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

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“Politics is in crisis. Disillusionment, a lack of trust in politicians, apathy, falling turnout at elections and a surge in populist movements around Europe. What is the way out of this miasma?

Digital tools and technologies have transformed the way we live and work. Could they transform our politics too? New technologies are not likely to be a silver bullet to the current predicament, but the lesson from cities across Europe is that they can play a critical role in engaging new groups of people, empowering citizens and forging a new relationship between cities and local residents.

Many of those involved in this new wave of digital democracy came together earlier this summer at the Democratic Cities event in Madrid to discuss the future of politics and democracy. The event also marked the end of D-CENT, a 3-year EU funded project with partners from across Europe, including the Citizens Foundation, Forum Virium Helsinki, Open Knowledge Foundation, Thoughtworks and Centre d’economie de la Sorbonne.

The project, led by Nesta, developed a set of open source, distributed and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment. These include tools which enable citizens to receive real time notifications about issues relevant to them, work collaboratively to propose and draft policies, decide and vote on proposals, and allocate resources through participatory budgeting processes.

Take, for example, Objective8, a tool for online crowdsourcing of proposals and collaborative policy drafting; or Mooncake, which provides a single newsfeed to help bring together comments, media, and notifications from other D-CENT tools. For privacy awareness, Stonecutter is a secure single sign-on for D-CENT which gives users control over the personal data they share; and Agora Voting is a cryptographically secure, verifiable and transparent online voting software, which opens the ballot boxes and tallies the results while preserving secrecy. The D-CENT project also ran workshops and worked with a number of partners to pilot and improve digital platforms in Reykjavik, Helsinki, Barcelona and Madrid.

The Democratic Cities event was an opportunity to hear about the outcomes of the D-CENT project, but also to learn from digital democracy pioneers from further afield. For example, we heard how Pol.is – a tool that collects opinion and then visualises consensus and disagreements within a crowd – was recently used by about 600 participants to map different stakeholders’ views and inform new changes to local Uber regulations in Taipei.

WAGL, a “politics start-up” in South Korea built a tool for direct citizen input into the now famous 192 hour filibuster of an anti-terror bill. We also heard how Wellington City Council used Loomio to engage local residents in agreeing a set of principles for the city’s local alcohol management strategy.

The Net Party, the original pioneers of the now widely used DemocracyOS platform, shared their story of building a large following through online and offline methods, and how they secured the political buy-in to pilot their technology within the Buenos Aires legislature. You can listen back and watch some of these stories, along with a handful of others, here.

What have we learned so far?

If this field of digital democracy is to mature – with cities, parliaments and political parties adopting these tools to engage and empower citizens in their everyday decisions and deliberations – digital activists will need to consider the following issues.

1. Keeping users engaged and informed

Advocates will need to follow three tips for encouraging participation. First, tools should be kept simple. Successful upvoting tools like Plaza Podemos (on Reddit) and Your Priorities make barriers to engagement low through simple and intuitive interfaces. Second, users should be trusted with meaningful questions – asking trivial questions is likely to yield trivial answers (Boaty McBoatface is a useful yardstick in this regard). Third, users should be kept engaged with information about how their input was used. This is particularly difficult where the volume of input is high, where time and staff resources are limited, or where the path of legislation is slow and complex. Nonetheless, these insights remind us to keep the scale, expectations and intended goals of the project as clear as possible from the outset.

2. Finding common standards for evaluation

One of the striking features of the discussion was an absence of information about impact. Where is the evidence? Given the now massive list of examples available it’s important that projects learn from others, share best practice, and, crucially, share failures. Previous work in this area has highlighted that honest discussion around failures can be difficult for projects seeking adoption in an already reluctant political environment. Another difficulty is when the design of a tool is over-emphasised (i.e. look at my beautiful code) at the expense of how the project aims to actually attract participation and achieve impact.

Defining ‘impact’ can be challenging in this space: in most cases, the number of participants is used as the only measure. Other, more difficult questions need to be asked, such as: did the process improve the quality or legitimacy of decision making? Did it help to improve the quality of debate and inform citizens about important political issues? Did it succeed in improving public trust? The World Bank has recently published a useful, and more detailed framework for digital engagement evaluation.

3. Blending online and offline engagement

Some of the most successful digital platforms at the city level, like Decide.Madrid, Decidim.Barcelona and Better Reykjavik, have their roots in bottom-up forms of political engagement (originating from Ahora Madrid, Guanyem Barcelona/ Barcelona En Comu and the Best Party, respectively). City governments elsewhere should learn from this: offline engagement is especially important where accessing hard-to-reach groups is concerned. They must also work with social movements and civil society organisations in order to actively reach out to local residents and pilot digital tools in local communities.

This mindset was well captured by Aik van Eemeren from Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office who said “technology doesn’t own the city, it’s just an enabler”. All this links back to engagement. It’s not all about the tool – a key challenge is working with communities so that they see the value in using it.

4. Broader engagement vs smarter engagement

Other questions arose about the types of crowds necessary to foster collective intelligence. In larger-scale exercises (often above the city level) the shared experiences and knowledge of participants is reduced, segregation of opinion is widened and ownership of the process is more uncertain.

Is the logic of large crowds reconcilable with the logic of policy-making processes in these cases? One study of a crowdsourcing exercise on off-road traffic law in Finland found that “massive, atomic [and] diverse input” was detrimental to the quality of the end result. To make these processes worthwhile, we might need stronger political will; we might need better methods of idea synthesis and aggregation; or perhaps we should seek smaller crowds with more distinct hierarchies of talent and expertise? This is one of the issues Nesta is exploring as part of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance.

Further questions then arise about legitimacy. It was generally assumed among the Democratic Cities attendees, and in the democracy field more generally, that engagement is a good in of itself, and that engagement strategies derive their legitimacy by involving as many people as possible. That is, the more people who were engaged by the process, the more legitimate the process and the decision ultimately taken.

However, there are inevitably some collective problems where a smaller group of participants – who have relevant experience or expertise – can alone improve the quality of decision making. What if processes are perceived as less legitimate but lead to better quality decision making or the inverse, where some processes are seen as legitimate, but lead to poorer quality decision making? This potential tension is something we will consider further over the coming months.

What next?

We’re currently looking at inspiring examples of digital democracy from around the world to distill key lessons for political parties, city governments and national parliaments. We want to understand how digital tools can be used to improve the quality and legitimacy of decision making and how they can be embedded into existing democratic structures and institutions.”

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One of the XCTIT prototypes

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.

XCTIT’s workshop at Can Fugarolas

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.

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