For 24 hours we will jam on all the concepts and definitions for cosmo-localism. We intend to identify and flesh out all the killer ideas and concepts that make CL a profound vision and possibility for the 21st Century.

Why:

Many hands make light work, and the knowledge of CL is emergent and distributed. We can get to a first cut of the concepts better through the contribution of many experts and readers. Your ideas and perspective are needed

What will happen:

The editors for the cosmo-local reader (Sharon, Gien, Jose, Michel) will facilitate during the 24 hour period, will keep zoom conference window open to answer questions and discuss any issues, and contributors (you?) will make any contributions into the dictionary that they want.

Where will it happen:

The dictionary page is here.

People can begin to add ideas beforehand, or wait till the jam to add things.

This zoom link will stay open to allow for anyone to pop in, say hello, ask any questions and have a conversation if necessary.

https://zoom.us/j/316495572

Attribution:

Any contributors will be acknowledged in the dictionary.

* The dictionary will form part of the Cosmo-local reader, to be published early 2020.

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(e.g., open knowledge and design) with local manufacturing and automation technologies (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts). This convergence could catalyze the transition to new inclusive and circular production models, such as the “design global, manufacture local” (DGML) model. DGML describes the processes through which design is developed as a global digital commons, whereas the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check. COSMOLOCALISM is a pilot-driven investigation of the DGML phenomenon that seeks to understand relevant organizational models, their evolution, and their broader political economy/ecology and policy implications. Through the lens of diverse case studies and participatory action research, the conditions under which the DGML model thrives will be explored.

COSMOLOCALISM has three concurrent streams: democratization; innovation; and sustainability. First, DGML governance practices will be studied, patterns will be recognized, and their form, function, cultural values, and structure will be determined. Second, the relevant open innovation ecosystems and their potential to reorient design and manufacturing practices will be examined. Third, selected DGML products will be evaluated from an environmental sustainability perspective, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. The interdisciplinary nature of COSMOLOCALISM will explore new horizons to improve our understanding of how to create sustainable economies through the commons.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

The candidate is expected to focus on the sustainability stream of the COSMOLOCALISM project. The objective is to assess the environmental sustainability of DGML artifacts empirically. What is the ecological footprint of a product (e.g., a 3D printer, a digitally fabricated beehive) that has been globally designed and locally manufactured? How well does it fit into the existing natural and cultural environment of its application?

The candidate will conduct life-cycle assessments (LCA) of at least two DGML technological solutions. The candidate should have a strong background in the field of LCA with relevant technical skills and practical knowledge. Master students with practical experience in LCA will also be considered. The position is an excellent opportunity for engineers looking to expand their expertise in social science research given the interdisciplinary nature of the project. Feel free to contact Prof. Vasilis Kostakis for any inquiries: vasileios.kostakis at taltech.ee.

The ultimate goal is to contribute to sustainable transitions research, formulating a groundbreaking research and action agenda which will identify techno-economic opportunities and challenges that are often fundamentally different from any our society has experienced before. COSMOLOCALISM attempts to advance our understanding of the political ecology of alternative technological trajectories; and of the future of the organization in the age of automation and beyond.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

The primary responsibility of the doctoral candidate is to conduct an LCA of at least two technological solutions that have been globally designed and locally manufactured, vis-a-vis similar products of conventional industrial production. This also includes primary data gathering and analysis, as well as involvement in the respective scientific publications and reports.

SALARY AND BENEFITS

The successful candidate will receive a three-year contract, renewable for six months after positive evaluation (so 3,5 years in total). Depending on qualifications and previous experience, the net salary will range between 1,100 to 1,300 euros per month (including Ph.D. scholarship and salary). Thus, a Ph.D. from TalTech will be acquired, for which residency in Estonia would be required.

APPLICATION
The position will only be filled when a potential candidate fully meets the project’s requirements, but not later than 1 June 2019. The application procedure can be found here. Should you have any question, feel free to contact Prof. Kostakis before application.

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Find out more on the Cosmolocalism Website.

Extended summary

COSMOLOCALISM will document, analyze, test, evaluate, and create awareness about an emerging mode of production, based on the confluence of the digital commons (e.g., open knowledge and design) with local manufacturing and automation technologies (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts). This convergence could catalyze the transition to new inclusive and circular production models, such as the “design global, manufacture local” (DGML) model.

DGML describes the processes through which design is developed as a global digital commons, whereas the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check. DGML seems to form economies of scope that promote sustainability and open innovation while celebrating new ways of cooperation. However, such claims rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations.

COSMOLOCALISM is a pilot-driven investigation of the DGML phenomenon that seeks to understand relevant organizational models, their evolution, and their broader political economy/ecology and policy implications. Through the lens of diverse case studies and participatory action research, the conditions under which the DGML model thrives will be explored.

