during the workshop, and the patterns provide an excellent starting point ⁴. They are:

• Intentionally Produce (Counter) Culture
• Systematically Distribute Care Labour
• Make Explicit Norms and Boundaries
• Keep Talking About Power
• Navigating the Communication Landscape
• Introduce New Tools With Care
• Make Decisions Asynchronously
• A Toolbox For Decision-Making
• Use Rhythms to Address Information Overload
• Generate New Patterns Together
• Get Unstuck With An External Peer

Concurrency: A Shared Timeline

Having reached an agreement in most issues, the core group proceeded to create a timeline reflecting the best elements of each prototype. This was no easy task but an overall narrative framework was proposed to help us make sense of what was on the table.

“Concurrency”, seen above, was one of the main features of this framework. As a reminder, this was a concept brought up by Richard Bartlett describing “a computational term that’s a useful management principle: not just that your work can happen in parallel (people doing different things), but in different order (not a chain of dependencies).”

The team was eager to work through the apparent contradictions and form resilient systems, so the timeline was divided into two main sections:

• STAGE ONE: Minimum Viable Model (assumed to end between 6 and 12 months)
• STAGE TWO: Lucas 9000 (assumed to begin between 6 and 18 months)

The flexibility in how these relative stages begin and end is due to the unpredictable nature of concurrent events. Stage One has many of the Culture fostering ideas expressed by Group 2. Most of the Structural ideas proposed by Group 1 start concurrently in this first Stage but more slowly, maturing further in Stage 2. Each stage has its characteristic features:

Stage One

Stage One is characterized by the use of a Minimum Viable (MVM) Economic/ Governance model. This is based on immediate implementation (if not full execution) of the Open Coop Governance Model, including changes agreed on post-meeting. Stage One would prioritize three lines of work:

• Research and implementation of MVM legal structure: Including options such as: an association in Spain, the “group hub” equivalent of SMart, Open Collective, or an Estonian e-company, as possible ways for the collective to invoice and receive funding.
• Community Building: Applies to the existing community (and its tools and processes), and additional community members via a handbook, selected outreach, etc. This includes prospective work circles.
• Project Funding: Seeds funds are required to support the first two main goals and other specifics for GT to mature into Commons-oriented Open Coop. This targeted work involves detailed project proposals, budgeting and alliances.

During Stage One, the team would use their existing communication and workflow tools as a sandbox for Stage Two.

Stage Two

Stage Two is characterized by the implementation of Lucas 9000, the “One Stop Shop”, all-in-one tool for Guerrilla Translation’s needs.

Conceived as being built “with, and on” Holo, following Emaline Friedman’s suggestions in Group 1, Stage Two sees GT as a DCO or “Distributed, Cooperative Organization”, a spin/critique of Ethereum-based “Decentralized, Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). The latter are code-based entities capable of executing payments, levying penalties, and enforcing terms and contracts without human interaction. Lucas 9000 will be agent-centric, serving the ideas and core values of the human Guerrilla Translators.

With Lucas 9000 implemented as an Open Cooperative DCO, Guerrilla Translation will use this Holo-based platform to process financial transactions (external invoicing, pro-bono work, hours-based carework metrics). The legal structure would be built around this distributed cooperative framework, based on Holo’s emergent network and with HoloFuel (Holo’s recently created non volatile and asset backed cryptocurrency) as a medium of exchange. Lucas 9000 would also provide clear, visual, information about the health of the collective, facilitating community conversations, and a suite of open source tools (dApps) to manage workflow and collaborations.

All community work during Stage One is further developed in Stage Two, where the collective foresees a multi-lingual, globally distributed team working through the platform, informing its community-centered development as well as fluid working circles attending to the collective’s needs.

“The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values. And I can’t leave out something about prototyping alongside sheeps playfully chasing each other and goats bleating…” – Emaline Friedman

The Lucas Plan: A Synthesized Timeline

The synthesized timeline was named “The Lucas Plan” ⁵. The team scheduled all agreed tasks from each timeline over a two year period, following the general framework described above.

The synthesized timeline can also be consulted ongoing as a spreadsheet here.

What now for Guerrilla Translation?

At the time of writing (late August 2018), the Guerrilla Translation gang is feeling energized and inspired to carry out our tasks.

• As a Community, we are mapping our capacities, setting our community rhythms, reclaiming GT’s social capital, stating our commitments, and mentoring and supporting each other. We are drafting a first version of the Guerrilla Translation handbook and contacting specific translators.
• In Governance, we are researching legal structures in Stage 1 of the timeline. We are also updating the governance model with all the knowledge and decisions made after GT Reloaded. We are also beginning to gradually implement it.
• Financial tasks include creating both project budgets according to our timeline and detailed funding proposals, and sharing these with prospective partners. We are also exploring new income streams.
• In Tech, we are clarifying and training in our workflow/ communication tools, updating the websites, and collaborating closely with Holo for future implementation of Lucas 9000.

If you want to know more, the full workshop report detailing our conversations and decisions is accessible. If you’re interested in collaborating with us as an individual or organization, we recommend you read the full report.

Left to Right: Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Lara San Mamés, Georgina Reparado (in spirit), Ann Marie Utratel, Susa Oñate, Stacco Troncoso

We are excited and ready for this journey. Guerrilla Translation has gone through many iterations, changes, disappointments and successes since its founding in 2013. We are all older, wiser, and hopefully also humbler and kinder. As we write these words, Guerrilla Translation feels reloaded and ready to dance. Please join us!

This post was written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel based on the collectively written Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Report. All images (except the “Rethink” screenshot) are by the Guerrilla Translation team and licensed under a Peer Production, P2P Attribution-ConditionalNonCommercial-ShareAlikeLicense. The Fundaction “Rethink” image was created by Sylvain Mazas and licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Footnotes

<sup>0. [The updated version of the Open Coop Governance Model (V 2.0) has been drafted. It is a dramatic overhaul from version 1.0 and can be read here. Complimentary, the version history is listed here]
1. [For a full account of Group 2’s findings, read the relevant section of the Guerrilla Translation Full Report in our wiki.]
2. [As with Group 2, a full account of Group 1’s presentations can be found here.]
3. [Once again, for full details on each group’s procedures and proposals, read our full workshop report.]
4. [If you’re interested in Richard D. Barttlet’s and Natalia Lombardo’s excellent work on decentralized, non-hierarchical organizing check out their website: The Hum. We highly recommend their workshops.]
5. [This is also a reference to the inspiring British design/technological sovereignty movement in the late seventies]</sup>

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A series of Collaboration Incubator workshops are being put out into the world to gather like-minded people to combine forces for building global grassroots democracy. I am Philine Krosse, a ‘transformation architect’ from the Netherlands, who was following links one morning and stumbled upon the website of Vanilla Way.

Without a second thought, I enrolled for the Berlin workshop from 5 to 7 October 2018.

I felt I needed something of a different order to grow further’

Yet after enrolling, I thought, why would I want to contribute to this movement? Why did I feel so strongly that this movement was something through that I could develop myself further. Also, I have never considered helping building a global democracy? For many years, I had been pondering, searching and diving into the deep of the big questions. I learned a lot from different people, literature and by designing and developing initiatives for communal healing and transformation to make collective sustainable development possible. Since a while, I felt I needed something of a different order to grow further and improve my work.

I had an inspiring talk with Manuela Bosch, one of the initiators of the Collaboration Incubator  about the intentions and drive that lead to this program. She explained to me, that this program isn’t about building a global institution. It is about finding creative and innovative ways to address local issues that impact us all globally – issues that cross borders and therefore can’t be resolved solely by one institution, one country or the existing global institutional governing bodies.

What if everything we ever tried were only prototypes of democracy? What if we don’t actually know how real democracy could look like? This thinking by Otto Scharmer (Theory U) inspired the tagline of the Collaboration Incubator: “Momentum building for global democracy”.  Within the Incubators, different existing local initiatives and movements are called to work on a vision and potentially also projects for a democratic society across boarders. Boarders not only in a geographical sense, but also in sense of sector, culture, class and any paradigm.

the required solutions are already existing, but there is a lack of cohesive effort

Participants of the Incubator in Berlin in May 2018 are putting their names up on the collaborative projects they want to support.

Facilitated through social technologies like Dragon Dreaming, Evolutionary Work and Social Presencing Theater, we are learning to maximize the knowledge, tools and resources that are available, to connect with others and organize change.  This is particularly powerful when combined with the increasing awareness of the importance of a more conscious lifestyle whether on an individual, community or organizational scale.  Our assumption is, that the required solutions are already existing, but there is a lack of cohesive effort that can only come from stepping out of our comfort zones for interdisciplinary organizing. This is what the people from the Vanilla Way network believe they can help to facilitate: connecting people with shared intentions and addressing issues that can’t be coordinated from top down with tools made for collaborative grassroots organizing.

we can only be as global as the reach of the network is

Enlarging the pool of diversity among the participants is one of the highest goals and greatest challenges.  Diversity comes for example by bringing people together from different socio-economic-religious-political backgrounds, but also from the wealth of experience an individual brings from their work and field of interest. The diversity topic is challenging, since first: we can only be as global as the reach of the network is; secondly: Diversity is dependent on our financial resources, too – this is why we i.e look for patrons for one-on-one scholarships and other ways of independent funding; and thirdly: Levering diversity depends more than ever on our own leadership capacity to deal with race, gender and inclusivity topics.

Through her work as trainer for the collaborative project design framework Dragon Dreaming, Manuela experienced that workshop participants are connecting fast and deep, but after meeting in a workshop focused on skill learning, it’s difficult to keep collaborating, even though good intentions are there. “There needs to be a reason for people to keep reconnecting. The activists and leaders I am speaking to, seem to have no more time to waste in workshops. At the same time people do want to network, connect on a deeper level and learn. Why not use the combined intelligence of a diverse group of people coming together interested in the collective change processes that are necessary? When we make time to travel and meet over three days, let’s work on the pressing question of what we can do for global issues! Could it be possible to work on a collective dream and also not let it’s realization be left to chance, but intentionally work on it? There is no guarantee to come to conclusion on this over the three days, but it’s worth to try!”

find good ways to use the resources we have wisely, plus all of our creativity

There seems to be an opening now, a commitment to come together and collaborate better. This program is contributing to what is already happening on so many levels and places. And, there is still so much work to do. Many active in organizing societal change feel there is no time to rest! Therefore another main goal of the incubator is about inspiring for self-care, so that we don’t burn out on the way. It is so important to find good ways to use the resources we have wisely, plus all of our creativity, to make sure that our power and energy endures all the way. The way of activism this Incubator supports is meant to be straight forward and honest, yet unexpected and joyful.

