Background

The terms “Sharing Economy” or “Collaborative Economy” have been commonly used in recent years to refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models and forms of work, from the development of far-reaching corporate digital platforms that have become means of organising cooperative practices, to local, regional and community-led collaborative initiatives in sectors such as housing, tourism, transport, social enterprise, culture and the arts, etc. Researchers from many disciplines are currently conducting ethnographic studies of practices, cultures, socio-technical systems and lived experiences of collaborative economies, producing case studies and data sets documenting these realities and their impacts and implications, as well as developing methodological and epistemological insights and sensibilities about approaching these contexts
ethnographically.

The conference will feature parallel paper presentations, keynote talks and open discussion sessions.

Participation in the conference will be free of charge (but places will be limited).

The conference is supported by the COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy” ( http://sharingandcaring.eu/), developing a network of actors focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice focused approach.

Submission Themes

We are soliciting papers contributing ethnographic accounts and understandings of collaborative economy practices and communities, and therefore contributing to the development of a multi-faceted view on sharing and caring practices. We are also keen on receiving papers focusing on the methodological aspects of studying collaborative economi(es) e.g. collaborative ethnography, participatory action research, co-design etc.

Suggested themes include (but are not limited to):

• Ethnographic accounts of practices and/or of forms of community aggregation in collaborative economy settings
• Ethnographic case studies of collaborative economy initiatives, frameworks and platforms
• Instances of ethnographically-informed design of collaborative systems in support of collaborative economy practices
• Reflections on theoretical, epistemological and methodological challenges of studying the collaborative economy ethnographically

Submission Instructions

• Abstracts should be between 500 and 700 words
• Papers should be between a minimum of 3,000 and a maximum of 4,000 words plus references.
• Papers should be anonymised for submission
• Papers should be formatted according to the requested template.
• Submissions should be made through EasyChair.
• All papers will be peer reviewed by the Scientific Committee, and accepted papers will be included in the conference book of proceedings and invited for presentation at the conference.
• Following the conference, authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their contributions for consideration for inclusion into an edited book.

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 April 2019

Notifications to Authors: 29 April 2019

Papers Submission Deadline: 19 July 2019

Notifications to Authors: 19 August 2019

Final Versions of Papers Due: 20 September 2019

Conference in Edinburgh: 25th October 2019

Organising Committee

Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh)

Proferssor Luigina Ciolfi (Sheffield Hallam University)

Scientific Committee

https://ulris.ul.ie/live/!W_VA_CV_BUILDER.SHOW_ALL?user=gabriela.avram@ul.ieGabriela Avram (University of Limerick, IE)

Chiara Bassetti (University of Trento, IT)

Vida Česnuitytė (Mykolas Romeris University, LT)

Professor Luigina Ciolfi (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)

Professor Richard Coyne (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Morgan Currie (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Professor Dimitris Dalakoglou (Vrije University Amsterdam, NL)

Anna Farmaki (Cyprus University of Technology, CY)

Alessandro Gandini (University of Milan, IT)

Karen Gregory (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Athina Karatzogianni (University of Leicester, UK)

Cindy Kohtala (Aaalto University, FI)

Airi Lampinen (Stockholm University, SE)

Cristina Miguel (Leeds Beckett University, UK)

Maria Partalidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR)

Chiara Rossitto (Stockholm University, SE)

Mariacristina Sciannamblo (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, PT)

Professor Chris Speed (University of Edinburgh, UK)

James Stewart (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Özge Subaşi (Koç University, TR)

Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh, UK)

For further information about the conference and/or CFP, please email us here: ethnocol@ed.ac.uk ethnocol@ed.ac.uk

The post CfP: “Ethnographies of Collaborative Economi(es) Conference” – University of Edinburgh, 25 October, 2019 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

GT’s model is an extensive overhaul of an orphaned open source governance protocol ^[1], which we have been substantially overhauled to better fit our needs. The adapted model explicitly incorporates the key practices of Open Cooperativism (a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the social tradition of the cooperative movement), Contributive Accounting (a form of accounting where contributions to a shared project are logged to ensure fair distributions of income and livelihoods) and, uniquely in this space, feminist economics and care work as essential elements ^[2].

After years of discussing the model, we decided to collectively reimagine it by convening a group of experts on decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, peer governance, distributed tech and mutualized finance. We called this process “Guerrilla Translation Reloaded“, which culminated in a new version of the model: The Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance and Economic Model (currently at version 2.0)

The full model can be read in the link above, but this article takes a narrative approach to answer two very simple questions: what is the model’s logic, and how does it work?

The best way to understand it may seem counterintuitive at first. If Guerrilla Translation is a co-op, think of the co-op members as shareholders. Okay, like in an evil corporation, but bear with us. Each member is an owner, holding different types of shares in the collective. These correspond to tracked “pro bono” (commons-oriented voluntary work chosen by the translators) and “livelihood” (paid) work, as well as reproductive or care work. Shares in these three types of work determine how much is paid on a monthly basis. Where does the money to pay shares come from, and how are they paid? From the productive work performed by the worker-owners — in GT’s case, that work is written and simultaneous translation, copyediting, subtitling, and related services. We will explain the “how” below.

In short, the more effort and care put into the collective, the larger the share. This is not a competitive, game-theory influenced scheme; it’s a solidarity based strategy for economic resistance that allows all members to contribute according to their capacity. All members create value; part of this value is processed through a market interface (the agency) and is converted into monetary value, which is then pooled and distributed to benefit all value streams. We call this value sovereignty. And, although the default decision making protocol is virtually identical to a traditional coop’s “one member, one vote” principle, your shares can influence decision making in critical situations, such as blocked proposal.

How is this type of share-holding a contrast to that found in a corporation? Let’s break down the differences. While shareholders in a corporation accrue power through money, in our model, power is treated differently. The descriptions are power-to and power-with, accrued via productive and reproductive work taken for the health of the collective and the Commons. A corporation (or a start-up, or any capitalist business) employs wage labor to produce profit-maximizing commodities though privately owned and managed productive infrastructures. By contrast, in an Open Coop, we work together for social and environmental purposes while also creating commons and building community, locally and/or globally. The model allows us to turn our talents to worthwhile, not dead-end, causes. This is how we are practicing economic resistance.

The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: How does it work?

We have established that Guerrilla Translators perform two types of productive work: pro-bono and paid (more about reproductive or care work later). If we take written translation as an example, both types are essentially identical. They are performed by the same team, using the same methods, working collectively, and sharing both the work and the eventual rewards. So, what are the differences?

Pro-bono translations are the ones we choose to do ourselves, based on our enthusiasm for the original material and well aligned with our values. This doesn’t make us unpaid volunteers, though. It all boils down to the way we choose to distribute value. To us, a pro-bono or a paid translation has the same value – literally. We assign a (cost) value for all work we do, whether it’s a self-selected pro-bono piece for publication on our blog, or work contracted by a client. Our model of income distribution diverts a portion of every paid/contracted job towards fulfilling the value of the pro-bono work shares accrued by our members. This has several functions. First, it allows all members of the collective to gain an amount of income from their productive work, whether it was pro-bono or paid. Second, collective members are not put into competition among themselves for paid work, nor for the “best” paid work (based on the per-word rate). All work is valued internally at the same rate, regardless of the external prices which are variable.

