Makers and the related  activities are more often observed in vibrant cities, encapsulating diverse communities of designers, engineers and innovators. They flourish around luscious spaces and events, where talent and ideas are abound. Pioneer cities, like Barcelona, Madrid, London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, have gradually evolved to prominent centres of the maker culture.

But what about places where these elements are less eminent? It is often said that some of the most advanced technologies are needed in the least developed places. And here the word “technology” conveys a broader meaning than mere technical solutions and enhancements of human capacities. Etymologically, technology derives from the ancient Greek words “techne”, i.e. art or craft, and “logos”, which refers to a form of systematic treatment. In this sense, technology is practically inseparable from the human elements of craftsmanship, ingenuity and knowledge. Elements that are as embedded in our very existence, as the practice of sharing with our neighbours. Especially in situations of physical shortage and scantness, solidarity and cooperation are the most effective survival strategies.

This is the case of a small mountainous village in North-Western Greece called Kalentzi. It is situated in the village cluster of Tzoumerka, a place abundant in natural and cultural wealth, yet scarce in the economic means of welfare. The local population mostly depends on low-intensity and small-scale activities combining arboreal cultivation, husbandry and beekeeping. Investment was never overflowing in the region, let alone in today’s Greek economy in life support.

A local community of farmers assembled around a practical problem: finding appropriate tools for their everyday activities. Established market channels mostly provide with tools and machinery that are apt for the flatlands. Acquisition and maintenance costs are unsustainably high, while people often have to adapt their techniques to the logic of the machines. They begun with simple meetups where they created a favourable environment to share, reflect and ideate on their common challenges and aspirations, facilitated by a group of researchers from the P2P Lab, a local research collective focused on the commons.

Soon the discussion was already saturated and they started building together a tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground. Several tools and methods have been used for this task for ages, though each one with its associated difficulties and dangers. Some farmers climb on ladders to hammer the poles, while others use barrels. However, it’s the combined effort of hammering while maintaining one’s balance that is particularly challenging, whereas there are often two people required for the job.

Interesting ideas were already in place to solve this problem. Designs were drafted on a flipchart with a couple of markers and the ones more available brought some of their own tools, like a cut saw and an electric welder, to build a prototype.

That has been the birth of Tzoumakers: a community-driven agricultural makerspace in Tzoumerka, Greece. Tzoumakers is more than an unfortunate wordplay of “Tzoumerka” and the maker culture; it is about a unique confluence of the groundbreaking elements of the latter, with the rich traditional heritage of the former. A distinctive synthesis that transcends both into a notion that seeks to create solutions that are on-demand and locally embedded, yet conceived and shareable on a global cognitive level.

It is important to emphasise that Tzoumakers is not a place that develops new tools ‘in house’. Rather it builds upon the individual ingenuity of its community and remains open for everyone to participate in this process. Through collective work, field testing and representation new tools may be released and further shared to benefit others with similar problems. Many of the necessary innovations are already there; the role of Tzoumakers is to collect, formalize and disseminate them.

But it’s also important to understand that Tzoumakers, much like its tools and solutions, cannot provide ready-made blueprints for solutions to be simply copy-pasted elsewhere. The same applies to the projects that have been its inspiration, such as L’ Atelier Paysan and Farm Hack, which cannot convey one unified cosmopolitan vision for the agricultural sector. The same process of connection, collaboration and reflection has to be followed on every different context, whether rich or poor, vibrant or desolate, in abundance or scarcity. But it is this combination of human creativity, craftsmanship, meaningful work and sharing that arguably embodies a true, pervasive and “cosmolocal” spirit for the maker culture.

Notes:

Tzoumakers and the P2P Lab are supported by the project “Phygital: Catalysing innovation and entrepreneurship unlocking the potential of emerging production and business models”, implemented under the Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg V-B “Balkan – Mediterranean 2014-2020”, co-funded by the European Union and the National Funds of the participating countries.

The post The Birth of an Open Source Agricultural Community: The Story of Tzoumakers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Automation and digitisation are rising in farming and the broader agri-food sector. Germany – industrial powerhouse of Europe –  seems an obvious place to embrace AGTech. From precision farming and data ownership to embodied energy and cost, what are the opportunities, the impacts and the implications? And how are agroecologists responding?

Helene Schulze: When the body is ready, the text is sent. Cows equipped with vaginal thermometers are now alerting farmers by text when they are in heat. So far, 5000 German farms have signed up to this Connected Cow system, as developed by Medira Technologies and Deutsche Telekom. And there are others similar systems emerging too, as the Internet of Things beds in.

There are ever more vocal fears that automation will put the labour forces of entire industries under threat. Increasingly robots, drones and machines are taking on jobs previously done by humans. Frequently they do them better and agriculture is no exception.

The idealised image of the small German farmer, ploughing away endlessly in the fields is outdated, as Ralf Hombach, business analytics expert at PwC explains:

‘increasingly the famer adopts a supervisory and controlling role.’

The PwC study (German) showed that of the cross-section of 100 farms analysed, 54% had already invested in digital technologies. 40% planned to either continue investing or begin investing in such technologies in future.

Drone spraying sugar cane. Photo by Herney

What is agricultural technology or AgTech? Where should we be worried? What can we expect in the years to come?

Ever since tractors were first fitted with GPS (or global-positioning-systems) at the start of the 21^stcentury, one can observe the boom of the agricultural technology, or AgTech, sector. Frequently it is heralded as the third wave of agricultural modernisation, after mechanisation from 1900-1930s and the growth and development of agrarian genetics during the Green Revolution, 1930s-1960s.

AgTech incorporates a range of technological and scientific developments to be used in farming. This includes ‘smart farming,’ i.e. hardware such as drones and robots but also software such as sensors, image recognition or machine-to-machine communication. Smart farming incorporates a whole swathe of different tools and functions from milking machines to satellite-driven soil and crop assessment.

Farm worker Derek Search powers an ATV across fields at Forage Systems Research Center. The ATV is equipped with sonar reading sensors that measure pasture growth. The data is ran through a computer that allows producers to manage nutrient applications. photo by Kyle Spradley CC BY-NC 2.0

The underlying intention is to increase the quality, quantity and efficiency of agricultural production through implementation of these various technologies; applying fertiliser where fertiliser is needed, milking the cow when she so requires. The idea is that this encourages the better allocation of resources such as pesticides only to those parts of the field that require it. It can save time for farmers, theoretically encourage pro-environmental farming strategies and produce a lot of food. So can AgTech innovations be a way of feeding the world – sustainably?

During the Seventh Framework Programme and now as part of Horizon2020, a research and innovation programme, the EU has sponsored a variety of AgTech projects. One example is the rollout of Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) technology. Primarily these are sensors used for monitoring the health and wellbeing of animals. Collected data includes GPS location, body temperature and activity. As outlined at the start, Medira Technologies and Deutsche Telekom collaborated to produce Connected Cow. Here a cow is equipped with a vaginal thermometer which alerts the farmer by text message when the cow is in heat. So far, this has proven popular among the 5,000 farms initially equipped with this technology. It could well be incorporated in efforts to ensure better animal welfare in livestock rearing, as is under debate in Germany.