In the recent Collaboration Incubator in May 2018 in Berlin the participants learned through a Social Presencing Theater 4D Mapping Report to May 2018 Incubator experiment about the importance of borders. We learned, they are not only separating us. They really help us to collaborate better across our fields and different stakeholders. If we look at borders that exist in the natural world, for example the zone between the river and the forest, this is where the most biodiversity can be found. In permaculture this zone is called ecotone. Also personal relationships provide a classic example. Maybe others experience this, too: When we put too much attention onto another person, trying identifying with them and their actions, we are faster questioning whether we agree with them or not. The possibility of conflict can become greatly increased.

connect with many people, interdisciplinary and diverse, with less resources or effort!

When we focus on the third identity, though, the in-between or intersections that exists between A and B, our collaboration can be more effective, lighter and even deeply strengthen both individuals or fields. We don’t have to agree on everything, yet accept each other as the mutual partners and siblings in a global family, that we are. Each with our own skills, strength and knowledge to work on collective solutions. This way it might become possible to connect with many people, interdisciplinary and divers, with less resources or effort. It is the art of connecting through the heart in seeing and acknowledging each other and at the same time staying focused around our own work, own needs and shared vision.

Beyond envisioning and planning, practicing collaboration by creating a shared piece of tape-art in the Incubator in May 2018 in Berlin.

The program can be called a success, when every participant has been able to take away at least one key learning or key link to a resource crucial for their current work or life. The contribution to global distributed democracy can be a side-effect and will keep building its momentum through continuous commitment of many over time. “If we are going to support the creation of a giant collaborative field, will depend pretty much on the participants and outcomes of the Incubators and especially what will happen between the ongoing workshops. If the Collaboration Incubator is helping unleash the connections between the existing movements, so that they can better recognize their own qualities and give each other direct help, we will move into this direction”, the organizers of the Collaboration Incubator hope.

the wisdom and spirit that is already in our bodies, heads, hearts, souls can come to the surface more easily’

To share the knowledge and keep developing and integrating internet based technology to coordinate our efforts and make our network power visible is important. As an underestimated addition to this I believe in connecting people and their visions on a deeper level face-to-face. The wisdom and spirit that is already in our bodies, heads, hearts, souls will come to the surface more easily. After writing this article I know that this is my motivation and intention to participate.

Lead photo, Celebratory activity during Collaboration Incubator in Berlin in May 2018. All photos, ©Momo-C.Gumz .

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John Leonard: The Decentralized Web Summit is over – what’s next?

Earlier this month a rather unusual tech event took place in San Francisco.

The Decentralized Web Summit played host to a gathering of web luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle and Vint Cerf. On top of that, activists and authors and screenwriters such as Jennifer Stisa Granick, Emili Jacobi, Mike Judge and Cory Doctorow put in an appearance, as did cryptocurrency pioneers like Zooko Wilcox, blockchain developers, and academics.

Then, there was what the Guardian‘s John Harris calls the Punk Rock Internet – companies like MaidSafe and Blockstack who play by their own decentralised rules.

Oh, and there was a sprinkling of techies from Microsoft, Google (Vint Cerf and others) and Mozilla in attendance too, along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities.

Uniting this diverse selection of delegates was the challenge of fixing the centralising tendencies of the internet and web.

Simply put, the internet’s reliance on centralised hubs of servers and data centres means that the more servers you control the more power you have, with all the negative consequences that follow from the creation of data-haves and data-have-nots.

To redress the balance, data needs to be freed from silos with control handed back to users, but how to do that while retaining the convenience and ease-of-use of the current web?

Aside from the inevitable resistance by the powers that be, this turns out to be quite the technical challenge.

One task among a set of complex interlocking challenges is to separate data from the applications that use it. People could then store their personal data where they choose, granting or limiting access by applications as they please. For example, Berners-Lee’s Solid platform enables everyone to have multiple ‘pods’ for their data allowing for fine-grained control.

Another element is authentication, ensuring that the data owner really is who they say they are, while ensuring real identities remain private by default.

Networking needs to be peer-to-peer rather than hub-and-spoke, with copies of files stored across multiple machines for redundancy and speed of throughput in a manner that users of torrent-based file-sharing services will be familiar with, but adding far more control and performance features.

And above all it will need to be easy to use, low latency and simple for developers to create decentralised applications for.

Computing contacted a number of contributors to the Summit before and after the event and asked about their take on progress towards a viable decentralised web.

Pic credit Vitor Fontes. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold (W.B. Yeats)

14/08/2018 – The key takeaways

With the summit now over and the participants returned to their basement labs (or shiny new offices) it’s time to consider the takeaways.

Interest in decentralisation is growing

While the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit summit attracted 350 enthusiasts, 2018 saw more than twice that number, with 800 attendees across 156 sessions. Not huge numbers as tech events in San Francisco go (the ‘big one’ Oracle OpenWorld attracts an astonishing 60,000 delegates), but important nevertheless in that it brought together the founders of the connected world with those looking at new ways to reclaim the web’s original vision.

“There are dozens and dozens of new projects and protocols and our goal was to get them to a place where people could do real learning,” said Wendy Hanamura of the Internet Archive.

For Blockstack’s Patrick Stanley the seed planted two years ago is still growing strongly: “I was very impressed by the quality of attendees and felt that the spirit of the original vision of the web as a place where people can create was intact,” he said.

No project is an island

The web touches almost every aspect of modern life. Re-architecting such a system will be a huge undertaking, one far too big for disparate bunches of developers working alone. MaidSafe COO Nick Lambert was among many urging more collaboration.

“Certainly, there are some efforts to work together on problem solving, but this is not happening universally,” he said. “Everyone at the event was clearly united in a common purpose to make the internet more private and secure, but the key takeaway for me is how we foster greater cohesion among the different projects.”

Money: no longer too tight to mention

Concerns about attracting VC funding haunted 2016, but those worries have largely evaporated as a result of the crypto goldrush which has given a huge boost to the value of the tokens that support many projects. Booms can turn to busts, of course, and sudden wealth can bring challenges of its own, but for now the gloom has lifted.

While some fear an inevitable clampdown on cryptocurrencies by the authorities, OmiseGO’s Althea Allen, who chaired a debate on the issue, said the worst may not happen.

“What I took away from talking with those excellent thinkers was actually quite a hopeful picture for the future of decentralised finance,” she said. “By all their accounts, they have found regulators to be more open to the possibilities of crypto than we tend to assume, with less default bias toward corporate interests, and largely concerned with the same things that we are: security, privacy, consumer protections; generally speaking, making honest people’s lives easier and not harder.”

Awareness of the bigger picture

Mindful of the developing relationship with the authorities, governance was front and centre of many discussions, a sign of growing maturity in decentralised thinking. For Miriam Avery, director of strategic foresight at Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies department, valuable lessons can be learned from those working “in countries where corruption is blatant, regulation is ineffective, and centralised control points cause palpable harm.”

Their experiences may turn out be more universal than some might think, she said. 

“The threat model is changing such that these harms are relevant to people who are less acutely aware of their causes. For instance, the things Colombian Ethereum hackers are worried about are things that we should all be a little worried about.”

Avery continued: “At the same time, digging into these projects we can already see pitfalls in the ‘governance’ of the software projects themselves, from the prevalence of benevolent dictators to disagreements on the limits of moral relativism. There’s room to grow these technologies through healthy, inclusive open source communities, and I’m excited to see that growth.”

The door needs to be wedged open, or it will be slammed shut again

Another Mozillan, software engineer Irakli Gozalishvili, said: “It was reassuring to see that the community is actively thinking and talking about not only making decentralised web a place that serves people, but also how to create technology that can’t be turned into corporate silos or tools for empowering hate groups.”

Scaling up

Any decentralised web worthy of that name needs to be quick and responsive at scale, said MaidSafe’s Lambert. “There is a long way to go to create a user experience that will encourage everyone to adopt the decentralised approach.  For example, none of the demonstrations at the summit were able to show scalability to millions of users.”

Front-end focus

The decentralised web, with a few notable exceptions, is still very ‘engineering-y’ with most of the effort going into the back-end rather than the user interface. The networking may be futuristic but the front end is (with a few honourable exceptions) still Web 1.0. Which is fine at the development stage but projects will soon need to move on from demonstrating capabilities to making apps that people actually want to use.

Creating an easy onramp is an essential step. Mozilla is piloting decentralised web browsing via WebExtension APIs, the first of the ‘major’ vendors to do so, although others have been working in this area for a while, notably the Beaker browser for navigating DAT sites and ZeroNet.

A long list of necessary developments includes a human-readable decentralised replacement for the DNS system, search engines, and proof that crypto-based incentive systems for the supply and demand of resources can make for a scalable economy.

And the next Decentralized Web Summit? Hanamura wouldn’t be drawn on a date. “We’re still recovering from organising this one,” she said.

Enthusiasm is not sufficient fuel

06/08/2018 – Maintaining the momentum

If the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit was a call to action, in 2018 it’s all about working code. That’s according to Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, the organisation that hosted both events. However, there’s still a fair way to go before it goes anything like mainstream.

The Internet Archive’s mission is to preserve the outputs of culture, turning analogue books, files and recordings into digital, storing digital materials for posterity and preserving web pages going back to 1996 in the Wayback Machine.

Unsurprisingly given its aims, the organisation is sitting on a mountain of data – more than 40 petabytes and rising fast. It has recently started experimenting with decentralised technologies as a way of spreading the load and ensuring persistence, including file sharing and storage protocols WebTorrent, DAT and IPFS, the database GUN and P2P collaborative editor YJS.

