This publication is an output of the Interactive Cities URBACT network that explored how digital, social media and user generated content can improve today´s urban management in European cities, whatever size. This challenge has been tackled in two ways.

This challenge has been tackled in two ways. Firstly, as an opportunity to redefine and deepen the concept of citizenship and civic engagement today, providing a path to spark cohesion, commonalities and shared value as well as increasing sense of place. In other words, making the most of the new channels to revisit the relationship between the individual and the local community in the digital era. Secondly, as a way to improve the quality of public services, in terms of efficiency and transparency, and even widen the current service chart provided by local authorities.

Download ebook from Cooperative City site

How the city of Ghent uses open data to increase the economic development and how the Interactive Cities network foster the participation and improve the exchange of ideas and best practices among partners – an interview with Thomas Lecompte. Interactive Cities’ final Conference in Genoa 11-13 April. 2018 Interactive Cities is an URBACT Action and Planning Network on the use of social media to foster interaction between cities and citizens categories. The network operated during 2015 and 2018 thanks to the support of the URBACT program with ERDF funding and was composed by the cities of Genoa (Lead Partner), Alba Iulia, CLLD Lisbon, EDC Debrecen, Ghent, Murcia, Palermo, Semaest Paris, Tartu and Varna. Find more information at: Interactive Cities

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For years, I’ve been looking beyond the technical and economic limits which we’ve developed during our fast few decades of personal computing and digital networking.  I’ve looked at co-creative potentials envisioned by Internet pioneers, and added ideas on the basic nature of communication and community.  This book reflects all of that research– but in most ways, it’s just a beginning.

Co- creating tech and culture

We can rebuild communications technologies (tools, techniques and systems) to foster the emergence of communities and inter-communities of autonomous peers. It’s an immense challenge, however, because we must displace corporations which marry communities to software platforms based on financially extractive models.

We can foster just and effective dialogue between tech and culture with these open tech goals:

1. All globally valuable communications software should be, or become, freely available to diverse digital networks.

2. Network participants should be able to use any software which meets systemic specifications for protocols or APIs.

Humanity first

I believe that p2p networking technology is crucial to a sustainable future.  However, it won’t get anyone out of the creative and social work we need to do together.

Communication and collaboration are deeply human. People must share ideas and activities to discover common interests, to plan and work fairly together, and to develop true community.

Putting humanity first, we won’t predetermine social tools and techniques according to currently usable software, including our evolving programming languages.  However, we’ll always need to refine tools and techniques through shared experiences with usable software.

Software applications and functions

Many processes described in Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking could be integrated into a small set of signaling and storage applications. However, they’ll probably be explored in various networks before they’re fully realized anywhere. Also, complex projects require coordinating functions which my book doesn’t yet mention. For instance, I’m developing a fractal process management system for objectives with unlimited levels of complexity.

I’m drafting a new paper on the open ecosystem of tools and techniques we need to support p2p organizing, including essential systems such as notifications, scheduling and calendars.  Designers can directly integrate such systems with this book’s networking models.

Coordinated Goals

I’ll openly develop Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking based on feedback, and I’ll use Agreement-Based Organization to help build co-authored versions of its networking models.  Ideally, participation will be open to all sincerely interested people, via distributive network management principles.

Agreement-Based Organization will always be separately available, and both documents will always be licensed for sharing and adaptation.  However, I believe that some form of agreement-based organization will receive increased attention as a component within a co-authored p2p networking model.

I’ll coordinate my goals with harmonious efforts in existing projects and communities such as Value Flows. We’ll only need a small fraction of our co-creative resources to develop open technologies for all people.

How you can help

I want and need feedback on Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking.  I’d especially appreciate if feedback reflects these framing questions:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

Maybe you have ideas I haven’t encountered before!  Feel free to comment directly on the document or email me, and share your thoughts on how we can emerge into an Information Age.