The fears that AgTech will eliminate the agricultural workforce have not yet actualised in Germany. A recent study (German) by search engine Joblift analysed job offers in the German agriculture sector over the past two years. It found that the past year brought consistent growth for the agricultural job market. 4% of jobs fell into the AgTech category and, despite automation, there were 20% more jobs in this sector than in the year previous. The AgTech branch is growing four times as fast as the rest of the sector.

1/3 of the jobs listed are from companies with over 1,000 employees and, due to the initial cost of AgTech, it is a sector spearheaded by big agribusinesses. The agricultural sector has very low margins and so necessarily hefty investments in innovation are difficult for small farmers. That said, the farm hack movement has seen citizen farmers taking the initiative in a myriad of open and affordable ways – some examples are below.

Photo (c)   Kyle Spradley CC BY-NC 2.0 Brent Myers and Bill Schlep plant corn for variety testing at the Bradford Research Center. They have utilized GPS mapping systems and computers to know where certain seeds are plotted in the field.

However, for some companies AgTech is financially lucrative terrain. Globally, the market was worth E3.2 Billion in 2016, according to AGfunder, a Californian based crowfunding platform. 363 million of this was spent on farm management and sensor technology, the Financial times reported last month.

Die Zeit newspaper reports Bosch has already made a billion Euro turnover in selling smart farming technologies. With this sector projected to continue growing, the company hopes to double this turnover in the next ten years. Other large agribusinesses are doing the same. Bayer has teamed up with the Institute of Geography and Information Studies at Hamburg University to work on the development of new field analysis tools. They have also partially taken over Proplant which had produced a milk cow assessment app. Bayer says it is working on ‘further strategic investments’ using satellite, drone and sensor-gathered data in the coming years.

Predictions of the future of smart farming see the increasing collection of big data to drive real-time decision-making on harvesting, planting and yields, for example. Since this field is still dominated by agribusinesses, there is growing concern about how this data is collected, what it is used for and who has access to it. Fears concern a monopoly of valuable information in the hands of the already powerful global agribusiness firms, data which could be used to differently charge farmers for the same product, for example.

However, with the rise of open source data initiatives across the world there is the chance, if strategically thought out soon, for collaborative, open systems where all stakeholders have access to huge data stores. This has the potential to democratise the supply chain network, redistributing power from the information-rich agribusiness firms and giving greater negotiating ability to smaller farms, new entrants or start-ups. This requires work on generating the institutional and regulatory infrastructures to ensure accessibility and affordability in data creation and sharing.

While there are a number of threats to farming and farmers in Germany, German farmers are not yet being eliminated from the labour force by robots. And we can likely expect exciting developments in AgTech in the coming years. This technology may have positive socio-economic and environmental effects, working against inequalities in the current food system and minimising the environmental impact of the sector. However, this requires forward planning to ensure frameworks are in place which allow accessibility to AgTech and its use for social good.

Helene Schulze has just completed an MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from Oxford University. Her dissertation focused on seed saving. She helped organise the 2017 Oxford Food Forum. She has also interned for Sustain: Alliance for Better Food and Farming.

Cross-posted from ARC2020. LEad image by Sanint.

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From the shownotes to the video:

When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.

The post Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly appeared first on P2P Foundation.

You may not know it by its admittedly awkward name, but a process known as commons-based peer production (CBPP) supports much of our online life. CBPP describes internet-enabled, peer-to-peer infrastructures that allow people to communicate, self-organize and produce together. The value of what is produced is not extracted for private profit, but fed back into a knowledge, design and software commons — resources which are managed by a community, according to the terms set by that community. Wikipedia, WordPress, the Firefox browser and the Apache HTTP web server are some of the best-known examples.

If the first wave of commons-based peer production was mainly created digitally and shared online, we now see a second wave spreading back into physical space. Commoning, as a longstanding human practice that precedes commons-based peer production, naturally began in the material world. It eventually expanded into virtual space and now returns to the physical sphere, where the digital realm becomes a partner in new forms of resource stewardship, production and distribution. In other words, the commons has come full circle, from the natural commons described by Elinor Ostrom, through commons-based peer production in digital communities, to distributed physical manufacturing.

This recent process of bringing peer production to the physical world is called Design Global, Manufacture Local (DGML). Here’s how it works: A design is created using the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, and then produced using local manufacturing and automation technologies. These can include three-dimensional printers, computer numerical control (CNC) machines or even low-tech crafts tools and appropriate technology — often in combination. The formula is: What is “light” (knowledge) is global, and what is “heavy” (physical manufacture) is local. DGML and its unique characteristics help open new, sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption.

Imagine a process where designs are co-created, reviewed and refined as part of a global digital commons (i.e. a universally available shared resource). Meanwhile, the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind. The process of making something together as a community creates new ideas and innovations which can feed back into their originating design commons. This cycle describes a radically democratized way to make objects with an increased capacity for innovation and resilience.

Current examples of the DGML approach include WikiHouse, a nonprofit foundation sharing templates for modular housing; OpenBionics, creating three-dimensional printed medical prosthetics which cost a fraction (0.1 to 1 percent) of the price of standard prosthetics; L’Atelier Paysan, an open source cooperative fostering technological sovereignty for small- and medium-scale ecological agriculture; Farm Hack, a farmer-driven community network sharing open source know-how amongst do-it-yourself agricultural tech innovators; and Habibi.Works, an intercultural makerspace in northern Greece where Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees develop DGML projects in a communal atmosphere.

This ecologically viable mode of production has three key patterns:

1) Nonprofit: Objects are designed for optimum usability, not to create tension between supply and demand. This eliminates planned obsolescence or induced consumerism while promoting modular, durable and practical applications.

2) Local: Physical manufacturing is done in community workshops, with bespoke production adapted to local needs. These are economies of scope, not of scale. On-demand local production bypasses the need for huge capital outlays and the subsequent necessity to “keep the machines running” night and day to satisfy the expectations of investors with over-capacity and over-production. Transportation costs — whether financial or ecological — are eradicated, while maintenance, fabrication of spare parts and waste treatment are handled locally.

3) Shared: Idle resources are identified and shared by the community. These can be immaterial and shared globally (blueprints, collaboration protocols, software, documentation, legal forms), or material and managed locally (community spaces, tools and machinery, hackathons). There are no costly patents and no intellectual property regimes to enforce false scarcity. Power is distributed and shared autonomously, creating a “sharing economy” worthy of the name.

To preserve and restore a livable planet, it’s not enough to seize the existing means of production; in fact, it may even not be necessary or recommendable. Rather, we need to reinvent the means of production; to radically  reimagine the way we produce. We must also decide together what not to produce, and when to direct our productive capacities toward ecologically restorative work and the stewardship of natural systems. This includes necessary endeavors like permaculture, landscape restoration, regenerative design and rewilding.

These empowering efforts will remain marginal to the larger economy, however, in the absence of sustainable, sufficient ways of obtaining funding to liberate time for the contributors. Equally problematic is the possibility of the capture and enclosure of the open design commons, to be converted into profit-driven, peer-to-peer hybrids that perpetuate the scarcity mindset of capital. Don’t assume that global corporations or financial institutions are not hip to this revolution; in fact, many companies seem to be more interested in controlling the right to produce through intellectual property and patents, than on taking any of the costs of the production themselves. (Silicon Valley-led “sharing” economy, anyone?)