We have several pricing tiers for our clients. Metaphorically, there’s a pay-it-forward spirit involved here on the client side, but it’s more like pay-it-backward-and-forward internally in the collective. Clients with the greatest financial means who are aligned with our principles and wish to provide support for our knowledge commons are offered the top tier rate – this is still quite competitive, in fact at the lower end of typical translation pricing. There will be a penny or two per word that these clients are directly donating to our pro-bono shares and also towards any contract jobs we accept for clients with minimal or bare-bones budgets (including small co-ops, activist collectives, non-VC startups, and others). This sliding scale helps us nurture relationships and help support collectives and initiatives with the least financial means so it is fair for everyone.

The soft stuff is the hard stuff: the importance of a care work

So far, we have mainly spoken about productive, tangible work: translations, editing, formatting. These tasks are mostly word-based and therefore, easy to quantify and assign credits. But what about everything that leads, directly or indirectly, to paid work? Searching for clients, project management, quality control, relationship and trust building, etc. – all the invisible work that goes into keeping afloat? This is reproductive work, or care work.

In GT. we distinguish between two types of care work: that for the health of the collective, and that for the living beings within.

When talking about caring for the health of the collective, we conceive it as a living entity or system, even a commons. The emergent values of this system are encoded in the governance model and embodied by the collective’s practices and legal-technical structures ^[3]. To maintain a healthy collective we choose to honour our collective agreements, maintain our communication rhythms, and distribute the care work needed to make the collective thrive. Other ways to care for the health of the collective include coop and business development, seeking and attending to clients, making sure our financials are up to date and everything is paid, maintaining active relationships with authors, publishers, following through on our commitments… everything that you’d consider as “admin” work in a traditional agency or co-op, and on top of that, everything else that’s easily forgotten if you’re not doing it yourself. It’s literally invisible work to those who don’t acknowledge it, and work that many feel unjustifiably obligated to take on.

The difference is that in Guerrilla Translation, these activities aren’t assigned to set roles. Instead, all “caring for the health of the collective” aka care work items are modular, easily visualized, and can be picked up by any collective member. In fact, those members may belong to one or more work circles, which steward certain areas, such as community, sustainability, networking, training, tech, etc.

Additionally, when we speak about care work for the living beings who make the collective, we refer to the individual Guerrilla Translators who mutually build trust and intimacy to care for and support each other. Our cooperative practices should never be solely dependent on technology or protocols, including the governance model. These are only tools to facilitate and strengthen our collaborative culture.

We believe that cooperative cohesion is primarily based on healthy, consent-based heterarchical relationships. To foster these we have committed to certain regular practices, such as mentoring — where we practice and document peer learning in the collective’s tools and practices — and mutual support — where we look after each other and care for our mutual well-being, attuned to everyone’s moods, needs and larger realities beyond the collective.

Every member, whether in training or longstanding, is supported by a specific person who has their back. Every member has someone else’s back. Supported members have a safe space to express themselves to be cared for and heard within the collective. In this relationship, they may also be reminded of their commitments, etc. Conflict resolution is handled through the mutual support system, ensuring the distribution of personal care work. This has been a very basic overview of the model’s structural (credits and shares) and cultural (care work) qualities. If it raises more questions than it answers, or if you’re simply curious, you can read the full model. In the following sections, we will visualize the ways in which the model can work.

What this looks like in practice

Meet “Jill”, a Guerrilla Translator. Today she’s got a little bit of a time and has chosen an article to be translated. Maybe she proposed it, or maybe she picked it up from an existing list of material waiting to be translated. She contacts the author to let her know that GT would like to translate and publish the article, and asks for any required permission if necessary, etc.

This describes a pro-bono translation. Jill will work alongside “María”, a copyeditor, and “Deb”, who’ll take care of the web formatting and social media promotion of the article.

The article is 1000 words long. This wordcount is processed through GT’s internal credits protocol, with this pro-bono translation valued at 0,16 credits per word. Once completed, 160 Love credits will be created. This is how they are split:

• 80 for the translation (Jill)
• 40 for the copyediting/proofreading (María)
• 10 for pre production (Jill, as she chose the article and contacted the author)
• 20 for formatting (Deb)
• 10 for post production (Deb, as she will be promoting the translation doing social media, etc) ^[4]

Let’s imagine that this is the first time that Jill, Maria and Deb have done a pro-bono project for GT. Once the project is accounted for, their respective pro-bono shares will look like this:

• Jill has accrued 90 Love Credits
• María has accrued 40 Love Credits
• Deb has accrued 30 Love Credits

A week passes, and an author or client wants to contract GT to translate an article. This is called livelihood work. The material is chosen by the client (obviously), and the deadline negotiated with the collective. Coincidentally, the text to be translated is also 1000 words long (amazing how our examples are identical!). GT’s agency side uses a sliding scale for prices. This client is a small, open source-oriented NGO, so the price is quoted at 0,12 € per word. The team will be Jill as the translator and María as the editor. Note that unlike the pro-bono translation above, there is no web formatting to be done. Once the translation is completed, the client owes GT 120 €, but this money will not be paid directly to Jill and María as income. This money will be held until the end of the month in a digital trust dedicated to maintaining health of the collective. Meanwhile, once the translation is complete and sent to the client, Jill and Maria will have accrued the following Livelihood Credits:

• Jill has accrued 80 Livelihood Credits
• María has accrued 40 Livelihood Credits

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that these are the only pro bono and agency translations undertaken in the history of the collective. Now it’s getting toward the end of the month and the Guerilla Translators are ready to distribute! There are exactly 120 euros in the bank account ^[5]. This is how they will be distributed:

• 75% of the funds will fulfill Livelihood credit shares
• 25% will fulfill Pro-bono credit shares

These percentages have been chosen to balance the time needed for paid work while not forgetting to set aside some time for the vital pro-bono side. Now, we will divest those 120 € within the trust and into two “streams”:

• The Livelihood Stream receives a total of 90,00 €
• The Love Stream receives a total of 30,00 €

This is now divided among the member’s shares in the following way:

Livelihood Stream: Jill holds 67% of the “shares” (80 credits of 120 total), while María has 33% (40 credits of a 120 total). So out of 88,80 € allocated for the Livelihood Stream, Jill will receive 60,30 €. María receives 29,70 €.

Love Stream: Jill holds 56% of the shares (90 credits of 160 total). María has 25% (40 out of 160) and Deb has 19% (30 out of 160). So, out of 30 € allocated for the Love Stream, Jill will receive 16,80 €, María 7,50 € and Deb 5,70 €.

Totalled up, this is the money that gets paid to the three active members:

• Jill receives 77,10 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)
• María receives 37,20 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)
• Deb receives 5,70 € (Just Love work, as Deb hasn’t performed any livelihood work this month)

This totals 120 €. Magic!

One example among many

This is one situation. During another month, María may have done much more editing work, which takes less time than translation. Deb may have done more care work (more on that later) in both the Love and Livelihood streams. New people may have come in, maybe there’s been a windfall! The model can account for all these and other possibilities while also being dynamic in changing circumstances. It’s a “Team Human” model where the technology is kept flexible, and updates to serve the qualitative experiences of the collective, not just the measurable ones.