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Here are some interesting findings, which I would like to highlight:

1. These communities are also ‘imaginary communities’ with specific values, i..e. they want to make the world a better place, i.e. they are ethical communities not just profit-maximising entities, and their identification is in global networks, not just the locales they are embedded in. This is historically important since it echoes the birth of nation-states as imaginary communities (see Benedict Anderson’s landmark book on this topic)

2. A majority of 78% of these communities are practicing, preparing and/or looking into open value or contributory accounting systems; again, this is significant since changes in accounting practices and philosophies have accompanied the great value regime transitions in the past

3. Reputation capital is a fictitious commodity that has an effective capacity to drive and allocate resources to these common projects.

This document is therefore a must-read for the P2P and Commons community.

This paper summarizes three years of ethnographic work on Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP) communities within the research project P2PValue, funded by the European Commission. By Adam Arvidsson, Alessandro Caliandro, Alberto Cossu, Maitrayee Deka, Alessandro Gandini, Vincenzo Luise, Brigida Orria and Guido Anselmi.

Key insights:

• CBPP is part of a broader transformation in the information economy whereby collaboration and common knowledge have come to play an ever more important part in value creation. This development has roots that go back to the industrial revolution in the 19th century and it has been greatly accelerated by the diffusion of digital media. CBPP or CBPP like modes of production have become a core component to the contemporary information economy as a whole.
• CBPP occurs in highly particular kinds of communities. They are not kept together by frequent interaction or a tight web of social relations. Instead they are kept together by sharing a common imaginary that posits a transformative potential on the part of the particular practice to which these communities are dedicated.
• Contributions to this potential through technical skills and/or virtuous conduct is rewarded with reputation. Reputation is the form of that exchange value takes in CBPP communities, it is the ‘fictious commodity’ typical to CBPP.
• Reputation is also the most important value form that structures transactions between CBPP and other institutional logics, such as that of markets, capitalism and the state.
• The value of reputation lies in its ability to give a proximate measure to risk.
• The fact that value is principally related to risk means that CBPP communities operate a value logic that mirror that of financial markets.
• Most CBPP communities envision commons based markets as alternatives to capitalism. Such commons-based markets build on the construction of imaginaries that are able to transform insecurity into risk in ways that mirror communitarian principles.

Introduction

“The publication of Yochlai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks in 2006 introduced the notion of Commons based peer production (CBPP) to the theoretical vocabulary of the social sciences. Similar issues had been debated for some time, mainly within the disciplines of computer science and management, and within the mainly non-academic debates that constituted what Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron (1996) called the ‘Californian Ideology’ of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, hackers and computer enthusiasts (for an overview see Turner, 2010, Romele and Severo, 2016). However, Benkler’s work, along with the contemporary writings of Michel Bauwens (2005), gave a coherent definition to the phenomenon and placed it within the tradition of mainstream social theory.

Benkler makes explicit the implicit suggestion already current within exponents of the ‘Calfornian ideology’, that CBPP should be understood as a new mode of production, alternative to markets and networks, which is emerging in digital environments. Departing from the perspective of transaction cost economics Benkler suggests the most important determinant of this development is the ability of digital media to greatly reduce the transaction costs involved in large-scale collaboration among strangers. These new forms of productive collaboration are marked by three central features: First, decentralization: in CBPP “the authority to act resides with individual agents faced with opportunities for action, rather than in the hands of a central organizer, like the manager of a firm or a bureaucrat” (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006:400). (In Michel Bauwens’ (2005) words CBPP communities are self-organized ‘adhocracies’: organizational structures and hierarchies emerges as a consequence of practice and members invest significant time and energy in developing organizational forms and governance systems as they go along.) Second, “a frequent use of common resources and public goods” (Benkler & Nissenbaum, ibid.). CBPP communities are commons based: they make use of shared resources, mostly immaterial as in the case of Open Software or other knowledge commons, but sometimes also material resources as in the case of Fab Labs, where machinery and other resources are shared among members, or within the ‘Sharing Economy’ more generally (Benkler, 2004). Within most communities, what members make out of such common resources is itself made common, put back into the commons pool, as when a line of open source code is deposited back into a common archive. The common nature of such wealth is sometimes extended beyond particular communities, as when Creative Commons licenses make it publicly available, in whole or in part. Third, CBPP is marked by the prevalence of non-monetary motivations. Here Benkler makes two apparently contradictory points. On the one hand he suggests that participants in CBPP are driven by a plurality of diverse motivations. This is because declining transaction costs and easy connectivity have made it so that enough interested talent will somehow find its way. There is no need to posit any common driver for participation in order to explain the functioning and sustainability of initiatives like Wikipedia or Seti@Home. At other times Benkler suggests that there is indeed such a common driver for participation. This common driver consists in the ‘common decency’ manifested in the kinds of social sharing that goes on, and that has gone on for a long time in the ordinary social relations that make up everyday life. CBPP is simply a technologically enabled extension of the forms of ‘social sharing’ that have been a feature of human life throughout history. They have been extended into the domain of high-tech digital production. That is, ‘sharing nicely’ has become a feature not just of neighborly relations, but also of ‘creative labor’ more generally (Benkler, 2004).