To avoid this, productive communities must position themselves ahead of the curve by creating cooperative-based livelihood vehicles and solidarity mechanisms to sustain themselves and the invaluable work they perform. Livelihood strategies like Platform and Open Cooperativism lead the way in emancipating this movement of globally conversant yet locally grounded producers and ecosystem restorers. At the same time, locally based yet globally federated political movements — such as the recent surge of international, multi-constituent municipalist political platforms — can spur the conditions for highly participative and democratic “design global, manufacture local” programs.

We can either produce with communities and as part of nature or not. Let’s make the right choice.

• Originally published in Truthout
• Art by Jared Rodríguez

The post Reimagine, don’t seize, the means of production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding sustainability

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

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

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

Towards ‘cosmolocalism’

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

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

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

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

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

Limitations and future research

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

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

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

Reposted from The Conversation

The post Design global, manufacture local: a new industrial revolution? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Summary

Chris Giotitsas and Jose Ramos: “The basic features of DG-ML are based on the conjunction of open source / open design production logics at the global scale, which are coupled with local-network production at a regional scale. Traditionally corporate enterprises have solely owned the intellectual property (IP) they employ in the production of goods. They source the materials for the goods through national or global supply chains. They manufacture those goods using economies of scale in a set number of manufacturing centres, whereupon those finished goods are delivered nationally or globally. DG-ML is an inversion of this production logic. First of all, the IP is open, whether open source or creative commons or copyfair,3 so it can be used by anyone. Secondly, manufacturing and production can be done independently of the IP, by any community or enterprise around the world that wants to. The democratization of increasingly powerful precision manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers and automated systems / robots potentiate this. This does not follow the logic of economies of scale (yet), rather it is focused on producing value for a critical reference group (CRG), a community who require such goods. Thirdly, distribution is localized to the CRG, or affiliates of the CRG.

DG-ML is not just the advent of new technologies that can be simply strapped on to the neoliberal globalization machine. DG-ML in fact represents the instantiation and operationalization of a new economic system that draws from an emerging worldview. Drawing from relationships and experiences with people involved in DG-ML, we believe it represents a substantive cultural shift in the orientation of material producers/consumers. It rejects the way in which industrialization has decontextualized inputs and outputs and associated externalities. It is thus allied to the vision for building circular economies, the idea being that the production materials used in a DG-ML process are sourced as locally as possible, with waste outputs utilized as inputs elsewhere, eliminating unnecessary supply chain associated costs and impacts. It is also connected to calls for a post-growth economic model, sustaining livelihoods based on measures of wellbeing rather than corporate / economic growth.10 It is interwoven with the open source movement, a vision for a digital commons where the legacy of human creativity is shareable. It draws from a planetary imaginary where local development work is responsive to the planetary challenges we face.11 It is in fact part of a movement to create an alternative globalization,12 and an expression of an emergent worldview: global ecological integrity versus overshoot, peer worker solidarity versus national competition, value pluralism versus the monoculture of GDP.”

Excerpts

From the conclusion: “These two cases provide a window into an emerging economic model that we are just beginning to understand. The cases demonstrate the peer production of shared value and common resources. However, unlike the open software movement, the mode of co-production within these cases are highly localized, members are collaboratively prototyping, designing and experimenting with machinery. These cases can be considered to be prefigurative, they are potential indicators of things to come. The logic of peer production has hit an important threshold, it is now instantiated through physical / material production. Yet the cases also demonstrate growing pains. For Farm Hack questions still remain concerning their financial viability and the challenges of sustaining the producing communities. Is a weak for-benefit organisation enough to facilitate the healthy growth of their network of peer producers? For L’Atelier Paysans, there are less problems with financing the operation, but more questions about how an entrepreneurial coalition is activated. Looking ahead, what might we take away from these case studies that may allow us to see the faint future outlines of an alternative political economy? The emergence of the network form and the logic of commoning embodied in DG-ML practices as demonstrated in these case studies, provide us with some of the seeds from which to begin to imagine an alternative future for political economy. DG-ML challenges the logic of zero sum competition, which is at the heart of our nationally based (and globally connected) capitalist systems. In the current system we are used to national governments supporting national industries to compete globally, win market share and take the lead in technology and innovation. The DG-ML model is part of the birth of a globally cooperative system, the design innovations from one community in one part of the world can be used and adapted for a community in a wholly different part of the world. Instead of systems of competitive advantage and capturing of market share, technological adaptation is community-based and meant to sustain the livelihoods of critical reference groups. While there is theoretical scope for larger industrial scale DG-ML which is able to produce for regional markets (cities of 4-20 million people for example), the examples in this report show a commitment to the adaptation of design and technology for local critical reference groups, rather than competitive marketing strategies.

This then can also help us to reconsider the role of the state with respect to industry and material production. If DG-ML helps regions to rupture from the zero-sum logic of competition, states may develop policies in which support is given to both scales of the DG-ML coproduction system – global and local. At the scale of the global, national policy can orient knowledge production to be open in a way that potentiates industry in material production society-wide and indeed worldwide. At the scale of the local state policy can support communities and local regions in bootstrapping enterprises and productive communities that can instantiate the potential and value of DG-ML processes, through participatory action research processes. This has been referred to as a partner state model.24Finally, because DG-ML is growing from within the dominant capitalist economy, it is important that the value of a global design commons is not simply captured by capitalist industry as a way to lower its operational costs, without having to reciprocate by entering into the coproduction of the commons. It’s important, therefore, to begin to consider how to create virtuous cycles in the value exchanges between different actors in the global DG-ML meta-system. Some ideas in this vein have may be the development of copyfair licences (commons-based reciprocity license),25 useful for trans-nationalizing a generative circulation of value across commons based initiatives – a form of Dzopen cooperativismdz,26 and through which the capitalist / corporate sector would need to concretely reciprocate into if it wants to draw upon it in the first place. This would conceivably require new global institutions that would be able to provide legal and administrative power in supporting, enacting and protecting an open cooperativist regime of knowledge and value exchange. The potential for DG-ML is to liberate the human heritage of knowledge and design, so that communities and people anywhere have the full array of technologies and capabilities to address their living economic and ecological challenges. If we want to accelerate the human capability to enact sustainable development strategies across the world, the right to global designs and concrete support for building local livelihoods are fundamental pillars. The case studied presented here provide hope grounded in practice. Building on these courageous pioneering efforts will be the next challenge.”

Visualization

Comparison of Traditional vs DGML-based peer production

(CRG refers to: critical reference group)

• Images courtesy of L’Atelier Paysan.
• Download the full report here: A New Model of Production for a New Economy.

The post A New Model of Production for a New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Thus began Farm Hack, an ambitious volunteer project that brought together the seemingly disparate cultures of technologists and agrarians. The start of Farm Hack came with an offer from M.I.T. to host a teaching event that could connect engineers with farmers’ needs. The National Young Farmers Coalition had just started a blog called “Farm Hack” and launched the first program, followed closely by more events held in partnership with GreenStart and Greenhorns agrarian networks and maker/hacker networks.

