Last month, an interesting article on Jean-Luc Danneyrolles was published (in French) on the site Reporterre. Danneyrolles is the founder of “Potager d’un curieux” (The Curious One’s Garden), a place in the Vaucluse region of France which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of free seeds. In particular, the article explains the obstacle course this farmer had to cross in order to have his activities accepted by administrative authorities. Fortunately, he has been able to stabilize the situation more or less, but one point continues to create friction: the marketing of the seeds produced.

When Jean-Luc is asked the simple question of the right to sell all his seeds, he reverses the question. “By what right would we not have the right to produce good seeds and to market them? It is the reappropriation of this heritage that I defend. We do not have the right, we take the right” To take a right is not to steal something, he explains. “I never imagined that the police would come to arrest me because I sell my seeds. We are supported by civil society, that is to say that there are plenty of people who encourage me to continue and that is enough for me.”

Prohibition on the marketing of free seed?

As I have already had occasion to mention on SILex, seeds can be the subject of intellectual property rights in Europe through Certificates of Plant Production (VOCs) which protect varieties obtained by seed producers. Moreover, in order to legally market seeds, they must be registered in a catalog based on criteria excluding by definition old varieties, as explained in the article by Reporterre:

For the marketing of seeds or seedlings, Decree No 81-605 of 18 May 1981 requires the inclusion of varieties in the official catalog of plant species and varieties. To be registered, the varieties must undergo two tests: DHS (for “distinction, homogeneity, stability”) and VAT (for “agronomic and technological value”). First hitch, the old, peasant, terroir varieties, call them as you want, are essentially unstable. They are expressed differently according to biotopes and climatic conditions. So, they are checked by the catalog entry tests.

The varieties which respect the DHS criteria are generally “F1 hybrids” produced by the large seed companies, which yield plants with identical characteristics, whatever their environment. They also degenerate from the first reproduction, which prevents farmers and gardeners from reusing the seeds and obliges them to repurchase seeds each year from the same manufacturers. Thus, the system has been designed to mechanically privilege varieties protected by intellectual property rights, while so-called “free” seeds (those belonging to the public domain) are disadvantaged, specifically because they can not be marketed.

The regulation has, nevertheless, been relaxed somewhat at the European level since 2011, with the introduction of a list complementary to the official catalog based on criteria of less drastic homogeneity, which makes it possible to include old varieties. But this margin of maneuver remains insufficient to cover all seeds in the public domain, which means that militant peasants such as Jean-Luc Danneyroles remain largely illegal when they want to market seeds that they produce. They risk fines imposed by the repression of fraud, which can be high (even if they are rarely applied in practice). A French association called Kokopelli decided openly to brave these aberrant prohibitions, claiming as a right the possibility of marketing free seeds, to defend it before the courts. Last year it was believed that the situation would change with the Biodiversity Act, an article of which explicitly allowed non-profit associations to market seeds belonging to the public domain. However, unfortunately, the French Constitutional Council declared this part of the text to be annulled, on the very objectionable ground that it entailed a breach of equality towards commercial companies.

Ambiguous links between enclosures and commodification

What I find interesting with this story told in Reporterre, but more broadly with the issue of free seeds, is that they illustrate well the complex relationships that exist between the common goods and the market. Indeed, free seeds are considered to be a typical example of “common” resources. They have reached us through a process of transmission from generation to generation of farmers, which has led the process of selection and crossing necessary to develop the varieties and adapt them to their environment. The so-called “old”, “peasant” or “traditional” varieties are not protected by intellectual property rights: they are in the public domain and are therefore freely reproducible. That’s why they are very interesting for farmers, especially to rid themselves of their dependence on the seed industries.

Since these seeds are in the public domain, they should also be free to be sold on the market as physical objects. It is clear that this is a prerequisite for activities such as “The Vegetable Garden of a Curious One” or Kokopelli to be sustainable and develop. Even if these structures generally adopt associative forms oriented towards non-profit or limited profitability, they need a connection with the market, at least to cover the costs incurred by the production and distribution of seeds. However, this is precisely what is now theoretically prohibited by regulations, which has been organized to exclude traditional seeds from the market, notably via the registration requirements in the official catalog.