And it’s open to looking at more in the future. “We’re glad to be in at the ground floor,” said Hanamura. “We have no horse in the race. We’re looking for all of them to succeed so we’re looking at different protocols for different functions.”

Wendy Hanamura

Despite some substantial progress, few decentralised projects could yet be described as ‘enterprise ready’. More work is required in many different areas, one of which is providing more straightforward ways for non-technical users to become involved.

Hanumara pointed to developments among big-name browsers including Firefox, Chrome and Brave as among the most promising for improved user experience. Mozilla demonstrated a Firefox API for decentralised systems at the event.

“Participants were able to talk to each other directly browser to browser without a server involved, and they thought that was tremendously exciting,” she said.

Collaborations

For Ruben Verborgh of the Solid project, the cross-pollination required to overcome some of the challenges is hampered by the diversity of approaches.

“Ironically, the decentralised community itself is also very decentralised, with several smaller groups doing highly similar things,” he said. “Finding common ground and interoperability will be a major challenge for the future since we can only each do our thing if we are sufficiently compatible with what others do.”

While it’s still too early for projects to merge or consolidate around standards, Hanamura said she witnessed “lots of meetings in corridors and deals being struck about how you could tweak things to work together.”

“That’s another way you can make it scale,” she added.

Maintaining momentum

The summit had strong ideological underpinnings. Hanamura described it as “an event for the heart. People came to share,” she said.

The strength of small open-source projects with big ideas is that they can easily sustain shared ideals, but this can be hard to maintain as they evolve, she went on.

“Many founders said governance was their biggest worry. You need a team of developers who believe in you and are willing to work with you – if not they can fork the code and create something very different.”

In 2016 the main concern was very different: it was funding. The success of cryptocurrency token sales (ICOs) have removed many of these worries, at least for some. A lot of money has flowed into decentralised technologies, for example Filecoin recently raised $230m in an ICO and Blockstack made $50m. But this can be a double-edged sword as rapid expansion and bags of cash make team cohesion more challenging to maintain, Hanamura believes.

“It makes it a dangerous time. We came to this with a purpose, to make a web that’s better for everyone. So we need to keep our eye on the North Star.”

Once the technologies hit the mainstream, there will be other challenges too, including legal ones.

“As this ecosystem grows it has to be aware of the regulations on the books around the world but also those pending,” said Hanamura. “We have to have a strong voice for keeping areas where we can sandbox these technologies. We need a governance system to keep it decentralised otherwise it can get centralised again.”

It’s gonna take a lot of thinking through

01/08/2018 – Why is decentralising the web so hard to achieve?

Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues faced a number of tough challenges when inventing the web, including having to build early browsers and protocols from scratch and overcoming initial scepticism (his original idea was labelled ‘vague but exciting’ by his boss at CERN). The nascent web also needed to be brought into being under the radar, and the terms for the release of its code carefully formulated to guarantee its free availability for all time. It took 18 months to persuade CERN that this was the right course.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it,” said Berners-Lee in 1998.

The original web was designed to be decentralised, but over the course of time it has been largely fenced off by a small number of quasi-monopolistic powers we know as ‘the tech giants’. This makes designing a new decentralised internet  – one that’s ‘locked open’ in the words of the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle – a challenge even more daunting than those pioneers faced. The problem is the tech giants are very good at what they do, said Jamie Pitts, a member of the DevOps team with the Ethereum Foundation, speaking for himself rather than on behalf of his organisation.

“One of the key hurdles to decentralisation is the lock-in effect and current excellent user experience provided by the large, centralised web services,” he said.

“Decentralised web technology must enable developers to produce high-quality systems enabling users to search, to connect with each other, and to conduct all forms of business. Until that happens, users will continue to be satisfied with the current set of options.”

While a subset of users is worried about power imbalances, surveillance and lack of control and transparency, the fact is that most people don’t care so long as there are bells and whistles aplenty. A tipping point must be achieved, as Althea Allen of OmiseGO put it.

“The only thing that will force those decentralised systems to change on a fundamental level is a mass shift by consumers toward decentralised systems.”

Selling ads and services through the centralisation and mining of data (‘surveillance capitalism’) has made the tech giants very powerful, and it can be hard to see beyond this model.

“The monopolisation that can occur in a rapidly-advancing technology space poses one of the greatest challenges to decentralisation,” said Pitts.

“Aggregation of capital and talent results from the network effect of a successful commercially-run service, and developers and users can become locked-in. While many of their needs of users may be met by the dominant content provider, search engine, or social network, the monopolised network becomes a silo.”

Moreover, the suck-up-all-the-data model has proven to be highly lucrative for the big boys, and while alternative economic methods for paying participants involving cryptocurrencies and micropayments are emerging, none has yet proved itself on the wider stage.

“There need to be viable business models for app developers that do not depend on advertisements or exploiting user behaviour and data,” said Blockstack’s Patrick Stanley.

On the systems side, there is a necessity to rethink the architecture to avoid central hubs. One of the toughest problems is achieving reliable consensus: with nodes seeing different versions of the ‘truth’ (i.e. what events are happening and in what order), how can one ‘truth’ be agreed upon without reference to a central arbiter? And how can this consensus be secured against faults and bad actors?

This longstanding conundrum was finally solved by the bitcoin blockchain a decade ago, and many efforts are ongoing to make it more efficient and a better fit for the decentralised web, the IoT and other applications. However, other projects, such as IPFS and MaidSafe’s SAFE Network, don’t use a blockchain, arriving at different methods for achieving consensus.

There are many ways to skin the decentralised cat – and that is another issue. What do people want, is it privacy, autonomy, security, an alternative economy, all of the above? Where are the tradeoffs and who decides the priorities? And how can the various strategies work together?

The problem is too big for one player to handle. MaidSafe’s David Irvine sees collaboration as key to any solution, which was one reason why the firm open-sourced all its code.

“We want to collaborate with other companies in this space. We have the scars of developing specific functionality and are happy to work with companies to integrate that functionality where it makes sense.”

Pic credit Rene Böhmer. A decentralised web can also be a place to hide

31/07/2018 What might go wrong?

Technology is morally agnostic. Nuclear power provides the raw material for nuclear bombs. That new road can carry serial killers as well as saints. And while a decentralised web would redistribute power over personal data, it could also provide a convenient hiding place for the bad guys.

Danielle Robinson

It’s high time technologists started to see this issue in the round, said Danielle Robinson, co-executive director, of Code for Science & Society, a non-profit supporting collaboration in public interest technology.

“When technology is built, the biases of its creators are often embedded into the technology itself in ways that are very hard for the creators to see, until it’s used for a purpose you didn’t intend,” she said during an interview with Internet Archive. “So I think it’s really important that we talk about this stuff.”

The increased privacy and security built into decentralised web technologies makes it easier for anyone to collaborate in a secure fashion. And that includes hate groups.

“They’re on the current existing web, and they’re also on the decentralised web, and I think it’s important for our community to talk about that,” she said. “We need a deeper exploration that’s not just ‘oh you know, we can’t control that’.”

In a separate interview, Matt Zumwalt, program manager at Protocol Labs, creator of Inter-Plantetary File System (IPFS), argued that proponents of decentralised web need to think about how it might be gamed.

“We should be thinking, really proactively, about what are the ways in which these systems can be co-opted, or distorted, or gamed or hijacked, because people are going to try all of those things,” he said.

The decentralised web is still an early stage project, and many involved in its creation are motivated by idealism, he went on, drawing parallels with the early days of the World Wide Web. Lessons should be learned from that experience about how reality is likely to encroach on the early vision, he said.

“I think we need to be really careful, and really proactive about trying to understand, what are these ideals? What are the things we dream about seeing happen well here, and how can we protect those dreams?”

Mitra Ardron, technical lead for decentralisation at the Internet Archive, believes that one likely crunch point will be when large firms try to take control.

“I think that we may see tensions in the future, as companies try and own those APIs and what’s behind them,” he said. “Single, unified companies will try and own it.”

However, he does not think this will succeed because he believes people will not accept a monolith. Code can be forked and “other people will come up with their own approaches.”

30/07/2018 Blockstack on identity and decoupling data

Authentication and identity are cornerstones of decentralised networking. Through cryptography, I as a user can verify who I am and what data I own without reference to any central registry. I can use my decentralised ID (DID) to log on securely and perhaps anonymously to services and applications with no third party involved.

Identity is bound up with another tenet of decentralisation: separating the data from the applications. Applications are now interfaces to shared data rather than controllers and manipulators of it. Without my express permission, apps can no longer use and retain data beyond my control.

Coupling data to ID rather than apps was the starting point for the Blockstack platform, as head of growth Patrick Stanley explained.

“Blockstack is creating a digital ecosystem of applications that let users fully own their identities and data on the Internet. User data – like photos and messages – are completely decoupled from the applications. Apps can no longer lock users and their social graph in, since they no longer store anything.”

Storage is taken care of elsewhere, in a decentralised storage system called Gaia. As apps are now ‘views’ or interfaces you don’t need to log in to each individually.

“People use applications on Blockstack just like they would with today’s Internet. But instead of signing up for each app one-by-one with an email address and password — or a Google/Facebook log-in — users have an identity that’s registered in the blockchain and a public key that permissions applications or other users to access pieces of data.”

That’s lots of positives so far from a user point of view, and also for developers who have a simpler architecture and fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, but of course, there’s a catch. It’s the difference between shooting from the hip and running everything by a committee.

“Decentralisation increases coordination costs. High coordination costs make it hard to get some kinds of things done, but with the upside that the things that do get done are done with the consensus of all stakeholders.”

There are already privacy-centric social networks and messaging apps available on Blockstack, but asked about what remains on the to-do list, Stanley mentioned “the development of a killer app”. Simply replicating what’s gone before with a few tweaks won’t be enough.

A viable business model that doesn’t depend on tracking-based advertising is another crucial requirement – what would Facebook be without the data it controls? – as is interoperability with other systems, he said.

And the big picture? Why is Blockstack sponsoring the event? Ultimately it’s about securing digital freedom, said Stanley.

