As you may have heard, there was some tragic news a few weeks back, when the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, passed away under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Without more details, we didn’t have much to report on concerning his passing, but Gabriella Coleman put together this wonderful look at how Murdock shaped the Debian community, and why it became such a strong and lasting group and product.

Ian Murdock in his Own Words: “The package system was not designed to manage software. It was designed to facilitate collaboration” Ian Murdock (1973-2015).

Peering in from the outside, the Debian operating system — founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock, then a twenty-two-year-old college student — might appear to have been created with hardcore, technologically-capable power users in mind. After all, it is one of the most respected distributions of Linux: as of this writing, the current Debian stable distribution, Jessie, has 56,865 individual open source projects packaged (in native Debian parlance software is referred to as packages), and Debian itself has functioned as the basis for over 350 derivative distributions. Debian developers are so dedicated to the pursuit of technical excellence that the project is simultaneously revered and criticized for its infrequent release cycle — the project only releases a new version roughly every two years or so, when its Release Team deems it fit for public use. As its developers are fond of saying, “it will be released when it’s ready.”

But if you take a closer look, what is even more striking about Debian is that its vibrant community of developers are as committed to an array of ethical and legal principles as they are to technical excellence. These principles are enshrined in a bevy of documents — a manifesto, a constitution, a social contract, and a set of legal principles — which guide what can (and cannot) be done in the project. Its Social Contract, for instance, stipulates a set of crystal clear promises to the broader free software public, including a commitment to their users and transparency.

In 2001, I began anthropological fieldwork on free software in pursuit of my Ph.D. Debian’s institutional model of software development and rich ethical density attracted me to it immediately. The ethical life of Debian is not only inscribed in its discursive charters, but manifests also in the lively spirit of deliberation and debate found in its mailing lists. Ian Murdock, who passed away tragically last week, had already left the endeavor when my research began, but his influence was clear. He had carefully nursed the project from inception to maturity during its first three years. As my research wrapped up in 2004, I was fortunate enough to meet Ian at that year’s Debconf. Held annually, that year’s conference was hosted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and it was the first year he had ever attended. Given his fortuitous presence, I took the opportunity to organize a roundtable. Alongside a couple of long-time Debian developers, Ian reflected on the project’s early history and significance.

By this time, many developers had already spoken to me in great (and fond) detail about Ian’s early contributions to Debian: they were essential, many insisted, in creating the fertile soil that allowed the project to grow its deepest roots and sprout into the stalwart community that it is today. In the fast-paced world of the Internet, where a corporate giant like AOL can spectacularly rise and fall in a decade, Debian is strikingly unique for its staying power: it has thrived for a remarkable twenty-three years (and though I am not fond of predictions, I expect it will be around throughout the next twenty as well).

It was well-known that Ian established the project’s moral compass, and also provided an early vision and guidance that underwrote many of the processes responsible for Debian’s longevity. But witnessing Ian, and other early contributors, such as Bdale Garbee, articulate and reflect on that early period was a lot more potent and powerful than hearing it second hand. In honor of his life and legacy, I am publishing the interview here (it has been slightly edited for readability). Below, I want to make two points about Ian’s contributions and do so by highlighting a selection of his most insightful remarks drawn from the roundtable discussion and his blog — comments that demonstrate how he helped sculpt Debian into the dynamic project it is today. …

Continue reading the full article on Techdirt

Photo by Ilya Schurov

The post Ian Murdock In His Own Words: What Made Debian Such A Community Project appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Espace des Communs

Communs en action

Un Espace des communs autogéré et distribué

• de documenter et de diffuser le savoir sur les Communs à partir du partage de nos expériences et nos apprentissages,
• de soutenir concrètement les projets de constitution, de réappropriation et de conservation des communs, existants ou en émergence, par l’entraide et l’engagement, et
• de développer la posture de « commoner » par le développement les compétences créatives et collaboratives des personnes.