The secret life of Livelihood, Love and the ways of measuring credits

As you may have noticed, if 1 love credit equals 1 euro, in the example above we’ve only paid down 30 Love credits (25% of distributed funds) in euros. As 160 Love credits were created with the pro-bono translation, this still leaves 130 which haven’t been paid in money.

The credits that have been converted into money and transferred to individual’s accounts are called Divested credits, ie: they’ve been paid down. The unpaid credits are considered Invested credits: active credits that have yet to be paid. If you think about it, on a month by month basis 75% of Love credits will be “invested” rather than divested/paid. In essence, the coop has an ongoing debt with its own pro-bono/Love stream which will be paid back on a rolling basis. ^[6]

The same situation is also applicable to Livelihood credits. As 75% of earned credits are divested, 25% will remain invested. Both types of credits (Love and Livelihood) can be divested or invested. Meanwhile, the sum of both are considered Historical credits.

“Why so many? So confusing!” Yeah okay, but complexity allows for dynamism, nuance and catering for the different life circumstances and preferences of Guerrilla Translators. Reality is complex, and we want this to work in many real situations.

For now, it’s important to make clear that the total amount of historical credits you have accrued reflect your investment in the organization. Whether it’s productive or reproductive work, it all gets tracked: this informs our governance.

While in typical daily situations, all Guerrilla Translators have what amounts to “one member one vote” rights, historical credits come into play when making critical decisions such as blocked discussions, large structural changes to the governance model, and legal structure changes. In these rare yet important situations, votes can be weighed against an individual’s historical credits.

Meanwhile, the invested/divested ratio helps clarify which members are prioritized for Livelihood work. Given that livelihood work gets divested at a 75% higher rate than Love work, we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to perform it, and that incoming work is offered to those with a higher invested ration first. Similarly, when measuring care work the invested/divested ratios helps clarify when individuals may be benefitting monetarily in lieu of caring for the collective (and its members). In these cases, the ratio is used to determine whether to divest less and agree to a renewed commitment to care work.

In essence, care work is measured in hours, not credits, but it is only entrusted to members who have already gone through a 9-month “dating” phase before becoming fully committed members. All care work hours are instantly turned into historical credits. The Governance Model also describes two scenarios for care work hours: one in which these are paid from an seed-funding pool and a second when once the Open Coop is stable, it is entirely demonetised, with members committing to a set amount of hours each month and adjusting accordingly when there are any discrepancies. ^[7]

Why have we chosen this model?

Imagine that María is single mother with two kids to take care of. She wants to do socially useful work, but her material realities don’t allow her that privilege. By working with Guerrilla Translation she a) can perform paid/livelihood work for causes that matter and b) will not “lose” income by doing pro-bono work – ie, translations that would not otherwise get funded, but which should still be translated.

In fact, she could spend most of her time just doing paid/livelihood work, and it would still benefit the pro-bono/love side (and vice versa). The model addresses the possibility of internal competition for “paid work” overshadowing the social/activist mission of the collective. In short, contributing to the Commons also makes your livelihood more resilient. In turn, you make the Commons more resilient by creating new commons and facilitating communications. The same can be said about care work. The more you demonstrate care for the collective, the more resilient and healthy it will be. If any member can’t contribute a similar proportion of care work as the rest, the member will simply have a proportional amount of their credits deducted and will be encouraged to compensate by committing to more care hours.

In summary, the model is designed to find an optimum balance between paid, pro bono and reproductive work, with equity and continued dialogue at the center.

And much, much more

Here we have touched on some of the characteristics of the model. The full version looks at every aspect in detail, including roles and responsibilities, onboarding and mentoring, the legal/technical backdrop, community rhythms, graduated sanctions, payment mechanics, decision making, and much more.

If you are interested in joining or collaborating with Guerrilla Translation, or are researching or writing about new forms of commons-oriented accounting (and accountability!), you are now much better prepared to grasp the model in its entirety:

Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance Model V 2.0

Meanwhile, for easy reference we are providing below a summary of the model’s main featured and a list of the materials that influenced its creation.

Open Coop Governance Model TLDR

In short: Guerrilla Translators undertake both pro-bono and paid translation/editing work. These types of productive work are accounted for in internal credits (1 credit = 1 Euro), creating shares. Net funds held in GT’s account are then distributed on a monthly basis: 75% of these are used to pay down members’ agency (livelihood) shares. The remaining 25% is used to pay for pro bono (love) shares. Reproductive work is tallied in hours and distributed according to each members ratio of benefits vs. contributions.

Below is the protocol for the model’s main characteristics. These can be applied as a bare-bones formula for other commons-oriented service collectives. Hyperlinks direct to specific sections of the full governance model text or to the Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki.

• The Open Coop performs socially-oriented pro-bono and paid work.
• Pro-bono work creates relationships and social capital which (can) lead to paid work.
• Both forms of work are tallied into credits.
• Net earned income is distributed to fulfil members’ shares, allocated as: Paid (75%) and Pro-bono (25%).
• Client prices are on a sliding scale but members’ credits accrued are stable.
• Higher (client) prices lead to surpluses, used to accelerate pro-bono credit payment.
• There are three levels of participation: Casual/unpaid (commons-based peer production); Dating/partly paid (Commons/coop onboarding process); and Committed/paid (Commons and Coop full membership).
• Casual members have no responsibilities and Committed members review their work for inclusion, or not
• Dating members have ongoing responsibilities (pro-bono and care work) during a nine month trial periodbefore mutual decisions are made about becoming Committed. They are peer mentored by the collective and continually evaluated.
• Committed members have ongoing responsibilities (pro-bono and care work), evaluated quarterly. Members unable to maintain these are downgraded from the Coop.
• Care and reproductive work is valued as highly as productive work. “Care” means caring for the health of the collective and also caring for its individual members.
• Care work is valued in time and entrusted selectively by committed members.
• Decision making is made by consent. Committed members’ votes are binding.
• Reproductive care work and productive pro-bono and paid work affect each member’s standing in the coop, as seen in their total credits over time.

Suggested Reading

First is a summary article of our GT Reloaded event, documenting the main discussions and takeaways from the encounter, where we picked apart and reimagined the governance model:

• Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism (article) “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.” See also the Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Workshop Report for a more detailed account.

Following is a list of articles, papers, videos on things that have influenced our governance model and general philosophy. They also explore some of the tensions we have tried to reconcile: between metrics and the immeasurable, system design and lived experience, and productive and reproductive work.