We see here that the specific enclosure that weighs on seeds consists of forced exclusion from the market, and it is somewhat counter-intuitive, in relation to the general idea that one can make of the phenomenon of common property. Historically, enclosures first hit certain lands that were collectively used by the distribution of private property rights to convert them into commodities. Landowners have been recognized in several waves of the right to enclose land that was previously the subject of customary collective rights of use. This is particularly the case in England during the 18th and 19th centuries. In France, the dismantling of the Commons took the form, in the French Revolution, of a process of “sharing the Communals”, which consisted in the sale in certain regions of these lands so that they became private properties. In both cases, enclosure takes the form of a forced inclusion in the market of goods that previously were “protected” and it can even be said that enclosure is then explicitly aimed at the commodification of the good.

In this regard, we must re-read the analyses of the historian Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation” in which he explains how “market society” has been constituted and generalized by producing three kinds of “fictitious goods”: the Land (and more generally nature), labor (human activity) and money. In his vision, it was the forced inclusion of these three essential goods in the market mechanisms that allowed the latter to “disentangle” the rest of society and become a self-regulated system that allowed the rise of capitalism.

Exclusion from the market as an enclosure

From the foregoing, one may have the impression that enclosure is thus intimately linked to “commodification”. Moreover, many of the social struggles carried out on behalf of the Commons demand that certain goods be excluded from the market or subject to a specific regulation which protects them from the most destructive excesses. This is the case, for example, for the fighting on water, in particular in Italy, which has gone through opposition to the privatization of water management by large companies.

Nevertheless, the case of seeds shows us that the issue of enclosures is much more complex. In order to grasp what happens to the seeds, we must understand them in two different ways: in their immaterial dimension, through the plant varieties that the seeds express and in their material dimension, through the physical objects that are the seeds produced by the peasants. Old plant varieties do not (and have never) been subject to intellectual property rights, unlike the F1 hybrids produced by the seed industry. As such, these varieties are actually ‘de-marketed’, in the sense that they can not, as such, be subject to exclusivity subject to authorization and transaction. But the seeds produced by the peasants constitute rival physical objects, which are the object of property rights and can be legitimately sold on the market. Except that the legislation on seeds has been organized to prevent these seeds from entering the market and being able to be marketed, unlike proprietary varieties. The enclosure of the common good which constitutes traditional seeds, therefore, does not have the same nature as that which has struck land or water: it consists of a forced exclusion from the market.

Indeed, it could be said that free seeds are subjected to a double process of enclosure, both working in opposite directions. It is known that some large companies like Bayer or Monsanto are working to file abusive patents on some of the characteristics of old plants, such as natural resistance to diseases. They do this to reserve rights over the “immaterial dimension” of plants, by creating new GMO varieties in which they will inject the genes carrying these particular traits. In such cases, they use an intellectual property right to induce a forced entry into the market on an element which previously belonged to the public domain and was freely usable. One of the best known examples of this phenomenon known as “biopiracy” has, for example, concerned a patent filed by a Dutch company on an aphid resistance of a lettuce, allowing it to levy a toll on all producers’ seeds for these salad greens.

Enclosure may therefore consist of forced entry into the market and is often the effect of the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Another example which could be cited in this sense is that of scientific articles. The vast majority of these products are produced by researchers employed by public universities. They are collected by private publishers through the transfer of copyright granted by the same researchers at the time of publication. They then resold at very high prices to universities. They are then obliged to buy back with public money what had originally been financed by public funds (salaries of researchers). To use Polanyi’s vocabulary, we are here in a caricature of “fictitious goods”, created by the artificial application of intellectual property rights on goods in order to forcefully include them in a market.