“If we’re going to live free lives online, there needs to be protocol-level safeguards to ensure your data stays under your control. Otherwise, the people who control your data ultimately control your digital life.”

Independent but interconnected

27/06/2018 OmiseGO on the importance of UI

OmiseGO, a sponsor of the Decentralized Web Summit, is a subsidiary of Asia-Pacific regional fintech firm Omise. Omise is a payments gateway similar to PayPal or Stripe that’s doing brisk business in East Asia. Omise enables online and mobile fiat currency transactions between customers and participating vendors, and OmiseGO, a separate company and open source project, aims to do the same with cryptocurrencies too.

The backbone of OmiseGO is the OMG blockchain which in turn is built on Ethereum. The goal is to provide seamless interoperability across all blockchains and providers. OMG uses Plasma, an enhancement designed to speed up transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, and the company counts Ethereum’s founders Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood among its advisors. While it’s very early days, in the long run OmiseGO wants to extend banking-type services to the billions of ‘unbanked’ people by cutting out the financial middleman who don’t serve those people, and also giving the ‘banked’ an alternative.

The current Internet has too many middlemen of its own, meaning that equal access does not mean equal control, explained OmiseGO’s head of ecosystem growth Althea Allen in an email.

“The decentralised web is crucial is providing equitable agency within the systems that internet users are accessing. Sovereignty over your own data, money and communication; access to information that is not censored or manipulated; the ability to control what aspects of your identity are shared and with whom; these are essential freedoms that the centralised web simply will not provide.”

However, if the alternatives are awkward and clunky, they will never take off.

“It is difficult, though not impossible, to create a decentralised system that provides the kind of user experience that the average internet user has come to expect. Mass adoption is unlikely until we can provide decentralised platforms that are powerful, intuitive and require little or no change in users’ habits.”

Team OmiseGO

Blockchains are a powerful tool for decentralisation as they can help keep control of events and processes across the network, but that depends on how they are used. There’s a lot of ‘blockchain-washing’ out there, Allen warned.

“Blockchains are not intrinsically decentralised – they can absolutely be private and proprietary. Many institutions, old and new, are showing an interest in adopting new technologies such as blockchains, maintaining the same centres of power and influence, and putting an ‘I blockchained’ sticker on them – essentially, appropriating the rhetoric of decentralisation without actually adopting the principles.”

Asked about the plethora of competing decentralised approaches, Allen said she believes this is positive, but sharing ideas is vital too.

“Cooperation is crucial for us to move the space forward, while healthy competition encourages the exploration of many different possible solutions to the same problems. We work particularly closely with Ethereum, but the success of our project depends on a thriving ecosystem (which extends well beyond crypto or even blockchain technology). To this end, we make a concerted effort to work with projects and individuals in many fields who are contributing to building the decentralised web.”

26/07/2018 MaidSafe on collaboration

As we mentioned in the introduction, a decentralised web will require a number of different interlocking components, including decentralised storage, decentralised networking, decentralised applications and decentralised identities.

MaidSafe, one of the event’s sponsors, is trying to cover all but one these bases with its autonomous SAFE Network, replacing the Transport, Session and Presentation layers of the current seven-layer internet with decentralised alternatives to create a platform for applications. The project is currently at alpha test stage.

So it’s all sewn up then, no need for further collaboration? Not at all said CEO David Irvine, who will be speaking at the event, pointing to the firm’s open-sourcing of its PARSEC consensus algorithm and its invitation to other projects to help develop it. It’s just not always easy to organise joint ventures he said. The summit will bring together many pioneers and innovators (70-plus projects are represented) with each pushing their own ideas for redefining the web.

“[Everyone’s] so passionate about improving the internet experience, we are defining the rules for the future, and everyone has a point of view. That does mean there are some egos out there who are quite vocal about the merits of their approach versus others, which makes for good media stories and fuels hype, but it’s not what we’re really focused on.”

Within any movement dedicated to upending the status quo, there lurks the danger of a People’s Front of Judea-type scenario with infighting destroying the possibilities of cooperation. Amplifying the risk, many projects in this space are funded through cryptocurrency tokens, which adds profiteering to the mix. It’s easy to see how the whole thing could implode, but Irvine says he’s now starting to see real collaborations happen and hopes the summit will bring more opportunities.

“We’ve already been talking to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project at MIT, and we have a growing number of developers experimenting with applications for the platform,” he said.

MaidSafe’s David Irvine

MaidSafe has been a fixture in the decentralised firmament for a while, predating even the blockchain which is the backbone of many other ventures. At one time it had the space almost to itself but has since been joined by a host of others. Asked about his company’s USP, Irvine came back with one word: “honesty”.

We asked him to expand.

“There is far too much hype in the wider blockchain crypto space and we have always tried to distance ourselves from that nonsense. We’re trying to build something hugely complex and radically different. That doesn’t happen overnight, so you have to be upfront with people so they are not misled. Sure we’ve learned along the way, got some things wrong, but whenever we have we’ve held our hands up and that has helped us.”

And the big-picture goal?

“In essence, privacy, security and freedom. The technology we are building will provide private and secure communications, as well as freedom through the unfettered access to all humanity’s data.”

25/07/2018 Kahle and Berners-Lee on the need for decentralisation

Organiser the Internet Archive directed us to some recent statements by founder Brewster Kahle. Here Kahle outlines some of the problems with the existing web.

“Some of the problems the World Wide Web that we’ve seen in the last few years are the surveillance structures that Snowden gave light to. There are the trolling problems that we saw in the last election. There’s privacy aspects, of people spilling their privacy into companies that sometimes aren’t the most trustworthy. There’s advertising technologies being used against users. There’s a lot of failings that we’ve seen in the World Wide Web.”

To be successful, the decentralised web will need to encourage “lots of winners, lots of participation, lots of voices” he said.

“So this is a time to join in, to find a place, get knee-deep in the technologies. Try some things out. Break some stuff. Invest some time and effort. Let’s build a better, open world, one that serves more of us.”

Open source principles are essential but not sufficient. There must be a focus on performance, functionality and new ideas.

“We’re only going to survive if the open world is more interesting than closed app worlds … what I would think of as a dystopian world of closed, segmented, siloed, corporately-owned little pieces of property. I’d much rather see an open, next-generation web succeed,” Kahle said.

Tim Berners-Lee

As ‘Father of the Web’ (Mk I), Tim Berners-Lee has become increasingly disillusioned with his offspring. Around the time of the previous Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, he said: “The web has got so big that if a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites you go to, they have tremendous control over your life.

“If they can spy on what you’re doing they can understand a huge amount about you, and similarly if a government can block you going to, for example, the opposition’s political pages, they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power.”

Since then, of course, many of the things he warned about have become evident in increasingly obvious and frightening ways. And in the US Congress recently scrapped net neutrality, doing away – in that country at least – with a longstanding principle of the internet, namely that ISPs should treat all data equally.

So, are there any positive developments to report over the last two years? Berners-Lee remains hopeful.

“There’s massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences,” he told Computing. “There’s a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data.”

In part this awareness is being driven by GDPR coming into effect, in part by news headlines.

Meanwhile, there’s the rise of “companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data” (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is “turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement”.

“These are exciting times,” said Berners-Lee.

John Leonard, Research Editor, Incisive Media

The post Decentralising the web: The key takeaways appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Economic Man vs Humanity: a Puppet Rap Battle

An economist, a songwriter and a puppet designer walked into a recording studio.

What came out? An economics puppet rap battle, of course.

In a one-of-a-kind collaboration, puppet designer Emma Powell, musician Simon Panrucker, and renegade economist Kate Raworth have created a surreal musical puppet adventure to challenge the heart of outdated economic thinking.

Their 7-minute video stars puppets pitched in a rap battle with their economics professor. The project’s aim is to equip economics students and teachers with a playful but insightful critique of Rational Economic Man, the outdated depiction of humanity at the heart of mainstream economic thought.

A synopsis of the storyline:

Dissatisfied with the model of man presented in their economics lesson, three students visit their professor and embark on a rap battle to debate the very nature of humankind. While the professor argues that Economic Man – a rational, self-interested, money-driven being – serves the theory well, the students counter that a more nuanced portrait reflecting community, generosity and uncertainty is now essential. A musical puppet adventure challenging the heart of outdated economic thinking ensues.

Kate Raworth is the author of the internationally acclaimed book Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21^st century economist (Penguin Random House, 2017). ‘One of the most dangerous stories at the heart of 20th century economics is the depiction of humanity as rational economic man’ she says, ‘He stands alone, with money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head and nature at his feet. In making this video, we wanted to make clear – as playfully as possible – that this absurd portrait is deeply out of date.’

The project was funded by the Network for Social Change and the video is being disseminated widely online. A full set of the lyrics is available for teachers and students who want to bring the details of the debate to life in the classroom.

Twitter: @KateRaworth    Facebook: facebook.com/doughnuteconomics    Website: www.kateraworth.com

The post Video of the day: Puppets take on Economic Man appeared first on P2P Foundation.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties,  there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”^[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common life. As Noam Chomsky would caution, the only strategy for assuring the uptake of this narrative would be the concentration of information and media, meaning, the consolidation of the voice and the imagination of what is possible. It was the belle époque of neoliberalism.

In her book, Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes (Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas:Comunicación y acción en la era de Internet), Guiomar Rovira tells the story of how that unitary discourse was questioned to open up new possibilities. It began with the emergence of activist networks that, taking advantage of the internet’s open and decentralized infrastructure, created new technological tools to share images, words and feelings distinct from the official narrative. These were the times of Zapatismo and anti-globalization. Later, with Web 2.0, the politicized use of networks became socialized, providing access to anyone. This was the time of connected multitudes, including 15-M and other movements spawned by the crisis.

#YoSoy132

Guiomar’s account distinguishes itself from regular academic production in two ways. To begin with, the book is fundamentally affirmative, rather than critical. It affirms the political power of technologies once people have seized their ownership. The author does not view the world from the angle of power: she does not reinforce our impotence, or how dominated and manipulated we are, nor does she victimize us. On the contrary — she speaks about what’s been done, what’s being done and what can be done. She contemplates the world from the perspective of potentiality.

