Community composters serve an integral and unique role in both the broader composting industry and the sustainable food movement. They are the social innovators and entrepreneurs that are collecting food waste by burning calories instead of fossil fuel, employing youth and marginalized groups, and developing innovative data-sharing applications and cooperative ownership structures. They are the compost educators and facilitators that are building equity and power in our communities from the ground up, by supporting businesses, schools, farmers, community centers, and other communities in need. They are the front lines, grassroots, boots-on-the-ground that are cultivating awareness of and demand for compost and its associated benefits. They are transforming landscapes, urban and rural (and everything in between), by getting compost into the hands that feed the soil that feeds us.

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Reposted from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

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Overview of Thematic Working Groups

Participatory Tools for Democracy

Commons and democracy are intimately linked. This workshop addresses civic participation and ways to foster citizens’ involvement in the production of their cities through engagement with public bodies and direct forms of political action.

Lately, technology and digital tools are integral to these initiatives to enhance democratic processes. This workshop will consider this dynamic and look at the co-production of public policies and projects through digital platforms.

Participants are interested in analyzing changes produced by these new collaborative processes. They have experience in the production of tools and resources such as online maps, collective storytelling, repositories of experiences, and initiatives designed to support political decentralization and co-production, with and without support from political institutions. This work also includes the development of charters, contracts and structures between different urban actors involved in urban commons.around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Currencies and financing of commons

This theme promotes currency and finance as fundamental to the commons and solidarity economy. How are alternative currencies and digital tools and platforms at work, and what are the infrastructures and material environments that support communing and collective responsibility in this sphere? The workshop will examine how we can multiply or upscale some of the initiatives, methods, frameworks, and formats that have already been explored locally.

Participants have expressed interest in strengthening networks and collaborative projects, developing tools to develop an economy based on the commons, as well as strategies and methodologies on P2P mechanisms of value assessment and exchange. They have experience in time-banking and various cooperatives, have developed crypto-currencies and mobilized economic resources and human partnerships; contribute to community building, disseminate and create awareness and commitment around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Data commons and the collaborative city

This workshop brings together the topics of control of (civic) data and the collaborative economic models that depend on online platforms. There is increasing interest in exploring alternatives that respect data and promote its civic control, taking into account possibilities for different modes of production & collection of this data. In what way can we facilitate data management and control in line with the social common good?

The workshop will take into account how regulations and policies on open source and open data, on the one hand, and those on technology and decentralized infrastructure, on the other, can play a role in facilitating data sovereignty and new forms of local cooperativism.

Moving away from large corporation and capital-led city development, we have to rethink the Smart City model and imagine data commons that socialise the value of data. How do initiatives like guifinet and Fairbnb fit in?  The starting point for the workshop will be recent experiences in Barcelona and Amsterdam.

Embodied productions of commoning: Food, Health, and Leisure

This workshop takes a holistic view of health creation to include also food production and distribution as well as sport and leisure activities. It will address the different determinants of our physical and mental condition, based on social justice, solidarity economy, and respect to biophysical limits of ecosystems. The commons approach underlines the importance of self-organised, locally rooted, inclusive and resilient community networks and civic spaces in order to re-think the practices and the development of public policy-making in this domain.

Participants have experience and are interested in the interrelationship at all points of the journey from “Land to Fork”, including access to land, nutrition, food sovereignty, cultivation, etc.; new forms of distribution, including for recycling; access to medical knowledge and patient-guided health policies and services; democratization of healthcare and self-organization of citizen efforts to reduce bureaucratic hurdles; and reclaiming the field for grassroots sports while challenging norms to inspire new models of recreation.

Law for the Commons

In order to guarantee the protection and development of commoning practices, legal opportunities and tools need to be located and addressed. This workshop deals with the search for these opportunities in relation to pre-existing and potential urban commons projects. This can draw from existing knowledge and institutional analysis in management of traditional commons, as well as contemporary legal practices for local, national and European legislation. It can also investigate instances where these concepts have been applied at the local scale.

These include participants’ experiences in, for example, production of municipal regulations for shared administration, which protects urban commons (squares, gardens, schools, cultural commons, streets, etc.) and compels local governments to collaborate with citizens. Participants propose the generation of platforms to exchange existing knowledge and experiences in legal mechanisms, as well as the production of practical tools to be used at European and local levels in relation with legislation, norms and institutional interaction.