• Patterns for Decentralised Governance and why Blockchain Doesn’t Decentralise Power… Unless You Design It To (Video and article) “There is a lot of anticipation for how blockchain and other decentralising technologies are going to drastically reshape society, but do they address power? “If you take a step back from the technology, if you look at the challenges we face in wider society, and you look at the history of social change, if you step back and just consider for a minute: “how can we decentralise power?”, then “build a better database” feels like a pretty weak answer. To me, it seems obvious that some of the most urgent power imbalances fall on gender, race, and class lines.”
• Patterns for Decentralised Organising (e-book) “I’m not so interested in what you’re working on together, I’m just going to focus on how you do it. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to build a better electric vehicle, or develop government policy, or blockade a pipeline; whenever you work with a group of people on a shared objective, there’s some stuff you’re going to deal with, some challenges. How do we decide what we’re working on? who does what? who can join our team? what are our expectations for each other? what happens when someone doesn’t fulfill those expectations? what do we do with disagreement? how do decisions get made?” ^[8]
• The Financialization of Life (article). “Do we want everything in life to be a transaction, as the market totalitarians propose? Or do we want to be citizen-commoners, co-creating shared value in freely associating communities? These differences matter, and Salvatore Iaconesi has written a brilliant analysis of the potential dangers of uncritically applying the blockchain to human life.”
• Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (booklet). “What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. This report explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things — and the political agendas we pursue.”
• There is an alternative: participatory economics (interview) In this interview, Michael Albert — co-founder of Znet — reflects on the vision of participatory economics, and how it could take us beyond capitalism. “For the Occupy movements, and for other projects and movements which are rousing and continuing all around the world, to all together merge into a massive project that is truly oriented to engender a classless, feminist, inter-communalist, participatory future — I think their membership will have to be in command, not some elite at the helm. And I think those memberships will have to know the broad defining attributes of where they are trying to go, so they use tactics and strategies consistent with getting there.”
• From Platform to Open Cooperativism (article) “Two cooperative movements are important in this discussion: Platform Cooperativism, and Open Cooperativism. One may be more publicly visible right now, but they have much in common. These movements marry the power of digital networks with the rich history of the cooperative movement. How do these approaches compare? Are they redundant, complementary, mutually exclusive? What exact problems do they solve, and what outcome do they seek? In this article, we explain their origins and characteristics, and see how the actions proposed by these movements can work together, helping us form resilient livelihoods in our networked age.”
• Why do we need a contribution accounting system? (article) “With the advent of the Internet and the development of new digital technologies, the economy is following a trend of decentralization. The most innovative environments are open source communities and peer production is on the rise. The crowd innovates and produces. But the crowd is organized in loose networks, it is geographically dispersed, and contributions to projects follow a long tail distribution. What are the possible reward mechanisms in this new economy?”
• Blockchain technology : toward a decentralized governance of digital platforms? (academic paper) “In the same way, blockchain technology has enabled the emergence of new projects and initiatives designed around to the principles of decentralization and disintermediation, providing a new platform for large-scale experimentation in the design of new economic and organisational structures. Yet, to be really transformative, these initiatives need to transcend the current models of protocol-based governance and game-theoretical incentives, which can easily be co-opted by powerful actors, and come up with new governance models combining both on-chain and off-chain governance rules. The former can be used to support new mechanisms of regulation by code, novel incentivization schemes and a new sense of ownership over digital assets, whereas the latter are necessary to promote the vision, and facilitate the interaction of commons-based projects and initiatives with the existing legal and societal framework.”
• Holo: The evolution of cloud computing (article) “This is an attempt to communicate Holo in simple, clear language (with a bit of playfulness to keep it entertaining)” and A Futurist’s View on Holochain, The Evolution Of Blockchain, (video). An easy to understand video walk-through on Holo’s architecture and potential.
• Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be (article). “Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left —anarchism, mobility, and cooperation— even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups — applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.”

Footnotes

The post The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: an Overview appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There are also some useful shared notes and links in the working doc from this session.

Photo by nigel_appleton

The post Open 2018: Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo on Patterns for Decentralised Organising appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’re talking about a different mental register of paradigm for understanding the world. For so long, we’ve had this presumption of fiction that the homo economicus, the utility maximizing individual, is the chief agent in the way to see the world. The commons says there is a different way to see humanity—not simply as a notional ideal, but as a practical operational system and there’s countless examples out there.

This audio interview (and transcript) with our colleague David Bollier was conducted by Adam Simpson and originally published by The Next System Project.

David Bollier joins us this week to discuss “the commons” and what such a concept means for social transformation. You can read more about David’s ideas in his paper for the NewSystems: Possibilities and Proposals series, and also read more of his work at www.Bollier.org.

Interview transcript

Adam Simpson: Welcome back to The Next System Podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson, joined today by self-described commons activist and director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, David Bollier. David is the author of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. He’s also the editor of From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond with John Clippinger, as well as Patterns of Commoning, and The Wealth of the Commons with Silke Helfrich.

Wouldn’t you know it, David is here to talk to me today about the concept of the commons. David, welcome to The Next System Podcast.

David Bollier: It’s great to be here.

Adam Simpson: Great. Well, before we get into the concept of the commons, David, I wanted to ask you: How did you first come to learn about this concept, what made you embrace it, what really drew you to this kind of work that you do?

David Bollier: Well, in the 1970s and 80s when I was working for Ralph Nader, all of my friends were fighting what I would now call enclosures of the commons, meaning privatization and commodification of things like federally funded research, public lands and the air waves, which are used by broadcasters for free and so forth. All these were being taken private, but we really didn’t have a language for talking about this. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s when I encountered the work of Elinor Ostrom, a great scholar of the commons and I realized that the commons was a great way to describe how things get done outside of the market and the state, meaning through self-organized activities and self-governance to manage projects that create things of value. I realized this at a time when neoliberal capitalism and its policies were getting worse and worse.

It was essentially colonizing and taking over all of these commons in our life. Not only the resources that belong to us, but our ability to self-manage them for our benefit. They were basically appropriated by the corporate world for global trade and turned into private property.

I realized that the commons had great potential as an alternative political vision that is not some unified movement or ideology, like in the past, but something that is locally distributed and grounded in things that people love and want to protect. So, the commons is about sharing those things that belong to all of us that we want to protect in our ability to manage them for our purposes.

Adam Simpson: Right. It seems like you started with intellectual property as a way of thinking about the commons, and not, say, the management of environmental resources?

David Bollier: Well, that was actually, you might say the proximate cause, because in the late 90s you may recall the world wide web had just gone live in 1991, and here was a system that encouraged automatic sharing, yet copyright was being asserted to prevent us from sharing…

Adam Simpson: This was the time of Napster…

David Bollier: Yes, it was the time of Napster; it was the time of the emergence of open source software, and then a few years later, of the blogosphere and many other innovations. All innovations in which value and creativity was based on sharing and collaboration, something that conventional economics and markets don’t understand because they want to create things that are artificially scarce and individually ownable, as opposed to something that’s shared.

Copyright was a very important force for me in bringing into focus that we needed to protect our commons, and in fact, I helped co-create the group called Public Knowledge. It’s a Washington advocacy group to protect the knowledge commons: on Internet and telecommunications policy, it’s trying to protect shareable information.

Adam Simpson: Yeah. It reminds me that one of my first interactions with this space would have been the late Aaron Schwartz and his work on public knowledge.

David Bollier: A real pioneer. I mean, there was a whole movement that has ebbed and flowed, but Larry Lessig, when he established Creative Commons licenses to allow legal sharing of content, that was a huge innovation. It provided a legal infrastructure for people to share. You have to remember, copyright was based on any little scribble or a guitar riff being born as private property. There was no way for stuff to be legally shared, so everything was implicitly piracy if you simply imitated or used somebody else’s work. Creative Commons licenses were an enormous innovation that did what Congress or federal authorities would not do, which is to legalize sharing.

Adam Simpson:  I heard you imply a critical take on Elinor Ostrom’s work when you said that she focused on the commons in terms of resources, could you elucidate what you meant?