We need to assume no fundamental change in the nature of humanity. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviors and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere in their own patterns. What has changed is that now these patterns of behavior have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship and mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organizing productive behavior at the very core of the information economy (Benkler 2006: 92).

At times Benkler suggests that such ‘social sharing’ is able not only to motivate but also to coordinate the productive practice that unfolds in CBPP communities. “Participants to social production use social cues and motivations, rather than prices or commands to motivate and coordinate the actions of participating agents” (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006:400). Throughout Benkler’s writings the possible contradiction between these two points of view is never addressed: Is participation in CBPP driven by a plurality of different motivations? Or is ‘social sharing’, ‘sharing nicely’, ‘social cues and motivations’ the one overwhelming factor that motivates participants and coordinates their actions? This omission is probably explained by Benkler’s reluctance to identify a theory of value for CBPP. To Benkler CBPP is primarily a civic, rather than an economic phenomenon. As such it is driven by virtues, which he understands to be beyond calculation (Benkler, 2006:109). And although he concedes that it is sometimes possible to construct economic explanations for participation in CBPP communities (as in the early work of Lerner & Tirole, 2002), this, he suggests, somehow does violence to the phenomenon:

Although it is entirely possible that the persistent and pervasive practice of spending time and effort producing something of value and giving it freely to be used by others for no compensation can be explained as self-serving behavior in pursuit of, say, reputation, a more efficient and direct explanation in many, if not most cases, is the pleasure or satisfaction of giving – generosity, kindness, benevolence (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006:408).

This non-economic nature of CBPP is central to Benkler’s whole theory. Not only does it serve to separate CBPP from markets and hierarchies, but it is also key to the civic and political potential of this movement. CBPP, he claims ‘offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods, but serve as a context for positive character formation ‘(Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006: 396). CBPP fosters particular kinds of collaborative virtues, and the motivations of participants are related to the realization of such virtues. Michel Bauwens goes even further and sees CBPP as the seed form of a new human civilization based on collaborations and self-organization (Bauwens and Kostakis, 2014).

Benkler’s early work was innovative and visionary but, at the time, little in terms of empirical studies were available to substantiate his ideas (Benkler, 2006:410). As a consequence, most of his theory development occurred with a few highly successful cases on mind, like chiefly, Wikipedia and Seti@home. Today this has changed, as the decade that has passed since the publication of Benkler’s magnum opus has seen the accumulation of a massive corpus of empirical studies of various aspects of CBPP (for a partial review, see Benkler et al., 2013). In the light of this material, and in particular, in the light of our own contributions to it within the research project P2PValue, we would like to revisit and discuss some of Benkler’s key ideas about peer production. In particular we would like to focus on and explore the question of value in CBPP trying to reconcile Benkler’s focus on the virtuous nature of participation with more sociological explanations that are able to account for the actual and potential relations between CBPP communities and the overall economic ecology of the information society.”