Right to the City (Public Space and Urbanism, Housing, Water & Energy)

This theme brings together different aspects of the configuration of the city: Public Spaces & Urbanism, Housing, Tourism, Water & Energy and Culture. Understanding the Right to the City as a collective and bottom-up creation of a new paradigm can help to provide an alternative framework to re-think cities and human settlements on the basis of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. The workshop will discuss processes of commercialization and privatization of public and common goods and resources; how commons can create forms of democratic urban management; and how re-municipalization processes of urban infrastructures can be linked to the commons discourse. It will also consider the policy frameworks for commons that can be implemented, how spaces can be collectively used for the common good and what kind of legal and economic frameworks are needed to stabilize communing practices.

There is a great diversity of experiences and interests within the group. Proposals include trans-local collaboration to develop perspectives on: urban rights, cultural ecosystems for integration within the city, commons-based housing plans, fighting gentrification and damaging tourism, among others. There is emphasis on sharing examples and tools and promoting the connection of practitioners, researches, professionals, and citizens with project initiators and grassroots actors. Participants draw from experiences including the redevelopment of brownfields and vacant properties, the creation of political platforms and public campaigning and engagement, and construction of community gardens and other spaces as learning environments for communing. Given the wide range of interests and backgrounds, for this theme we can also imagine a mix of general discussions and more specific working spaces, to be decided by the participants themselves, either in organizational process before the meeting or in situ.

Solidarity as a commons: Migrants and Refugees

In many countries, migrants and refugees are confronted by very repressive policies, and in some cases violence. In certain places, citizens are responding by getting involved in local activities to distribute food, clothes and other commodities, to provide information about asylum procedures or how to meet basic needs and human rights, to facilitate the inclusion of migrants or refugees in cities and cohabitation between people in neighborhoods, etc. At a time when policies about immigration and refugees in most European countries are inadequate and troubling, these mobilizations are extremely important and sharing experiences is key.

The purpose of this workshop is twofold. First, it aims to share experiences and knowledge about local citizen-developed initiatives to help migrants and refugees across Europe. In addition, the workshop will be an opportunity to discuss solidarity with migrants and refugees as a commons. Themes to discuss include: the effects on policies and policy makers of the production of solidarity by citizens, the modalities of governance among civil society organizations around their initiatives, and the forms of interactions with municipalities around the initiatives of civil society actors.

Participants have experience in local initiatives of solidarity and hospitality with migrants and refugees; are engaged in research and activism on urban commons focusing on migrant rights; or are involved in initiatives like ecovillage movements, commons support for artists at risk, or community social centers that work to develop new forms of participative work and cooperation to build solidarity.

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At the end of October, I wrote an article entitled “Evgeny Morozov and personal data as public domain” .
I got a lot of feedback, including from people who had never heard about these kinds of theories, trying to break with the individualistic or “personalist”  approach based on the current law about the protection of personal data, to think/rethink about its collective dimension.

Actually, there are many theories which, I think, can be divided into four groups, as I tried to show with the mindmap below (click image for full mindmap).

Click image to view full mindmap

The four groups of theories are as follows (some make a direct link between personal data and commons, while others establish an indirect link):

• Free software theories (indirect link): personal data are not directly connected with common goods, but digital commons should be developed (particularly free software) in order to regain control of them. Furthermore, we must go back to a decentralised framework of the web and encourage a service-based economy if we want the Internet to be preserved as a common good, to prevent abuses of personal data and to limit the ascendance of state supervision.
• Collectivist theories (indirect link): personal data are not directly connected with common goods, but we have to allow people to pool and share them safely or to implement collective actions in order to defend individual rights (class action lawsuits, specific unionism, etc.).
• Commoners theories (direct link): the legitimate status of personal data has to be changed to secure its collective dimension and recognize it as a common good (for example, grant a common good status to “social graph” or “network of related data”). This will make it possible to rethink the governance of personal data as a “bundle of rights”.
• Public sphere theories (direct link): the legal status of personal data has to be changed to recognize its nature as a public good. This will enable states to weigh on digital platforms, particularly by submitting them to new forms of taxation, or by creating public organizations to enhance collective control of data.

I tried to make sub-divisions for each of those four theories and to give concrete examples. If you’d like more information, you’ll find links at the end of every “branch”.

I’m not saying this typology is perfect, but it has allowed me to better apprehend the small differences between the various positions. It can be noted that some of the authors appear in different theories, which proves that they are compatible or complementary.

Personally, I tend to be part of the commoners’ family, as I have already said in this blog.

