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>

The post Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Join Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel to play Commonspoly- the resource-access game where we win by working as a community. The event will take place at 18:30 on Monday September 17th, at SUPERMARKT Berlin – (Mehringplatz 9, 10969 Berlin). Sign up though the comment section here or through this Facebook event (yes, we hate Facebook too, but we had to do this short notice)

About Commonspoly

Hi there, we hope you had a safe journey, welcome to Commonspoly’s utopia!

Commonspoly is a free licensed board game that was created to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the commons as a critical discourse towards relevant changes in society, but to do it playfully. This game is an ideal device to introduce commons theories to groups in a pedagogical and enjoyable way. But it’s also great for boring, rainy afternoons!

And another thing, Commonspoly is an attempt to repair a misunderstanding that has lasted for more than a century. Back in 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a board game to warn about, and hopefully prevent, the dangerous effects of monopolism. Years later she sold the patent to Parker Brothers, who turned the game into the Monopoly we know today: a game that celebrates huge economic accumulation and the bankruptcy of anyone but you.

Commonspoly turns the basic features of the traditional game upside down in an effort to imagine a possible world based on cooperation instead of competition. But is it possible to play a board game where the players have to find ways to work together, not beat each other? Well, the cycles between financial crises are shortening, global unemployment rates are skyrocketing, ice caps are melting, and we all have that hard-to-explain, creepy feeling… In this game, it’s a race against time and every player’s help is more than welcome! It’s not all bad news – we have some powerful, community-based tools to use in this struggle against the apocalypse. Let’s get down to business: we have urban, environmental, health and knowledge-based common goods to preserve!

We are working on a new version, which is going to be available this summer. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions: [email protected]

The post Play Commonspoly at SUPERMARKT Berlin – Sept 17th appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The new site features four types of materials suited different levels of interest: short Q&A-style articles with illustrations; longer, in-depth articles for the more serious reader; a library of downloaded PDF versions of research publications by the P2P Foundation; and a collection of videos, audio interviews and links to other content.

The website does a great service in introducing topics that are sometimes elusive or abstract, giving them a solid explanation and lots of working examples. Go check it out!

Start with a series of Short Articles that addresses such questions as “What is a commons transition?” and “What is distributed manufacturing?” Then browse the Longer Articles section and read “10 ways to accelerate the Peer to Peer and Commons Economy,” a visionary piece on the movement to design global and manufacture locally.

The Library contains a number of major reports on how to embark upon a commons transition. The organizational study of Catalan Integral Cooperative as a post-capitalist model is fascinating. Check out the new conceptualizations of value in a commons economy, and the two-part report on the impact of peer production on energy use, thermodynamics, and the natural world.

There is also a wonderful overview of some leading commons, especially tech-oriented ones, in a collection of fifteen case studies. These explore such projects as Wikihouse, Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysan, Mutual Aid Networks, Spain’s Municipalist Coalitions, and the Ghent’s urban commons (in Belgium).

Elena Martinez Vicente has produced a number of fantastic infographics that really help demystify some abstract ideas (the new ecosystem of value creation, patterns of open coops, cosmo-local production). Mercè Moreno Tarrés did the dazzling original art for the site, which helps make the material so engaging.

The Commons Transition Primer was produced by the Peer to Peer Foundation and P2P Labs with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Kudos to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for conceptualizing the project and preparing much of the material, and to Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis for their contributions to the text.

The post The Commons Transition Primer Demystifies and Delights appeared first on P2P Foundation.

You may not know it by its admittedly awkward name, but a process known as commons-based peer production (CBPP) supports much of our online life. CBPP describes internet-enabled, peer-to-peer infrastructures that allow people to communicate, self-organize and produce together. The value of what is produced is not extracted for private profit, but fed back into a knowledge, design and software commons — resources which are managed by a community, according to the terms set by that community. Wikipedia, WordPress, the Firefox browser and the Apache HTTP web server are some of the best-known examples.

If the first wave of commons-based peer production was mainly created digitally and shared online, we now see a second wave spreading back into physical space. Commoning, as a longstanding human practice that precedes commons-based peer production, naturally began in the material world. It eventually expanded into virtual space and now returns to the physical sphere, where the digital realm becomes a partner in new forms of resource stewardship, production and distribution. In other words, the commons has come full circle, from the natural commons described by Elinor Ostrom, through commons-based peer production in digital communities, to distributed physical manufacturing.