The full article is available here.

Photo by ai3310X

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“At an event yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn promised that Labour would deploy digital technology to mobilise Britain’s ‘most visible General Election campaign ever’. He said:

‘Labour have now lost two successive general elections…we will not win elections solely by relying on the methods and strategies of the past. And I’m pleased to say that our leadership campaign is leading the way in harnessing the advances of new technology so that we can organise political campaigning like we’ve never seen before in Britain…the challenge is to now take this forward to the next general election. Labour under my leadership will utilise the advances of digital technology so that we can mobilise the most visible, targeted and effective General Election campaign in British history.‘

While it is of some concern that Corbyn didn’t get more specific as to precisely how Labour can mobilise its massive and growing membership, nor how it can leverage new media for a comparative advantage on the ground and circumvent an often hostile mainstream media, as with much elsewhere, it’s clear that his offer is significantly more substantial than that of his rival, Owen Smith.

Let me be honest. As much as I like Jeremy Corbyn, fundamentally I don’t think that one person at the top of an organisation can make the difference between winning and losing. Nor can one person be sufficient to determine the future of what is now Europe’s largest centre-left party. What I do believe however, and this seems more sensible than anything I’ve heard about how Owen Smith could become Prime Minister, is that the Corbyn candidacy comes with a very unique dividend: a much larger membership – and with it more money and a potentially superior ground campaign – as well as the affordances of a social movement. More of that in a moment.

As I’ve written previously, it is this dividend which is Labour’s ‘get out of jail’ card. It might not lead to a parliamentary majority after the next General Election – after all that’s for the public to decide – but it is the answer to a decades-long crisis of social democracy more generally and the Labour party in particular.

What is the scale of that crisis? Well, Labour have lost seats at every single general election since 1997. That’s four elections and nearly two decades. While Cameron was a talented enough leader – after all he led his party for ten years – the rot set in well before he was hugging hoodies and riding huskies. Labour, under Tony Blair no less, lost forty-six seats in 2005. That wasn’t because the Tories offered anything new or because Michael Howard dazzled, he was only a slight improvement on his two predecessors, but because Britain was already tiring of New Labour. How else do you explain John Major winning more votes in 1997 than Blair eight years later? As I’ve said before, Labour dominance at the beginning of the century was probably more a result of Tory torpor than Labour talent.

Five million votes were lost between 1997 and 2010, and that was before the Scotland fiasco last year where the party lost forty out of forty-one seats – automatically rendering tragi-comic any future interventions by Ed Miliband regarding electability. People talk about Corbyn polling in the high twenties as a disaster, but they seem to have forgotten that’s precisely what Labour under Gordon Brown actually won in the 2010 general election. That was with a relatively united party and a mass media not perpetually beset by foaming wrath.

It’s clear that something seismic has shifted since the global financial crisis of 2008. Since then we have seen the same story that unfolded after the two major economic crises of the Twentieth Century: 1929 and 1971. A global crisis of capitalism has unravelled the prevailing orthodoxy, and with it how Labour understands the best way to run an economy and deliver rising living standards. As to when the party will find an answer and adapt this time round – as it previously did in 1945 and 1997 – remains unclear. I maintain you can see its outlines with the Corbyn project.

New Media is More Than Social Media

So, back to the Corbyn leadership and some of its unique advantages. One commonly hears the refrain that if Twitter was a decent indicator of public opinion, Ed Miliband would have won a healthy majority at the last general election. I agree. Twitter is no decent barometer of public sentiment – especially when age is an increasingly predictive indicator of party political preference. But to view this as what is meant by new media under Corbyn, and the opportunities it confers, is to disregard not only a rapidly changing area around media consumption but, put simply, how effective organisations now operate.