• Communs urbains
• Communs comme nouvelle sujet politique
• Coopérativisme ouvert et plateformes de coopération

The post Call for participation in the Commons Space at the World Social Forum 2016 Montreal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Thomas Greco

The problem is all inside your head, I told the Greeks
The answer is easy, you need only stop the leaks
The power is yours to claim the freedom that you seek
There must be fifty ways to leave the Euro
          (Apologies to Simon and Garfunkel)

Following the resounding “NO” vote by the Greek people on the bailout conditions in the July referendum, the negotiations between the Greek government and “the institutions” resumed with the expectation that a better deal for Greece would ensue. The outcome was quite the contrary. Greek negotiators ended up agreeing to a bailout deal that was far more onerous than the one the voters had rejected. Why?

The harsh reality is that the Greek government is insolvent. Having been lured into the debt-trap and the shared euro currency by western oligarchs using a combination of measures, including outright fraud, Greece was forced to accept the onerous conditions attached to the first two bailouts. Now it has been bludgeoned into accepting a third. The weapon of choice is the euro currency itself which is being wielded by the European Central Bank (ECB). By throttling the flow of euro currency into the country, the ECB last summer created near chaos in the Greek economy. This, and the threat of even more severe punishment in the future, was enough to bring the Greek government to heel.

With sovereign debt up around 180% of GDP, there is no way that the Greek government will ever be able to grow its way out of the current mess. The draconian measures demanded by the creditor institutions will just make it worse. Even the IMF has acknowledged (with apparent reluctance) that some debt relief is necessary for the Greek economy to recover. The new agreement forces the Greek government to yield even more sovereignty and to open its economy and its people more fully to exploitation by corporate interests and transnational banking institutions.

While the Greek government may be insolvent, the nation of Greece is not poor, at least not yet. But many of the conditions being imposed on the Greek government and the Greek economy will change all that. These include the demands for privatization of public assets, as well as the debt repayments and increasing tax burdens that are doing great harm to family-run businesses and mid-level enterprise that form the backbone of the Greek economy.

The fact is that Greece is blessed with many riches and the vultures from the west would dearly love get their hands on all of them. All the negotiations, past and present, have been about pressuring the Greek government to help them do it. Investigative reporter Greg Palast, with Michael Nevradakis, in a recent article spotlighted a fundamental root of the current problem saying that, “… the euro itself ..is the virus responsible for Greece’s economic ills,” and “The imposition of the euro had one true goal: To end the European welfare state.” So it isn’t Greece alone that has been a target. Palast and Nevradakis continue, pointing out that, “Each Eurozone nation, unable to control neither the value of its own currency, nor its own budget, nor its own fiscal policy, could only compete for business by slashing regulations and taxes.”

But the roots of the problem go even deeper than the euro currency. The present eurozone crisis is but one current example of the elite agenda that was kicked into high gear during the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s and became codified in the “Washington Consensus.” Using international trade agreements and institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as their instruments, “the powers of financial capitalism” have been able to easily invade one country after another with toxic loans, enabling them to wield increasing power as they loot the commons and convert all manner of publicly owned assets to private corporate profit centers. Professor Carroll Quigley, mentor to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, revealed almost 50 years ago that “…the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. ”

Fortunately, in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, money and banking are at long last again becoming common topics for political debate. People are waking up to the fact that those who control money control economics, politics, and virtually everything else. Yet we have all been duped into allowing the money power to be turned over to unelected and often unknown persons. The result has been the subversion of democratic government, increasing disparities in incomes and wealth, and economic hardship and impoverishment of the masses.

Greece is now the pivot point of a struggle that has been ongoing for a long time. People around the world must now decide whether we will create a “new world order” based on democratic government by and for the people, or allow ourselves to be herded into a neo-feudal society dominated by the few at the top of the international banking and corporate pyramid.

In the wake of his re-election victory on September 20, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras continues to argue that Greece’s economy cannot recover from its deep depression unless the burden of servicing its debt is eased. As things stand at this moment, it seems the best the Greek government can do is to negotiate a stretching out its debt repayment schedule. That may buy a bit more time, but will not be enough to cure the “disease.”

Despite all the fear mongering and predictions about the dire consequences that might result from Greece’s exit from the eurozone (Grexit), the choice is clear for the Greek government, either it will continue to surrender its people and its economy to be raped and plundered, or it will declare its independence, withdraw from the eurozone, and do what needs to be done to rebuild its economy on its own terms. How might that be done?

