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

The post Personal data and commons: a mapping of current theories appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Maps shape our perception, they direct our transitions and they inform our decisions. Whoever doubts the power of mapping, might think of Google maps impact on the lives of the many. But not all, because there is an alternative: Open Street Map. The difference between the two becomes crystal clear when asking: Who owns the maps? Who owns the data? And who reaps the benefits?

Open Street Map is based on free software. It is owned and governed by you. It is constantly in the making, and open to all those who wish to contribute to it on the basis of the collective Open Street Map community criteria. Open Street Map is the topographic sister of Wikipedia.

When TransforMap was initiated, back in 2014, the community sought to combine the Open Street Map approach with the ambition of making the plethora of socio-economic alternatives – TAPAS: There Are Plenty of AlternativeS – visible. We wanted to add to the many crowdsourced maps a possibility to see TAPAs unfolding at a glance, all at once, on people’s devices, in a user-friendly way without being patronizing nor concentrating data. That was and still is TransforMap’s ambition: to challenge both the dictatorship of corporate-owned data and the cultural hegemony of a an economy stuck in a neoliberal or neoclassical Market-State framework through bringing plenty of Alternatives to everybody’s attention, among them the Commons.

Countless mapping projects around the world have similar ambitions. Just like TransforMap, they are committed to enhancing the visibility and impact of all those projects, initiatives and enterprises that contribute to a free, fair and sustainable future. However, most of them receive little attention in mainstream media and general culture, because they are:

•   utterly disconnected from each other
•   partly enclosed on proprietary platforms – like Google maps
•   built on different taxonomies, and
•   (luckily) highly diverse in their mapping approach

In short: not interoperable.

Working towards the interoperability of the countless alter-maps is widely perceived as a key element for enhancing their impact. Thus, the need for  convergence and for atlasing maps based on a ‘mapping as a Commons’‚ as opposed to ‘mapping the Commons’. The former is a mapping philosophy and crucial for distilling the governance principle of emancipatory mapping projects; the latter is just one out of many ‘objects’ or ‘items’ to be mapped.

The following lines roughly sketch out our understanding of ‘Mapping as a Commons’. Later on, they might turn into a manifesto for ‘Mapping as Commoning’‚ for many, many maps and through a multitude of mappers. They are written in an un-imperative manifesto form, to be used from now on as a guideline or quick analytical tool to evaluate the own mapping practices.

Mapping as a Commons: what does it mean? (0.2)

The following is based on the raw notes from Commons Space at WSF 2016 and an initial summary by @almereyda. The principles are the condensate of globally dispersed, locally found initiatives which collaborate for building and maintaining a shared mapping commons.

1. Stick to the Commons,  as a goal and a practice
The challenge is twofold: contribute to the Commons as a shared resource and do it through commoning. Your mapping project is not a deliverable, nor a service/product to compete on the map market. Hence, it is paramount to systematically separate commons and commerce and to integrate the insights (patterns?) of successful commoning practices into your mapping initiative. Strive for coherence at any moment!

2. Create syntony on the goal
Discuss your common goal and your understanding of “mapping as commoning” again and again. And again! Everybody involved should resonate in the essentials and feel in syntony with mapping for the Commons through commoning at any time.

3. People’s needs first
Maps provide orientation to common people but they also provide visibility of power and policy-driven agendas. Make sure your map doesn’t feed the power imbalances. People’s needs trump the desires of institutions, donors or clients.

4. Keep an eye on interoperability and use web technology
To map as a commoner implies caring for other mappers’ needs and concerns. You will take them into account through dialogue with partner-mappers and make sure interoperability is a shared goal.

5.Contribute to the Federated Commons
Mapping the World through Commoning is a double contribution: among commons projects and initiatives toward a Federated Commons and between Commons projects, solutions or initiatives and other socioeconomic alternatives.]

6. Provide open access
Always. To everything.

7. Use free software
Working with free software at all levels is critical, as it is not about the freedom of the software, but about your freedom to further develop your mapping projects according to your own needs.

8. Self-host your infrastructure
Only use technology which allows to be replicated quickly, and document transparently how you do it. Transparent documentation means understandable documentation.

9. Build on open technology standards
Ensure your map(s), data and associated mapping applications can be reused on a wide diversity of media and devices. Ergo: hands off proprietary technologies and their standards. Don’t consider them, not even as interim solution. If you do, you risk adding one interim to another and getting trapped into dependencies.

10. Make sure you really own your data
‘Mapping as a Commons’ strives for mapping sovereignty at all levels. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing data for geo-location or copying and pasting what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent being sued or having your data being enclosed. Make sure you really own your data. It prevents the real nightmare of at some point losing your data without being able to do something.

11. Use free open data licenses
To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your common data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. What is in the Commons must remain in the Commons. Free licences protect the result of your collective work at any moment. Make use of them. It’s simple.

12. Guarantee the openness of taxonomies
A taxonomy is incomplete as a matter of fact. It is one out of many entry points to complex social worlds. The more you learn about these worlds, the better you can adjust your taxonomy. An open taxonomy allows your peer mappers and users to search it for a concept, link them – via tags – to a parent category, to add missing concepts (if you allow), or to merge tag structures.

13. Make the Data Commons thrive through your usage
Link to WikiData and OpenStreetMap from the beginning! It’s just nonsense to maintain your single data set. There is so much to benefit from and contribute to the data commons. Explore abundance and contribute loads to our shared data.