As Daniel Kreiss recently put it, ‘With digital convergence and technological change, all political communication practices, from advertising and field canvassing to direct mail, have taken on new technological dimensions and are now premised in some way on digital media, data and analytics’. There is no such thing as ‘digital organising’ or ‘digital activism’, just organising and activism. These are technologies that are now so fundamental to our lives that they have become ‘mundane’ – for some a new technology becomes transformative precisely at the moment it is taken for granted. To see the digital element of organising, persuasion and mobilisation as somehow distinct from the real thing is, in 2016, a misnomer. What is clear is that UK politics has significantly trailed events in the US over the last decade. Similarly, as Tim Ross identifies in his excellent book ‘Why the Tories Won’, Labour had trailed behind the Tories in deploying new media at the last election. With Corbyn as leader that gap, so the argument goes, could be overcome. That claim was repeated at yesterday’s event.

So, as someone who has researched this field for over five years – and as a response to yesterday’s digital media event – I’ve drawn up a list of proposals that Corbyn’s Labour should introduce focusing specifically on new media.

This list is informed by broader thinking about building left hegemony, not only within Labour but also in civil society more broadly. I’m speaking here to Owen Smith supporters as much as Corbyn ones. Some of you have asked me what I think needs to be done, so here it is. This, in part, is how we prepare to win.

1. Establish a Campus Recruitment Program: GradLAB.

This program would focus primarily on computer science departments, seeking out individuals who care about progressive issues and causes. The pitch to these young people, students but also graduates, junior academics and researchers, would be a simple one: come to volunteer and work for us so that we can build a set of technologies and processes not only capable of winning a general election, but changing minds and values across the country. Let’s engineer a new country. It can’t be left to serendipity that talented people in this field stumble across party politics and activism – and anyway, there aren’t enough of them – they must be actively sought out. These graduates would work on things like the party’s data and analytics platforms, data integration, APIs and field tools. They would also feed into the party’s ‘digital leaders’ program (see point 3) as well as a more digitally empowered Labour Students operation.

2. Re-establish an annual NetrootsUK Event.

Between 2011 and 2013 there were several ‘NetrootsUK’ events across the country. These were modeled on the annual political convention in the US, ‘Netroots Nation’, originally organised by a community orbiting the US blog the Daily Kos (the event was initially called the YearlyKos).

While NetRoots has proved an enduring success in the US, running every year between its inception in 2006 and earlier this month in Atlanta, Georgia, the UK equivalent failed to really get going. For me that offers, in microcosm, the gulf between what has happened in the US over the last decade in relation to progressive politics and the new media space, where significant advances have been made, and the UK. I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the first event at Congress House in 2011, but I think NetRoots would make far more sense in the present political environment, including not only anti-austerity groups and single issue campaigns, but also unions old and new, Corbynistas, Greens, and SNP activists. Politics has only got more interesting since 2011, and I think that would be reflected in the event. While the UK events had previously partnered with the likes of 38 Degrees, Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy and the TUC, this seems to have created an aversion to a politics of disagreement and persuasion (the only politics that matters). A similar event, jointly hosted by unions, parties and other third sector groups, should happen – and with the same intentions in mind. This time, however, there will need to be a space for politics and, yes, ideology. It would be fantastic if not only Labour, but the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems, as well as groups like Compass and Momentum could be partners in such an event. Ideally, more than simply an annual event in London, NetRootsUK would be something that happens on a relatively regular basis in every major UK region, if not city.

3. Creation of a Digital Leaders Program in the party.

If Labour is to establish a genuine advantage with new media, not only nationally but at the local level too, talented amateurism needs to be polished and professionalised. What we’ve seen in the last five years is the emergence of a layer of activists that are intelligent content creators, operating at the interface between increasingly mediatised politics and journalism. While journalists have always held political commitments, sometimes stated and explicit, for the new generation that is now more true than ever before. Is Milo Yiannopolous a writer or an activist? How about Owen Jones? Paul Mason? Laurie Penny? Cenk Uyghur? Molly Crabapple? This phenomenon, which spans both the left and the right, is less to do with a revolving door between media and politics – thats nothing new – but the fact that modern political journalism is increasingly hybrid: it aims to inform but also to act. When Owen Jones tweets a facebook event for a protest he is facilitating collective action in a way which, until recently, we thought only organisations could perform. That is not to say that organisations aren’t necessary – they are as important as ever for sustained, compelling action – but that the worlds of politics and media increasingly overlap.