David Bollier: Let’s first introduce Elinor Ostrom. I mean she was a Indiana University political scientist who, over the course of 30 or 40 years, from the 1970s until her death in 2012, studied lots of natural resource-based commons: forests, fisheries, farm land, irrigation water, etc. She showed that contrary to the whole “tragedy of the commons” fable that Garret Hardin proposed in a famous 1968 essay, people can and do self-organize to sustainably manage resources. Her life’s work was, first of all, studying that on the ground level and then creatively theorizing to explain how and why that occurs. Well, she, as a woman working in the male-dominated economics professions, saw that social relationships mattered in creating things of economic value. That was a lot of what her work was about. But, at the end the day, she’s working within a rational economic framework as opposed to a cultural or social framework.

In some ways, she was providing an interesting counterpoint to the conventional economic theories. In other ways, she was still working within, what you might call, the ontological framework: the premises of our human relationships, rationality, and behavior. The very dominant theme then was the prisoner’s dilemma in which people supposedly are always trying to calculatedly maximize their personal gain, which of course happens but it’s not the full story of what humanity is about.

I think that there are other dimensions of our propensity to give, to collaborate, to share, to be part of something larger than ourselves, which is arguably non-rational and haven’t had been adequately conceptualized within economics. The commons helps to deal with that.

Adam Simpson: Part of the intervention of the commons, it seems to me, is a cultural shift as well because in the prevailing context of capitalism and neoliberalism, it makes sense for people to try to maximize their outcomes, but in the framework of the commons, it doesn’t make sense to put this kind of personal gain at the forefront.

David Bollier: Well, let’s just say nobody wants to be a sucker in being taken advantage of. So if the prevailing system is ‘get all that you can for yourself,’ you are a sucker if you just give it away. However, if you can develop a sufficient critical mass with protectable boundaries around your shared resources and generative capacity the way open source software does, the way a lot of local systems do, the way countless different commons do, you can create a different paradigm that is—I think—more humanly satisfying, that benefits more people without the gross inequality and exploitation that occurs now, and that is more ecologically benign because it doesn’t have the growth imperative that capitalism has. So you can start to reintegrate people with each other and with natural systems.

We’re talking about a different mental register of paradigm for understanding the world. For so long, we’ve had this presumption of fiction that the homo economicus, the utility maximizing individual, is the chief agent in the way to see the world. The commons says there is a different way to see humanity—not simply as a notional ideal, but as a practical operational system and there’s countless examples out there.

Adam Simpson: On the notion of rational economic man, it seems to me that with a fairly rudimentary knowledge of anthropology one would see numerous examples of commons. I don’t know, this seems fundamentally a question about human nature: homo economicus and “rational economic man” versus a kind of collaborative creature that I think most social scientists understand humans to be.

David Bollier: Well, first of all, I’m dubious about saying there is some essentialist human nature. Having said that, evolutionary scientists are showing that our propensity to cooperate seems to be in-born even though, of course, we’re quite capable of competitive and quite awful things as well. But part of it, it comes down to what the culture validates and nourishes or what it allows to become the cultural norm. We, of course, within capitalism know what those norms are. But in some ways, we do have more capacity to create these alternatives worlds in making them sustainably not just as some fantasy or a cult or isolated community. We can see this in many different domains from natural resources to urban spaces to digital spaces.

I think it’s important to understand that this is a cross-sectoral/cross-cultural paradigm that can give us a way out of some of our very profound problems today.

Adam Simpson: A key concept in this conversation within this framework of the commons is the notion of property and ownership. I wanted to ask how does our current system of property and ownership fail us and how is the paradigm of the commons different?

David Bollier: Well, property law tends to privilege the whole idea of individual exclusive control, and it presumes that that is the only way to go, even though individual property ownership tends to deny the realities of our social connection to each other and our embeddedness in ecosystems. In other words, it denies relationality as the basis of human life because it focuses mostly on simply market exchange of objectified things that have been put inside an envelope of property.  So for instance, you have snippets of music sampling defined as appropriations of private property. It’s been taken to such extremes that all sorts of knowledge, like the breast cancer susceptibility gene, can be privately owned, nano-matter is being patented, and it goes on and on.

Basically, there is, of course, an important role for private property, but so much private property is, in fact, corporate property.  This is consequential for the natural ecosystem, because it’s gotten out of control. This dominion of private property is reaching extremes, with various cascading environmental problems and climate change happening as capitalism tries to propertize everything in the world.

The commons is an attempt to assert, “No, there need to be limits to private property and some things need to be collectively managed for the collective good and not simply leveraged as much as possible for market gain.”

Adam Simpson: I mean, this is exactly my next question: the question of commodification and enclosure. I heard, earlier today, that the human genome is 20% patented. What would you say are the consequences and the implications of this kind of continuous enclosure, this commodification of everything? What does it mean for our society?

David Bollier: Well, we’re living through it right now: it means grotesque inequality, with many shared common needs not being met. This is, in the large part, driven by the private propertization and marketization of everything. I mean, even social problems themselves are marketized. We have to create new kinds of property rights, for example, pollution rights, in order to tackle pollution. Or we need to financialize incentives to deal with nature, like let’s monetize how much pollination bees do for crops. Let’s put a market value on that and create a market security that can be traded as a way to solve the problems of bees disappearing.

In other words, it’s grotesquely out of control. We are trying to use property and market incentives to deal with precisely the problems these structures and incentives have created in the first place. Can we start to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature instead? There are things that are outside of the market that should remain inalienable and not be propertized. I think this is one of the pre-eminent concerns of our time, but paradoxically even progressives and liberals who are tied to the market growth grand narrative can’t go there, because they see the only way to solve problems is further growth, further growth, further growth, and that’s something that we have to step up to and deal with.

Adam Simpson: Related to the question of growth—you suggest that continuous growth is one the maxims of our system. We can’t even have a stable or a steady-state economy, as it’s called. We have to always keep growing. How might an advocate of the commons understand the concept of economic growth or the steady state or de-growth, as some people call it?

David Bollier: Well, capital is driving this because capital wants more and more return and things that are un-owned—not yet propertized—are ripe resources for the market machine. A commoner would say, “How can we create things that are simply not for sale?”

I think we need to cultivate this ethic that many things are not for sale and devise either the legal or technological or social norms to prevent that from happening. We have to realize that the growth paradigm is no longer the tool for improved civilization in human betterment. It’s becoming destructive of those very things, yet capital insists that that’s the only way forward.

We have to have a reckoning on that, and it’s not simply going to happen at the macro level first, we have to cultivate that at the micro level where we live: in our own medium of productive needs.

That’s what the commons can do: meet needs in decommodified ways, where you don’t need to have market exchange. Your needs and what the market wants are different things entirely.

Adam Simpson: Related to the question of growth is the question of value; our market centered system depends on the enormous amount of ‘externalities’ that go unaccounted for. How does the concepts of the commons inform your understanding of value?

David Bollier: Well, market economics regards anything that can be exchanged and it has a price as being valuable. The commons regards all sorts of things that don’t have a price as also being valuable, but that doesn’t have any standing within the conventional political or economic discourse. For example, the value of rivers, lakes, oceans as natural systems of wildlife, species and genes as natural systems; the value of care work that work women and family, and unfortunately very few men are involved in. All of these are non-market phenomena unless they’re turned into something for sale. The whole notion of the economy which focuses on exchange value needs to start to focus on use value, meaning what’s valuable for us to use whether or not it has a price, whether or not money is exchange to make it happen.