But conversely, there are also intangible goods which undergo, like seeds, phenomena of enclosure by forced exclusion from the market. If one takes for example the case of free software, one knows for example the problem of tied selling (sometimes also called “forced sale”) which means that one can not generally buy computers without proprietary software pre-installed, which conditions users to the use of protected software to the detriment of free software. Last year the Court of Justice of the European Union refused to consider that the tying of PCs and proprietary operating systems constituted an unfair commercial practice. The seed analogy is not perfect, but there is a link as long as the problem of tied selling prevents free software from reaching the consumer under the same conditions as proprietary software. The machinery market would be important for their distribution and adoption by the greatest number. In the end, the consumer is deprived in both cases of the choice of being able to opt for a free solution, radically with regard to the seeds and relatively for the software.

For a complex approach to the links between Commons and the market

To be able to grasp the phenomenon of enclosures in its complexity is, in my opinion, important, in particular to avoid misunderstandings on the question of the Commons. It is sometimes said that the Commons constitute a “third way between the market and the state”, but this way of presenting things is rather misleading. It would be better to say that the Commons, with the State and the market, constitute a way for humans to take charge of resources. These three poles can, depending on the moment in history, have more or less importance (today we are going through a period of overwhelming dominance of the mechanisms of the self-regulated market, resulting in a marginalization of the Commons and a weakening of the State). But the Commons are always articulated to the State and the market: they never constitute a completely autonomous sphere. In particular, they may need market opportunities to exist and weigh significantly in social relationships. This is clearly illustrated by the example of free seeds.

Of course, there are also cases where we have to fight for a “de-commodification” of certain goods and many struggles for the recovery of the Commons go through this confrontation with the market to “snatch” from the essential resources. But there are also cases where, on the contrary, it will be necessary to fight for the right to have resources joining the market to be traded. At first glance this may sound confusing, but it seems crucial to keep this in mind so as not to sink into a romanticism that would lead us to believe that the goal is to “get out of the economy”, as one can sometimes read … There is also a struggle to lead “in the economy”, as Karl Polanyi rightly said, in order to “re-integrate” this sphere within the processes of social regulation and in particular in the logics of reciprocity.

That is what Jean-Luc Danneyroles expresses in his own way at the end of the article by Reporterre, referring to the question of barter and the commons. One senses at the same time his reluctance to consider the seeds as goods “like the others” and his need to connect yet to a market:

Quietly, in his open kitchen, at the time of the coffee, as almost every day, Jean-Luc receives the visit. A curious one looking for Roman chamomile for skin care. Jean-Luc gives him advice, names of plants and methods of cultivation. She will leave with her sachets of seeds, in exchange for soap and toothpaste that she has made. Jean-Luc always has a little trouble with getting paid. “The ideal is barter, I like the idea of common goods, which one does not pay for what belongs to nature. Utopian, yes, but feet on the ground. “Every work deserves salary,” he knows, and his seeds are his means of living.

Photos used by permission, Éric Besatti/Reporterre

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The story focuses on a hamlet that is suddenly upended when the kindly lord of the settlement, Master Kent, discovers that his benign feudal control of a remote patch of farmland and forest has been lost to his scheming, cold-hearted cousin, Edmund Jordan.  Jordan is a proto-capitalist who has a secret plan to evict everyone and turn their fields into pastures for sheep.  He plans to become rich producing wool for the flourishing export market.  But Jordan can’t simply announce his planned dispossession of land lest it provoke resistance.  He realizes that he must act with stealth and subterfuge to take possession of the land and eradicate the community, its values and its traditions.

The story is essentially a tale of what happens when a capitalist order seeks to supplant a stable and coherent community.  But this states the narrative too crudely because the book is a gorgeously written, richly imagined account of the village, without even a hint of the ideological.  Told through the eyes of a character who came to the village twelve years earlier, the story doesn’t once mention the words “enclosure,” “capital” or “Marx.”  (Indeed, theWall Street Journal’s reviewer praises the book for “brilliantly suggest[ing] the loamy, lyric glories of rustic English language and life.”)