Paul Mason understands such individuals, those already mentioned as well as politicians like Pablo Iglesias (who started his political career on the TV show ‘La Tuerka’ ) and Yanis Varoufakis, as ‘networked individuals’. I agree with that label and think it cascades all the way down to individuals operating in local and hyperlocal activist-media contexts. What holds for these people – just as with the likes of Iglesias and Jones albeit in a different way – is that they are able to channel resources and information in ways that suit them and their politics to an extent that is significantly higher than is true for the general public. While everyone’s personal bandwidth to communicate and broadcast is widening in the digital environment, there are now individuals whose bandwidth is bigger than organisations. This is new.

More importantly, these networked individuals aren’t just influencers who come laden with social and media capital, but everyday people who allow contemporary social movements – from Black Lives Matter to Oxi – to achieve rapid scalability. They are the modern day ‘bridge leaders’ that Belinda Robnett identified as fundamental to the US civil rights movement. They are creatives, writers, video and podcast producers, designers and developers. One of the most exciting things about the groundswell of support around Corbyn, and other UK-based events such as IndyRef in 2014, was how the networked youth (and I understand this to mean the under-50s generally, but millennials in particular) suddenly engaged in massively increased communicative output. More than just Facebook posts and tweets, they created videos, blogs, podcasts. They campaigned using new media, created apps and convened conferences. In the case of Labour under Corbyn much of this must be formalised, trained and empowered. That’s where the Digital Leader Program comes in.

Right now CLP branches and Momentum groups will be using generalists: people familiar with Photoshop, video editing and content writing. The problem with that is people who are competent with Premier Pro (video editing software) tend to be less able at writing copy or collecting and analysing data. What Labour must offer these activists – networked individuals operating in local contexts – is training and certification. Very quickly this will become a training program, with its own academy, where party members are trained in a range of new media practices regarding campaigns, persuasion, infrastructure, data collection and mobilisation. Here they will learn about things like analytics, web development, content strategies and production. And all for free. In the short term, given this will be an important undertaking involving a significant transfer of communicative power to everyday people, it will be limited to a digital leaders program (Labour DLP) with numerous individuals in each CLP offered the opportunity to undergo a prototype training course including video production and editing, Photoshop, crowdfunding campaigns and web development. Each of these will be modules with certification.

One element of persuading those presently critical of Corbyn, and the dividend the party as movement will bring, is to make clear that the opportunities of new media also extend to candidates ‘downstream’ from Westminster elections. This new, large cohort of digital leaders will help MSPs, AMs, mayoral candidates and councillors win elections up and down the country. They will also, as an ancillary point, empower other campaigns and activist efforts that Labour members choose to involve themselves in. This network of digital leaders will interact with the party’s graduate program as outlined in point one, although there would be an open – and easy – applications process that is open to members of all ages and backgrounds. Individuals from minority backgrounds would be favoured, this being a first step in getting more BME members, as well as those from working class backgrounds, into elected office.

4. Establish a new media and technology incubator in Labour party HQ: LabourLAB.

In 2014 the Republican Party announced the launch of Para Bellum Labs. While the name of that project was unfortunate, it was also the name of a pistol produced by Nazi Germany, the concept was an impressive and original one. Para Bellum was intended to be an autonomous operation that operated both within and apart from the party. This would allow it to develop a different culture and serve as the incubator of new technologies for the Republican Party.

