We’re so used to seeing the world from the point of view of institutions, that the most important things are hidden from us. We all “feel” it when a neighborhood or a city begins to decompose, even before anybody tells us to only call “trusted” taxi drivers, not to be on the street after six in the evening, or that we have to pay the rent in cash. It may even be that a society, like in many countries in eastern Europe before the fall of the Wall, is not insecure simply because the repressive capacity of the state prevents security, but because it is so decomposed that as soon as the State withers, the vacuum is immediately filled by organized crime of a new kind that, to everyone’s surprise, is woven into the culture overnight.

It’s true that it’s difficult to define, because even though it can be measured, it’s produced in a space so intimate that the crude tools that a sociologist or a city hall has can’t do it. But it’s there.

It’s there when we leave our child in the care of the neighbor to go and do some last-minute shopping; when the cashier tells you “you can pay me tomorrow”; when we trust a kid from the neighborhood school to give us private classes, or when there is always someone quicker with their wallet than the neighbor who lost his job when it’s time to buy a round.

All these micro-interactions between people, outside of any institutional framework, not only start from a general trust in the surroundings, they also build it. If we listen to the studies that massive businesses do of their customers, each positive experience earns the trust of one person, but each dissatisfaction, each negative experience, alienates nine. Which is to say, for the fabric of social cohesion to be strengthened, at least nine out of ten interactions with the neighborhood have to be satisfactory.

This means that, if we want strengthen the fabric that sustains social cohesion, the best possible strategy is to increase the number of interactions based on sharing between people, while we also create theconditions so that less than 10% go badly.

Space, identity and the logic of connection

But we can’t bring everyone into a big plaza to do that. The panopticon, a building in which everyone sees everyone, functions as a control mechanism in prisons and schools, when there is a watcher and fear of that watcher. When there is not, as we’ve seen with Twitter, the result is the devaluation of conversation, a culture of being “on edge,” and recurrent and sometimes terrible episodes of harassment.

But even in cases where there is effective control, like in many centralized services of the “sharing economy,” trust is placed in a third party, the organizing business, not in others. That’s why they have not had a positive impact on urban identity. And that’s also why, looking at the city, the natural space for sharing is the neighborhood, not the city as a whole.

But neighborhoods are not isolated entities, nor should they be. Any strategy to develop “sharing” in a neighborhood also has to promote “going outside,” understood as a projection of that trust that we’re looking to maximize by supporting daily sharing. The technical solution is nothing more than a replica of the way in which networks grow in the real world, a mechanism called “federation.” In the end, something as simple as knowing about someone requires someone from our broader environment to give them some minimal trust. Then we will be able to choose if we also want give it to them or not, but either way, they will be able to come up in our conversations.

A strategy to develop social cohesion in neighborhoods

Let’s take neighborhoods as cells of a distributed structure, and let’s federate them with each other. Let’s include everything that the “sharing economy” has taught us, all those demands that we know that are there because there are already dozens of centralized platforms trying to turn them into businesses: from car-sharing to get to work to exchanging hours of language practice, from offering babysitting to offering hospitality to people who speak other languages or are part of our hobby network. And let’s add all those microentrprenuers who bring food to your office or make a website for you. And life-long businesses that want provide services or set up activities. Let’s turn them all of them into more forms of communication on a virtual network, the same way we share photos or videos. And let’s add to all that, like in Daniel Suarez’s novel, a mechanism that allows us to identify those neighbors who are most active in collaborating with others, most ready to lend a hand.

Wouldn’t that be a true “sharing city,” a “smarter” city, than than the ones the corporate giants are installing? And above all, wouldn’t it promote the development of sharing, of small daily gestures made with community spirit, of cohesion and of the feeling of belonging?

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

The post The invisible fabric of social cohesion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Facebook and Twitter socialization model, the FbT model, is like a large plaza where everyone can shout their slogans, while barely listening to each other and without taking responsibility for looking at context and understanding conversations. The result is like a big chicken coop, a “fray,” where any attempt to maintain a conversation on any topic is immediately cut off by an avalanche of slogans and aggression by users who, quite possibly, haven’t even read the article that led to the conversation.

Why does GNU social create more value in its conversations than Twitter?

It is no coincidence that what users most value is having “fewer links that on Twitter, more characters and more conversation,” “a space without noise for calm conversation,” “speaking calmly and dealing with other topics,” etc. All these messages point to the intimate relationship between the value of a conversation and the trust that has already been established within the nodes. It is a consequence of the distributed structure of GNU social. Thanks to it, GNU social is free of anyrecentralizing tendencies and builds the network based on independent nodes — generally formed by affinity between groups of friends who communicate with each other thanks to the federation of content.