Feel free to comment if you think of more examples for this map or if you think this typology could be improved in any way.

Photo by Sarah @ pingsandneedles

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For more information about the program, click here.

In cooperation with the Transeuropa Festival and MediaLab Prado, the assembly features 4 days of workshops, visits to local commons initiatives, debates, talks, art and parties in the heart of Madrid. An eclectic mix of commons activists from all over Europe will get together to discuss the commons and the future of Europe.

The European Commons Assembly starts on Wednesday (the 25th of October) and ends with a closing assembly on Friday (the 27th of October). Saturday (October 28th) will be filled with trips to local commoning sites around Madrid and exciting sessions organized by Transeuropa Festival in the afternoon.

Workshop themes include ‘Participatory Tools for Democracy’, ‘Right to the City’, ‘Law for the Commons’, ‘Data Commons and the Collaborative Economy’, ‘Food’, ‘Health and Leisure’, and ‘Solidarity as a Commons: Migrants and Refugees’.

For more updates, follow us here on Twitter or join the event here on Facebook.

We hope to see you in Madrid!

Photo by Tom.Lechner

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Adrien Labaeye: You may have heard of smart cities that use data to improve urban networks like public transportation systems. In the shadow of this well-marketed story is another narrative around data in the city; a story where the right to the city extends to the digital realm. Here are two initiatives where reclaiming citizens’ control over data has enabled practices that run counter to mainstream narratives of market-driven urban development — practices of commoning data and urban spaces, together.

Usually, talking about the role of digital technology in cities brings about the concept of “smart cities.” With billions of corporate and public money invested into the concept, the narrative of tech and efficiency is quickly eluding other notions such as equity, participation, diversity, and nature. With its focus on all-efficiency, the smart city narrative is pushing a vision of the city where urban development is decided by planners and algorithms bound by financial capital that are gradually, as Richard Sennett put it, taking away from citizens the possibility to shape the space where they live.

Case study #1: Urban Foraging in Germany

In 2009, Kai Gidhorn was regularly picking apples while cruising on his bike through the backcountry of Berlin, Germany. Because he wanted to remember the good spots, he plotted them on a map. And because he also wanted to share that with friends, he made it a collaborative map online. Slowly, the map grew as people added more fruit trees in public spaces to it. One thing lead to another, and Mundraub (“theft of food”) was born. Now the Berlin-based initiative has more than 40,000 registered users in Germany and Austria.

The practice in itself — foraging and gleaning — is not new. Still, it was forgotten, particularly in cities. Thanks to Mundraub’s collaborative mapping (or so it seems), the practice is now re-emerging in Germany. People have become used to maps to relate to their environment and find their way. This is not limited to the German-speaking world. Falling Fruit, a similar platform in the U.S. has a global reach and has collected probably the largest data repository of fruit trees globally, tapping on the crowd as well as open data. To sum it up, the idea of urban foraging is to crowdsource a map of growing edibles, reconnect ourselves to our edible urban landscape, and, if possible, get free food. But this isn’t just about taking.

Mundraub staff work with children and adults to share literacy about edibles and plant growth. They also offer tours to uncover new edibles, organize collective harvests, and make apple juice and cider, giving people a taste of DIY projects. In December of 2016, in Pankow, a borough of Berlin, urban foragers struck a deal with the local government to plant and take care of fruit trees in a public park.

Fruit trees are usually not favored by municipalities because they require intensive care. While the number is humble — twelve trees — this is quite a ground-breaking achievement when one considers the tradition of top-down management of German city administrations. Consider that in most German cities, in order to pick up fruits from public trees you are supposed to ask permission to the municipality. In Berlin-Pankow, not only have urban foragers received a bulk authorization to pick fruits from any public tree, but also the right to take care of the planted trees, which includes pruning.

“We are currently in an experimentation phase: If it’s successful, if citizens take good care of the trees, then we are ready to open more land for such direct involvement of citizens,” says Andreas Johnke, director of the municipal service in charge of streets and green spaces of the Berlin-Pankow borough. This is just a start, one borough, twelve trees planted, but Mundraub plans to do the same everywhere in Germany, and many cities already have shown interest. The goal is to get 200 cities by the end of 2017 to open up their tree cadasters and grant bulk authorization to citizens to pick up edibles without needing to ask. And in March, Mundraub also collaborated with a supermarket to let citizens plant five fruit trees in the parking lot, blurring the line between private and public space.