Now that we recognize what the elite agenda is and the true nature of the political currencies that are being used to beat governments and peoples into submission, it is clear that we must find ways to (1) disencumber ourselves of obligations that have been fraudulently imposed on us, (2) reduce our dependence on systems and structures that cheat and disempower us, and (3) build functional alternatives that serve the common good. Here are the steps that will eventually need to be taken by Greece and others that find themselves in a similar predicament.

Continue to read the full article on Common Dreams – http://commondreams.org/views/2015/11/06/50-ways-leave-euro-greece-and-global-crisis

The post 50 Ways to Leave the Euro: Greece and the Global Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The post Events – Fostering a culture of Cooperation for the Commons in Ireland appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The legitimacy of a given social order rests on the legitimacy of its debts. Even in ancient times this was so. In traditional cultures, debt in a broad sense—gifts to be reciprocated, memories of help rendered, obligations not yet fulfilled—was a glue that held society together. Everybody at one time or another owed something to someone else. Repayment of debt was inseparable from the meeting of social obligations; it resonated with the principles of fairness and gratitude.

The moral associations of making good on one’s debts are still with us today, informing the logic of austerity as well as the legal code. A good country, or a good person, is supposed to make every effort to repay debts. Accordingly, if a country like Jamaica or Greece, or a municipality like Baltimore or Detroit, has insufficient revenue to make its debt payments, it is morally compelled to privatize public assets, slash pensions and salaries, liquidate natural resources, and cut public services so it can use the savings to pay creditors. Such a prescription takes for granted the legitimacy of its debts.Today a burgeoning debt resistance movement draws from the realization that many of these debts are not fair. Most obviously unfair are loans involving illegal or deceptive practices—the kind that were rampant in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. From sneaky balloon interest hikes on mortgages, to loans deliberately made to unqualified borrowers, to incomprehensible financial products peddled to local governments that were kept ignorant about their risks, these practices resulted in billions of dollars of extra costs for citizens and public institutions alike.

A movement is arising to challenge these debts. In Europe, the International Citizen debt Audit Network (ICAN) promotes “citizen debt audits,” in which activists examine the books of municipalities and other public institutions to determine which debts were incurred through fraudulent, unjust, or illegal means. They then try to persuade the government or institution to contest or renegotiate those debts. In 2012, towns in France declared they would refuse to pay part of their debt obligations to the bailed-out bank Dexia, claiming its deceptive practices resulted in interest rate jumps to as high as 13 percent. Meanwhile, in the United States, the city of Baltimore filed a class-action lawsuit to recover losses incurred through the Libor rate-fixing scandal, losses that could amount to billions of dollars.

And Libor is just the tip of the iceberg. In a time of rampant financial lawbreaking, who knows what citizen audits might uncover? Furthermore, at a time when the law itself is so subject to manipulation by financial interests, why should resistance be limited to debts that involved lawbreaking? After all, the 2008 crash resulted from a deep systemic corruption in which “risky” derivative products turned out to be risk-free—not on their own merits, but because of government and Federal Reserve bailouts that amounted to a de facto guarantee.

The perpetrators of these “financial instruments of mass destruction” (as Warren Buffett labeled them) were rewarded while homeowners, other borrowers, and taxpayers were left with collapsed asset values and higher debts.

This is part of a context of unjust economic, political, or social conditions that compels the debtor to go into debt. When that injustice is pervasive, aren’t all or most debts illegitimate? In many countries, declining real wages and reduced public services virtually compel citizens to go into debt just to maintain their standard of living. Is debt legitimate when it is systemically foisted on the vast majority of people and nations? If it isn’t, then resistance to illegitimate debt has profound political consequences.

CONTINUE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

The post “Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.” Everything You’ve Been Told About Debt Is Wrong appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Alternative currencies should be considered an essential part of every communities tool kit for discovering and declaring a greater degree of economic sovereignty over their lives but are localised alternative currencies enough to challenge the power of a financial system that is global in its reach? Can the lessons learned in these communities be taken from the local to the global?