This recent process of bringing peer production to the physical world is called Design Global, Manufacture Local (DGML). Here’s how it works: A design is created using the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, and then produced using local manufacturing and automation technologies. These can include three-dimensional printers, computer numerical control (CNC) machines or even low-tech crafts tools and appropriate technology — often in combination. The formula is: What is “light” (knowledge) is global, and what is “heavy” (physical manufacture) is local. DGML and its unique characteristics help open new, sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption.

Imagine a process where designs are co-created, reviewed and refined as part of a global digital commons (i.e. a universally available shared resource). Meanwhile, the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind. The process of making something together as a community creates new ideas and innovations which can feed back into their originating design commons. This cycle describes a radically democratized way to make objects with an increased capacity for innovation and resilience.

Current examples of the DGML approach include WikiHouse, a nonprofit foundation sharing templates for modular housing; OpenBionics, creating three-dimensional printed medical prosthetics which cost a fraction (0.1 to 1 percent) of the price of standard prosthetics; L’Atelier Paysan, an open source cooperative fostering technological sovereignty for small- and medium-scale ecological agriculture; Farm Hack, a farmer-driven community network sharing open source know-how amongst do-it-yourself agricultural tech innovators; and Habibi.Works, an intercultural makerspace in northern Greece where Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees develop DGML projects in a communal atmosphere.

This ecologically viable mode of production has three key patterns:

1) Nonprofit: Objects are designed for optimum usability, not to create tension between supply and demand. This eliminates planned obsolescence or induced consumerism while promoting modular, durable and practical applications.

2) Local: Physical manufacturing is done in community workshops, with bespoke production adapted to local needs. These are economies of scope, not of scale. On-demand local production bypasses the need for huge capital outlays and the subsequent necessity to “keep the machines running” night and day to satisfy the expectations of investors with over-capacity and over-production. Transportation costs — whether financial or ecological — are eradicated, while maintenance, fabrication of spare parts and waste treatment are handled locally.

3) Shared: Idle resources are identified and shared by the community. These can be immaterial and shared globally (blueprints, collaboration protocols, software, documentation, legal forms), or material and managed locally (community spaces, tools and machinery, hackathons). There are no costly patents and no intellectual property regimes to enforce false scarcity. Power is distributed and shared autonomously, creating a “sharing economy” worthy of the name.

To preserve and restore a livable planet, it’s not enough to seize the existing means of production; in fact, it may even not be necessary or recommendable. Rather, we need to reinvent the means of production; to radically  reimagine the way we produce. We must also decide together what not to produce, and when to direct our productive capacities toward ecologically restorative work and the stewardship of natural systems. This includes necessary endeavors like permaculture, landscape restoration, regenerative design and rewilding.

These empowering efforts will remain marginal to the larger economy, however, in the absence of sustainable, sufficient ways of obtaining funding to liberate time for the contributors. Equally problematic is the possibility of the capture and enclosure of the open design commons, to be converted into profit-driven, peer-to-peer hybrids that perpetuate the scarcity mindset of capital. Don’t assume that global corporations or financial institutions are not hip to this revolution; in fact, many companies seem to be more interested in controlling the right to produce through intellectual property and patents, than on taking any of the costs of the production themselves. (Silicon Valley-led “sharing” economy, anyone?)

To avoid this, productive communities must position themselves ahead of the curve by creating cooperative-based livelihood vehicles and solidarity mechanisms to sustain themselves and the invaluable work they perform. Livelihood strategies like Platform and Open Cooperativism lead the way in emancipating this movement of globally conversant yet locally grounded producers and ecosystem restorers. At the same time, locally based yet globally federated political movements — such as the recent surge of international, multi-constituent municipalist political platforms — can spur the conditions for highly participative and democratic “design global, manufacture local” programs.

We can either produce with communities and as part of nature or not. Let’s make the right choice.