Similar, then, to a start up, Para Bellum Labs recruits highly skilled staffers by claiming its work is of significant importance to American democracy. This would also hold true in terms of the core beliefs behind LabourLAB – a similar operation – and how it would recruit. What specifically would this incubator do? It would take data and figure out how to harness it in order to change outcomes in elections; work on tools that empower local party democracy; upgrade the digital infrastructure of the Labour Party; and create processes and technologies by which Labour activists could communicate better among themselves, with other civil society actors and with the electorate.LabourLAB would inject the party with a different working culture in relation to new media and the relationship between analytics, data, communication and mobilisation. It would help create many of the tools and processes necessary in any fundamental disruption of British politics.

5. Hire a party Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

This individual would, at the highest level, be accountable for the party’s digital media, data and analytics operations, as well as delivering on the architecture outlined in the rest of this article – from local digital leaders to LabourLAB, and, eventually, regional directors of new media. A world class technologist in their own right they would work closely with not only the NEC and party leadership, but also the New Media Advisory Council (see point 8).

6. Creation of a Head of New Media (Battleground Constituencies).

This individual would be one of several answerable to the party’s new CTO and, ultimately, NEC. They would be accountable for new media in fifty constituencies isolated by the end of 2016 that Labour would be looking to win at the next general election. They would work not only with the CTO and new technology incubator above them, but also digital leaders across the fifty relevant constituencies below them. Again, this would be the beginning of a bigger process with heads of new media operating on a regional basis that serve as bridges between a massively enhanced party headquarters and empowered, well-resourced local party operations. In the future ‘battleground constituencies’ would be only one of these positions, but it is sensible that it is the first. This individual would be responsible for implementing new media strategies in each constituency – starting immediately – delivering content strategies that are locally relevant. These strategies would ultimately be coordinated with digital leaders in each constituency.

7. Creation of a party donation site for crowdfunding and microdonations: BeRed.

ActBlue is a political action committee (PAC) established in 2004 that enables anyone to raise money online for the Democratic Party candidates of their choice. In spite of that, it is independent of the party and does not endorse individual candidates. Over the last twelve years, ActBlue has raised more than US$1.1 billion for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations at various levels of politics, making it the single largest source of funds in US politics.

The last twelve months have shown a pressing need for a similar platform here in the UK. While rules around party spending are different this side of the Atlantic, crowdfunding has already played a significant role in internal party elections (Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and 2016, as well as Tom Watson last year and recent NEC elections); paying the costs for a recent legal challenge by five new party members who chose to contest the NEC decision to exclude them – and 126,000 others – from this month’s leadership election; and by Momentum, most recently in paying towards some of the costs for their ‘The World Transformed’ event at Labour party conference. Elsewhere the recent Deliveroo Strike in London saw its strike fund entirely crowdfunded.

Just as the Democratic Party has ActBlue, Labour now needs BeRed: a crowdfunding and donation platform for Labour party candidates, projects and various efforts undertaken by allied organisations and actors in the party’s orbit. Each party member – in addition to enjoying a membership number – would also automatically get a BeRed number and identity as well as be added to its mailing list. Were the party membership to reach one million before the next general election this would be a huge, instant community for crowdfunding and fundraising. Not only would it pay for various electoral efforts at local, regional and national levels, but it would also help resource the kinds of projects which are now fundamental to Labour becoming a genuine social movement at the local level: food banks, literacy classes and breakfast clubs. How this happens – and where – will, of course, be up to local party members. The ability to create assets and content for local crowdfunding efforts would be one of the original modules on the Digital Leaders Program.

The platform would also be used by affiliated organisations such as the Fabians, Labour Students, LGBT Labour and the Coop Party, with this new, disintermediated network helping to finance a flourishing party ecology at every level. The platform would not be limited to party members, but would be open to any member of the public – whether that means funding a project or starting one.

8. The Creation of a New Media advisory board (New Media Advisory Council).

This would be drawn up from world class academics and practitioners who would discuss best practice from around the world and how it can be adapted and deployed in a British context. The New Media Advisory Council would meet once every two months and would liaise with the party’s CTO and LabourLAB to discuss and measure progress in the party’s new media operation, the potential prototyping of new projects, and potential obstacles and opportunities that are on the horizon. Those on the council would include people from both the UK and beyond. The likes of Andrew Chadwick, Manuel Castells, Tiziana Terranova, Francesca Bria, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Ada Colau, Daniel Kreiss, and Joe Rospars should all be extended invitations.