When we use local alternative currencies we place our trust in the community, as well as supporting the local economy personal relationships are reinforced through the use of the currency and it is these relationships of trust that essentially ground and back the value of the currency. Issues arise when alternative currency systems scale. The more people that use the currency the more difficult it is to maintain the kind of face to face relationships that secure trust in local communities. The state offers a solution to this issue of scale by providing currencies that are guaranteed through legal means. Trust moves from the community to the state.

You might ask doesn’t money issued by the state also support exchange that can foster trust and relationship building in the community? Well yes it does to a degree but this is secondary to the function of the currency as an instrument of speculation that puts communities in a vulnerable position to the dictates of financial powers who control the levers of the money supply. There are cases where local government issue complementary currencies and there are movements for positive money to take control of money creation away from private banks, but in the absence of enlightened politicians and effective change at the level of the state what more can we do?

Love it or hate it Bitcoin has had a huge impact in terms of challenging conventions and introducing a generation to new thinking about money. It’s important to distinguish between Bitcoin as a currency and Bitcoin as a technology. The Bitcoin technology as it has been implemented as a currency has a number of problems that will be addressed later. For now I will focus on Bitcoin as a technology to highlight two of its key innovations.

Bitcoin is the first successful implementation of a peer-to-peer currency. As software it is a purely technical currency solution and it enables people to make direct transfers without the need for a trusted third party such as a bank to manage the transaction. In this sense Bitcoin can be considered as a kind of trust-less system. Instead of placing trust in financial institutions or the state, trust is placed in the technical implementation of the algorithm—an open source code that is available for rigorous scrutiny and testing by the bitcoin user community to insure that it operates in a secure and transparent fashion.

The blockchain is a central component of bitcoin. It is essentially a distributed database that acts as an accounting system to publicly record all exchanges using Bitcoin. As the blockchain is distributed across the computer network of bitcoin users, the accounting system can’t be interfered with or corrupted by any one powerful user. In this way the Blockchain offers a reliable and secure technology for transactions. As Bitcoin is software this means anyone, anywhere on the planet with a computer or smartphone can use it. Clearly bitcoin has shown it has the capacity to scale globally and since information is borderless it represents a very real and public challenge to traditional finance and the state as it’s very difficult if not impossible to regulate.

To give a sense of the scale of the Bitcoin economy according to Blockchain.info the current market value, as of June 2015, is over 3 Billion Dollars—that’s more than 2 Billion Pound Sterling (down from a peak of almost 13 Billion in 2014.) This brings us to the big flaw in how Bitcoin has been implemented as a currency as it is clearly not immune to speculative bubbles. The currency has proved to be highly volatile and, while it has overcome many of the trappings of conventional fiat money, it also reproduces the speculative culture typical of capitalist currencies. Some have also argued that the distribution of Bitcoin—with over 30% of the currency being held in as few as 100 wallets—not only mirrors the extremes of inequality that we see in fiat currencies but is in fact much worse. Recent efforts to estimate the Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of inequality based on income distribution, placed Bitcoin at 0.88—comparable to the extreme inequality in countries such as North Korea.

So returning to my earlier question, could the lessons learned from the experience of local alternative currency communities be taken from the local to the global to really challenge financial power? Now consider this. What if the technology of bitcoin could be implemented in such a way so as to support the scale required while at the same time placing human relationships at its core thus bringing together the best of both worlds. This is exactly what FairCoop have set out to do.

FairCoop describe themselves as the Earth Coop for a Fair Economy (https://fair.coop). Its name is clearly inspired by the Fair Trade movement and is an indicator of how it sees itself. FairCoin is FairCoop’s implementation of Bitcoin technology and while it is a core component, it is but one part grounded by an ecosystem of tools, services and, most importantly, a community aimed at bringing about an Integral Revolution—the construction of an alternative economy networked at the global level.

The founder of FairCoop is Enric Duran infamous in his home of Catalunya, Spain as the Robin Hood who borrowed around 500,000 Euros from the banks at the height of the bubble and donated it to social movements in the region in what he declared a public act of civil and economic disobedience. Duran is now in exile and pursued by the Spanish state for refusing to pay back the banks. His actions are a direct provocation aimed at exposing the hypocrisy inherent in a system that confers the privilege to create money on private banks to the benefit of wealthy propertied elites whose speculation has subsequently been paid for at the expense and impoverishment of ordinary working Spainish people who suffered disproportionately the results of the economic crisis.