• Originally published in Truthout
• Art by Jared Rodríguez

The post Reimagine, don’t seize, the means of production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our intention with this site is to make the ideas of the Commons and P2P accessible and attractive to commoners and communities worldwide. The site is organized into several sections:

1. Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
2. Long: In-depth, longer articles
3. Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
4. More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links

We’ve built some other useful features into this site, too. In the Short articles, Key Concept pop-ups offer definitions of specialized terminology. Case Studies outline the practices of existing commons communities, often adapted from our own research publications. Infographics and illustrations have sections of their own, for easy sharing. To keep things light, we’ve added a tab with a “TLDR” summary (internet slang for “too long/didn’t read”, if you didn’t already know), plus a tab for Resources which links to source and reference materials for the specific article.

This website was produced with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and is an outgrowth of our previous Commons Transition and P2P Primer in print form, which was co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis and produced in cooperation with the Transnational Institute (TNI). It will be followed in 2018 by a publication from Westminster Press titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto and written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis. We’d like to thank Heike Loeschmann, Joanna Barelkowska and Joerg Haas of the Böll Foundation for their consistent support and feedback during the process.

The Commons Transition Primer website project was coordinated, edited and/or co-written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel (except where other authorship is noted). Elena Martínez Vicente led the design and UX, Mercè Moreno Tarrés provided the illustrations while Javier Arturo Rodriguez took care of the technical details and backend. Thanks are due to David Bollier, Vasilis Kostakis and Rajesh Makwana for reviewing the texts in the “Shorts” section. Special thanks are also due for the technical expertise and last-minute interventions of our colleague, Lisha Sterling.

We offer thanks to the growing, worldwide P2P Foundation community for continuing to enthusiastically share, research, promote and experiment with the ideas and tools of the Commons and P2P. We hope you enjoy this site (and your feedback is welcome!)

The post Commons Transition, Illustrated – Our New Web Primer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Are there alternatives to the profit-driven models of translating, publishing and distributing books? “Information wants to be free”, a famous dictum reads; and the following article demonstrates, through a case study of Guerrilla Translation’s “Think Global, Print Local” initiative, how this could happen:

“To bolster commoning as challenge to the standard practices of economics, alternative relations and structures of production are needed. In this context, the starting points of this article are a problem and a nascent opportunity. The problem is the need to share a knowledge artifact, such as a book, with people and communities elsewhere, but in a language into which the artifact has not yet been translated. The opportunity is the convergence of decentralized online and offline ways of sharing knowledge, from the Ιnternet and book printers to commons-oriented copyright licenses and crowdfunding platforms.

This article discusses a case study that synthesizes the aforementioned dynamics and tools and, therefore, presents a new commons-based publishing model codified as “think global, print local”. The uniqueness of the case rests in its goal to pioneer a commons-based model of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. By using the digital knowledge commons as well as distributed nodes of printing hardware, this case study tries to avoid centralized production and environmentally harmful international shipping in an economically viable way for its contributors.

The question we address is the following: Can this experiment serve as a template or an example that could strengthen commons-based practices in the field of writing, translating and publishing? This article focuses on two interrelated aspects that may allow us to further the understanding of institutions for the use and management of shared resources. First, we describe an emerging techno-economic model of value creation and distribution in relation to the knowledge commons. Second, we discuss the dynamics of the chosen commons-oriented copyright license, named the Peer Production License.”

Read the full article here.

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Click on the image to download

Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer

This short primer, co-published with the Transnational Institute explains the Commons and P2P, how they interrelate, their movements and trends, and how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental. Drawing from our ten year + history researching and advocating for P2P/Commons Alternatives, the Primer is structured in a Q&A format, providing answers to questions such as “What are the Commons, what is P2P and how do they relate together?” “What are P2P Economics?” “What are P2P Politics?” and, more important, how these different factors can combine together at higher levels of complexity to form a viable transition strategy to  solid post-capitalist system that is respectful of people and planet.

The Primer features explanations for some of the key concepts we handle, as well as various case studies and infographics. It was co-written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel and designed by Elena Martínez, from the P2P Foundation.

The Commons Transition Primer is a year-long multimedia project/campaign aimed at making the world of the Commons and P2P more comprehensible and attractive to commoners worldwide. This publication will be followed up by a website, video material and events. In 2018 we will culminate the process with a full-length publication on the Commons Transition co-authored by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis.

Click here to download Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer

BIOS:

Michel Bauwens, co-founder and core team member of the P2P Foundation, is a Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist. An active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subjects of technology, culture and business innovation, he is the Vision Coordinator for the P2P Foundation.