What is “federation?”

The connections between the nodes of GNU social are established by the users who follow each other. Through these “following” relationships, all nodes can communicate and form a network. It’s what’s known as “federation,” and could be understood as a network of agreements.

All it takes is for me to follow a user on another node for everything that that user publishes to be visible to all members of my node. Thanks to this, you can see not only messages from the people that you follow in your inbox or on your personal time line and messages that are published in your node on the public timeline of the node, but also a much broader collection of messages, “the whole known network,” where, in addition to previous messages, you’ll be able to see messages from people in other nodes who at least one user in your node follows.

This creates wonderful things, like “the whole known network” being different in every node, because its composition is based on the people you follow and who follow your nodemates (or “nodies”). This is a very valuable aspect because it means joint exploration of the network. And starting from the existing relationship of trust between the members of a node, each time a member of the node follows — which is to say, establishes an agreement with — a user on an external node, the space of trust is expanded.

The key to creating space and favorable conditions for conversation is that the federation of content is based on what the users of each node follow on others, and not the general aggregation of all content by all nodes. The result is that if a person that neither I nor anyone else on my node follows says something in a conversation, I won’t see their posts. This might seem like a “bug”, but it’s really the result of an agreement, an implicit contract: to be part of a conversation of another node, I first have to have received the trust of someone who is taking part in it.

“Federation issues”

This model of federation is criticized by many new users who land on GNU social having had the experience of socialization of Twitter and Facebook. They label this difference “federation issues” and complain that conversations they participate in only show messages from the person that they themselves follow or other people in their node. The solution is as technically simple to implement as it is dangerous.

What such a request would do, in reality, is break the federation of content based on implicit contracts and open the doors to the aggregation of everything, everywhere, breaking any chain of trust. That is, it would remove the basis for allowing the nodes to create spaces for real conversation. By breaking this model of federating content, we would be importing the social model of the great centralizers, the Facebook-Twitter model, into the spaces and networks that we built on the basis of tools like GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica, etc.

Massive socialization through Facebook and Twitter has impoverished conversations and cut off the birth of new identities. It has done so by imposing a narrative about how the more accessible any conversation is to anyone, the better a network and its interactions are. In other words, when it is not necessary to have a minimum of prior trust to be able participate or interrupt the conversation of others. However, the search for this kind of accessibility obscures the very basis of distributed networks: the fact that a distributed network is made up of nodes, of independent groups that communicate among each other.

Conclusions

The problems or defects of the federation of content are only such if we accept and approve of the FbT socialization model. Really, we should call them “federation advantages,” because if which we’re seeking is to build enriching and conducive spaces for conversation, what we have today in GNU social is the structure that makes it possible.

The federation of content based on following relationships — agreements between people — is the base on which to build enriching and conducive spaces for interaction and for conversation. This is a determining aspect to not give in to centralizing pressure and turn spaces built with GNU social into a new version of the chicken coop that Twitter or Facebook currently offer us. The distributed structure of servers is “invisible,” and if we change the spontaneous logic of federation so that the user sees the network and behaves the same as in a centralized network, we will have changed everything to keep everything the same.

The world of the federation of content is passionate, and will largely determine the future of the web. Speaking concretely of the model of the federation of content, we sincerely believe that the challenges that we have to confront are in developing private communication and enlarging the system of exchanging short messages to a system where we can share everything useful — creating networks of hospitality, supply and demand, music, etc. — for our circle of friends, associations, community and surroundings.

That is, we believe it would be a mistake to replicate the centralized model and its culture. That would serve information without agreements between people, and therefore, approve of irresponsibility and encourage confrontation. For us, GNU social’s priority should be on becoming the “Swiss Army knife” of distributed networks based on sharing, by developing a culture of socialization based on trust within the nodes and the responsibility for understanding what is being talked about when someone joins a conversation. And for that, the key is to connect through federation, as has been done so far, on the basis of the minimum responsibility that comes with the fact that, to be an equal on another node, someone from that node has to considers what I say interesting enough to follow me.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

The post GNU social: Federation against the social model of Twitter appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Guild coat of arms of a smith

Executive Peer-to-Peer Summary:

This essay is partially in response to Whither government regulation in a highly complex age? which questions the ability of a hollowed-out, privatized government to effectively cope with the increasing complexity of social and environmental crises such as global warming. What follows assumes some prior familiarity with the basic ideas of p2p culture.