Secondly, it is a lived book. The author’s personal experiences – through punk, Zapatismo or Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement – form a basis for reflection. Guiomar Rovira is a Catalonian journalist and writer living in Mexico since 1994. She is the author of numerous essays and a teacher in Mexico City’s UAM-Xochimilco University.

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem.

Zapatismo and the Hope International

Amador: There is a second social movement that would be central to the creation of those activist networks. I’m referring to Zapatismo which, unlike punk, wouldn’t be a “dark” movement. Zapatismo opens a horizon of hope, removed from the metropolis. What can you tell us about the relation between Zapatismo, technologies and communication?

Guiomar: We have to take into account that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and we lived in a unipolar world marked by the “end of history”. But suddenly, from the most surprising and unexpected place, there is rebellion, hope, and a movement that speaks to us, and where I found myself.

I feel that the significance of Zapatismo is that it allowed for a global common framework. This was a moment marked by despondency across all struggles: the global left was despondent, the Latin American guerrillas were in the doldrums, and so on.  Suddenly, an interpellating framework that rescued us from isolated processes of resistance was born. A framework for active mobilization that allows many different struggles to have a shared sense of identity and a common foe. It is humanity against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas say. And who proposed this framework? The indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the most forgotten, the smallest, coming from a corner of the world where many weren’t even aware that there were indigenous communities, or resistance, or the possibility of struggle.

This was still a global media event, accordingly relayed by traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television). The World Wide Web was barely a year old, hardly anyone was using it. After a few days, though, the newspapers and radio dropped the story. Nevertheless, people sought ways to keep abreast and intervene in what was happening in Chiapas, supporting this rebellion as a locus of hope for the world.

Amador: This is when the appropriation of the Internet takes place. At that time, it was a new means of communication. How did that come about?

Guiomar: The appropriation was almost natural, spontaneous even. Given the lack of information from the traditional media, alternative media moved to occupy that space. Like many others present, I was participating and publishing in hegemonic media, important newspapers…but I was also sending a wealth of information to alternative radio stations, alternative media, fanzines…

In the midst of all this, these gringos (sometimes gringos can also bring about good things!) kept telling us, “you have to use the Internet”. They were the first hackers, tramping around with their spiky hair, installing modems and strange artefacts in your computer. We had no clue what those maniacs were on about. Less than three months later, we were all using the Internet. When I say “all”, I’m referring to the journalists, the NGOs, the activists. The first websites covering the revolution in Chiapas appeared spontaneously. Some US students decided to follow the situation and began publishing the EZLN’s communiqués. These were sent by fax and then published in the website (called Ya Basta). More people turned up spontaneously and started translating to English, French…

That is how information began to be shared and an informational scaffolding was built around the situation in Chiapas. This was huge: at that time the Mexican government was still quite invested in pushing a positive image internationally (that is no longer the case). But information was not the only thing circulating; many people were travelling to Chiapas, visiting the communities, and generating even more information. There were inputs and outputs, a communicative atmosphere supporting an indigenous rebellion and indigenous rebellion proposing the idea that another world is possible. An interpellation finding resonance in many places around the world and allowing for common action, aside from any differences in our ways of doing.

Walter Benjamin: Power above all things

Amador: I want to pose a question a bit beyond our conversation about activist networks and connected multitudes, about the support you find in the classic author Walter Benjamin. What is it about Benjamin, what kind of ally is he?

Guiomar: What I find in Benjamin is a profound metaphorical, poetical and political inspiration. In the darkness of his time he was able to see the light, more so than any other member of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin helps me understand this need of mine to find the power in each moment, each place.

Technique is not our enemy. It also represents the possibility of living in a fuller world, where our covenant with nature is not hostile, nor does it force the violence by which we survive or perish. Predatory capitalism, based on artificially created pain and scarcity, undermines the potential of technique. The blame for the expulsion of life and accumulation through dispossession lies not with the Internet, but with a montage, a global system, that takes technique and, rather than put it in the service of humanity, gifts it to capitalism and the predatory production of scarcity. Benjamin invites us to conceive of another, non-capitalist modernity.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin sees the democratizing possibility enabled by the fact that we can all take ownership of technique, become authors, and have fuller lives, our own voices. There is another idea of his, which appears in Theses on the Philosophy of History, the concept of jetztzeit: the radiant moment that constellates a kind of epiphany in the here and now where everything opens. This is the idea of the constellation, which I keep coming back to in the book. Those that precede us implore us to see that justice is done. At the same time, there isn’t a single genealogy for all movements. Rather, every movement constructs its own history, shines a light on its radiant moments and, from there, articulates its own destiny. It is a tremendously creative way of understanding that the political also represents an opening to the past.

Benjamin is an inspiration. He died in Portbou, my grandparents’ village. This summer I went to see his grave. He lived a terrible life and never achieved the recognition he deserved. Still, he was the most optimistic, the most creative of the intellectuals of his time. It’s ironic that the one who suffers the most is more able to see the openings, the possibilities, the power.

Connected Multitudes: Technology in anyone’s hands.

Amador: First there is networked activism, the appropriation of technology by activists (punk, Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement), but then there would be a second movement marking a radical transformation from networked activism, which would be the “connected multitudes”. I would like you to tell us about that transition.

Guiomar: The communicative environment of networked activism remains permeated and populated mainly by militants — people with political consciousness. The shift to connected multitudes is highlighted by the fact that the leading voices are no longer limited to those coming from activism. Anyone using a social network has a voice, without necessarily having been previously politicized or part of any specific activist space. And this can happen in politically incorrect spaces like Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, which are privative networks.

For example, take Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement. Not all the Ibero-American University students that started the protests were already politicized, but they did feel aggravated, and used tools to voice that discontent and be heard in the media after remarks were made about president Peña Nieto’s visit to their University. The video they uploaded to YouTube had impressive consequences, generating a wave of indignation that many sorts of people felt identified with. Everybody wondered how it was possible that such an important movement hadn’t come from the UNAM^[2], or from the groups that had been cutting their teeth for years, denouncing unjust situations. Instead, this came from a totally unexpected, unpredictable collective.

In those protests we see a phenomenon that Manuel Castells calls Mass Self Communication: everyone becomes an information producer, a remixer, a retweeter. Everyone takes part in conversations and strengthens the movement with his or her own ability, for example, graphic arts. The processes of putting out and taking in become fuzzy; the entrenched notions of origin, authority and attribution become somewhat “lossy”.

Amador: The book highlights the positive character of the shift between these two stages of alternative communication. This is a process of democratization: if networks had previously been in the hands of activists, now the political use of technology is in the hands of anyone. But, doesn’t this mean that we’ve also lost sight of the importance of technological infrastructures and technological sovereignty? These elements, crucial to the hacker mentality, seem to have been sidelined in favor of “ease of use” in the distribution of content, thanks to social networks made freely available by the same system we are trying to undermine.

Guiomar: While what you’ve mentioned is undoubtedly important, I can’t fully agree with your assertion of what it is we’ve lost. I think that we’re shifting from a very uninformed and automatic use of networks to a more conscious usage due to the Snowden or Wikileaks revelations on spyware. I think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement that is far more aware about surveillance, control and data appropriation in social networks. This awareness is something new and we’ve reached it thanks to the work of certain hackers. I see Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange as hackers. They’ve shown why we need to be careful and use Tor, use free software, why we need to have secure passwords and use the web responsibly. We’ll see what comes of that.

Doing it together

Amador: Instead of intellectuals raising a finger to tell us: “be careful, this is not going well”, what we need is more social appropriation of technology, more learning, more technological literacy, more hacklabs. I think that this is one of the key messages in your book. You acknowledge that the Internet is taking a somber turn, while asserting that the solutions will not be found outside the Internet.

Guiomar: Discursive critiques of technology never solve anything. How can we teach ourselves about sociability in networks? By appropriating spaces, constructing them collaboratively, sharing what we know…by doing what we feel like doing, in ways we feel like doing it, and generating new ways. This is what, in my book, I describe as “hacker unfolding.” This is not just a technological possibility; to me, the concept of hacking goes far beyond technology. The hacker takes something apart to then build something new, deconstructing what is offered as a black box to open new possibilities. And this is not limited to technology, it can be done anywhere. Widen your scope and construct new potentials, whether it’s in the university, or in human relations. As Fernanda Briones, the hackfeminism expert, says “Let’s do it together”.^[3]

Amador: How do you consider of the relation between technology and bodies, between the world of bytes and the world of atoms.

Guiomar: My position is that, beyond the differentiation between online and offline worlds, everything occurs on-life. Seen this way, the corporeal experience of encountering is the key. Going out, looking at each other, experiencing the body-to-body connection. Physical encounters, opening spaces for emergence, experimenting with the body’s vulnerability, all of this is essential. The very logic of networks stresses the commonality of how impossible it is to live under the conditions imposed by this expropriating capitalism. This encounter is the quintessential political moment of our times.

To me, this dimension that deals with the vulnerability of the body, this exposition, has transformed voluntary activism into something more alive, less predetermined. The body becomes visible; it interacts and creates convivial, caring spaces while simultaneously politicizing what is private. My current thesis identifies a feministization of connected multitudes, a kind of free appropriation of feminism, a feminism that becomes inevitable. No emancipatory movement can ignore the widely varied approaches to women’s struggles and feminist struggles over the course of time. All of this happens through the body.

Internet feminista y redes libres – Liliana Zaragoza Cano (Lili_Anaz)

Bodies in the street and communication through networks; I can’t think of these as separate. We are a type of cyborg: we carry our own technological extensions. When I think about politics, technology becomes part of collective action. It’s not something additional, or different. If you pay attention, the most important cyberspace and network actions have always taken place within a context of street mobilization. Acting is communicating and vice versa. Everything happens in the on-life dimension. Our brains are the ultimate platform. There is nothing non-physical. The idea that networks are beyond physicality is just dead wrong, and I have put my mind to opposing it.

This text was transcribed from an interview during Guiomar’s book launch. It took place on September 19, 2017 in UAM-Xochimilco. The original Spanish interview was transcribed by Gerardo Juárez and edited by Amador Fernández-Savater.