Harvest depicts the sensuous experiences of a village community wresting its food from nature, but with relative peace and happiness.  “Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools. The clamour deafens us. But that is how we have to live our lives,” the narrator tells us.  The book also shows how easily this world is shattered by a brutal outsider who uses fear and social manipulation to rip apart a community in order to install a new regime of efficiency, progress and personal gain.

The story is narrated by a character named Walter Thirsk – a play on the words “water thirst”? – who has access to most of the players in the drama.  Thirsk tells the reader:

When I first came to these vicinities I thought I’d discovered not quite paradise, but at least a fruitful opportunity – some honest freedom and some scope.  Some fertile soil!  I’d never known such giving land and sky.  I do remember my first week, and – still my master’s serving man – walking through the commons to the forest edge and not daring to go in, but touching everything.  I’d found a treasury.  I know I pushed my nose against a tree and was surprised by the ancient sweetness of the bark.

The author Chace does not prettify this rural commons, which lies a day’s walk away from the nearest town.  With lots of archaic English words, Chace describes the gritty daily lives of commoners as they manage their households, grow crops, make love, drink barley liquor and dispose of animal carcasses and human waste in the Turf and Turd dump. There are celebrated traditions, too, such as the selection of a young girl as “Gleaning Queen” at the end of the harvest.

One day a surveyor mysteriously arrives in town to draw maps of the entire village.  His maps provide an unfamiliar, abstract representation of a place that had previously only been known by experience.  The map is intended to help the new Master Jordan supplant the benign paternalism of Master Kent and convert the farmland commons into parcels of private property.

This is the beginning of a week-long nightmare as the cold-hearted Master Jordan takes possession of the manorial estate and common lands.  But how to evict the villagers from their ancient lands with the least blood spilled?  One strategy is the promise of wealth and leisure.  The narrator tells the reader how the new master promises a new world of capitalist paternalism:

“Now I am required to listen to a lecture on the principles of stewardship.  The province of a hundred people out of every one hundred and one is to take and not provide direction, he says.  He mentions Profit, Progress, Enterprise, as if they are his personal Muses.  Ours has been a village of Enough, but he proposes it will be a settlement of More, when finally he’s fenced and quickthorned all the land and turned everything – our fields, the commons, and ‘the wasted woods’ – into “gallant sheep country.”

The new Master Jordan’s scheme amounts to “a ‘simple quest,’ for a tidier pattern of living hereabouts which would assure a profit for those – he means himself – who have the ‘foresight.’” To Jordan, the whole scheme represents “the organization to all our advantages” and “the chance to start on a spotless sheet of parchment.”  This happy untruth papers over the actual cruelty and death needed to make the enclosure a reality.  It also ignores the loss of a way of life that was deeply satisfying, however “backward.”

The real power of Harvest is precisely in its poetic, immersive storytelling. The book is an artfully rendered account of what it probably felt like to live in a seventeenth century rural English commons, based on Chace’s extensive historical research, very lightly worn. Harvest is absorbing and persuasive precisely because it so depicts a premodern world in richly human terms — and the plenitude that is stolen through enclosure.

Originally published at bollier.org

The post Book of the Day: “Harvest” A Tragic Tale of Enclosure, Poetically Told appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Continuing our campaign supporting MediaLab Prado in the face of a possible private enclosure, today we’re republishing their Manifesto regarding the takeover. Please read and share.

Manifesto in support of MediaLab Prado

Medialabs are a crucial element in societies, they foster innovation, participation and knowledge dissemination. MedialabPrado (Madrid) has proven to be a successful model and has been consequently recognized. A fundamental aspect of its success is its growing community of deeply engaged users, both in the local and global arena.

MediaLab-Prado was  inspired by the new collaborative practices arising from digital  networks, and has been able to answer two of the great challenges of our  time: first, to shorten the distance between people and institutions,  creating a style of close organization in which users feel included;  and second, to connect and integrate different areas of knowledge and practitioners from the arts to technology, from academia to amateur, and from activist to hacker.