COSMOLOCALISM has three concurrent streams: democratization; innovation; and sustainability. First, DGML governance practices will be studied, patterns will be recognized, and their form, function, cultural values, and structure will be determined. Second, the relevant open innovation ecosystems and their potential to reorient design and manufacturing practices will be examined. Third, selected DGML products will be evaluated from an environmental sustainability perspective, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. The interdisciplinary nature of COSMOLOCALISM will explore new horizons to substantively improve our understanding of how to create sustainable economies through the commons.

The post Cosmolocalism in Nutshell appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First ever ERC Starting Grant at Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance

The post Vasilis Kostakis of P2PLab Awarded ERC Starting Grant appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Fablabs, makerspaces, emerging global knowledge commons… These are but some of the outcomes of a growing movement that champions globally-sourced designs for local economic activity. Its core idea is simple: local ownership of the means to produce basic manufactures and services can change our economic paradigm, making our cities self-sufficient and help the planet.

Sharon Ede, urbanist and activist based in Australia has recently launched AUDAcities, a catalyst for relocalising production in cities. She shared her insights on the opportunities of making cities regenerative and more sustainable as well as the limits of cosmo-localization. Interview by Fernanda Marin.

Technology, as we all know, is not neutral. Making the transition to self-sufficient cities needs a cultural shift, not just a technological one. So, how do we design open-source tools that foster a change in behaviours and are inclusive?

Technology will go where cultural, social and economic values direct it. A cultural shift will include open source tools, and the kinds of processes we need to create those – but a cultural shift will require much more.

Governments can and do play a significant role in shaping culture through policy and regulation, and contrary to popular belief about where innovation originates, the state is not only a key entrepreneurial actor but also has a huge opportunity to reinvent itself as the ‘partner state’ – where government responds to the contributory democracy we are seeing emerge as a force that does with, not for or to, the communities it serves. The technology, and who owns it, is just a manifestation of what we value.

There has been a lot of debate about the real benefits of local production, especially that last-mile delivery is more harmful to the environment than the benefits it brings. In your experience, what is the ecological footprint of a product that has been globally designed and locally manufactured?

Any production that is not hyperlocal ie. from materials sourced within a very short supply chain, has to find its way to the consumer somehow. With respect to environmental concern, the ‘last mile’ is a question of the existing production paradigm finding the most efficient and low carbon way to achieve its objective. I’m not sure that the last mile debate concerning the most carbon-efficient delivery by a globalised supply system can be compared to local production. Local production will have ‘last miles’ (and more energy used in transportation, depending on where the materials were sourced for the production), but in general, I’d be less worried about lots of last miles from local production, than many more tens of thousands of miles of transportation required with ‘remote’ production.

It’s also worth noting that shipping is responsible for 17% of global emissions, but neither shipping and aviation are accounted for in international climate change negotiations due to the difficulty in allocating emissions ie. do they belong to the producing or consuming country? In general, local has many benefits, but it’s simplistic to assume local always equals ‘good’. It depends on so many things, for example, is the activity occurring in a water-scarce environment? How intensive is the production? Is the power source for the products generated from renewable energy?

Life-cycle analysis (LCA) is one way of assessing the ecological cost-benefit of different methods of production, but it can get quite complicated. Descriptions can offer a sense of the impacts, however, measuring these and making the trade-offs is less clear and requires not only a lot of data but a lot of consideration and interpretation.

This map of shipping routes illustrates the relative density of commercial shipping in the world’s oceans

Before even considering ecological footprints of production, one of the first things cities could do is look into ‘boomerang trade’ – the new economics foundation produced a report on this activity in the UK, where similar goods are being traded and transported across continents, or across the globe. There are also ridiculous examples, such as what I have dubbed ‘frequent flyer prawns’ – shrimp being flown to Thailand from Scotland, and then back because the labour needed to shell them is cheaper in Thailand.

Trade used to be about genuine comparative advantage. If economics is supposed to be about the efficient allocation of resources, and this is what our systems of economics are incentivising, then we need new economics.

What are the limits to urban manufacturing? Surely not everything can be made/produced locally, so as a percentage of a city’s total consumption of resources, how much can we expect to shift?

In theory, a city could make anything. It depends on factors such as whether we shift to safe, non-polluting products and production processes – one of the reasons for zoning in cities was to separate sensitive uses such as residential areas from the nuisance and potential danger of industrial areas (and there are environmental justice issues with who lives near dirty industry). What a city can produce also depends on what it wishes to prioritise, for example, does it want to invest a lot of land in car-dominated transport, or can it reclaim land for all kinds of productive purposes? Does it have the energy available to relocalise more of its production, or is it willing to invest in building such capacity?And governments and business love to talk about the circular economy, and recycling, but if you’re not making locally, if you’re not providing a way for things to be produced and materials to be remade locally, you don’t have a circular economy.