The commons is about encouraging use value not as mediated by price or supply and demand, but by social need in negotiation, in coordination, and that’s a different proposition than the market.

Adam Simpson: You mentioned care work; I want to follow-up on that because that appeared in quite a few different passages of different works of yours I’ve read. As you mentioned, the market interpretation of care work would be that it is a service that is either bought or sold or traded, etcetera. As you stated, I’d like to reemphasize that whether we’re talking about child care or elder care, this is mostly done by women. It’s mostly unpaid and when it is unpaid, it’s mostly done by women. I want to know how the idea of care work fits into the framework of the commons.

David Bollier: Well, it is a major sector of non-market life that is regarded as external to the economy, and because it’s external to the economy and it’s therefore not productive, it’s not valuable in any price sense or a return on investment sense. Some ingenious people have been able to turn care work—elder care, child care or household activities—into a market. Suddenly, it’s valuable. The problem is that’s inconsistent with the very notion of care which cannot be regimented. You can’t put a price on what real care is about because care involves sacrificing of yourself. You’re not maximizing your utility; you’re giving of yourself to someone else. You’re spending a lot of time with them in ways that are not productive or creating value in a market sense.

There is an inherent contradiction involved in marketizing care work. Care work creates a problem for economics in the sense that we obviously know that care is essential to a human civilization. In a society, somebody needs to raise and enculturate the children, somebody needs to educate them, old people need to be taken care of. But the problem is that it doesn’t fit within market categories and economics doesn’t quite know how to deal with it—but of course it has to be done.

That’s a theoretical limitation of conventional economics. It doesn’t want to go there because there’s no exchange value going on, so I think the ambition should be to integrate the commons into our notion of the economy so that the reproduction of life, families, households has stand-in in economic analysis as opposed to, “Oh, if not being paid for, it’s not worth anything.”

Adam Simpson: I want to move on to the possibilities that the commons unlocks. I’ve read about the commons being used to support programs ranging from a basic income, to environmental protectionism or even, I think, Peter Barnes’ combination of the two with a cap and dividend program around carbon emissions. Are there examples you would highlight that you come your mind immediately as the kind of political, economic and, or social programs that are unlocked through a more detailed understanding of the common?

David Bollier: Well, this is a frontier right now because the conventional state is so allied with markets and capital as the only way to get things done that it doesn’t consider the commons as something worth pursuing. It doesn’t generate tax revenue, or at least not as much tax revenue as market growth does, so the state is either indifferent or uncomprehending of the commons.

That said, there are a handful of interesting experiments that are trying to use state power to support the commons. You mentioned Peter Barnes, things like the Alaska Permanent Fund in which the state legislature created a trust to take revenues from state oil sales, put it in a trust fund owned by every resident in Alaska and every year, residents of Alaska get between $1,000 and $2,000 from that fund. Even people like Sarah Palin support it.

Well, the state could create trust funds for natural resources that we all own: groundwater, forests, minerals. This would be one way to protect them from simply being exploited by rip-and-run companies, so that the public could get some benefit from them and steward them so they’re not simply leaving ecological destruction in their wake.

That’s one interesting model. There’s others. In Europe, there’s a lot of cities that are developing so-called “public-commons partnerships,” where the city government is collaborating with self-organized neighborhood groups or other initiatives to facilitate them doing work that bureaucracies would otherwise do. It’s a great advance because the citizens care about their neighborhood, they want it to work, they can devise their own systems that are not legalistic or bureaucratic or come with lots of high overhead. It’s really a way to get people re-engaged with the city, and for governments to support genuine citizen participation. Another example might be participatory budgeting where people can have a direct say in how budgets are allocated.

There are some of these things but, frankly, this is more of a frontier that is now being explored as commons grow and start to bump up against conventional systems, market systems, bureaucratic systems.

Adam Simpson: I wanted to ask specifically about the notion of finance and money. In a lot of ways, money is a public utility that we use to lubricate exchanges, but money is something that’s really not controlled publicly as a utility in the current system, although there are experiments like with alternative currencies and things like that. How does the monetary system fit into the framework of the commons?

David Bollier: Well, people don’t realize that 95% of the money in the United States is created privately through banks. They give out loans and that creates new money. They don’t necessarily have a significant amount of money in the bank. Their loan creates the money, and they then reap the gains of that through interest payments all the time. Essentially, the US government has surrendered its prerogative as a sovereign state. It has surrendered the power to create money to private banks—and all the profits from that are privately capitalized and controlled.

This means that we, the people of the United States, don’t reap the benefits of that power to create money. This is called the power of ‘seigniorage.’ Well, could we capture some of that value ourselves by having the government or its designated trustees create money rather than banks? We saw, for example, how the government used that power to bail out the banks in 2008: it essentially created money to bail them out without it being considered public debt that needed to be repaid. That’s only because the government has that power: the state has that power.

Why can’t we have quantitative easing for the environment or social needs without it being considered public debt that needs to be repaid? We could do that responsibly so long as the money is sapped up through taxes so that we don’t create inflation. Mary Miller, a British monetary specialist has written about this in a book called Debt or Democracy? The point is, these alternative ways of creating money are entirely feasible and responsible as opposed to simply surrendering that power to private entities to reap all the gains.

Adam Simpson: Of course, sovereign fiat currency issuers have the power to create money in such a way and right now, we let private banks do it. Are you compelled by the notion of publicly owned banks or other institutions that might have another way of generating this for the people?

David Bollier: Well, public banks would be a huge improvement as well—because instead of a city or state governments having to borrow money from private banks at their exorbitant interest rates, they could radically lower their interest cost. For example, in creating major infrastructure, they could save a quarter, a third or more of the cost by having their own bank. A city, if it were to open its own public bank, deposit city funds in it, and then make loans, could save lots in infrastructure.

Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute is the leading expert on this. A lot of states and localities are now exploring public banks as a way to throw off the yoke of dependency on private banking. It’s entirely feasible.

Adam Simpson: Right. Now, I want to talk about the theory of change here. In your model’s paper, I believe it’s called Commoning as a Socially Transformative Paradigm, you mentioned that some parts of the left that rely on top down notions of theories of change like “if we get this elected office or enough people in this legislative body, we can affect change.” What do you think that these pathways that rely on the notion of taking political power, what do you think they get wrong about the theory of change?

David Bollier: Well, I think that as those top down approaches become autonomous onto themselves, they lose connection with the people they’re trying to serve—the way the Democratic Party has, for example, and they become a self-replicating political elite. Moreover, they lose sight of the fact that simply taking power is a dead letter if you can’t prevail on a transformative agenda or have the will power and imagination to do so. We saw how the left took over power in Greece in how it was pointless because they were trumped by international capital.

Even as a sovereign nation, they could not deal with their debt crisis because the international banks were saying, “Too bad, we hold all the trump cards.” I saw the same thing in Bolivia where Ivan Morales took power from the left as an indigenous person. He essentially had to retain the extractivist economy that had existed before because of their dependence on international capital and markets.