Currently, MediaLab-Prado is ready to evolve and adapt to changes, provided that it definitely has stable working conditions and the support of the City of Madrid. Following a move that altered its normal course of business,  rumors about its future do not raise the morale of its staff and community, nor its image.

MediaLab-Prado has proven to be a learning organization that is able to adapt to new circumstances and  to ‘do more with less’. But times of distress should end as soon as possible. After so much has been achieved, it would be an inexplicable waste for the city of Madrid to lose this space of innovation and acceptance of new and more radical forms of cultural artistic, technological and social expression.

You can change the building  and change the people but it is impossible to transfer a project like MediaLab-Prado that has accumulated an unquantifiable capital. We want the City Council to reconsider the situation, and we offer six reasons why it should reaffirm its commitment to the most vibrant, inclusive and innovative cultural forms:

• It is a project open to the participation of all citizens. This openness translates  into work formats that offer various modes of involvement and  transparent management of resources, programs and activities.

• It is formed as a distributed network (no bosses, no centers, no leaders) that succeeds in welcoming very different and diverse active communities of  users.

• It  functions as a breeding ground for the creation of alternative forms of  economy that redistribute access to decent jobs and occupations at  local and global scale, relying on practices based on collaboration,  experimentation and criticism.

• It encourages  forms of self-organization and self-management based on the commons,  and intends to challenge the need to build relationships with the  private sector that go beyond merely cultural.

• It is an organic organization that reflects on their own practices, incorporating those who use its facilities into the process, allowing constant learning and evolution.

• As an open project, it has produced an innovative pedagogy that has inspired many initiatives, companies and governments to learn new ways of management closer to the production model that many authoritative thinkers predict for the near future. Medialab is an urban innovation engine in the city of Madrid.

The lack of transparency with which Telefónica has been holding talks with the city of Madrid clearly prevents us from assessing  the scope of these decisions and how they affect the future of this  project. Who is involved in the negotiations? What are the arguments? On what are they based? Under what criteria  does the Madrid City Council measure profitability ? After months of uncertainty, it was recently published that Telefónica aims to manage the building to install a center for entrepreneurs, a  ‘co-working’ space and  an exhibition hall. We understand that Medialab Prado is already a  collaborative workspace between citizens, institutions and companies  that promotes entrepreneurship and the dissemination of various projects through exhibitions.

Medialab-Prado in its own projects such as  Interactivos?, has  had a presence in the United States (New York), Brazil (Belo Horizonte  and Rio de Janeiro), Mexico (Mexico City), Peru (Lima), Ireland  (Dublin), Slovenia (Ljubljana), etc. Its workshop format was even worthy of a special mention in the 2010 Prix Ars awarded by the prestigious Ars Electronica Austrian institution for its form of working collaboratively.

Medialab-Prado turns  out to be by far the institution of the council with greatest  international presence and recognition. Few  public programs can boast of  having been thus emulated  internationally. It is incomprehensible that  an institution that acts  as an international ambassador for the city of  Madrid, providing an image abroad  of the contemporary city and linked to  technological and social  innovation, is neglected in this way by the City Council, who seems  unaware of its potential.

The post MediaLab Prado’s Manifesto appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Image by Carla Boserman, www.carlaboserman.net

Yesterday we spoke about MediaLab-Prado‘s plight in the face of its threatened enclosure. Today we’re republishing an Open Letter pleading for help, penned by José Luís De Vicente, director of the Visualizar Program for Data Culture and part of MediaLab’s defense collective. Along with the letter, there’s a video from a year ago featuring international figures showing support for the lab.

“There’s no one better than you to help us to make them understand how important is protecting and preserving the valuable role that Medialab Prado has played in the last ten years. For this, we are requesting any of this three things:

1. A statement or blog post in your own website explaining why you appreciate and value the role of MLP and showing your concern for how the current situation could threaten it. We will link to it and translate it from the website of support we are currently setting up, that should go live in the next hours.

