Michel Bauwens: Dear Nathan, this is not your first book. Could you give our readers a short overview of your “life in books”, i.e. how each subsequent book is linked to the other, eventually leading to the insights and motivations that resulted in your new book on the future of the cooperative tradition ?

Nathan Schneider: It does seem like a rather baffling path. First, a book on arguments about God, then a close-up on Occupy Wall Street, and now co-ops. But it all makes sense in my head somehow. The overriding challenge for me has always been that of capturing how people bring their highest ambitions into the realities of the world. I’m drawn to people with both adventuresome imaginations and the audacity to put them into practice.

This book followed especially naturally from the Occupy one, Thank You, Anarchy. After the protests died down in 2012 and 2013, I started noticing that some of the activists I’d been following got involved in cooperative businesses. The first business I know of that started at Occupy Wall Street was a worker co-op print shop. Other people were helping create co-ops in areas of New York hit by Hurricane Sandy. There was this euphoria about the idea of co-ops among many of these people—a way of earning a livelihood while retaining the democratic values of the protests. I experienced a bit of that euphoria myself, which turned to a more serious fascination as I realized how long and deep this cooperative tradition has been.

MB: Can you tell us about the evolution of your engagement with Platform Cooperativism?

NS: Pretty early on in this work, I started seeing opportunities for cooperatives in tech. I’ve long been a tinkerer with free software and open source, so I’d been used to thinking of technology as a kind of commons. But this came to a head around 2014, when more and more people were wising up to the fact that Silicon Valley’s so-called “sharing economy”—which was then becoming mainstream—really didn’t have much to do with sharing. Especially under the guidance of the OuiShare network based in Paris, Neal Gorenflo of Shareable, and of course the P2P Foundation, I started noticing that a few entrepreneur-activists were trying to figure out a real sharing economy, with sharing built into the companies themselves. This was a hack open-source software was missing; those people had hacked intellectual property law but they’d left the extractive, investor-controlled corporation unscathed. Now it was time to rethink the logic of companies, and the old cooperative tradition seemed like a sensible place to start.

In late 2014 I teamed up with Trebor Scholz, who had been thinking along similar lines, and the following year we organized the first platform co-op conference at the New School in New York. The response was way beyond what we had expected, and we had the germ of a movement in our midst. The more I was getting approached by new startups trying to create platform co-ops, the more I found myself turning to history in order to be able to offer advice based on some kind of evidence. The more I did that, the more I discovered how much there is to learn and to draw from.

MB: How do you see the relations between cooperativism and the commons? Could they possibly merge?

NS: I regard cooperatives as a kind of commons, a mode of commoning that has made itself legible to the industrial-era state and market. Compared to the visions of many commons activists today, however, the co-op tradition is quite conservative. I like its conservatism; it makes for fewer wheels in need of simultaneous reinvention. As a storyteller, I find it can be hard to tell stories about the more cutting-edge commoners because the challenges they are taking on are so hard, and so new, that people who lack an ideological commitment aren’t going to stick around for long. Cooperatives are a way of introducing people to a radical vision of the commons that also includes familiar stuff like Visa, Associated Press, and the credit union down the street. But I wouldn’t claim cooperatives are sufficient. They’re a starting point, a gateway to more diverse and widespread commoning.

Another concern: Cooperatives are all about old-fashioned property and ownership. I’m sympathetic to the “property is theft” vein of anarchism, but I also think it’s a mistake for commoners to relinquish ownership before the lords do—as the sharing economy proposed. That’s feudalism. Open-source software developers relinquished ownership over the code for Linux, and now it powers history’s most effective corporate surveillance tool, the Android operating system. As Piketty demonstrates, capital ownership (more than wage income) is the driving force behind economic inequality. The cooperative tradition is a way of distributing ownership more equitably. That will put us in a better position to shift toward a world in which property is less important and we can meet more of our needs through the commons. Commoners need to claim their rights from a position of strength.

MB: One of your chapters reviews the experience of one of your interviewers and the FLOK Society project in Ecuador. What is your evaluation of that experience?