^[1] Pensée unique, a term coined by French journalist Jean-François Kahn refers to hegemonic ideological conformism. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[2] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the world’s highest ranking University in R&D. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

^[3] “Hagámoslo juntas” in the original. Spanish is gendered, “juntas” is the female form of “together”. Female (as opposed to the “default” male) grammatical forms have become more commonly used after the 15M movements, such that people of any gender identity more frequently choose to use the female form to describe mixed gender groups.

Republished from Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Lead image from It’s Going Down

Original article published at eldiario.es

The post No Future: From Punk to Zapatismo and Connected Multitudes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Laura James: OPEN 2018 last week was an exciting event, not only because of the incredible people the organisers brought together, but because it felt like something new was starting to take off.

There were people from many different organisations, sectors, and backgrounds, and they found sometimes unexpected things in common with each other. Although we heard some big ideas from the stage, it felt like most attendees were actually working on things, and had practical questions and collaborative opportunities they wanted to discuss. To me, the diversity and the blend of pragmatic action and shared big vision feels like a new movement getting off the starting line.

But what is the movement? OPEN 2018 has “platform cooperatives” next to the logo and yet a lot of the most interesting conversations weren’t actually about platform co-ops. It felt like a melange of several things:

• internet technologies
• open source
• open standards and protocols (as distinct from open platforms)
• commons (not just of code, but of knowledge, public space and more); a mixture of collective goods, and public goods (echoing the Public Stack Summit)
• co-operatives, the co-op principles, and the broader co-op movement
• entrepreneurship — people trying new ideas and ventures
• networks and ecosystems of mutual support
• a desire for impact at meaningful scale (looking beyond local activities)
• resilience and distributed systems (in the technical sense)
• equality and fairness, specifically around technology and data

This is a powerful set of ideas.

They are things I’ve been thinking about and working on in different ways for some time, but I didn’t have a clear sense of them as a group or a coherent whole until now.

I wonder whether others would recognise this list as the facets of OPEN 2018?

It all fits together quite coherently, to me at least, although we’ve no catchy phrase to explain it as a whole. “Platform co-operatives” doesn’t quite do it. “Collaborative technology for the cooperative economy” is the event byline, which is good, although maybe not quite the visionary call to action a movement might coalesce around. Oli Sylvester-Bradley talked in his thoughtful introduction about “people and planet before profit” which seemed to resonate with many of us as a grand vision, although it’s perhaps a little vague? Or maybe it sets out a general dream, without defining what this particular community is doing to achieve it. Gary Alexander talked about a movement and a shared vision too: working together for mutual benefit rather than competing; a society organised for the wellbeing of people and planet (not for money and profit). He also helpfully checked what the audience thought about this (positive, but a little mixed), and admitted some of this may be too much like “new age bollocks.” Recently John Elkington, creator of the triple bottom line (where social and environmental factors are considered alongside economic ones), announced earlier this year that it was time to review whether it is still fit for purpose. So maybe we need to thrash out some more specific, compelling and useful framing…

Part of what made it feel like the emergence of a new thing was that, whilst there is a big vision for a new economy, fit for the internet age, still a little vague in some details, it didn’t feel like a hyped up rally where we all unhesitatingly cheered. Even on the main stage, as well as in smaller conversations, critical questions were posed which we do not have answers to. And there was an energy and a focus on practical action as well as reflection and learning.

Of course, there were ways the event could have been better, and I’m sure 2019’s equivalent will be different, more diverse, and maybe more interactive. But it’s quite something to convene across interests in this way and to frame an event which felt so special. Huge thanks and congratulations to Oli, Thomas and the Open.coop team!

Nathan Schneider had questions about the cooperative side of things. Are we using the language of commons, or the language of ownership? Are we escaping ownership, or doubling down on it? As I feel I’m barely on the edge of the cooperative movement, still figuring out how it works, and its relationship to technology, Nathan’s musing on whether this community is part of the traditional co-op movement or something new and different was interesting. I remain astonished how many co-operatives there are around us. In the UK there’s the Coop Group, John Lewis (as I think John Bevan said, you can take a radical stance just by getting your groceries at Waitrose), but also many others such as dairy co-ops. I learned at OPEN2018 that in the US, a surprisingly large proportion of electricity cable networks are co-operatives. I hadn’t realised that Visa and Mastercard were mutuals until early this century. But they are pretty much invisible in everyday life, in conversations about economic growth and enterprise. Cooperatives UK’s 2018 co-op economy report highlights the scale and scope of co-ops in the UK.

Nathan also talked about where we all sit relative to the mainstream, for-profit startup world. Are we doing entrepreneurship but a bit differently? Or are we doing something radically different, entirely away from concepts like disruption?

One of the things I found really encouraging at the conference was the number of enthusiastic initiatives setting out to make it easier to set up and grow co-operatives, with different combinations of toolkits, mentoring, and funding (Platform6, start.coop, incubator.coop, Solidfund, CoopStarter, and more). And boy, are there more ways to get risk financing in the co-op space than I’d realised. There’s paying a regular cash return, investment from other co-ops, token issues, specialist investment houses such as Purpose Ventures; and depending where you are, tax breaks and specialist co-op startup funds. I was surprised how different the co-op startup financing environment is in different countries. Regardless, platform co-ops are out there already, and in diverse sectors — eg. Stocksy, Savvy.coop and Arcade City. There are more tools than ever before to support scalable co-ops too, with collaborative budgeting (eg. Cobudget), decision-making (eg. Loomio), and day to day participation. There are co-ops you can work with on technical stuff, such as Outlandish or the other denizens of CoTech, and co-ops who can help you with other things such as working openly. Coming soon there will be new ways of distributing computing, organised by co-ops like RChain. Of course, there are also support networks and communities of practice, such as Enspiral.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya talked about the words we use, in a great session on narrative and the importance of stories. In particular, she highlighted that some of the most successful campaigns and movements avoided using the words that one might expect to define them; instead, focussing on stories, and getting away from polarising framings such as anti-capitalism (maybe a story about corruption might be more persuasive?). Cristina also highlighted a point I tried to make in my talk earlier that day, that collaboration is not always built on a shared discursive framework, but might involve parties with very different world views and ways of communicating.

I’m delighted to hear there will be an OPEN 2019, and looking forward to it already. (This is also motivating me to make sure that I can show up next year and feel I’ve done something useful in the interim!)

A note on hyphens: I’m sticking with “co-op.” I can’t bring myself to say “coop,” like a place chickens might live, and I think I know enough people who, like me until very recently, don’t know much about co-ops, and would be confused by coops in this business context

Some rights reserved – CC-BY-SA 4.0

Laura James  is the editor of Digital Life Collective

The post Thoughts on OPEN 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Megan Hafner and Elizabeth Ramaccia:  Far too many young people in the United States today are growing up without tangible examples of people impacted by a problem having the opportunity to shape their own reality. A teenager in a rural community could feel this absence after the town’s lone employer, which long provided the power and leadership to look after the basic needs of most people, shutters its doors, and no one knows quite how to fill its shoes. For a teenager growing up in an urban Rust Belt neighborhood, it could be because for decades her community was redlined, and power was, and still is, systematically denied.

We believe that knowing how to shape your own reality—be it individually in professional or personal matters, or together as communities—should be a core part of young people’s education. With that knowledge, they will be better equipped to navigate their own futures as well as participate in shaping the future of the place they call home. This belief, however, begs the questions: What does it look like for a community to own its own future? What do the people who make up a community need to know and be able to do?

In 2014, we founded Why We Work Here (WWWH) and embarked on a year of research to observe, record, and analyze what it looks like when various place-based groups seek not just to “fix” problems head on but also to make problem solving an inclusive, community-driven process, wherein power and leadership are shared. We selected six groups to look at across the country, representing a range of sectors (nonprofit, private, and philanthropic) and issue areas (economic development, environmental sustainability, education, housing). Each group distinguished itself in how it saw its role in and relationship to its community, and the degree to which it controlled decision-making processes. All saw measurable, positive, equitable change ensue from their efforts. We wanted to know: How do they do what they do? What do they believe? And, technical skills aside, what do they know how to do?

We discovered that, despite hailing from different sectors and geographical locations, the approaches used by these organizations have strong common threads, including:

• Leadership development and capacity building. The groups recognize that supporting self-aware, empathetic, and action-oriented residents capable of working collaboratively across differences is critical for change to be transformative and enduring. Specific projects or efforts are vehicles for ongoing capacity building as much as they are about project-specific outcomes.
• Building a foundation of trust. The groups prioritize the development and sustenance of trusting relationships, both between them and the greater community and among community members. They do this through supporting diverse constituencies by identifying common values, being transparent in their own decision making and operations, and delivering on their word.
• Shared vision. The groups recognize the value of “looking at the same picture,” and work to ensure that stakeholders are a part of the development and execution of a shared vision.

These tenets, along with the specific skills and mindsets we identified through our research as essential to the groups’ effectiveness, are the inspiration and underpinnings for WWWH’s current work with educators and high school students. Through real, project-based experiences that are contextualized in the community, we support young people to recognize their own agency in shaping both individual and community-wide outcomes, and equip them with the skills to act with courage. We work closely with educators so that they can lead these programs and integrate skill-building activities into the regular school day.

We would like to share the stories of three of the groups we researched in the hope that tangible examples can help others imagine how their own actions could support alternative futures for their own communities.¹ 

Incourage Community Foundation

Gus (left) was a high school principal in 2000, when Consolidated Papers, Inc. and the regional economy collapsed. Today, he and his teammates (Corey, center, and Heather, right) facilitate resident engagement efforts at Incourage and focus on building strong relationships and networks founded on trust. Their goal is to move people from a place of “They will take care of it,” to “I have a responsibility to be involved,” and eventually to “We can have shared stewardship of this place.”

Incourage is a community foundation that’s fostering a participatory culture whereby residents are shaping a renewed, inclusive economy in south Wood County, Wisconsin.