The Farm Hack community quickly expanded through online and in-person social networks across the east and west coasts of North America. Within three years, it became a user-driven, collaborative community of ideas and tools with many thousands of active participants. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from every continent were soon contributing tens of thousands of hours to the platform. Farm Hack has become a rapidly growing repository of agricultural knowledge, containing scores of open source designs and documentation for farming technologies and practices. In effect, Farm Hack is an emergent, networked culture of collaborative problem-solving.

Hacking has been defined as the art of coming up with clever solutions to tricky problems by modifying something in extraordinary ways to make it more useful. Hacking also means rejecting the norms of consumer culture, and imagining ways to modify, improvise, and create new, accessible, custom solutions for particular problems. Not surprisingly, both hacker and maker culture are a natural fit for the sustainable agricultural movement. Both cultures formed in response to ongoing, hegemonic attempts to control users’ access to basic technologies and other resources. Both arose from a realization that open access to knowledge is the best strategy to counter dominant industry interests. This has long been an inherent part of agriculture in general, and a critical part of sustainable agriculture in particular. On most farms, identifying a problem, thinking of a solution, testing that solution and assessing its efficacy while thinking of the next iteration is a daily practice.

Within its first year, the Farm Hack website featured documentation for over 100 innovative agricultural tools. They ranged from manufacturing instructions for newly created farm-built hardware such as garlic planters, to the remanufacturing of an “extinct” farm-scale oat huller. The community contributed designs for greenhouse automation and sensor networks and business models for organic egg enterprises.

The power of open source exchange is illustrated by the quick pace and diversity of modifications and improvements made to tools on Farm Hack. One of the first greenhouse monitoring projects was turned into an electric-fence alert system, which quickly evolved into an automation and data logging system, which then spun into businesses selling kits. An organic no-till roller made open source by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania was quickly modified in New Hampshire, then Quebec, and then France and Germany; the latest versions being built in New York are based on German and French improvements made six months earlier. In this production model, inventors increasingly may not be able to predict the ultimate use of their tools, as the ultimate use will be collaborative and emergent.

Despite being an all-volunteer organization, operating without a budget until 2014, Farm Hack partnered with dozens of organizations, universities, open source and maker communities in the US and Europe to expand the network. In addition to providing an online forum and repository for the community’s knowledge and tools, Farm Hack has hosted in-person and online events to document and improve tools, foster sharing and build skills. In these events, the group carries on the agrarian club tradition of mixing participatory education with lots of good eating, drinking and socializing.

With growth of the community came greater financial burdens of hosting and guiding the conversations and idea exchanges. The community also needed to evolve in its role from organizing and planning, to facilitating, guiding and recruiting new contributors. Initial funding to support these needs came indirectly through the founding partner organization budgets supplemented by contributions from community volunteers. It was three years before the first general grant support was secured. A university extension program wrote a grant on behalf of Farm Hack to document, measure and extend the reach of USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) funded projects.

To manage the challenges of growth and expansion in its third year, the Farm Hack network adopted a set of ten principles; participants wanted to maintain the representative open agrarian values of the network as they interacted with established power structures. The collaborative and flexible structure of the organization, and rapidly evolving tools for remote collaboration, became important ways for the organization to evolve while remaining representative and emergent. For example, a collaborative tool currently in development, by the community and for the community, is a best practices template for open source project contracting to help navigate the tension of having paid and volunteer efforts working side by side. The template is exploring the awarding of bounties and other rewards for commercial contracts, special recognition to volunteer efforts, and pooled payments or retainers on a project-by-project basis for participants.

Open Source Software Converges with Agrarianism

Farm Hack has blended a rich set of old and new traditions – the Enlightenment salon ideals of the eighteenth century and those of the open source software movement. Both believe that the natural state of knowledge is to be free. Farm Hack also looks to the Physiocratic worldview of nature-governance articulated by Quesnay, Jefferson, Locke and Franklin, who regarded the productivity of the soil, and the education of the populace to provide for their own livelihood, as necessary for liberty and the health of a culture. From this perspective, agricultural production is the root of sustainable civilization. It is not just an occupation, but a foundation for the shared cultural values of a healthy society.

Well before the Internet, Enlightenment thinkers pioneered the idea of crowdsourcing with their community-created Encyclopedie: A Systematic Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, first published in 1751 and written with over 2,250 contributors. More than 250 years later, the contemporary open source software community is pioneering the development of networked tools, such as wikis, forums and collaborative documents, all of which facilitate social cooperation and trust. Building on these models of voluntary reciprocity, Farm Hack implicitly challenges the prevailing norms of conventional agricultural economics and research. It challenges not only what types of questions are asked in agricultural research and development, but also who asks the questions, the types of tools that are produced, and how they are financed.

The Farm Hack community believes that the tools, seeds, and techniques used in agriculture should both reflect and benefit those who intend to use them, not just those intent on selling them. Through an ongoing amateur inquiry that connects farmers with other farmers, designers, engineers, and thinkers, Farm Hack has embraced, woven together, and expanded upon preindustrial and modern hacker/maker ideals. Its open, social collaboration creates the potential for every farm to become a research farm, and every neighbor to be a manufacturer, drawing upon a global library of skills and designs.

An Alternative Template for Agriculture

From Encyclopedia of Practical Farm Knowledge, published by Sears and Roebuck, 1918. Available at archive.org.

By documenting, sharing, and improving farm tools and associated know­ledge, Farm Hack is not just framing agriculture as a shared foundational economic activity. It illustrates an alternative template for local manufacturing and provides greater citizen choice, control and local self-determination. The primary limiting factor in agriculture shifts from the (negative) extraction of scarce natural resources to the (positive) expansion of skills and systems understanding of all participants. Farmers are able to learn better ways of harnessing the complex biogeochemical flows of atmospheric carbon, water, and nitrogen into productive and resilient agroecosystems. The emphasis shifts from efficient extraction of resources to skilled regeneration of resources using all available knowledge.¹ The focus becomes improving rather than diminishing the natural resource base.

Another contribution to the rapid expansion of Farm Hack’s community has been its reliance on the network structures and administrative tools pioneered by other open source communities, including Drupal (blogging software), Wikipedia (wiki collaboration), Open Layers (Java script software), and Apache (server software). It has been able to build trust, grow, and adapt while making its own unique contributions back to the commons. Another important tool used by Farm Hack is the Collective Impact Framework, a structured approach that allows organizations to use collaborative tools to form common agendas and adopt shared measurement tools, mutually reinforcing activities and continuous communication among diverse sorts of participants.² This Framework has been adopted in order to enable the community to identify and reduce overlapping, duplicative efforts, and to build upon the cumulative achievements of the broader open source community.

Farm Hack’s online platform is a prototype for implementing this framework in the context of open source agriculture practices. Just as symbiosis is as powerful an influence as competition in nature, Farm Hack believes that it can help turn the conventional agricultural research and development system on its head. By creating tools and social norms that reward, refine, test and evaluate collaborative production, it is possible to stimulate rapid, reliable community knowledge and innovation.

In 1726, Jonathan Swift famously wrote, “Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” The quote embodies Farm Hack’s partial but expanding achievement: By creating open source repositories of knowledge and technologies, it is bypassing the dominant political and economic power structures behind industrial agriculture. Farm Hack is shifting the balance from those who derive their power through the control of scarce resources and knowledge to those who mix their creative skills with nature in order to create abundance.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Dorn Cox is a farmer in Lee, New Hampshire (US), where he continues to develop and refine open source agricultural research and development systems to improve farm productivity and resilience. He is a founding member of Farm Hack, the New England Farmers’ Union, GreenStart, the Great Bay Grain Cooperative, and the Oyster River Biofuel Initiative. He has a B.S. from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of New Hampshire.