Vasilis Kostakis is the founder and coordinator of the interdisciplinary research hub P2P Lab that investigates the socio-economic and political impact of free and open-source technologies. He was the Research Coordinator and is now a core team member of the P2P Foundation.

Stacco Troncoso is a core team member and Advocacy Coordinator for the P2P Foundation. A co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, his work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners worldwide.

Ann Marie Utratel is a core team member of the P2P Foundation working in advocacy and infrastructure. She is also a co-founder of Guerrilla Translation and contributes narrative storytelling and collaborates in strategic alliance building for the larger P2P/Commons ecosystem.

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“Who has access to knowledge and information online? Who controls this exchange and who can profit from it? These issues of decisive importance to our digital future are the P2P Foundation’s bread and butter. In recognition of their committed work, the non-profit organization is this year’s recipient of the Golden Nica in the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category.

Credit: Stefano Borghi

The term P2P is actually stands for peer-to-peer—i.e. communication among equals in a network. But in the case of the P2P Foundation, it isn’t defined strictly in a technical sense; P2P is meant more in the sense of jointly achieving objectives, collaboration, person to person and people to people. Since it was founded 10 years ago by Michel Bauwens, the P2P Foundation has put into place key building blocks for a new mode of communication—digital exchange of knowledge that’s self-organized on the internet and gets along completely without hierarchical structures.

There are many examples of P2P platforms—for instance, 3-D printable prostheses for people in war zones, open-source cars that can be assembled in no time, and Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation’s internet browser that was developed by a network including not only professional programmers but also volunteer experts from all over the world. The P2P idea has gone into every one of these projects.

The P2P Foundation‘s mission is to analyze and document these peer-to-peer strategies and to make them available for other uses to anyone interested in doing so. Its go-to source is the P2P Foundation Wiki, the world’s largest platform that bundles and shares info about P2P. The non-profit organization is this year’s recipient of the Golden Nica in the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category. In this interview, Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation’s staff talk about their understanding of P2P and its advantages.

P2P and Utopia from P2P Lab on Vimeo.

Some of us first experienced the advantages of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network while downloading files from P2P sharing platforms like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa or BitTorrent. What’s your understanding of P2P?

Ann Marie Utratel: Although these platforms can be described as P2P, our understanding of it is more generally human-scale rather than exclusively tech-focused. For us, it means “person to person”, “people to people”. Peer to peer is a relational dynamic; it describes the process of people getting together and self-organizing in a non-hierarchical way to create common value. Processes like these have been happening throughout human existence, but with the advent of the Internet, we can see a rapid crystallization of P2P practices happening worldwide.

Stacco Troncoso: However, there are many different understandings of P2P. The key factor for us is whether these peer to peer dynamics channel the value they create into a commons. A platform like Airbnb, for example, may be P2P on the surface in that it is a group of people getting together to mutualize housing for travel rentals: but how is it creating a commons? Is the person who’s renting his or her house now a peer of Airbnb’s upper management or investors? In other words, do they hold a representative degree of decision-making power about the resources spent and gained in the enterprise? True P2P describes a more horizontal and self-managed system of peer interactions. Popular examples include Couchsurfing, Wikipedia and the Linux operating system, but we also see P2P practices increasing in the sectors of material production, politics and activism. When the structure becomes flatter and more broadly inclusive, less top-down, that’s a sign of P2P principles and activity.

Credit: Stefano Borghi

What are the advantages of peer-to-peer (P2P) for our society?

Stacco Troncoso: Commons-oriented P2P dynamics promote equal access, participation and fairness, all qualities that help foster democratic interactions. When civil society produces something of value, these achievements are sometimes invisible.

Ann Marie Utratel: We can even see this in the language used to describe this form of value creation: “non-governmental, non-profit or third sector”. It’s a rather marginalizing, even negating, set of descriptions that can create a subtle impression of outliers, or outsider activities, somehow less valuable. We believe that civil society, or “peers”, are in fact the main producers of value.

Stacco Troncoso: The roles of government and markets could be drastically altered through the introduction of P2P practices. Right now, cities like Madrid and Barcelona in Spain and Bologna in Italy are among those at the forefront of social innovation and democratic participation. Ethical entrepreneurial coalitions such as Enspiral and the Fairshares Association demonstrate that there are more democratic, fair and challenging alternatives to the market innovations of the start-up world.