For much of the twentieth century, the regional economy of south Wood County was dominated by the paper industry and flush with stable jobs that allowed most people to live comfortably. In 1999, however, Consolidated Papers, Inc.—a Fortune 500 company headquartered there—announced that it was cutting seven hundred jobs, and the following year it was sold to a foreign company. By 2005, total employment in the county had been cut by 40 percent.² The sudden loss of this economic anchor heightened social divisions and the sense of hopelessness throughout the community, and resulted in the loss of a shared identity.³

The collapse was a wake-up call for Incourage—then the Community Foundation of Greater South Wood County—which at the time operated the same way as many community foundations: it reacted to the needs of the community. Its board and staff began reexamining the foundation’s role toward helping the region heal and regenerate a local economy. Their belief was that upward, lasting change would be possible if residents could develop the enduring confidence and competencies to envision and implement community-wide transformation.

In the past decade, Incourage has invested in efforts that are laying the groundwork for a new culture of collective self-determination locally, including their most ambitious project yet—the community-led redevelopment of the Tribune Building, once the home of the local newspaper. Incourage purchased the abandoned building in 2012, and since then it has facilitated a process for the community to direct the building’s redevelopment and programming.⁴

As anyone involved will tell you, this was about more than a building. At its core, the Tribune is a vehicle for building relationships based on mutual interests and hopes, for establishing new skills and ways to collaborate constructively, and for rebuilding a collective sense of confidence to act proactively. Regular meetings begin with a discussion of what progress has been made to date and how the current evening’s activities will influence the development process. Community members—usually several hundred in attendance—work in groups around a programmatic component of shared interest: the microbrewery, the kitchen incubator, the children’s spaces. Groups are led by community members who are trained facilitators.

While the Tribune process itself encourages new expectations, behaviors, and mindsets in participants, it also builds off of previous efforts investing in adaptive leadership skill development and building partnerships to support a stronger local economy. “What we’re seeing now wouldn’t have been possible previously,” an Incourage staff member explained, referencing the way participants are coming together to hear one another and collaborate and recognizing the value and potential of their own ideas.

Saint Paul Federation of Teachers

When her undergraduate advisor encouraged her to do her internship with SPFT, Zuki said, “Are you crazy?!” She felt like she’d been burned by teachers as she tried, and failed, to get answers and support during the first few years of her oldest son’s schooling. She reluctantly took the internship, however, and found herself a part of the pre-contract-negotiation listening sessions SPFT was facilitating. She saw how many teachers had both the same desires and frustrations as she did. Today, she’s a huge advocate for teachers, and she wants more parents and teachers to have control over how their schools are run. She’s a trainer for Parent Teacher Home Visits, a PTO chair, and she was elected to the school board in late 2015.

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT)⁵ is a teachers union that has evolved its priorities and built stronger relationships with parents in order to support the development of “the school system Saint Paul students deserve” (one of SPFT’s main rallying cries). Nationally, the dialogue about the problems with U.S. schools often focuses on the deficits of teachers and the ineffectiveness of teachers unions. This story was playing out in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as well, and many teachers felt deeply discouraged by the divisive climate and narrative that excluded the voices of the people at the heart of the matter: teachers, parents, and students.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

During this process leading up to its 2013 negotiations, SPFT engaged teachers and parents in a series of listening sessions. They discussed three questions: “What are the schools Saint Paul children deserve?”; “Who are the teachers Saint Paul children deserve?”; and “What is the profession those teachers deserve?”⁶ What they came up with was a bold, constructive vision that became a guide for the union’s negotiations. Just as important, teachers and parents saw each other as allies who ultimately wanted the same opportunities and outcomes for children and wanted to support one another to achieve their shared goals.

While most collective bargaining sessions remain closed, SPFT opened its sessions to the public. Because of SPFT’s consistent and deep investment in teachers and parents up to this point, throngs of people filled the negotiating room as conversations heated up. Union members and parents went door to door and rallied outside in the depth of winter. Parents created their own Facebook pages to better organize themselves in support of their students’ schools and teachers. Ultimately, the school board agreed to negotiate on every point they presented, which included smaller class sizes, less standardized testing, and the hiring of additional librarians, nurses, social workers, and counselors.

Today, more teachers are joining the union and more parents are getting involved in ways ranging from running for the school board to becoming trainers for the Parent Teacher Home Visits.⁷ In a move to support leadership development for both teachers and parents, SPFT employs two full-time organizers, who support long-term constructive strategies and focus on matching people’s interests and availability with opportunities to get involved.

People United for Sustainable Housing

Often referred to colloquially as “the mayor of the West Side,” David “Saint” Rodriguez is a leader, activist, and prominent personality in the neighborhood. A lifelong resident there, Saint struggled for much of his life and was imprisoned for several years. He had a hard time finding work after his release, but noticed a construction crew rehabbing a house nearby and started showing up every day as a volunteer. “I treated it like a job,” he recalls. Soon, it became one. His basic needs met, Saint was able to look beyond the paycheck from PUSH and see the holistic way the organization facilitates neighborhood-led local development. Today, he carries a strong sense of neighborhood responsibility with him and is an active member of PUSH’s board.

People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) in Buffalo, New York, is a member-driven organization that combines community development and organizing to address Buffalo’s West Side residents’ needs and build greater community control of resources.

Buffalo’s West Side is a poor neighborhood in one of the nation’s poorest cities, and has suffered from decades of disinvestment. Yet the neighborhood has a rich cultural legacy, and today it’s more diverse than ever. Its affordability allows many to build new lives—including refugees from Burma, Somalia, and other countries beset by conflict—yet because it borders a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the West Side’s affordability is being jeopardized as property values rise.

PUSH began, humbly, in 2005, when its cofounders went door-to-door listening to issues voiced by residents. Jennifer Mecozzi, PUSH’s organizing director (now its logistics coordinator), was one such resident. “[One of the founders] came to my house one day and asked all these questions…. He didn’t write anything down, but he must have really written a book after he left. He came back about three months later…and he brought up everything I had talked about. I was totally impressed…so I thought, ‘Well, you took the time to do this, so I’ll go to a meeting.’”⁸

Based on what the founders heard—that vacant and substandard housing was a major problem for many—they began rehabbing a house in the neighborhood. Many service providers had previously entered and exited the neighborhood, and many residents had grown accustomed to and skeptical of newcomers promising support and solutions. PUSH quickly set itself apart from its predecessors by being action oriented, responsive, and accountable to the conversations staff had with residents.

Today, PUSH is building a self-supporting ecosystem in the West Side neighborhood: it builds housing for sale and rent; provides energy-efficiency retrofits; develops urban gardens and storm-water management infrastructures; manages green economy and construction crews who hire locally and pay living wages; and runs an afterschool program for neighborhood youth. The ideas that become campaigns or programs come from residents through many avenues, including annual community congresses, regularly convening working groups, and conversations community members and PUSH staff have that happen organically.⁹

PUSH’s focus on building human capital every step of the way gives this ecosystem durability and power. The success of its capacity building and leadership-development efforts relies on first addressing the most basic, unmet needs of residents (housing, employment) and then supporting individuals to participate more deeply in actions that support their community’s shared future.

These groups recognize that making inclusive, community-driven processes the norm and sharing power and leadership calls for a cultural transformation that takes a long time to evolve, necessitates immense patience and thoughtfulness, and requires an appetite for risk and for practices atypical of their sector. Their investments are paying off, however, and we hope that their pioneering efforts will serve as examples that will help other organizations, regardless of sector, issue area, or geography, to facilitate deep cultural transformation in their own communities.

Notes

1. The stories are from interviews conducted by the authors over a four-month period in 2015, and from the organization’s websites and/or other supplemental materials.
2. Judith Millesen and Kelly Ryan, “Community Foundation Leadership in the Second Century: Adaptive and Agile,” from Here For Good: Community Foundations and the Challenges of the 21st Century, Terry Mazany and David C. Perr (New York: Routledge, 2014).
3. Ibid.
4. “Tribune: Our Community Accelerator,” Incourage Community Foundation website, August 31, 2015.
5. All information in this section was taken from Eric S. Fought, Power of Community: Organizing for the schools St. Paul children deserve (St. Paul, MN: Federation of Teachers, 2014).
6. Fought, Power of Community, 11.
7. “Parent Teacher Home Visits,” Saint Paul Federation of Teachers website, accessed November 7, 2015.
8. From an interview with the authors, October 2014.
9. “About Us,” PUSH Buffalo website, accessed November 7, 2015.

Megan Hafner is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Elizabeth Ramaccia on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Megan has a background in media, storytelling, education, and community organizing. At Purpose, she focused on projects connected to public education and sustainable food systems. She has also worked with the independent global TV/radio news hour “Democracy Now!,” in New York City.

Elizabeth Ramaccia is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Megan Hafner on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Elizabeth has a background in community development and civic participation. Prior to Purpose, she led community-based design projects at a housing nonprofit in rural Alabama. Her prior research focused on the role of design thinking in community leadership development in underresourced American communities.

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud

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Abstract

Critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of makerspaces, that is to say, those emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices; exercise community-based forms of governance; and utilize local manufacturing technologies. A bird’s-eye-view of the history of makerspaces is provided tracing their roots back to the hacker movement. Drawing from secondary sources, their community-building, learning and innovation potential is briefly discussed. Makerspaces, this essay argues, can serve as hubs and vehicles for citizen-driven transformation and, thus, play a key part in a more inclusive, participatory and commons-oriented vision of the smart city.

Excerpts

Introduction

Urbanization is a trend of our times, with the largest share of the human population globally living in cities; a trend that is only increasing. Cities are economic centers that through the consumption of massive resources lead to heavy environmental impact as well as to social contestations and conflicts. This creates the need for new conceptualizations for a city that will be able to deal with the current issues in more imaginative, inclusive and sustainable ways.

In this paper, critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices and commons-based peer production.

In light of the rise of the collaborative commons, i.e., shared resources, the concept of urban “makerspaces” is discussed. The latter are community-led, open spaces where individuals share resources and meet on a regular basis to collaboratively engage in creative commons-oriented projects, usually utilizing open source software and hardware technologies. Through the intersection of digital technologies and urban life, several initiatives have emerged that attempt to circumvent the dependence on private firms or governments to provide solutions.