Families planting edible trees for future generations on the private land of a supermarket in Berlin. Photo: CC-BY-SA-NC Adrien Labaeye

Case study #2: Reclaiming Vacant Land in New York City

In 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, Paula Segal started to gather information about a vacant space in her neighborhood. It was empty for years, collecting garbage. After some research, it appeared the vacant, fenced lot was public, and had been planned as a public park — which was never built. After several community meetings and exchanges with the municipality, Myrtle Village Green was born as a community space. It includes a research and production farm, meeting space, and an open-air cinema.

Based on this first experience, Segal and other activists wanted to find out how many such vacant public lots existed. It turned out to be 596 acres, which became the name of Segal’s initiative. Over the past six years, the grassroots organization reclaimed, remixed, and opened to the crowd public data about vacant lots through its Living Lots map. The map offers information about each lot and gives an avenue to chat with neighbors interested in doing something with it. “New community gardeners are contacting us because they are using the Living Lots map to explore what city-owned land is potentially available for community gardening,” says Carlos Martinez, deputy director of Green Thumb, New York’s program for community gardening that emerged to support civic use of land left vacant by the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s.

However, the true strength of 596 Acres lies not only online: The organization also puts up signs calling neighbors to seize the land for their community. And it works. It has spurred the creation of 32 community gardens on previously vacant public land mostly in underprivileged neighborhoods that lack parks and community facilities. Another reason for the success of the organization lies in the productive relationship it has with local agencies for urban gardening: “With 596 Acres, we work closely with each other, they help us to find key people who have interest to be the steward or the leader of a community garden,” says Martinez. As of January, more than 848 acres of vacant public land have been plotted on the map.

Map and Data: Strategic Resources to Inspire Citizen-Led Change

These two examples show that creating a data commons about a shared physical resource may be a critical step in enabling communities to reclaim that resource. In one case, the data is crowdsourced from scratch, and in the other, open municipal data is compiled and given a new life.

As our cases show, data needs to be broken down into digestible bits of information, and the map is a crucial tool in doing that. The mapping interface allows people to make sense of complex information, to visualize vacant lots and fruit trees in the city. It creates a new reality in our minds. Open data alone is not enough to start a social process of slowly and iteratively re-appropriating public space. Data itself needs to be re-appropriated, remodeled, refined into digestible information and collaborative mapping is a powerful tool to do so.

But as Paula Segal found out in Brooklyn, real change happens when people start working together. The point on the map, the sign on the vacant lot is the starting point to collaboration, but it is really on land (i.e. in the physical space but not necessarily offline) co-production, the joy of doing things together that really brings lasting change in communities. It is about pressing apples into juice, planting trees, and so on. Only the sustained and lasting collective action has a chance of reshaping the status quo of local governance towards more collaborative governance of urban resources.

For city administrators, in our two cases, active participation of citizens was viewed favorably: “We find it a good thing that citizens start taking care of a piece of land,” says Johnke of Berlin-Pankow. “They switch from being  like passive customers expecting something in return for the taxes they pay to a more active and civic attitude where they feel and act responsibly.” This, he continues, has a wider impact: “With increasing participation of the public, the role of city administrators in charge of public land is changing from being simple managers of streets and park to becoming more facilitators, coordinators.” But at the same time, administrations are careful about delegating their work to groups of citizens who may fail to sustain action over time. For this, community building and some clear structures and clear rules are essential, says Carlos Martinez, from Green Thumb in New York City.

This image is a screenshot of Mundraub’s map in Berlin: Each icon shows different fruits or herbs

From Public Management to Commoning Cities

This evolution of the role municipal administrations can play, from being top-down managers to becoming facilitators of citizens’ re-appropriation strongly echoes the philosophy followed by the City of New York. “We don’t intervene in any decision-making, [community gardeners] decides their own rules,” Martinez says. “What we ask them is to have by-laws or some guidelines — regulations on how they manage the garden to reduce the risk of conflicts. In that case we may facilitate the conflict resolution, but, generally, we try to stay away, giving them the tools to resolve the conflict themselves.”

Leaving citizens to design the rules to manage shared spaces supports a process of commoning public spaces. This is less about arguing whether green spaces or trees are public goods or commons. It is about municipalities acknowledging and actively enabling the self-organization of public space by citizens. This is what cities like Bologna in Italy are doing at scale to manage the city as a commons. In this process and as we have shown, digital networks offer new opportunities. “With a new generation of gardeners — millennials — there is more room for digital technology to be part of this [community gardening] movement,” Martinez says. The coming of age of the digital natives will transform these traditional grassroots practices. Commoning will have to be increasingly understood as a process that manifests across the digital and physical spaces.