2. For those of you with affiliations with universities, museums or companies, a signed letter of support with the logo of your organization. If you can send it to me I will get it into the website and also printed to send them all together to the City Council.

3. A short video that we can embed in the website, offering your support.”

“Dear Friends,

Probably many of you have already heard about the serious problems that Medialab Prado is undergoing currently that threatens to stop the activity of the center and maybe, in the mid term, it’s very existence. I know many of you have in the past years taken part in projects and activities there, and have good memories of the institution. Even those of you who have not been there have heard about it and know it’s an interesting, lively place that has made significant contributions to this community. Now it needs as much support from the community as possible to go on.

What it’s going on?

Less than one year ago, Medialab Prado opened, after 5 year of renovation and 6 million Euro of public investment, a brand new building. A new facility that multiplies the size of the previous space by eight and creates all kind of new opportunities, with much better resources. While the previous space kept the organization relatively under the radar for many in the city council, the new building is really iconic and has raised the profile of the organization considerably.

Recently we have learned that major telecommunications multinacional Telefónica is looking for a building in Madrid to set up its new startup incubator and has expressed interest in the Medialab Prado building. The City Council, always eager to please, has considered the request and has acknowledged in public that they are under negotiations to satisfy this request. The implications for Medialab Prado are, obviously, quite serious. While they insist in theory on keeping their support for the institution, the reality is that:

• they have not made a firm offer of a new space that is already available and in the right conditions to continue the program with no major disruptions
• they have not committed to invest any resource in allocating the center in a new space
• they have not guaranteed that any transfer could be done promptly and without a long transition that could stop the activity in the center for many months

The reality is that Medialab Prado could be stuck in a limbo for a very long period, and any development from the possible eviction onwards is at this point very uncertain. The community of users of Medialab Prado has serious concerns that this could start a process that could end with the death of the institution.

To make things worse, it’s important to notice that the building that Telefónica wants to take over has been renovated with public money and with the specific goal of being a cultural facility.

How can you help?

We need to show the City Council in clear terms that Medialab Prado is an important institution that is highly respected and valued internationally. One of the most ironic aspects of this situation is that given the problems they’ve always had to understand what is Medialab Prado -not being a museum, a gallery, or an arts production center- they have never been understood that this is one of the most influential and valued cultural institutions today in Madrid and Spain.

There’s no one better than you to help us to make them understand how important is protecting and preserving the valuable role that Medialab Prado has played in the last ten years. For this, we are requesting any of this three things:

1. A statement or blog post in your own website explaining why you appreciate and value the role of MLP and showing your concern for how the current situation could threaten it. We will link to it and translate it from the website of support we are currently setting up, that should go live in the next hours.

2. For those of you with affiliations with universities, museums or companies, a signed letter of support with the logo of your organization. If you can send it to me I will get it into the website and also printed to send them all together to the City Council.

3. A short video that we can embed in the website, offering your support. Here are some videos from 1 year ago -before the crisis started- that can be used as a model:

http://medialab-prado.es/article/medialabinternacional

That is all. If you have other suggestions or contributions, please let us know. Thanks for helping us keep Medialab Prado alive.

Best,

MediaLab-Prado”

The post An Open Letter from MediaLab-Prado appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Commons is under fire in Madrid, and we need help. To give you some context to understand what’s happening right now, we’re reposting this article written by Bernardo Gutiérrez, which originally appeared at Guerrilla Translation.

MediaLab-Prado, located here in Madrid, is on the cutting edge of investigative practises related to Free Culture and the Commons. It’s also one of the collaborative spaces where the initial gestalt of the 15M movement was born.

7 million Euros of public funds was invested by the local government in the rehabilitation of an historic building in Madrid (the Serrería Belga), in order to house MediaLab. The building was leased as a public space for the development of the lab’s activities, projects and openly accessible workshops.