Photo by thegreenhorns

The post Patterns of Commoning: Farm Hack: A Commons for Agricultural Innovation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There is an emerging body of ideas and practices around distributed manufacturing / production. P2P Foundation researchers recently articulated the “design global – manufacture local” (DGML) model. Last year I followed up with this essay for the P2P Foundation on “cosmo-localization“. Meanwhile Fab City launched its initiative to drive localized city based open design production. New communities like Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysans and enterprises like OSvehicle are making practical strides.

To explore this further, I am organising an event in Melbourne, Australia, that will bring together experts in the areas of additive manufacturing, industrial design, the maker movement, and ecological economics. Together we will explore the emerging outline of this new economic model. Join us if you would like to find out what this revolution means for industry, for government policy and for society. You may discover opportunities to connect with the people driving and playing in this emerging space.

DATE AND TIME: Fri, May 12, 2017, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM AES

LOCATION: Kelvin Club, 14-30 Melbourne Pl, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

• Five speakers will present, each for 10 minutes (descriptions below).
• This will be followed by a Q&A for any guests to ask questions.
• Food and drink can be ordered from the Kelvin Club before, during or after the event.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite – Book Now

Symposium Presenters and Topics 

Sharon Ede will present on Fab City, an example of ‘Design Global Manufacture Local’ based in Barcelona, which seeks to leverage the digital and traditional production infrastructure of Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories) and open source design to help bring production and making skills back to cities. Barcelona, Paris, Boston, Detroit, Santiago, San Francisco and Shenzhen are among the cities which have taken a pledge to relocalise 50% of their production of energy, food and manufacturing by 2054.

Rob Eales will discuss his current work including, developing tools for small acre and organic farmers, the farm hack model as a way to drive the development of new tools, the opportunities in the development of better internet access for Victorian rural and regional communities, the OSVehicle project and what it could mean for local production, the drivers and opportunities for his practice and current issues that exist for these approaches including scaling up or across, the funding and documenting of Open Source Hardware (OSHW) projects and R&D in the context of these projects.

Dr. Mark Richardson will discuss four core principles that tie together his practice-based design research – openness, modularity, design for reuse and making. He is interested in how tangible expressions of these help create the narratives that shift culture, inspire systems renewal, develop communities of practice and provide new and optimistic senses of self, space and place.

Alison Kershaw will talk about how makerspaces are places of opportunity and possibility. As local and global economies change makerspaces are going to play a vital part in providing low cost, low risk and supported access to new technologies and communities of people wanting to create, learn, share, solve both local and global problems. Current policy and thinking regarding makerspaces is short sighted. It predominantly focuses on makerspaces in educational institutions, to the exclusion of community makerspaces, which are more than educational but communities of makers exploring new ways of working, doing business and creating value.

Dr. Jose Ramos will talk about the transition to a design global, manufacture local approach to production, what he calls “cosmo-localization”. This shift includes a number of critical elements: the human right to produce from global designs, the elaboration of a circular economy to complement industrial micro-clusters, a “partner state” model where government will support both localized manufacturing, peer production communities and makerspaces, the development of anchor organizations that protect the design commons, and entrepreneurial coalitions capable of scaling production from niche to market.

BIOS

Sharon Ede

Sharon Ede is an urbanist and activist working to build the sharing and collaborative movement in Adelaide, Australia and beyond. In 2012, she set up Share Adelaide to document and inspire local sharing activity. In her public servant role, she initiated and collaborated on a project that maps community sharing assets, which was funded and open sourced by the State government.Sharon is a co founder of the Post Growth Institute and a catalyst for the FabCity Global Initiative.

Rob Eales

Rob Eales is an Industrial Designer working with Open Source Hardware and Software as a way to explore new approaches and methods for the development of products and services that seek to address critical societal issues such as climate change. He is interested in how the development and distribution of open source products could redefine the work that communities do and where they do it. Recently he has been working with small-acre, organic farmers to develop new tools, organising farm hack events and discussing the possibilities of open source vehicle design with his network.

Mark Richardson

Mark Richardson is formally a senior designer at Ford Motor Company, he was involved in both conceptual and global manufacturing projects, such as the R7 show car, Territory, European Mondeo and Asia Pacific Fiesta. Mark now lectures in Industrial Design at Monash University, having completed a PhD seeking evidence to support the advance of ecologically and socially sustainable mobility systems through hands-on practices of making. His research now investigates how we can transition from current design and production methods to more sustainable, resilient and accessible systems of creating, making, sharing and learning.

Alison Kershaw

Alison Kershaw likes to work at the edges and at the beginning of things. She relishes collaborating and working with others to find solutions to problems and making great things happen. Alison loves the interface of community development activities and technology to build inclusion, participation and change. Alison is happiest when she is brining ideas to life. Alison has produced large scale events, directed plays, set up an accessible internet café, designed and implemented policies and currently facilitates community development and engagement initiatives. Alison is the founding Chair of the volunteer not for profit SA Makers Inc, which promotes makers and making in South Australia. SA Makers manages Fab Lab Adelaide and produces Maker Faire Adelaide.

Jose Ramos

Jose Ramos is director of Action Foresight, a Melbourne-based business that focuses on bridging transformational futures with present-day action. He has taught foresight, public policy and social innovation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Sunshine Coast and Victoria University. He is senior consulting editor for the Journal of Future Studies, and has over 50 publications spanning economic, cultural and political change. He is an honorary fellow at the Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing in Melbourne.

The post Transforming Production: An Open Design Distributed Manufacturing Symposium appeared first on P2P Foundation.

L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings adapted to the specific practices of small farm agroecology. In addition to distributing free plans on its website, L’Atelier Paysan organizes winter self-help training sessions, during which farmers train in metalworking and build tools which they can then use on their own farms. L’Atelier Paysan works to develop the technological sovereignty of farmers by helping them to become more autonomous through learning and regain knowledge and skills.

In market gardening, crops are grown on beds formed from long strips of land. Generally, little or no attention is paid to ground compaction by tractor wheels. In subsequent years, farmers will then try to grow on these tracks. The idea of permanent, “ridged” beds is to form perennial growing beds so the tractor wheels always run in the same place. Tools are needed to form these ridged beds, which allow crops to have superior moisture retention and drainage, and to warm up better in the sun. 

Michel Bauwens: What was the origin of L’Atelier Paysan project?

Julien and Fabrice: The project was born in 2009 after a meeting between Joseph Templier, an organic market gardener from GAEC “Les Jardins du Temple” in Isère (south-eastern France, near the Alps), and Fabrice Clerc, then a technician with ADABio, the local organic agriculture development association. ADABio was created in 1984 to help improve practices, find resources, and share knowledge, among other things.

Joseph and his colleagues used tools on the farm that are very relevant to the soil, especially adapted to an innovative cultural technique called “permanent beds”. Many young farmers came to train in the techniques, the system and the organization of the “Jardins du Temple” and then to practice them on their own farms and projects. At the same time, Fabrice went to many farms in the Rhone Alps to collect and disseminate knowledge and agrarian know-how. Fabrice and Joseph’s idea was to widely publicise the innovative tools used on this farm, which were crafted and assembled from recovered materials and refurbished old tools. Some standardization was necessary first, in order to be able to publish plans for building the tools from parts and accessories that can be found at any hardware store.