FairCoop builds on Duran’s experience as one of the founders of the Cooperativa Integral de Catalan (CIC). The CIC represented the first steps in what Duran calls the Integral Revolution. “In Spanish, “integral” means holistic, complete. That is to say, it concerns every single facet of life, and that’s what it means to us. The CIC’s objective is to generate a self-managed free society outside law, State control, and the rules of the capitalist market.” – Enric Duran

FairCoop’s approach is not simply a technical fix, as a democratically structured and open cooperative organisation, they reintroduce the human element that puts Faircoin at the service of the common good.

Anyone can buy and sell FairCoin, it is not exclusive to the members of FairCoop. However being bought and sold on the open market exposes Faircoin to speculative traders. FairCoop recognise this and take a number of steps to bring greater stability to the currency. The most significant is that FairCoop and its supporters hold a controlling stake in the currency, perhaps 40% or more of all FairCoins. FairCoop members are encouraged to save and with a large enough group this counters the negative impacts of speculation. Instead of spending FairCoins members of FairCoop will soon have the option to use FairCredit, a mutual credit system. Both FairCredit and FairCoin can be used to buy and sell goods and services through the coops online FairMarket which aims to be a kind of ethical ebay.

FairCoop is more than simply a means by which communities can buy and sell. One of the greatest barriers to the development of ethical projects that serve the Commons and the Cooperative Economy is access to finance. Venture capital demands that start ups conform to the conventional shareholder model with control of copyrights and patents part of the deal. Finance and investing in projects that further the construction of an alternative economy are a core part of FairCoop’s mission. They have created the Commons Fund and the Global South fund specifically for for this purpose.

Alternative currencies are nothing without a community who accept and trust them. It is the human element and the power of a community committed to principles of solidarity and cooperation that FairCoop brings to FairCoin. This is the strength of FairCoop and what makes it stand out as a grand experiment pioneering and challenging thinking about how we organise and construct much needed alternatives to capitalist economy.

https://fair.coop/

This article was first published in the Summer issue of STIR magazine you can order it here – http://stirtoaction.com/stir-summer-issue10-pre-order-discount/

The post The challenges of building alternatives that scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society to vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property, conduct literacy campaigns, conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards, catch criminals, start universal schooling—requires the invention of units that are visible.

Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. The degree of knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention. In other words, one might say that the greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required
to effect it. It was precisely this phenomenon, which had reached full tide by the middle of the nineteenth century,
that Proudhon had in mind when he declared –

“To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about….To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.”

Communal Property by P2P Foundation

The post Communal Property: A Libertarian Analysis by Kevin Carson appeared first on P2P Foundation.

https://personaldemocracy.com/media/reverse-engineering-vampire-squid

Astra Taylor speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum on debt resistance . The Debt Collective in which she is involved are organising a Rolling Jubilee and organising more 1200 students to strike to have their loans wiped out by the department of education.

“We believe people should not go into debt for basic necessities like education, healthcare and housing. Strike Debt initiatives like the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual offer advice to all kinds of debtors about how to escape debt and how to join a growing collective resistance to the debt system.”

How Does Rolling Jubilee Work?

“Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%.”

The post 1200 students are ready to strike #DebtResistence appeared first on P2P Foundation.

DotComrade are organising their first one day hack event hosted at Mozilla London June 12th

Meet, share ideas and build tools that help workers organise

The aim is to provide a forum where people can meet, share ideas and start building some apps that will help workers to organise.
Although there is limited space at Mozilla London we will opportunities for evernyone that wants to to get involved – including a wildcat SlackDay for those that would like to attend but cant get the time off work. We’re encouraging those people to shrug off their usual workload and get hacking with the rest of us, albeit from the comfort of their own desk.

Whether you want to create a wildcat ‘swipe to strike’ app, an anonymous mumsnet for dissatisfied workers or a platform for sharing information about workers’ struggles, the day should be a great place to meet other people and work together to create something that will help empower workers.

For more information and to get involved visit http://dotcomrade.org.uk/

The post DotComrade – Tech Workers of the World Unite for a Hackday in London appeared first on P2P Foundation.