In this story of the digital transformation of cities data in the form of maps, is just a powerful tool among many others that communities may use in a wider commoning process to co-produce shared spaces — a sharing city. This (messy) reality on the ground contrasts starkly with the narrative of a smart city smoothly planned and managed from the top by the technocratic alliance of the bureaucracy and market that would  thanks to big data — calculate the most efficient solutions, and shape optimal, but stupefying spaces. At odds and in the shadow of the mainstream, initiatives like Mundraub and 596 Acres show us that commoning urban data, making it actionable and accessible for normal citizens may trigger a creative practice of commoning public spaces and make cities more livable. Commoning the city in an age of digital transformation may provide people with opportunities for a convivial use of technology. Commoning, with the use of tools like collaborative mapping, enables urban dwellers to actually own and shape the places where they live. Thus, Sharing Cities could be a powerful antidote at a time when so many feel powerless and overwhelmed by a world that appears to be getting more complex and threatening every day.

These two small stories sound marginal? How can we uncover many more?

Photo by Daniel Wehner

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the Great Lakes Commons Map (a bioregional map of healing and harm), World of Commons (innovative forms of citizen-led governance of public property and services in Italy), Falling Fruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forgeable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trustdirectory maps.

As the varieties of maps proliferate, there is growing concern that the mapping projects truly function as commons and be capable of sharing data and growing together. But meeting this challenge entails some knotty technical, social and legal issues.

A group of mappers met at the Commons Space sessions of the World Social Forum in Montreal last year to try to make progress on the challenge.  The dialogues continued at an “Intermapping” workshop in Florence, Italy, last month. After days of deep debate and collaboration, the mappers came up with a document that outlines twelve key principles for developing effective data and mapping commons. The Charter for Building a Data Commons for a Free, Fair and Sustainable Future is the fruit of those dialogues.

The Charter’s authors describe the document as “the maximum ‘commons denominator’ of mapping projects that aspire to share data for the common good.” If you follow these guidelines,” write the mappers, “you will contribute to a Global Data Commons. That is, you will govern your mapping community and manage data differently than people who centralize data control for profit.”

“The Charter does not describe the vision, scope or values of a specific mapping project.  It is rather an expression of Data Commons principles. It will help you reimagine how you protect the animating spirit of your mapping project and prevent your data from being co-opted or enclosed.”

Here is version 0.6 of the Charter, which is still a work-in-progress:

1. Reflect your ambition together.  Discuss the core of your project again and again. Everybody involved should always feel in resonance with the direction in which it’s heading.

2. Make your community thrive.  For the project to be successful, a reliable community is more important than anything else. Care for those who might support you when you need them most.

3. Separate commons and commerce.  Mapping for the commons is different from producing services or products to compete on the map-market. Make sure you don’t feed power-imbalances or profit-driven agendas and learn how to systematically separate commons from commerce.

4. Design for interoperability. Think of your map as a node in a network of many maps. Talk with other contributors to the Data Commons to find out if you can use the same data model, licence and approach to mapping.

5. Care for a living vocabulary. Vocabularies as entry points to complex social worlds are always incomplete. Learn from other mappers’ vocabularies. Make sure your vocabulary can be adjusted. Make it explicit and publish it openly, so that others can learn from it too.

6. Document transparently.  Sharing your working process, learnings and failures allow others to replicate, join and contribute. Don’t leave documentation for after. Do it often and make it understandable. Use technologies designed for open cooperation.

7. Crowdsource what you can. Sustain your project whenever possible with money, time, knowledge, storing space, hardware or monitoring from your community or public support. Stay independent!

8. Use FLOSS tools. It gives you the freedom to further develop your own project and software according to your needs. And it enables you to contribute to the development of these tools.

9. Build upon the open web platform. Open web standards ensure your map, its data and associated applications cannot be enclosed and are prepared for later remixing and integration with other sources.

10. Own your data. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing or copying what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent you from being sued or your data being enclosed. Ban Google.

11. Protect your data. To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. Use appropriate licenses to protect your collective work!

12. Archive your project. When it doesn’t work anymore for you, others still might want to build on it in the future.

(Earlier versions of the document can be found here and here. If you have comments or new points to add to the Charter, here is a hackpad for new contributions.)

These twelve principles represent a lot of hard-won wisdom into the functioning of data commons!

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