Your approach seems very pragmatic. Yet when I read through your website, it is also a very thoughtful approach (philosophical and political). How did you move from one approach to another?

We have just put into words what is happening. A number of farmers in the Alps independently designed and built their own machines, adapted to their own needs. We have gathered and compiled all this into a guide. In the process of constructing this guide, it seemed useful to formalise our approach: first, to take an inventory of innovations on the ground, then to answer the question “what is the meaning of all this?” Why all these bottom-up innovations, which were traditionally outsourced to the equipment manufacturing industry. So, why was the farming world excluded from the design process? Whereas the farmer and the artisan of the village once built the machines needed, now farmers have disappeared from the chain of innovation.

It is not only in the agricultural sector that this has happened: it’s possible to build bridges with changes in other areas such as shared self-build community workshops, and to think about Do It Yourself from the viewpoint of human/social (re)construction. For example, in Grenoble, there are about ten woodworking workshops with available machines and tools, and self-renovation housing initiatives. They are important factors for emancipation, inclusion and social reintegration. For the last 6 or 7 years, we have been thinking a lot about these issues. We don’t want to just make machines. It is a total experience that consists of thinking about daily life and of the political approach it requires.

Current political debate reflects a very strong social demand on the ground. The guide to self-construction is the first book we published in 2012. This is the sum of the first field census of sixteen machines adapted to organic market gardening. These machines, which are low tech (in construction and design) call for a lot of craft know-how. They do not suffer in comparison with high-tech machines. Our machines are three to four times cheaper for an efficiency equal or superior to those of the trade. Why is this search for autonomy not more valued? This is a question of the technological sovereignty of farmers. It is something that is coming back into fashion, taken up by a militant farming community.

The word “farmer” was, until the 1980s, a word used to denigrate. Today, on the contrary, it means someone who is not only a cultivator of agricultural produce but part of a terroir, connected to an ecosystem and a social life. The word “farmer” relates to the invention of a specialized, segmented profession. Today they are even called “producer”, “operator”, or “Chief Operating Officer”. The logic of industrialists and economists invades agriculture.

What are the current project developments?

The approach is open to the whole field of small and organic farming on a human scale. It started around organic market gardening, but now it is open to all sectors: arboriculture, breeding, viticulture… For example, we can include the re-design of livestock buildings and storage. For market gardeners who want to add some poultry farming to their production, we are also working on the issue of mobile buildings.

Depending on the demands of the farmers’ groups on the ground, our resource platform will respond to co-design the tools required for the specific practices of small and organic farmers. We want these tools to be used by conventional farmers to help them adopt a more autonomous and economical approach. It is becoming increasingly credible because it is intended to be a resource available to all farmers. Most of our users are already going through this process, but the technical principles developed, aim to ensure that conventional farmers are no longer frightened by the demanding, know-how-based, techniques of small farm agroecology.

The project started in 2009 at ADABio, a local association of organic producers, but very quickly grew to such a large scale that in 2011 a transitional association was created and then converted into a cooperative in 2014: L’Atelier Paysan. In this human adventure, meetings played a very important part. At each meeting, we took sideways steps, then small jumps and then big jumps. Today we are 11 permanent staff, quite a lot of seasonal staff as well as those who volunteer as a civic service. Everyone comes as who they are and our approach is closely linked to what each person brings. We are very attentive to the requests that come to us, and we have more and more!

What is your business model?

We operate 65% through self-financing and 35% from public funding. In our view, these are normal contributions to our effort to produce and disseminate common goods. We believe that we are in the public interest and that communities need to be involved. Unfortunately, with the reactionary right-wing coming to power in many places, this sort of support has been drastically reduced.

However, we are relatively more secure than other structures, sometimes subsidized at 80%. The 65% self-financing comes from our self-build training activity. In France there are joint vocational training funds that can cover the cost of training. We also profit from a margin on group orders for internships.

We will raise funds more and more from the public: if we want to change the agriculture / food model, the whole of society is involved. That’s why we have set up a partnership with a Citoyens Solidaire endowment fund to collect donations and the associated tax [1]. It is a mechanism that allows people to choose where their taxes are going. We want to make citizens aware of our work so that they can contribute to the economic independence of L’Atelier Paysan.

What is your relationship with other farmer or social movements?

L’Atelier Paysan is positioned as one of the actors in the alternative food project, an additional tool in the social and solidarity-based agricultural economy. As actors of this arena, we naturally wanted to associate ourselves with those that represent the agricultural environment, to connect, so that they might disseminate our information, our technical material and to bring together our different users. Moreover, the question of agricultural machinery was very seldom dealt with by the existing organisations.

Also, we have had an awareness-raising activity for a year now, through the InPACTassociation, which brings together about ten associations at the national level. We have been the standard-bearers for the technological sovereignty of farmers in this context, in particular to document and expose, on the one hand, the over-sizing of farming equipment production tool and, on the other hand, the publicly funded introduction of robotics and digital technology supported by the techno-scientific community.

At the international level, we are in the Via Campesina network. We participated in the 2nd Nyéléni forum on food sovereignty (in October 2016 in Romania) where we talked about agricultural equipment, saying that there can be no food independence without farmers’ technological sovereignty.

At the forum we met with Spaniards, Romanians, Austrians, Czechs and Hungarians, who were very interested in questions around farming equipment. We staged an exhibition of drawings and fact sheets that really appealed to people. It was not especially a field of exploration for these activists, and there, something happened. No one in Europe has yet set up a platform such as L’Atelier Paysan, which provides ways to document and disseminate knowledge (data sheets, self-construction training …).

We went to Quebec in January 2014 to organize the first self-build training in North America, with the CAPÉ (Coopérative d’Agriculteurs de Proximlité Écologique) and l’EPSH (École professionnelle de Saint-Hyacinthe ), around the vibroplanche (for cultivating permanent “ridged” beds). And now, they independently create self-build courses from the shared tools on our website.

In the United States, we are connected with Farm Hack, incubated and launched by Greenhorns, which itself came from a young-farmer’s coalition, the NYFC (National Young Farmers Coalition). They share tips on adapting machinery via hackathons and open-hacking camps. Though they have not yet organized any training.

We also have discussions with the Land Workers Alliance (a member of Via Campesina) in England. Two years ago they organized the first Farmhack event which we attended to present our work.

Here, a farmer can come for training and can build their own tools: it doesn’t cost much thanks to our famous training funds and group-buying of materials and accessories. Working with metal, tool use (a kind of after-sales service), sharing (using the machine and adapting it to their context in the form of versioning); this is the whole methodology that one wants to share. There is a very specific context in France, which means that a structure like ours can still rely on a large amount of public aid and shared professional funds to pay for the internships (this is not the case in the USA, for example, which has to rely on private funds).