Most cities could readily produce more of their own furniture, utensils, fixtures and fittings, appliances, equipment/tools, textiles and clothing – as cities once did anyway before cheap fossil fuels allowed production to sprawl across the globe. But not all cities can or would want to make more complex artefacts like aircraft, which require specialised skills and facilities. It is likely that some kinds of manufacturing will still require an economy of scale – regional, or national, but not necessarily international. It depends on the size of the city; the skills of the workforce; whether the city values local production and associated economic and social benefits over windfalls derived from property speculation; and what its policy and incentive frameworks prioritise, though these are often influenced by national policy.

In general, it is wiser not to have your population running an ‘ecological deficit’, or being dependent on supply lines that may suddenly change or be disrupted, for example by a fuel shock or a change in policy elsewhere.

Try a thought experiment – if you cut off all external inputs to your city for a month, could it feed, water, power and otherwise sustain itself to keep functioning? What if you had to design the city anew, under such conditions? Could it be designed to still function in an interconnected global economy, but be resilient enough to meet the majority of its own needs?

For you what is the difference between Robertson’s 1994 idea of “glocalisation” and “cosmolocalism”?

Cosmo localism, or ‘design global, manufacture local’, certainly has some overlap with ‘glocalisation’, or the adaptation of globally marketed products to local culture, in that a shared global design can be replicated (or adapted then produced) locally. But by whom, and how?

Glocalisation is about the top-down marketing of consumer products designed remotely, in a centralised way and then tweaked for local culture. Cosmolocalism, or Design Global Manufacture Local (DG-ML) is based on a different production logic, as explained by Jose Ramos and Chris Giotitsas in ‘A New Model of Production for a New Economy’:

Traditionally corporate enterprises have solely owned the intellectual property (IP) they employ in the production of goods. They source the materials for the goods through national or global supply chains. They manufacture those goods using economies of scale in a set number of manufacturing centres, whereupon those finished goods are delivered nationally or globally.

DG-ML is an inversion of this production logic. First of all, the IP is open, whether open source or creative commons or copy fair, so it can be used by anyone. Secondly, manufacturing and production can be done independently of the IP, by any community or enterprise around the world that wants to.

Relocalised production is said to help people find new meaningful economic activities and be part of a community in a word where jobs are disappearing. So far there isn’t a solid business model supporting this shift. What type of policies could policy-makers implement to assist this?

There are plenty of examples of where local production has a solid business model and operates successfully. There may be some new elements to address in building enterprise and livelihoods around open source – something I am still on a learning curve with. However, it could also be that the issue isn’t just a business model per se, but a range of policy and investment incentives that prioritise non-local business(‘attract and retain’) at the expense of local business, the same way that perverse subsidies for fossil fuel energy incumbents have made it harder for renewables.

This is why ‘relocalised production’ needs further nuance. It’s not just about bringing the process of material production back, but a question of ownership, of who benefits. Is the relationship of that production to where it happens regenerative – mostly staying within the local community, making a social, economic and environmental contribution to the place in which it operates? If not, the value generated is ‘leaking’ out of where it is created, which is an extractive dynamic that weakens economic prosperity.

‘Halifax EcoCity Project – proposal for a fractal of an ecological city, Adelaide, Australia / Paul Downton

Part of audacities’ mission is to give advice to cities on how to invest towards “cosmolocalism”. What is the first step cities should take to make this transformation possible?

Each city will have its own unique way of addressing this, however here are some suggestions:

• Build the understanding and buy-in to get people invested in the idea. Determine how you can best communicate what cosmolocalism means, and articulate the benefits for different interest groups – why would they want to pursue this, what’s the story to engage them with?
• Make an inventory or map of what locally productive capacity already exists, both formal and informal.
• Know when and why local production might not be the best option for a certain activity.
• Keep the emphasis on people and culture first – and then appropriate technology. Give at least as much emphasis to the role of ownership and underlying economic DNA in local production as to the flow of physical materials.
• Appreciate that innovation occurs and is being practised by people who do not identify with the language of innovation, who might not see themselves as entrepreneurs or makers or agents of change. Recognise that remarkable, innovative activity occurs in unexpected places – outside the boundaries of ‘innovation districts’ where, all too often, business and government and the big end of town have determined ‘this is what innovation looks like, who does it, here’s where it happens’ because you will miss many voices, many ideas, and a big part of what’s going on in your city.
• Take some calculated risks – you can’t be innovative, or achieve anything audacious, without it!