Ann Marie Utratel: More “peer to peer” interaction means more innovation, engagement and creativity. It places tools into people’s hands, enabling their responsible participation in their own environments.

What were the initial reasons to form the P2P Foundation more than 10 years ago?

Stacco Troncoso: Our co-founder, Michel Bauwens, discovered through his initial research that while P2P was an existing, practical relationship dynamic, it was still very much invisible, even to those involved. An initiative was required to help gather information with which to produce a solid, integrative P2P theory, share this knowledge and help people begin to form a resilient network. This work began in 2005 with our participatory wiki and has since expanded to include more in-depth research and advocacy work to help people, organizations and governments’ transition towards commons-based approaches in all fields of life.

p2pfoundation.net is a comprehensive resource for peer to peer practices. What are your target audiences and what do they find in your wiki?

Ann Marie Utratel: Our audience is varied. It began with academics and researchers, activists and organizers, authors and speakers, but the truth is that through social media and in-person events and outreach, our audience has become much wider, transcending the more specialized initial audience for wiki.

Stacco Troncoso: Our main wiki is very extensive and far ranging, featuring over 30.000 articles and more than 2.000 users. We also maintain another wiki (Commons Transition) focused on concrete solutions for change makers, as well two blogs, a daily “newspaper” which has been reflecting the ongoing realities of the P2P/Commons movement during the last ten years, and Commons Transition, which highlights our most refined materials, as well as feature stories and reports. Our dedicated research division, the P2P Lab, also regularly publishes research papers painstakingly analysing the potential of P2P practices.

OSVehicle – TABBY EVO Platform Assembly Timelapse from OSVehicle on Vimeo.

Could you introduce us some current and innovative P2P projects you’ve encountered?

Stacco Troncoso: Examples abound in the fields of material and immaterial production. There are exciting projects like Refugee Open Ware, which provides open source solutions, education and prosthetics in war torn areas. There’s also the Tabby, an urban, open source car which can be manufactured in less than an hour, or Wikihouse, an open source construction set, allowing anyone to design, download and easily fabricate and assemble houses. The most widely visible projects include the Mozilla web browser, the Apache web server, and the Linux operating system and its offshoots.

Ann Marie Utratel: Apart from these manufacturing projects, we are also excited about P2P forms of governance in certain cities (mentioned above), with their inclusion of practises like participatory budgeting and civic decision-making. P2P is synonymous with innovation.

Are there any serious alternatives to social media platforms like Facebook and search engines like Google? And isn’t it hard to compete with these Internet giants?

Ann Marie Utratel: There are serious alternatives, such as GNU social, Duck Duck and Diaspora, but “serious” is not the same as “competitive”. In this, we have a long way to go. Even people who are educated about the dangers of centralized platforms find it hard to break away.

Stacco Troncoso: The pervasiveness of these platforms was built through huge investment programs and dubious business models (e.g. privacy concerns, harvesting user data), which have resulting in not only in popularity but also, far more attractive user interfaces. Decentralized platforms which do not traffic in user data find it much harder to find the necessary funding that would allow them to realistically compete with the giants.

Ann Marie Utratel: We need alternative funding options for platforms that create commons, not commodities, and which also offer real benefits to potential users, such as privacy, ownership of information, and more democratic interfaces.

As part of the core team at the P2P Foundation, Ann Marie Utratel is the communications steward. She also works on the Commons Transition platform, web magazine and its associated projects, as well as on the P2Pvalue project. Additionally, she is the co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, and is a Network Hubs correspondent for the Connected Actions for the Commons project of the European Cultural Foundation.

Stacco Troncoso is the strategic direction steward of the P2P Foundation as well as the project lead for Commons Transition, the P2PF’s main communication and advocacy hub. He is also co-founder of the P2P translation collective Guerrilla Translation and designer/content editor for CommonsTransition.org, the P2P Foundation blog, and the new Commons Strategies Group website. His work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship-building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners worldwide.

NOTE: The Prix Ars Electronica is featured in the CyberArts exhibition, the Prix Forums and the Ars Electronica Gala at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival (theme: RADICAL ATOMS and the alchemists of our time; dates: September 8-12, 2016). At Prix Forum II – Digital Communities on Saturday, September 10, 16, festivalgoers will have an opportunity to meet Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation and get first-hand information about this non-profit organization.“

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