The Xarxa de Ciència, Tècnica i Tecnologia (XCTIT), which means “Network of Science, Technique and Technology”, is the committee of the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) that is responsible for the development of tools and machines adapted to the needs of productive projects in CIC’s cooperative network. The driving force of XCTIT is its conviction that the machines developed by the industry are not appropriate for the needs of commons-oriented projects, which they imprison into a relation of dependence with capitalist firms. By contrast, XCTIT develops solutions – which exemplify the principles of open design, appropriate technology and the integral revolution – geared to the needs of commons-oriented cooperative projects. In this way, XCTIT serves as a “vehicle” for the re-appropriation of science, technique and technology by the new cooperative movement.
Presently, XCTIT’s activities focus on the development of various prototypes – mostly of agricultural tools and machines – and the organization of training workshops for the purpose of knowledge sharing. XCTIT is also engaged in the production of theory (e.g. through publications like this) and in the licensing of the technology artefacts developed by the committee and its collaborators. XCTIT’s last undertaking is an open design license called “XCTIT-GPL”, which gives end-users the right to modify and redistribute XCTIT-GPL-licensed technologies, thereby protecting legally the free sharing of knowledge.
The committee is made up of five core members (working full-time) and about twenty collaborators who are actively involved in its activities. For the coordination of the group and decision-making, XCTIT has a meeting once a week at Can Fugarolas, where its workshop has been hosted since 2014.
Can Fugarolas is not just a building. It is a collectively managed space of 4000 m2 in the seaside town of Mataró (near Barcelona) in Catalonia, which is host to the activities of about a dozen collectivities like XCTIT. For the payment of the rent, which is a thousand euros per month, each collectivity contributes according to (a) the character of its activities – whether or nor they are profit-oriented and “eco-friendly” – and (b) how much space it occupies inside the building. For XCTIT, in specific, the rent of the space occupied by its workshop is a hundred euros per month.
To this day, the work of the committee has been supported by the “basic income” of four hundred “monetary units” received by each of its members. However, in the context of CIC’s strategy of decentralization, the last permanent assembly (in Barcelona in May 2016) decided to discontinue the provision of basic income to the XCTIT, thereby turning it from a committee into a financially autonomous project. Consequently, in order to ensure its sustainability, from now on XCTIT plans to rely on the following two sources of income: first, it collects 20% of the revenue from the workshops organized by other groups and collectivities at XCTIT’s space inside Can Fugarolas.[1] Furthermore, it aspires to complement its income through replicat.net, which it recently launched as an electronic marketplace for the prototypes developed by XCTIT and its collaborators.[2]
Notes
[1] So far this income has been used to fund projects in XCTIT’s network, such as Faboratory and Can Cuadres.
[2] XCTIT collects 2% of the revenue from the sales of prototypes developed by its collaborators.