Photos by Christopher Burns, AJColores & NASA on Unsplash

B.S. Halpern (T. Hengl; D. Groll) on Wikimedia Commons

And the ‘Halifax EcoCity Project – proposal for a fractal of an ecological city, Adelaide, Australia / Paul Downton‘

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Imagine a prosthetic hand designed by geographically dispersed communities of scientists, designers and enthusiasts in a collaborative manner via the web. All knowledge and software related to the hand is shared globally as a digital commons.

People from all over the world who are connected online and have access to local manufacturing machines (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech crafts and tools) can, ideally with the help of an expert, manufacture a customised hand. This the case of the OpenBionics project, which produces designs for robotic and bionic devices.

There are no patent costs to pay for. Less transportation of materials is needed, since a considerable part of the manufacturing takes place locally; maintenance is easier, products are designed to last as long as possible, and costs are thus much lower.

Take another example. Small-scale farmers in France need agricultural machines to support their work. Big companies rarely produce machines specifically for small-scale farmers. And if they do, the maintenance costs are high and the farmers have to adjust their farming techniques to the logic of the machines. Technology, after all, is not neutral.

So the farmers decide to design the agricultural machines themselves. They produce machines to accommodate their needs and not to sell them for a price on the market. They share their designs with the world – as a global digital commons. Small scale farmers from the US share similar needs with their French counterparts. They do the same. After a while, the two communities start to talk to each other and create synergies.

That’s the story of the non-profit network FarmHack (US) and the co-operative L’Atelier Paysan (France) which both produce open-source designs for agricultural machines.

With our colleagues, we have been exploring the contours of an emerging mode of production that builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies.

We call this model “design global, manufacture local” and argue that it could lead to sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption. It follows the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global while what is heavy (manufacturing) is local, and ideally shared.

When knowledge is shared, materials tend to travel less and people collaborate driven by diverse motives. The profit motive is not totally absent, but it is peripheral.

Decentralised open resources for designs can be used for a wide variety of things, medicines, furniture, prosthetic devices, farm tools, machinery and so on. For example, the Wikihouse project produces designs for houses; the RepRap community creates designs for 3D printers. Such projects do not necessarily need a physical basis as their members are dispersed all over the world.

Finding sustainability

But how are these projects funded? From receiving state funding (a research grant) and individual donations (crowdfunding) to alliances with established firms and institutions, commons-oriented projects are experimenting with various business models to stay sustainable.

These globally connected local, open design communities do not tend to practice planned obsolescence. They can adapt such artefacts to local contexts and can benefit from mutual learning.

In such a scenario, Ecuadorian mountain people can for example connect with Nepalese mountain farmers to learn from each other and stop any collaboration that would make them exclusively dependent on proprietary knowledge controlled by multinational corporations.

Towards ‘cosmolocalism’

This idea comes partly from discourse on cosmopolitanism which asserts that each of us has equal moral standing, even as nations treat people differently. The dominant economic system treats physical resources as if they were infinite and then locks up intellectual resources as if they were finite. But the reality is quite the contrary. We live in a world where physical resources are limited, while non-material resources are digitally reproducible and therefore can be shared at a very low cost.

Moving electrons around the world has a smaller ecological footprint than moving coal, iron, plastic and other materials. At a local level, the challenge is to develop economic systems that can draw from local supply chains.

Imagine a water crisis in a city so severe that within a year the whole city may be out of water. A cosmolocal strategy would mean that globally distributed networks would be active in solving the issue. In one part of the world, a water filtration system is prototyped – the system itself is based on a freely available digital design that can be 3D printed.

This is not fiction. There is actually a network based in Cape Town, called STOP RESET GO, which wants to run a cosmolocalisation design event where people would intensively collaborate on solving such a problem.

The Cape Town STOP RESET GO teams draw upon this and begin to experiment with it with their lived challenges. To make the system work they need to make modifications, and they document this and make the next version of the design open. Now other locales around the world take this new design and apply it to their own challenges.

Limitations and future research

A limitation of this new model is that the problems of its two main pillars, such as information and communication as well as local manufacturing technologies. These issues may pertain to resource extraction, exploitative labour, energy use or material flows.

A thorough evaluation of such products and practices would need to take place from a political ecology perspective. For example, what is the ecological footprint of a product that has been globally designed and locally manufactured? Or,to what degree do the users of such a product feel in control of the technology and knowledge necessary for its use and manipulation?

Now our goal is to provide some answers to the questions above and, thus, better understand the transition dynamics of such an emerging mode of production.

Reposted from The Conversation

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