Guild coat of arms of a shoemaker

I agree that the failure of government regulation to curb the destructive activity of large corporations is only likely to worsen with the increasing privatization of government and the increasing complexity of global problems. So what can p2p culture do about this?

1. Establish powerful, confederated P2P Guilds and Leagues based on various global commons of knowledge and expertise so that mitigations, adaptations, and other interventions can be crowd-sourced by massively distributed, parallel, and open networks of peers.

2. Establish many strong, self-reliant economies at the local geopolitical (or Eco-political) level by forming partnerships between the P2P guilds and progressive local communities. These partnerships would maximize economies of scope via peer production and would also be strongly confederated with their peers bio-regionally, nationally, and globally.

3. One more maneuver that may be necessary to assist this process I will dub “castling”, a term borrowed from the game of chess. What I mean by this is a shifting of local populations between adjacent local geopolitical jurisdictions (such as cities and counties in the US) so as to create political, social, and economic majorities of p2p culture in the targeted locations. Those locations that are simultaneously abandoned by p2p culture are essentially “sacrificed” to the corporate predators. (Half a loaf saved is better than none.)

Guild coat of arms of a fisherman

The resulting strongly confederated p2p cultural strongholds might stand the best chance of competing with the large corporate entities, excluding them from the “castled” commons, and limiting the scope of their environmental destruction.

How P2P Culture Might Save the Day

1. P2P Guilds and Leagues

Various authors have suggested the concept of “phyles” or “tribes” for characterizing horizontal organizational structures in p2p culture. See for example the Las Indias cooperative movement. (p2pfoundation.net)

I am not opposed to these , and in the end it is important for peer groups to self-identify with the descriptions they

Guild coat of arms of a tanner

prefer; but I think I prefer the idea of confederated GUILDS and LEAGUES, and perhaps I can make an argument for these terms that will be persuasive to some.

A guild can function just as envisioned for a phyle (from Greek phul? — tribe, clan) but does not carry the same connotation as a tribe, clan, or phyle of having a primary basis in familial kinship, nor the historical reputation (in certain cases) of rebellion against central authority. The subtle but important difference is that a guild is all about practical know-how and about taking care of business– not about ideology or revolution (eh, at least on the surface…).

The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild by Rembrandt, 1662.

The Guildhall, London (engraving, ca 1805)

“The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials. A lasting legacy of traditional guilds are the guildhalls constructed and used as meeting places.

Guild coat of arms of a mason

“An important result of the guild framework was the emergence of universities at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford around the year 1200; they originated as guilds of students as at Bologna, or of masters as at Paris.” (Wikipedia)

One point on which I think guilds differ from Las Indias’ conception of phyles (“In Phyles, Community precedes Enterprise” -David Uguarte) is that for guilds, community and enterprise are two sides of one coin. I think this fits well with p2p culture while also being relatively non-confrontational with mainstream corporate/capitalist norms. The ability of guilds and leagues (such as the League of Women Voters) to present a relatively “normal” outward face, may have occasional tactical advantages.

According to Phil Jones,

“One issue people have with the traditional Guild is that Guilds are demarcated by profession. They aren’t a grouping that implies a multidisciplinary team. Guilds are great for teaching, accrediting and providing a retirement policy but aren’t self-sufficient or “closed” economic loops.”

Guilds, phyles, tribes, etc. . . .each has extensive variation and we can pick and choose features of one or all and remix to

Guild coat of arms of a taylor

suit our purposes. However, I think that overall, p2p relations have more to do with behavior and knowledge than with kinship. Guilds in the form of trade unions and academic institutions also have a rich history of confederation across multiple disciplines and locations, making the guild, IMO, a more appropriate basic raw material to further hack, improvise, and remix.

Michel Bauwens notes that “for lasindias, guilds can be phyles and are in fact the historical example for it .. the Venetian and Florentine guild councils, who originally ruled the cities, had international structures to support themselves, with halfway houses etc … The Hanseatic League is an interesting example. It never did have a constitution or formal membership as far as I know. Cities, guilds and towns just identified with it and co-operated in respect of matters of common interest, like suppressing piracy.”