On Friday, April 4th, Madrid’s local government’s plan was revealed. They intend to rent out this public space – again, paid for with public funds and for public use – to Telefónica. The irony is rich: Telefónica was Spain’s nationalised public telecommunications provider, later privatised in 1997 under the neo-liberal government of Jose María Aznar. Today, Telefónica is a private global telecommunications conglomerate, and the fifth-largest mobile network provider in the world.

History repeats itself. With total opacity, the local government is evaluating Telefónica’s proposal. Obviously, Telefónica wants to hitch a ride on the emergent P2P revolution by having the building host its “Open Future” project – which, according to them, “will lead the third Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution”. This blatant appropriation – enclosure, if you will – of P2P-Commons movement rhetoric is yet another example of the dangers posed by Netarchical Capitalism’s encroachment on vital projects like MediaLab Prado.

See what’s at stake. Read Bernardo’s article (below), and follow the updates on MediaLab’s newly created Twitter account for its defense: @savethelab.

UPDATE: We’ve also published MediaLab’s call for help in this link.

Image adapted from an original at Nómada Blog

It seems that “lab” is the word making the rounds amongst innovation buffs these days . Maybe the term “laboratory” isn’t the most appropriate analog, given that its dictionary definition, “a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research, experiments, and measurement may be performed”, falls short in describing the present day use of “lab”, and what these spaces are about.

This divergence of terms originated with the foundation of the first Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1985, a space characterized by its convergence of technology, multimedia art and design. However, in recent years, MIT’s model seems obsolete and at a standstill, especially when compared to a newer and more relevant generations of labs. Madrid’s MediaLab Prado, currently celebrating its tenth anniversary at a new location -la Serrería Belga– stands out as the premier reference points for labs worldwide.

So, what is a lab, exactly? A technical laboratory? A multidisciplinary space open to the public? Rather than nailing down one definition, it may be better to observe some of these labs worldwide, and notice the local idiosyncrasies. Any city eager to reinvent itself and adapt to the networked society invests in an urban lab, such as the Laboratorio Procomún in Rosario, Argentina. Cultural centers like, for example, Ljudmila Media Lab (Liubliana, Slovenia) are currently mutating into places where the artistic paradigm goes beyond art objects.  Digital art spaces, such as the prestigious Eyebeam in New York, are recycling themselves following collaborative models. All of the above share a common source of inspiration: Medialab Prado Madrid.

This could likely be said about many other institutions, labs, universities and cultural centres around the world. Any city would be proud to host something like a Medialab Prado. What is it about this media lab’s DNA that makes it so desirable in areas as diverse as technological innovation, culture and civic participation?

The key to MediaLab Prado’s success may be held in a definition first proposed by José Luis de Vicente: “it’s a community incubator”. In fact, both words, “community” and “incubator”, have been the trend amongst Silicon Valley circles and community managers alike. It’s also worth noting that, as terms, they are seldom seen together. And, as Juan Freire and Antoni Gutiérrez Rubí express in their book “Manifiesto Crowd”, in the age of networks, innovation walks a different path. “The factories that were churning out companies in the 20th century are dead. The 21st century is witness to the birth of spaces for collective innovation”. An incubator lacking a community will never be enough. This is the reason why a lab – both in its physical and digital realms – needs to be an open platform. And that is precisely why MediaLab Prado has become such a a relevant space for coexistence, innovation and mutual co-creation.

MediaLab Prado is both a physical and a digital platform. Physically, it’s a space where anyone can walk in, while online it functions as a laboratory for connecting ideas. MediaLab Prado is an interdisciplinary workspace for creation and innovation. And here’s an important detail: its strength doesn’t reside in its own programming, put together by stewards and specialists. It lies instead in the various working groups, projects and encounters collectively cooked up by the citizen communities who frequent Medialab’s headquarters, or participate in its digital channels. Every Friday, for example, there’s an open lab where anyone can collaborate with anyone else in the creation of new projects.