If we’re talking about being transformative, simply taking power through the state is maybe necessarily but is quite insufficient. It’s not going to be transformative unless it’s really organically connected to local change and local change has a different political and cultural logic. In other words, it doesn’t want to simply placate or accommodate or even support international capital.

I think that the seeds of change have to come from the bottom and that when they do, they will express a different political culture through people’s personal and social practices. That has to be origins at this point because the rest of the system is too indentured: too tied up with the existing logic of the system, and so we need some external forces to intervene because within the logic of the existing system it is just is not going to happen.

Adam Simpson: You talk about not just the commons, but the verb commoning. I was hoping to get you to elaborate on how commoning represent an effective theory of change and if there are some examples of commoning that you might refer people to.

David Bollier: I’m very suspicious of novel words being our salvation, and we’ve seen the lifecycle of the word sustainability, for example, where it’s now meaningless because everybody is sustainable. The point is what’s happening that’s achieving the goal of that word? The truth of the matter is there is no such thing as a common as such, there is commoning: the social practices of talking, negotiating, working it out for shared goals, bringing diverse perspectives into alignment. This is the processing of commoning, and this is a form of democratic empowerment and governance that can happen right now without permission from the government or the corporations. We can do it ourselves in lots of arenas.

Commoning, you might say, is the seedbed of a new democratic practice. Well, Peter Linebaugh, great historian of the commons says there is no commons without commoning, and I think that’s a way to keep the vitality and aliveness of the commons. In fact, it’s the only to keep it alive because if you’re simply mouthing the word as a buzzword or marketing or messaging strategy, it’s dead right then. You have to have a community of people who have the commitment, the activity and it has to be constantly recreated.

To put it in high flown words this is the relational theory of value. The value is created through people enacting their relationships together through commons, so that’s where I think really transformative change is going to come from. It needs that grounding in people’s lives, in local practice.

Adam Simpson: Thank you, so that was actually my last question. I think it’s a great place to end actually, but is there anything you’d want to add for our listeners about the subject of the commons or about your work?

David Bollier: Well, we didn’t discuss so much the broad range of things going on but I would just say, first of all, there’s lot of people that are, you might say, commoning and don’t even know it. The value of the commons language and vocabulary is it helps validate something that they might consider trivial, marginal, not consequential. But it is, and I think that’s part of the importance of the language of the commons, especially as a counterpoint to the market narratives that are seen as the only legitimate, the only productive way of producing things.

Second, I would point out that there are lots of projects in different domains. I mentioned the city as commons, lots of digital projects from open source software to Wikipedia and dozens of Wikis to open access scholarly publishing and it goes on and on, which are forms of commoning that are incredibly productive, creative arguably more so than the proprietary versions.

I just wanted to say that there is a broad variety of social activities that are commoning right now, so this is not some utopian abstract thing, it’s happening; it’s practical whether it’s recognized culturally as commons: as a different form of value generation. That’s precisely what a lot of the commons movement is all about: validating this as an important activity that needs to be protected and extended.

I would just leave it at that and what people know that there is a lot of resources out there. I can direct them to my website blog which Bollier.org, but there’s other important ones like the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, which has a lot of stuff on peer production, open design, and manufacturing. You can go to the Commons Transition website, and then in Europe there’s quite a few different sites, if you have more specialized interest, for instance in Barcelona, which is in the vanguard of a lot of activities around the commons.

I just wanted to end with the notion that this happening, even if it’s not being culturally recognized—at least in America.

Adam Simpson: Well, to our listeners, thank you for listening this week and, David, thanks so much for joining us.

David Bollier: Thank you.

The post Social Transformation Through ‘The Commons’ with David Bollier appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before we start talking about your book, can you tell us a bit about the context that prompted you to write it, and how it fits in your personal quest for understanding social change? I mean, can you say a few words about yourself, your engagement in green politics, and your work with OIKOS?

Twenty-five years ago, I started working as an academic researcher in the field of environmental philosophy and bioethics. With degrees in engineering and philosophy, I tried to understand the role of technology in how people shape their world and dominate nature, to analyse what the importance is of the dominant value system in a society. So, I learned how Modernity radically changed our relation with nature, which from then is an object we as subjects can dominate and manipulate. While this was a rewarding time, it was maybe my engineering background that made me feel that only writing articles and lecturing is not enough to stop the destruction of our living planet. So I joined the Green party and within a few years I first was elected as local councilor of the City of Ghent and subsequently as member of the Flemish Parliament. I learned that politics really matters, being in government we were able to introduce innovative changes in e.g. the care system and energy policy (a law as voted to close the nuclear plants the coming decades). At the same time I experienced that our representative democratic system, established in the 19th century, needs a thorough update. So the first book I wrote was about the need for Deliberative Democracy, acknowledging the value and importance of citizens engaging in an active dialogue.

After being a member of parliament, I founded the green foundation OIKOS, because I believe innovative ideas are the core fuel of societal change. You cannot develop new sustainable systems – think of mobility, energy or food- with old concepts. At the same I noticed how citizens are taking their future back in their hands, becoming from consumer producer again. These citizens’ collectives, commons, are the basis for what I see as the most promising actor of change in our current times.

Your book centers around the tension between freedom, which I read as individual freedom, and security, which I read as more of a collective reality. Can you describe how you see that tension and how you see it as resolvable or not.

In the dominant narrative of our society, we see freedom as an individual quality. But this creates the illusion that we are independent actors that can create our own future and lifeworld on our one. While freedom is maybe the most collective concept we now. How free is someone who is born in a poor country, without a decent educational system? What kind of choices (s)he can make? If freedom is the ability to influence the future development of our world, we can only do it if we work together. That was what the green thinker Ivan Illich meant with autonomy: ‘the joyful capacity to shape the world together’. Anyway, how free are we if the corporations and multinationals determine what we (can) buy. Everyday, we see thousands of advertisements and marketings signals (like logos). Do you really think they don’t influence us in a profound way? So the paradox is that enhancing you personal freedom is working together to change the environment you live. Like the Green mayor of Grenoble did, but getting rid of advertisements boards in public spaces and streets.

Does our welfare system have to change, and if so, how so.

Our current welfare system was built on the assumption of full employment with man working 40 hours a week, staying 40 years with the same employer, in the framework of a decent fiscal system with rich people and big companies paying the fair share of taxes. No need to say that our society has changed in many fundamental ways.

We need what I call a new ‘security package’ for the 21th century, empowering people and allowing them to enrich their community and society. This package is based on the fact that there are three different kinds of work: next to our job, the paid work, there is the care work we do while raising kids, cooking at home etc. and also autonomous work, things we find important, like establishing with people in your town a commons, think about an energy co-op or growing vegetables together. If our goal is a good life for all, we have to make sure people can combine these types of work in a relaxed way. Hence, I suggest the combination of a shorter working week of 30 hours with a universal basic income of 500 euros that for low and middle incomes compensates for the lower salary, in combination with an affordable education and health system.

The number of hours, 30 a week, is not randomly chosen. It is the weekly number most women work who have to combine their job with their family work and personal development. I see the ‘security package’ as a transition model, in the evolution towards a social-ecological society. The more things we do in our autonomous work, products and services who are cheaper and last longer than produced by corporations – think about Wikipedia or platform co-ops for car sharing – will enable to live better with less buying power, allowing to maybe lower the normal working week to 21 hours, as the New Economics Foundation proposes.