What is the community-building, learning and innovation potential of makerspaces towards a more inclusive, commons-oriented smart city?

Community-building potential

Makerspaces can be viewed as community-run hubs that connect citizens not only of the same city but also of other cities worldwide. Approximately 66% of the UK-based makerspaces collaborate with other UK-based or foreign makerspaces on a regular basis, while 46% contribute to commons-oriented, open source projects which normally have a global orientation. Yet, individuals are more engaged and committed to one local makerspace. Further, two of the top reasons people use makerspaces are socializing and learning. Hence, makerspaces can be platforms that cultivate relationships and networks, building social capital, i.e., “social networks and the attendant norms of trust and reciprocity”.

However, claims around the potentialities of makerspaces are still speculative and depend on how individuals associate with such places. While makerspaces have been built in ethnically and geographically diverse environments, there is yet a lack of racial and gender diversity within many of them. For instance, membership is predominantly male in 80% of UK makerspaces and 77% of China’s makers are male. Additionally, 81% of U.S. makers are male with an average income of $106,000. These are indications that participation in the maker movement is heavily dominated by affluent men.

As an attempt to correct this lack of diversity, some feminist and people of color-led makerspaces have emerged, such as Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna and Mothership Hackermoms in Berkley (feminist spaces created in 2008 and 2012 respectively) or Liberating Ourselves Locally in Oakland (a “people of color-led” space created in 2012). However, such strategies have been met with controversy, since they are deemed to go against the principle of openness.

Learning potential

The learning potential of making coupled with open learning environments; project-based learning; informal tinkering; and peer collaboration can motivate the social learning and personalized involvement of participants. Makerspaces exhibit the aforementioned characteristics and, thus, show great promise as emerging learning hubs. That is why makerspaces have recently generated much interest in diverse educational circles. For example, several libraries and museums have created spaces with the aim to empower creative activity, resource-sharing, and active engagement with making, materials, processes, and ideas in relation to their collections and exhibits.

It appears that makerspaces offer the capacity for informal community activity as well as a proper learning environment with a focus on productive processes rather than skill-set building. Varying activities may be combined (like programming and hardware building and even manufacturing tools development), following the approach of constructionism.

Nevertheless, inclusivity and participation in such educational activities is not assured. Although more than 50% of UK makerspaces offer support, courses and tool inductions, the majority of makers are well-educated and technologically-confident. Likewise, 97% of makers in the U.S. have attended or graduated from college, while 80% say they have post-graduate education. Thus, to facilitate learning for diverse users, makerspaces should be staffed by qualified educators who are knowledgeable about theories of teaching and learning as well as about user needs and behaviors.

Innovation potential

In makerspaces people innovate and learn together by making things and using the Web to globally connect and share designs, tutorials and code. They offer creative environments where sustainable entrepreneurs, potentially with diverse motives and backgrounds, can meet and interact and thus benefit from synergies and the cross-pollination of ideas. Moreover, in makerspaces designers can come together and collaborate in participatory explorations during the use phase by prototyping, adding small-scale interventions and, therefore, moving from a “design-in-the-studio” to a “design-in-use” strategy.

Several innovative entrepreneurial endeavors and start-ups have emerged through makerspaces. This article refers to some prominent cases with the aim to provide an overview of the most mature examples that cover a wide spectrum of areas, from ICT and local manufacturing technologies to farming, culture and neuroscience.

In all, makerspaces should not be viewed merely as experimentation sites with local manufacturing technologies but as places “where people are experimenting with new ideas about the relationships amongst corporations, designers, and consumers”. The review of makerspaces-related innovation illustrated that they mainly produce user-led, incremental product and process innovations. Some of the aforementioned projects and eco-systems, such as the RepRap- or Arduino-based eco-systems, may represent both the Schumpeterian and social-oriented understanding of innovation. They seem to create win-win situations for both instigators/entrepreneurs and society, and inaugurate commons-oriented business models which arguably go beyond the classical corporate paradigm and its extractive profit-maximizing practices.

Conclusions

Are makerspaces a manifestation of the “new spirit of capitalism” that has successfully incorporated and adapted several of its various critical cultures? Or could we consider makerspaces as sites with non-negligible post-capitalist dynamics? Both possibilities still exist.

If we subscribe to the idea that at least some makerspaces can be seen as CBPP in practice, then, makerspaces may belong to a new form of capitalism but, at the same time, also highlight ways in which this new form might be transcended. If the dominant discourse of the “smart city” project is aligned with a neoliberal, corporate vision for urban development, then the “makerspace” could simultaneously be a source of legitimacy for the project and also serve as an institution for citizen-driven transformation.

An alternative vision for the smart city may be possible through a commons-oriented approach, geared towards the democratization of means of production. The basic tenet of this approach encourages citizens to participate in creating solutions collectively instead of merely adopting proprietary technology. In addition to virtual connections observed in several sharing economy initiatives, makerspaces can be the physical nodes of a collaborative culture. Further, they can serve as a new “design template”, where knowledge/design is developed and shared as a global digital commons while the actual customized manufacturing takes place locally, thus initiating a decisive break from the current production model.

Full title: “Making (in) the Smart City: The Emergence of Makerspaces”.

Originally published at Telematics & Informatics.

Find this and more articles here.

Photo by olabimakerspace

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Bill Tucker: Mankosi is a remote rural community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. It is home to almost 6,000 people. The nearest city is Mthatha, about 60 kilometres away, as a bird flies.

Most homes are not connected to the electricity grid; residents charge their cellphones at a local shop or shebeen, for which they must pay. Both data and airtime for those phones also cost a lot: a survey shows that people spend up to 22% of their income on telecommunications. This is money that could be spent on food, education, transport and other needs.

They’re not alone. South Africa has some of the highest mobile voice and data costs in the world.

Yet, things are changing in Mankosi. A research team at the University of the Western Cape has worked with residents to develop a solar powered wireless community network.

The Zenzeleni Networks project – Zenzeleni means “do it yourself” in isiXhosa, the Eastern Cape’s most prevalent language – is, as far as we’re aware, South Africa’s first and only Internet Service Provider (ISP) that’s owned and run by a rural cooperative. Just like any ISP, Zenzeleni installs and maintains telecommunications infrastructure and also sells telecommunications services like voice and data.

Yet what’s special about the project is that it involves a registered not-for-profit company which works with cooperatives in the community to deliver affordable voice and data services. Crucially, the project also keeps money in communities like Mankosi, often beset by high rates of unemployment.

The community networks model has proven successful elsewhere in the world: the largest is in Spain – the Guifi.net project. Others that have been developed successfully include projects in Zambia and Mexico.

How it works

The Mankosi project was launched in 2012 and legally registered in 2014. I have done research on information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) in the Mankosi area since 2003. Since then, colleagues and postgraduate students have also worked, even lived, in the area for extensive periods of time.

To establish the Zenzeleni network we approached local leaders to help get the community on board and we provided help and mentorship. Ultimately the residents run the project themselves.

With the local authority’s permission, a cooperative comprising ten local and respected people was formed. This group designed the network layout, and built and installed a dozen solar powered mesh network stations. These are mounted on and inside houses around Mankosi. These are organised in what we call a mesh network and WiFi stations cover an area of 30 square kilometres.

Zenzeleni constitutes a fully fledged Internet Service Provider (ISP), equipped with an Internet and Voice-over Internet Protocol gateway, and a billing system in isiXhosa run by community managers.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), which grants licences to ISPs and collects fees where necessary, granted Zenzeleni a licence exemption; so it costs Zenzeleni nothing in fees to operate infrastructure and sell services. The community only has to pay for the backhaul Internet connectivity, which they can get at wholesale prices from companies like EastTel and OpenServe, and for educational use from TENET.

Any device – even a low to mid-range smart phone – that’s WiFi-enabled can access the network. There are two dedicated wireless connections to “point of presence”, or POP, fibre in Mthatha.

Zenzeleni’s voice calls and data costs are much cheaper than what’s offered by the big mobile operators. For example voice calls can cost 20c a minute rather than the standard R1.50 or more while data costs can be between 20 and 40 times cheaper.

The solar powered stations also charge cell phone batteries less than what’s usually charged by spaza shops or shebeens. Those shops also tend to be some distance from the village, so people save time as well as money.

A true community project

Community is at the heart of Zenzeleni’s model. All revenues stay in the community: each cooperative has a bank account, and all residents get together to decide what to do with the money that’s been paid for Zenzeleni services.

For example, the Mankosi cooperative has provided micro-loans to residents for starting small businesses.

No one is currently earning a salary from the community network. Yet when usage grows, as we expect it will do with super cheap data, revenues are likely to grow so much that the cooperative will want to install more nodes and hire people to actively maintain them making the network more resilient. Since March 2014, the project has earned around R33,600 (about USD$2422.16).

Keeping money at home

On the surface it may appear that Zenzeleni cannibalises the revenues of big telecommunications companies like MTN and Telkom. We believe the opposite is true. Firstly, Zenzeleni purchases backhaul Internet connectivity from areas like Mankosi that Telkom and others have failed to connect – so it’s operating in entirely new areas that have been ignored because they’re considered too remote to generate good revenue.

Secondly, all telecommunications companies earn interconnect fees. Calls to mobile and landline numbers across South Africa incur these fees, which are charged when calling from one network to another. This is also true for Zenzeleni so that’s extra money in the bank for all telecommunications companies.

Lastly, and most importantly, most of the money generated by this project stays in Mankosi. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Zenzeleni model, and one we believe will foster economic growth which will benefit people living in and around the village, and enable them to purchase telecommunications, and other goods and services, that they currently cannot afford.

Zenzeleni Networks’ next goal is to build critical mass to support between 20 and 30 communities surrounding Mankosi. When this happens, about 300,000 people will be able to sustainably connect themselves – and their schools, clinics, hospitals and homes – to cheaper voice, data and phone battery charging. This puts telecommunications into their own hands, by themselves.

Bill Tucker, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of the Western Cape

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo: A Zenzeleni cooperative member carefully aligns some equipment in the village of Mankosi, Eastern Cape /Bill Tucker

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