NS: The experience of FLOK, which was an effort to craft a country-sized commons transition, was very instructive for me. It was a chance to see commoning presented as a comprehensive social vision, not just as a series of isolated interventions. Cooperatives were a critical ingredient in all that, of course. And of course, too, the Ecuadorian government’s follow-through was very limited. But that process led to the Commons Transition resources, which have been invaluable for articulating in a comprehensive way what all this is about. For me it was a magnificent education. Everyone should have that experience once in a while—to participate in crafting a plan for the future of the world.

MB: Your engagement is strongly linked to your faith. How can one be a progressive Christian in this day and age?  Do you link to particular elements in that tradition?

NS: The more I got to know the cooperative tradition, the more I found it to be bound together with religious traditions. I saw this especially in my own Catholic tradition, which produced such examples as the North American cooperative banks and the great Mondragon worker cooperatives, but similar examples can be found in so many other faiths as well. I wouldn’t say that cooperation is in any way reducible to religion or dependent on it, but as with so many other major forces in our world, religion plays a vital and mysterious role.

I was personally grateful to discover, through this work, some new patron saints. For instance, Clare of Assisi, co-founder of the Franciscan order, insisted in the Middle Ages that her nuns should have the right to self-govern, and that all voices should be heard. John A. Ryan, a prominent Catholic economist in the early 20th century United States, wrote beautifully about the moral education that comes through cooperative business. Albert J. McKnight, also a priest, brought a Pan-Africanist vision to the development of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. And those of us trapped in English are in dire need of more translations from the work of José María Arizmendiarrieta, the half-blind priest who founded the Mondragon co-ops. Each of these people turned to cooperative economics out of a deep-rooted faith that God has endowed each of us with the dignity to be capable and deserving of co-governing our communities.

MB: How do you see the coming ‘phase transition’ unfold? How optimistic are you that humanity can pull this through?

NS: I’m not big on predictions, despite the subtitle of the book. But what I do know is that, if we decide we want to practice democracy in richer ways than most of us do now, we’re capable of it. The past makes that clear enough. It’s perfectly possible that someday we’ll look back and laugh at the current condition of vast inequalities and autocratic corporations and the occasional ballot box. But at present it seems just as likely that we’ll give up on democracy entirely as that we’ll opt for ever more excellent forms of it.

The following excerpt is republished from Everything for Everyone, by Nathan Schneider:

Phase Transition

Commonwealth

The first time I saw it, I took the metaphor literally. “We will all meet in Quito for a ‘crater-​like summit,’“ the website said. “We will ascend the sides of the volcano together in order to go down to the crater and work.” Alongside those words was a picture of Quilotoa, a caldera in the Ecuadorian Andes where a blue-​green lake has accumulated in the hole left by a cataclysmic eruption seven hundred years ago, enclosed by the volcano’s two-​mile-​wide rim.

What the website beckoned visitors to was something less geologically spectacular than Quilotoa, but possibly earth-​shaking in its own right. The government of Ecuador had sponsored a project to develop policies for a new kind of economy, one based on concepts more familiar in hackerspaces and startups than in legislatures. The project was called FLOK Society—free, libre, open knowledge. Its climactic event, which took place in May 2014, was called a summit, but the nod to Quilotoa’s crater was a way of saying this wasn’t the usual top-​down policy meeting. Nor were the people behind it the usual policymakers.

Michel Bauwens, the fifty-​six-​year-​old leader of the FLOK Society research team, held no PhD, nor experience in government, nor steady job, nor health insurance. A native of Belgium, he lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife and their two children, except when he left on long speaking tours. He dressed simply—a T‑shirt to the first day of the summit, then a striped tie the day of his big address. His graying hair was cropped close around his bald crown like a monk’s. He spoke softly; people around him tended to listen closely. The Spanish hacktivists and Ecuadorian bureaucrats who dreamed up FLOK chose for their policy adviser an unemployed commoner.