In general, our approach is total, that is what is exciting in this adventure. We are giving ourselves the means to advance this process, between ourselves and with other actors. From a practical point of view, to reach one person is good, but to reach many takes us much further. We also consider political and economic issues, and what are the factors for acceleration and efficiency. The question of agricultural machinery is a question of political and scientific thought. On the whole, on a whole bunch of questions, there is no science-based production. On April 5th we are organizing a seminar on technological sovereignty: we have struggled to find people who have admitted incompetence. These are questions they have never faced.

What do you think of the “Commons” as a political concept?

We would like to be further advanced on this issue of the Commons. We assume that the issue of food, like drinking water, the air we breathe and biodiversity, are essential to protect. In turn, the means to achieve it (know-how, agricultural land, communal areas, techniques…) must by definition be common, since this is the survival of our species. All the know-how and the knowledge of farmers did not come ex nihilo [from nothing. Ed]: they come from sharing, putting into a common pot, shared innovation and openness. We see as a scandal any attempt to expropriate technological solutions so that they can be part of another feed-source for personal profit. This is an issue that we are exploring and trying to pay attention to.

We are alert to the legal regimes related to this issue of the Commons, to open licenses and to what could best reflect this willingness to share knowledge through which we enrich our community of users. If we use Creative Commons, we are always looking for the right license that best expresses this willingness to share.

The starting material of our work are the tools developed by Joseph: he participated very much in the emergence of these communities. But he didn’t only tinker with machines, he also thought of them with regard to a working group of farmers who wanted to adopt the innovative cultural techniques of permanent beds. His machines are designed in a collective. It is therefore the result of a whole lot of visits and picking up of knowledge and know-how from his peers. He had the talent and the energy to imagine and manufacture these machines. It is his way of contributing, like other activists.

How do you see social change? The political atmosphere is not very positive for the change we want. Do you imagine that you work in a “hostile environment”? Is there a political side to your work?

There is the question of public education. The first step of the document on the technological sovereignty of farmers will be to amalgamate the ideas of the users, the political partners, etc. Some participants in our training events do not take long to take the ideas and techniques and disseminate them.

We are also starting to have quite a lot of feedback from researchers / thinkers, who congratulate us for imagining this new way of thinking. This is our goal because we are not going to be able to produce everything: scientific studies, political thinking … What partnerships can be set up to make common the commonalities of these subjects? Additional advocates can be found at meetings. We do not have a strategy. There is nothing stronger than a groundswell to spread our way of doing things. The tidal wave will be less important, there will be no media buzz, no pretty teaser with a background of country music, but this is much more powerful. When people have experienced their ability for self-determination, there is a kind of arriving without the possibility of backtracking.

Are there projects similar to yours but which you criticize and if so, why?

We are quite distinct from the sort of ideas promoted by the likes of Open Source Ecology in the US with a beautiful trailer, to us that does not seem grounded in reality. None of the machines actually work. It is a process of innovation that comes from not involving real users. They are engineers who imagine things a bit on their own.

We are also distancing ourselves from Fablabs, which seem to be an incubator for start-ups rather than for public education. For us, a Fablab must be a place of public education and not of low-cost technological experimentation for the industry.

We are in Grenoble, the cradle of nanotechnology. Here, a Fablab is funded by industry and advanced technology. So there is Fablab after Fablab (woodworking, pedal-powered machines…), and they are generally talking about something other than the quality of what is produced. It takes funding to run a Fablab. In 2013, those who won the call for projects from the Ministry of the Digital Economy are not those who provide public education. How do we finance a general interest?

More broadly, if by Fablab we mean laboratories of open innovation and shared human resources, there are tens of thousands in France. There are ecocentres, Third-Places, associations related to self-build, others that repair bicycles, social innovation, human and economic. They are not necessarily in the high-tech field and are less publicized, but they are working on the necessary questions.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? How do you think the world will be in which you will evolve? Do you project yourself into the “global arena” and if yes / no, why and how?

The observation is that today, in January, we do not know much about where we will be at the end of December. This has been true since the beginning of the adventure. We are in an exploratory phase, and it is very difficult to know where we will be in 3 years. After 5 years we have already exceeded our dreams of 3 or 4 years ago! Our collective dynamics explode, economically we will have to find more avenues because humanly we will not be able to go much further. We refuse work every day! One of the interesting tracks in a time-scale of 3 or 4 years is to set up our own training centre on a farm with a workshop training centre suited to our needs, a logistics platform, a classroom, offices, garages, and accommodation. Why a farm? To have our feet on the ground, a real support for our experimentation and a working tool to match our needs. Today we operate within our means, but we have ways to improve our work.

In the years to come, beyond the concerts at Rock à la Meuleuse (rock on the grinder) which we organized during our Rencontres in June 2016, we have plans to explore an illustration of our work through contemporary art.

Among the perspectives, we imagine a European network centred on technological sovereignty. In the world of development and international cooperation associations, this idea has been around since the 1970s, based on appropriate technologies: reclaiming ourselves, being more sociable, connecting and building links throughout Europe so that there are more exchanges between our different countries.

Our adventure is not without effort. Part of what helps us keep going is that we don’t miss out on poetry, pleasure and being as we are. We thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly, explore the paths and horizons that are available to us.

One of the objectives for which we believe we are on the right track is the following: while in France local development has always been specialized, today things are actually de-compartmentalized. If we think about things more “globally”, we will participate in developing something richer, more powerful and sustainable. What makes us strong is that we control the whole chain: self-building at the political and collective level.

We are full of energy: our desire is to testify that the fields we are exploring with the methodologies we use, can be applied to a whole bunch of other things.

All images by L’Atelier Paysan. Check out the full photo essay here.

Interview translated by William Charlton and edited by Ann Marie Utratel

[1] A registered (private) donor can get a tax exemption of 66% on a donation. On a donation of €150, the donor receives a €100 rebate – the recipient gets 80% of the donation i.e. €120 http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-particulier/ for business donations (60% tax exemption) see http://www.citoyens-solidaires.fr/don-entreprise/

The post Julien Reynier and Fabrice Clerc from L’Atelier Paysan on self-build communities in farming appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Around the world, a new economy is being shaped by a “leave things better” story about the meaning of progress and development. In a million projects, people are growing food, restoring soils and rivers, designing homes, generating energy,  journeying, caring for each other, and learning, in new ways.

These activities are incredibly diverse, but a green thread connects them: the regeneration of local living economies. Growth, in this story, takes on a new meaning as the improved health of soils, rivers, plants, animals – and people. Production is re-imagined as a source of equipment for the local system: from greenhouses and water tanks, to solar panels and mesh networks.

At the same time, new tools and business models are transforming relationships between makers and users: Sharing and Peer-to-Peer; Community Ownership; Platform Co-ops; Fair Trade; The Maker Movement; Civic Ecology; Circular Economy; Food and Fibersheds; Transition Towns; Bioregions.

Traditional craft communities, which so often embody healthy relationships between people, place, and living systems, can be important partners for learning and innovation in this new economy. What kinds of relationship, in this context, are most promising?

Maker economies

The rapid emergence of maker spaces, distributed manufacturing, new distribution channels, and disruptive business models, is blurring the distinction between developed and undeveloped, ‘them’ and ‘us’.

Craft producers in the South are just as much actors in a making economy as are the Fab Labs, makerspaces and microfactories that are blooming in the North.