14. Care for your Data Commons
Strive for accuracy and remember at the same time, that there is always subjectivity in data.

15. Protect the ‘maps & atlases commons’ legally as commons
Remember: each commons needs protection. Innovative legal forms help to prevent cooptation. Make sure the resulting maps and atlases own themselves instead of being owned by any specific person or organization.

16. Crowdsource your mapping
Do so whenever you can and for whatever is needed: money, time, knowledge, storage space, hardware, monitoring, etc.

Last resort

17. Remember always why you are making the map and who you are making it for. Remember that everyone is a mapmaker. Share what you can and if everything looks dark, take a break, keep calm and continue commoning.

18. Archive the map when it doesn’t work for you anymore. Others might want to build on it, sometime.

PLEASE HELP US  TESTING AND IMPROVING THESE PRINCIPLES.

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A pioneer in this style of high-tech activism is the Brooklyn-based group 596 Acres, whose name comes from apparent number of acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn in 2011 as determined by the NYC Department of City Planning.  Since its founding that year, 596 Acres has ingeniously used various databases to identify vacant lots throughout the City that could be re-purposed into public gardens, farms parks, and community meeting spaces.

Paula Z. Segal, an attorney who works with the Urban Justice Center in New York City, explained in a blog post that shortly after its founding in 2011, “the 596 Acres team started hunting down all available data about city-owned land. Once we got the data, we worked to translate it into usable information. For each publicly owned ‘vacant’ lot we found, we asked two questions: 1) ‘Is this lot in use already?’ and 2) ‘Can you reach this lot from the street?’”

The group used a combination of automated script, Google Maps, the interactive community maps at OASISNYC.net, and gardener surveys done by a NYC nonprofit, to identify the unused lots accessible from the street.  It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.  But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

There is a backstory to 596 Acres’ activism: In the 1990s, many New Yorkers converged on trashed-out parcels of city land, converting them into hundreds of community gardens. This amazing surge of commoning helped to humanize the cityscape while, as a byproduct, raising property values for adjacent buildings in the neighborhood. People could undertake this work only because the vacant lots were open and accessible. (In the era of Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, by contrast, any vacant lots are fenced, effectively thwarting the reclaiming of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for commoners.) Guiliani sought to sell off the land that commoners had reclaimed, provoking a fierce backlash that resulted in the creation of scores of community land trusts to manage the gardens.

Now that vacant lots are fenced, 596 Acres post signs on the fences informing neighbors that the land is actually publicly owned (i.e., government, not commoners, has title to the land). The signs invite people to organize to try to convert the unused lots into gardens or parks. To help move this process along, 596 Acres has created online maps giving detailed information about each vacant lot – who is the registered owner, the land’s legal status, city departments and politicians who should be contacted, etc.

Living Lots NYC now serves as “a clearinghouse of information that New Yorkers can use to find, unlock and protect our shared resources.”  The site features a searchable database and map of 899 “acres of opportunity” on 1,337 sites, and 1,186 acres of community projects on 584 sites.  The map also includes colored dots showing where people have access and where people are organizing to liberate land.  A primary goal of the site is to “broadcast what is know-able [about vacant city land parcels] and to help people find one another on a property-by-property basis.”

Paula Segal explains that:

Wherever possible, the goal is a permanent transfer of public land to the NYC Parks Department, or private land to a community land trust. But sometimes creating a temporary space for a few years until other planned development moves forward—arranged via an interim use agreement—is the only achievable outcome.

In each instance, residents must navigate a unique bureaucratic maze: applying for approval from their Community Board, winning endorsement from local elected officials, and negotiating with whichever agency holds title to the land. Along the way, 596 Acres provides legal advice, technical assistance, and a network for sharing best practices from successful campaigns.

Some of the benefits of building power this way have been unexpected.  In January 2015, when NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) published a list of 181 “hard to develop” properties that they would sell for $1 to developers willing to build affordable housing, we were able to quickly analyze the list and find out that it included 20 community garden lots. Six of those were gardens that had been formed with our support.

Within three weeks of the list’s publication, over 150 New Yorkers, including four City Council members, were rallying on the steps of City Hall. By the end of that year, the administration had transformed 36 formerly “interim use” spaces to permanently preserved NYC Parks Department gardens, including fifteen of the gardens on the January list. Using our network, community gardeners had preempted a major threat, ensuring that the largest wave of garden preservation in NYC history would happen without a legal battle.

596 Acres has now moved beyond vacant lots, focusing on how inaccessible and neglected NYC parks, buildings and post offices could be put to better use.

In collaboration with the Urban Justice Center and Common Cause/NY, 596 Acres also operates a website called NYCommons that helps people learn more about New York City’s public spaces.  Some 3,243 properties are listed, with colored dots indicating whether the property is a library, post office, waterfront facility, public housing, garden, vacant lot, whether “development is pending” and if organizing [against “development”] is underway.

“Some are opportunities to organize new spaces for integrated community services,” writes Segal. “Others we hope to preserve in the face of a real estate market hungry for places it can transform into luxury development.”  Many of of the neglected land parcels, parks, community centers, public baths, rest rooms and buildings are in low-income communities of color — victims of the city’s fiscal crisis and class-driven policy choices in the 1970s.

I’m impressed with how database-driven maps can be used to galvanize and assist citizen campaigns to reclaim the city.  It suggests that commoners should convene more “inter-mapping” confabs to trade insights and develop database activism.

Photo by kika13

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