What I found very useful in your book is the historical context you are offering about how current social movements, and the surge for the commons in particular, are related to the earlier struggles post-1968. Can you elaborate a bit?

Big corporations – think about Apple – want to make us believe that they invented all the new stuff in our society. Mariana Mazzucato has in a convincing way shown that corporations only can make these products and profits because governments invested loads of money in research and development. On top of this, I want to add that quite a lot of crucial innovations where introduced not by companies or public authorities, but by citizens’ initiatives. Who build for instance the first wind mill to start the transition towards a renewable energy system? It where villagers in the north of Denmark in the 1970’s. Who invented the recycle or thrift shop, the starting point for the circular economy: wise citizens in the Netherlands. The same goes for sharing, with people in Amsterdam experimenting with a bike sharing system, already in the mid 1960’s? These initiatives are part of a broader emancipatory movement with a lot new social movements..

Overall, the emancipatory movement wanted to create more space for citizens by reducing the reach of the state, other traditional structures and multinationals. Looking back, we can say that this movement has been successful, but did not achieve its goal. This is connected with the greater success of the neoliberal freedom concept. This concept of freedom succeeded in reducing the build-up of identity into an individualistic project, where consumption plays a crucial role.

How did it happen? The 1980s and 1990s are the battleground of these two freedom-based concepts. A crucial difference lies in scale: while businesses are organised worldwide, this is less evident for new civil movements and unions. Only the anti-globalisation movement would later bundle forces across borders. Meanwhile, large corporations have taken up the free space for the most part.

A second explanation concerns the evolution of most of the new social movements. Starting mostly from a position of a radical critique, professionalisation and building a relationship with mainstream politicians leads to a pragmatic attitude. Proposals must now be feasible within the framework of the current policy. The increasing dependency on subsidies of many non-governmental organisations has sometimes led to uncritical inscription into government policy options. As said, at the same time, more and more citizens were seduced by the neoliberal narrative that a good life means work hard, earn money and spent it all to be happy. If you don’t feel well, just buy a ticket for a wellness club.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930’s, which started ten years ago, changed everything again. The crisis is a real wake-up call for a lot of citizens, they realize that if they want a sustainable future for their children, they have to build it themselves. So, we see all over the world a new wave of citizens’ initiatives, rediscovering the emancipatory concept of freedom and autonomy. A crucial difference is that we know live in the age of internet, lowering the transaction costs of cooperation dramatically. What was very hard to realize in the post-68 period, e.g. sharing cars in a neighborhood, is now a piece of cake with digital platforms.

What can we learn from this history? That if social movements want to be successful in a globalized world, they also have to build translocal and transnational networks. It for instance makes no sense that in ten cities in the world, people are trying to build their own digital platform as an alternative for companies like Airbnb or Uber. Transnational networks of commons cities can be the fundament of a new governance model in the future.

Do you have a prescription for our future, and a way to get there? Also to which degree does your book also apply to non-European or non-Western countries?

I don’t have of course the prescription for our future, what I did in preparing my book was observing society carefully, looking for the places and processes of hope. I found two very relevant developments: citizens starting new collective initiatives, commons, for the production of sustainable products and services, and local governments implementing very ambitious policy plans in fields like climate, energy, food and mobility policy.

Slowly but surely, there is a new range of autonomous activities that together form a transformational movement towards a socio-ecological society. It is important to note that we are not only talking about small or isolated projects. Take, for instance, the 20 majestic wind turbines at the coastline of Copenhagen. This project was started by a group of habitants of the city who developed the idea and went with it to their Minister of Energy. Instead of refusing or taking it over, the government decided to start a co-creation process. Civil servants give technical and judicial advice. Half of the shares were owned by a citizens’ co-op, after completion, thousands of families every year receive a financial dividend. Similarly, following the Energiewende in Germany, half of the renewable energy installations are owned by citizens and their co-ops. Even in smaller towns, governments support the local population in setting up renewable energy projects. This adds up to really big business. So, citizens and local governments really can make a difference, and build together the counter current.

My book starts from the history and developments in Europe, so I am really modest on what it has to say to other continents. At the same time, I see the same developments in cities all over the world. There I think the crucial concept of action developed in my book based on the work of André Gorz, revolutionary reformism, really can be very useful. It answers the question how to move a step further, beyond all the individual great citizens’ initiatives and local policy proposals.

The two concepts are each in themselves insufficient. A political revolution that will change everything for good at once – we should not hope for that. And a few reforms of the existing system will not lead to a real structural change. For example, while it’s good that people share cars, this alone will not lead us to sustainable accessibility and mobility. This needs strategic cooperation and planning.

Revolutionary reformism can be defined as a chain of far-reaching reforms that complement and strengthen each other and, at the same time, raise political awareness. In system terms, it is a matter of implementing reforms that are complementary and reinforce each other. This will generate synergy and even positive feedback: virtuous circles. For example, in progressive cities like Ghent you see the establishment of commons if the field of renewable energy, mobility, food, etc. But for most of them they don’t cooperate beyond the borders of their domain. Imagine a food coop distributing their food boxes by another commons specialized in delivery by electric bikes, that in turn only uses green energy produced by the urban energy coop. When they then, supported by the local government, introduce and use the same local currency for connecting their economic transactions, you put in motion a chain in action that will reinforce itself. It is this kind of thinking and action that is crucial for the future, and can be useful all over the world.

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John Restakis

John Restakis: Historically, cooperatives have been primarily focused around providing support and service to the members. Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op. That has been the traditional form of cooperatives for a long time now. Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members. That has changed over the last 15 years or so, particularly in the field of the provision of social care.

Social co-ops emerged in the late 70s in Italy as a response to a market failure within public services in Italy. Groups of families or users of social services, primarily originally from within a community of people with disabilities, decided to organize cooperatives as a better way of designing and providing services to themselves. This is a very different model from the state-delivered services to these people. What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community. And so, they were communitarian, community service organizations that had a membership base of primary users of that service, whether it was healthcare, or help for people with drug addictions, or whatever.

These social co-ops have now exploded in Italy. I think they have taken over, in a sense, the provision of social care services in many communities under contracts to local municipalities. In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops. These are democratically run organizations, which is a very different model, much more participatory, and a much more engaged model of designing social care than the traditional state delivered services. The idea of co-ops as being primarily of interest in serving their own immediate membership has been expanded to include a mandate for the provision of service to the community as a whole.

This is an expansion of this notion of cooperatives into a more commons-based kind of mission, which overlaps with the philosophy and values of commons movement. The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates. And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services. One of the real strengths of the cooperative form is that it not only provides a democratic structure for the enterprise – be it a commercial or social enterprise – but it also has a legal form that allows it to enter into contract and negotiate legal agreements with the state for the provision of public services. This model of co-op for social care has been growing in Europe. In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops, and they are generating an increasing portion of market share for the provision of services like home care and healthcare, and it’s also growing in Europe.

So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services. This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services. This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response? Social co-ops have been part of this tide of reaction and reinvention, in terms of civic solutions to what were previously state-designed and delivered public goods and services. So I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but it’s just an indicator of the very interesting ways in which the co-op form is being reimagined and reinvented to respond to this crisis of public services and the changing role of the state.

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Photo by OiMax

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