The rediscovery of rust-belt production resources – “tractor factories”  as they call them in Bilbao – is further broadening the range of options for local production. In the forgotten industrial zones of many rustbelt cities, hundreds of local factories, workshops and makers are hidden away, and just about hanging on – but still viable.

The MakeWorks ‘factory finding’ platform launched in Scotland (see above) is a great example; their platform is now starting up in Bristol and Birmingham, too. Another great example, Farm Hack (see below) was born in the US but has now been launched in Scotland, too.

Digital platforms are a means to an end in this context. They make it easier for creative professionals to source local fabricators, material suppliers and open-access workshop facilities.

Documenting these resources is a creative activity in itself. It involves extensive research, mapping, filming and photography of factories, makers and manufacturers.

A number of web-based platforms have emerged as an online marketplace for makers — including OpenDesk, Etsy, Shapeways, Ponoko, Quirky, Kickstarter, and The Grommet.

But according to Will Holman, the economics of making things in a makerspace, and selling them through web-based platforms, are as tough for a designer selling on Etsy as its is for an artisan in Thailand. Most makers in the the US online marketplace earn less than the U.S. median wage.

A purely transactional maker economy, based only on selling things, is unlikely to be sustainable in the longer term.

If it’s just about the thing,
someone will soon find a way to source a similar thing,
but cheaper.

Rather than focus only on selling products as the core measure of progress, it makes more sense to focus on the resources and connections needed for a regional economy to thrive.

Foodsheds



In agriculture,  the healthiest food  systems and landscapes have been created, shaped and maintained by generations of farmers and herders building on local knowledge and experience. Artisan traditions that embody healthy relationships between people, place, and living systems, can therefore be our teachers.

So-called extension services in which farmers—often women— teach other about about agroecological practices are more developed in the south than in the city-dwelling north. In large areas of Asia, farmers are able to join farmer field schools, a group-based learning process that enables farmer-to-farmer instruction.

The opportunity here is to accelerate learning among growers groups whose  expertise and resources, when pooled,  can deliver a lot of the value currently added by today’s cost-adding layers of intermediaries. Of particular importance are alternative trade networks and the Community Agroecology Network.

Fibersheds

Networked actions at a bioregional scale are also emerging in the form of Fibersheds

. The fibershed model integrates all the activities involved in growing, making and using fibre within a soil-friendly, climate-beneficial fibre system.

Fibersheds are organised at the scale of a bioregion. Each region’s shepherds and farmers, producers, shearers, artisans, designers, knitters, fiber entrepreneurs, and clothes-wearing citizens, discuss what practical steps are needed to bring ‘farm-fresh’ clothing to their situation.

As shared production facillties and network coordination improve, small fibersheds are beginning to link together in pan-regional networks to share knowledge and facilities in ways that improve supply.

Poor-To-Poor Energy

Rural, artisan and cash-poor communities in cities are highly innovative, too, in obtaining energy for daily life necessities. We have much to learn from the ways these communities procure, deploy and share affordable, general-purpose, low-tech tools and equipment.

The North can help amplify this capability. Open-source platforms that enable distributed, peer-to-peer energy production, and local area networks, can  enable energy and value flows from poor-to-poor. New coop models make it easier for individual energy producers – at a household or community scale – to pool resources to meet local needs.

In Australia, for example, whose west coast residents see 300 days of sunshine per year, citizens trade directly with the people around them rather than sell excess energy back to the power company.  In a project inspired by Brooklyn Microgrid, energy meters in each participating household are fitted with Raspberry Pi mini-computers to track their energy usage. Homeowners decide to whom and for how much to sell their excess renewable energy. A blockchain ledger keeps track of transactions.

In the Brooklyn Microgrid (above) homeowners decide to whom and for how much to sell their excess renewable energy. The model has the potential to be adapted in poor-to-poor communities everywhere.

The design tasks here are not just about discrete bits of equipment, such as solar panels, or water pumps. Bottom line: resilience is not primarily about products. An entrepreneur who understands this, Paul Polak, reckons the design and technology of a device, such as a pump, is not much more than ten percent of the complete solution. The other ninety percent involves distribution, training, maintenance and service arrangements, partnership and business models. These, too, have to be co-designed.

Solidarity

The ‘gig economy’ and the ‘precariat’ may be uncomfortable novelties for people in the North – but for eighty percent of the world’s population they are the old normal. As welfare and solidarity innovators, we have much to learn from different times as well as from different places.

For most of human history, people have met daily life needs through networks of reciprocity and gifts. Communities have survived, and often prospered, thanks to social systems based on kinship, sharing, and myriad ways to share commonly-held resources. Work has been done for generations without being packaged as permanent jobs.

Bicycle-based wool seller in India – one of many examples of India’s dynamic economy of informal two-wheeled traders. For more examples see velowala.org )

Many historic practices are being reinvented in megacities across the global south. Informal settlements are filled with pop-up retail, street traders, guerilla gardening, and informal parks. In the world’s refugee camps, too, myriad micro-economies are constantly evolving in which in which people share energy, materials, time, skill, software, space, or food.

What precarious or informal workers most need but usually lack, is the capacity to plan ahead rather than be perpetually at the mercy of fickle seasons, or regulations. Liquidity – money – is always an issue. So, too, is the need for insurance against unforseen events. These needs, too, are beginning to met by next-generation ways to mutualize risk among trusted networks.



Money will not disappear as this new economy unfolds – but it will be only part of the picture., and there will be more than one variety. Trust between people, shared ownership, and networked models of care, depend more on social energy, and trust, than on fixed assets and real estate. There’s an emphasis on collaboration and sharing; on person-to-person interactions; on the adaptation and re-use of materials and buildings.

Bioregions



This mulitude of bottom-up new project seedlings is cheering – but something more is needed if the whole is to be more than the sum of its parts. A compelling story, and a shared purpose, are needed that diverse actors can relate to, and support, whatever their other differences.

A strong candidate for that connective idea is the bioregion. A bioregion re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the unique places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, fibersheds, and food systems – not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’.
Growth, in a bioregion is redefined as improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities. Its core value is stewardship, not extraction.

Bioregions can be what Noble Laureate Ilya Prigogine described as “small islands of coherence” that,  in a sea of chaos,  that have the capacity to “shift the entire system to a higher order”.

Cooperation Platforms

Traditional does not mean static. Exciting opportunity for innovation lie in combining the knowledge systems, tools, and cultural assets of South and North into forms of finance, law, policy, and culture.
Relocalising at the scale of a bioregion does not mean the end of trade and exchange. On the contrary, there are numerous ways to share ideas and tools for food, energy fibre production in loose associations – think Hanseatic League of Bioregions. The geographical rule is that light things – bits, information, shared/open source design may well travel, but heavy things (atoms, the physical, manufacturing) stay local.

Platform cooperatives have been heralded as an alternative to platforms like Uber which exploit and disempower workers. But platform coops have a broader potential, too, as the infrastructure new alliances between cities, citizens and public utilities working together on water supply, waste disposal, and energy provision.

Platform coops cannot be downloaded in a simple click, like an app. A lot of work is needed to foster trust and clarity of purpose among members. But platform coops are not landing on empty ground. Millions of people are already collaborating to meet social needs in new ways. Their energy and creativity can be harnessed, right now, to to accelerate the spread of the platform coop approach.

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Cross-posted from Thackara.com

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