Another defining feature is its focus on prototyping – another digital culture and IT term. Prototyping culture doesn’t seek definitive or finished products; instead, it prefers to function in a transparent and collective  manner, employing open projects in a constant, citizen-fueled process of improvement. All in all, MediaLab Prado has become a catalyst for culture, technology, networks, science, education, and innovation.

Evidently, MediaLab Prado’s official areas of competence are both necessary and relevant. Interactivos? (a laboratory for creative and educative technological applications) Visualizar (data and citizenship visualization) or its Commons Lab (transversal investigation centered on the Commons) are clear international reference points. Additionally, self managed working groups, such as “Funcionamientos: Diseños abiertos y remezcla social” (Functioning: Open design and social remixes) or “Género y Tecnología” (Genre and Tech) are just as influential. MediaLab Prado cannot simply be described as a  “Cultural Centre”, as it is so much more than a building populated with works of art or technological infrastructures. It’s a connector, a hub, a platform for the collective intelligence that is transforming industry, economics, technology, education and art throughout the whole planet.

In fact, it’s been one of the citizen hubs where civic activism slowly forged the 15-M/ Indignado movement that heralded Occupy Wall Street and the global revolution. To give an example, in early 2011, while Spanish mass-media ignored collectives such as Democracia Real Ya or Juventud sin Futuro, the Redada Encounters in MediaLab Prado transformed an incumbent and collective -as opposed to hierarchical- form of web activism into a palpable phenomenon. Open code practices, now essential to modern activism, have always been central to MediaLab Prado.

The challenges in this new chapter in MediaLab Prado’s history are undoubtedly many. One of the most important will be channeling corporate innovation and navigating new economic paradigms. At a time in which The Economist, no less, dedicates its front page to the sharing economy, MediaLab Prado is in a better position than many. By developing its own trajectory, it could well become a great catalyst for the future networks of innovation, open culture and citizen intelligence that will soon be needed in Europe. In fact, connections established within MediaLab Prado in these last few years have given rise to projects and citizen start-ups such as MLP, Play the Magic, Open Materials, Hackteria, Lummo, Muimota, Máster DIWO, Ultralab and Data Citizen Driven City, amongst many others. Certain working groups, like IoT Madrid (Internet de las Cosas) or exhibitory projects such as Impresoras 3D: Makerbot y Reprap clearly lead the way to the future.

Living at a time when most of the world’s population is concentrated in cities, urban innovation may well be MediaLab Prado’s greatest challenge. It’s no coincidence that some of the most influential labs in the world, such as CityLab in Cornellà, Barcelona or the BMW Guggenheimlab in New York, are focusing their efforts on urban innovation. This is the reason why Medialab Prado’s new location at the heart of historic Madrid is so essential. Its urban vocation is most evident in working groups such as Ciudad y Procomún, the new Ciencia Ciudadana (Citizen Science) station or projects like Hacer barrio or Quality Eggs.

The history of Barrio de las Letras -or “writer’s district”- where Medialab Prado is currently located, is another key facet. The scientific institutions of the 18th Century were responsible for the first major developmental push in Madrid, which then led to the expansion of Barrio de las Letras. During this time, the city witnessed the construction of the Botanical Garden, the Astronomical Observatory, the Academy of the Sciences (which now houses the Prado Museum) and the General Hospital (currently housing the Reina Sofía Museum) and the “Gabinet de Máquinas” a demolished Industrial Engineering museum from that era and situated quite close to the old Army Museum. All of this frantic building activity took place in less than 3 decades. MediaLab Prado´s new location in the Serrería Belga, an old abandoned industrial building, is another telling metaphor of an industrial era that left so many urban carcasses in its wake.

In summary, the conversion of an old,  abandoned, industrial space into an citizen innovation lab in the same area where literature and science flourished in centuries past, is a promising metaphor indeed. MediaLab Prado is one of the closest examples of the new Partner State proposed by Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation. A State which guarantees the necessary space and resources to activate a P2P society’s collective intelligence for the improvement of the Commons.

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