Another interesting example is the Iroquois League:

“The Iroquois League, historically the Iroquois Confederacy, is a group of Native Americans (in what is now the United States) and First Nations (in what is now Canada) that consists of six nations: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca and the Tuscarora. The Iroquois (also known as the Haudenosaunee or the “People of the Longhouse) have a representative government known as the Grand Council. The Grand Council is the oldest governmental institution still maintaining its original form in North America. The League has been functioning since prior to major European contact. Each tribe sends chiefs to act as representatives and make decisions for the whole nation.” (Wikipedia)

Guild coat of arms of a carpenter

Anyway, I like many (if not all) of the characteristics of leagues and guilds, and I like the anachronistic romance of the words. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Justice League of America. . . these could become the League of Extraordinary Peers and the P2P Justice League. Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property that was produced by The League of Noble Peers.

We could also have P2P Makers Guilds, P2P Designers Guilds, P2P Programmers Guilds, and P2P Privacy Guilds. Such guilds would not be organizational stovepipes. Peers could affirm their interests and expertise by membership in as many guilds as they may qualify for.

Interestingly, many players of computer and video games have become familiar with guilds and their popularity continues to increase. “In computer and video gaming, a … guild is an organized group of players that regularly play together in a particular (or various) multiplayer games. These games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members… Numerous [guilds] exist for nearly every online game available today” (Wikipedia) In some cases the guilds are internal to the game play and sometimes they are external. Some gaming guilds have their own web sites. I don’t know if these gaming guilders are learning good guilding habits or bad ones from the perspective of p2p culture. My distance from the gaming community has obscured this information from me.

In any case, such guilds and leagues as may be created in the service of p2p culture will be able to confederate in any number of flexible ways. So too can those peer groups who, despite my valiant efforts of persuasion, prefer to call themselves phyles, tribes, clans, pods, schools, gaggles, or ganfaloons…

In many cases peers will be able to join multiple guilds, leagues, phyles, etc. as appropriate to their interests and skills. In p2p culture most such groups, despite their other characteristics, will tend to be the peers of each other and will tend to practice the same cooperative individualism or cooperative autonomy that pertains amongst individual people peers. This will make a flexible and resilient network of peers and peer groups spanning local, regional, national and global topologies.

2. Partnerships between P2P groups and local, regional, national, and international geopolitical (evolving into Eco-political) and non-state sovereign entities.

P2P culture will help to establish many strong, self-reliant economies at the local geopolitical (or Eco-political) level by forming partnerships between the P2P guilds, leagues, etc. and progressive local communities. These partnerships will maximize economies of scope via open, peer processes such as peer production and crowd-sourcing. These p2p/geopolitical or p2p/eco-political partners would also become increasingly confederated with their counterparts bio-regionally, nationally, and globally.

There may be cases where such partnerships fuse into indivisible p2p entities and cases where they do not. Regardless of that, the objective is to weave the influence of p2p culture into the geopolitical fabric of the planet, concentrating first at the the local level, at the most receptive local geopolitical “nodes,” and then spreading outwards. The levers which p2p culture will employ in this effort will be open knowledge, expertise, and methodology that will enhance the comparative advantages and capabilities of the geopolitical partners in contrast with those geopolitical entities which do not embrace the p2p partnership. In effect, p2p culture will come to the rescue of local entities that give us access. At the same time, we will redirect the public policies and practices of our geopolitical partners towards open and sustainable operations.

This follows the axiom that the only way to save ourselves is by saving others.

3. The “Castling” Maneuver

This is a shifting of local populations between adjacent geopolitical jurisdictions (such as cities and counties in the US) so as to create political, social, and economic majorities of p2p culture in the targeted locations. Those locations that are simultaneously abandoned by p2p culture are essentially “sacrificed” to the corporate predators. (Half a loaf saved is better than none.)

This kind of effort will involve brokering a lot of property on favorable terms for all involved. It will involve massive relocation of homes, small and medium businesses, farms, and personal revenue streams. We will need the ability to concentrate the efforts of our global human and financial resources on as many concurrent locales as possible.

Our ability to accomplish such maneuvers will depend heavily on the quality of the organizations and networks we build and our technology toolkit. Our social networks, alternative financial systems, and complementary currencies will need to operate very well and very securely at scale. We will need the ability to perform large volumes of complex social organizing activity and complex economic activity in a highly secure and efficient manner.

As Elinor Ostrom wrote in Green from the Grassroots, the last post before her death on June 12:

“The goal now must be to build sustainability into the DNA of our globally interconnected society. Time is the natural resource in shortest supply…“

We don’t have forever. Hopefully we have a decade or two. But we may not have even another decade to prevent unprecedented suffering and practically irreversible ecosystem collapse.

Poor Richard

The post Guilding the Lilly? (using p2p guilds for public regulation) appeared first on P2P Foundation.