Final thoughts

Already, the movement behind Corbyn is without precedent and has deployed new media in hitherto unseen ways in UK politics. In spite of that, the current trajectory doesn’t indicate a sufficient architecture to leverage the party’s growing membership, broadcast its message or circumvent – where necessary – an often hostile mainstream media.

What is now needed is the institutionalisation of what has been, so far, emergent and organic activism. The movement behind Corbyn now needs to create a discernible architecture for leveraging new media to not only win a general election, but transform civil society and dramatically shift public attitudes. I believe that with the institution of new actors at the national level (a new CTO, LabourLAB, regional CTOs), local level (Digital Leaders Program and ChangeLAB), with new technologies (BeRED) and new events (a revivified NetRootsUK) that process can be started.

All of the suggestions here, as well as being aimed at the Corbyn leadership and those who support it, are also intended for those backing Owen Smith or who remain sceptical of the possibilities that a party as social movement brings. It is now incumbent on us, as those supporting Corbyn, to visibly demonstrate the advantages of the party’s new direction, and, importantly, show how it confers new opportunities and advantages downstream to candidates seeking to win elected office at every level, from councillors to mayors and MPs. It is now incumbent on Corbyn’s team, and his movement, to advocate an architecture for the incipient energies his leadership bid has re-energised, and what the party can concretely achieve before, during and after the next general election.

The post Recruit, re-tweet, re-nationalise: Eight ideas for Labour’s new media strategy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Today, the ultimate Internet candidate, Donald Trump, offers not to tear down a wall but to build one between the United States and Mexico. Thanks to the discrete bits and binary logic of the digital age, as well as the frightfully alienating spectacle of beheadings on social media, we are becoming obsessed with divisions and identification. For better and for worse, both the spirit of decentralization and the latent power of nationalism are in full force. This is utterly consistent with the media landscape of our society.

Consider the current argument over Ted Cruz’s status as a “natural born citizen.” No matter how disingenuously the question was raised, it proved wiggly enough to bring Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe to explain on CNN that “the Supreme Court has never fully addressed the issue one way or the other.” Even though Tribe believes Cruz’s eligible to run, he nevertheless wants this grey area to be rendered in black and white.

This is a digital-style problem. I don’t mean it’s caused by digital media so much as reflective of the qualities, the biases of the digital media environment in which we live.

For just one example, as we transitioned from emulsion film to digital photography and projection, we replaced smooth, random specks of silver with discreet pixels of numerically rendered tints. Each pixel required the computer to make a decision about what color to enter into the pixel. Back when there were 16 colors, that was a very crude estimate. Is it blue or purple? Whichever is closest.

Even with millions of colors and retina-display density, the decision must be made.
Definition is forced, and once the decision is made, fidelity is assured forever more. Everything has been made discrete (not discreet, but distinct).

That’s why we’re either Americans or Mexicans, Canadians or natural born citizens. Red states or blue states. Where pixels are getting mixed up, well, that’s where we have to build better walls. Get Supreme Court decisions that something is one way or the other. All the wiggle room, the undefined nooks and crannies that may have created ambiguity but also helped soften the edges of our societies, is taken away.

I was thinking our goal should be to re-establish the ambiguity?—?find new tolerance for ill-defined and undefined places on the spectrum. But even in those places, like the increasingly nuanced definition of gender, most are gravitating toward evermore specific names for their sense of self.

So now I’ve started to wonder if it’s better to push through. Maybe forcing definitions, as our digital environment seems to be doing, will lead to more granular definitions and categories. But each time we do this process, we will also be forced to come to terms with the arbitrary nature of all these categories and distinctions. Each one is a compromise, no matter how many decimal places we use.

The post How the Digital Media Environment Enforces Boundaries appeared first on P2P Foundation.