If Ecuador was to leapfrog ahead of the global hegemons, it would need a subversive strategy. “It’s precisely because the rest of the world is tending toward greater restrictions around knowledge that we have to figure out ways of producing that don’t fall within the confines of these predominant models,” Ecuador’s minister of education, science, technology, and innovation, Rene Ramirez, told me. He and other government officials were talking about dispensing with such strictures as copyright, patents, and corporate hierarchies. “We are essentially pioneers in this endeavor. We’re breaking new ground.”

At first this was a subversion mutually beneficial to guests and hosts alike. Several months before the summit, Bauwens said that FLOK was a “sideways hack” — of the country, maybe even of the global economy. “It’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity to do something innovative and transformative in Ecuador.” He saw a chance to set the conditions for a commonwealth.

FLOK bore the style and contradictions of Ecuador’s brand at the time. The president, Rafael Correa, sometimes spoke in favor of open-​source software; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been living in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012. Even while exploiting rain-​forest oil resources and silencing dissenters, Correa’s administration called for changing the country’s “productive matrix” from reliance on finite resources in the ground to the infinite possibilities of unfettered information. Yet most of the North Americans I met in Quito were out of a job because Correa had recently outlawed foreign organizations, likely for circulating inconvenient information about human rights.

As the summit approached, local politicians seemed to evade Bauwens and the team of researchers he’d brought there. Team members weren’t paid on time. Two dozen workshops about open knowledge took place across the country, with mixed response. By the time I met Bauwens in the gaudy apartment he was renting in Quito, a few days before the summit began, he looked exhausted from infighting with the Spaniards and wresting his staff‘s salaries from the government. “It’s going to be a much harder fight than I anticipated,” he said.

Bauwens had a knack for seeking out potent knowledge. He grew up in Belgium as the only child of two orphan parents. His curiosities drifted from Marxism as a teenager to, as an adult, various Californian spiritualities, which led him to Asian ones, then esoteric sects like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Meanwhile, Bauwens put his cravings to work in business. He worked as an analyst for British Petroleum and then, in the early 1990s, started a magazine that helped introduce Flemish readers to the promise of the internet. As an executive at Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, he guided its entry into the online world by acquiring startups. And then, in 2002, he’d had enough. He quit, then moved with his second wife to her family’s home in Chiang Mai.

“Capitalism is a paradoxical system, where even the ruling class has a crappy life,” he says. He started to believe his unhappiness had cataclysmic causes.

For two years in Thailand, Bauwens read history. He studied the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism—a ”phase transition,” as he puts it. It was an age when the previous civilization was in crisis, and he concluded that what led the way forward was a shift in the primary modes of production. The Roman slave system collapsed, and then networks of monasteries spread innovations across Europe, helping to sow the seeds of the new order. What emerged was an interplay of craft guilds organizing free cities, warlords ruling from behind castle walls, and peasants living off common land. As the feudal system grew top-​heavy, networks of merchants prepared the way for the commercial, industrial reordering that followed.

With the internet’s networks, he came to believe that industrial civilization faced a crisis of comparable import, as well as the germ of what could come next. He zeroed in on the notion of commons-​based peer production— the modes by which online networks enable people to create and share horizontally, not as bosses and employees but as equals. It was a new rendition of the old medieval commons, but poised to become the dominant paradigm, not just a means of survival at the peripheries. He set out to find examples of where this world-​transformation was already taking place. By seeking, he found.

The bulk of Bauwens’ oeuvre lives on the collaborative wiki that long served as the website of his Foundation for Peer‑to‑Peer Alternatives—the P2P Foundation, for short. Its more than thirty thousand pages, which he has compiled with more than two thousand online coauthors, include material on topics from crowdsourcing to distributed energy to virtual currencies. His life’s work takes the form of a commons.

Bauwens tends to talk about his vision in the communal “we,” speaking not just for himself but for a movement in formation. He borrows a lot of the terms he relies on from others, then slyly fits them into a grander scheme than the originators envisioned. Put another way: “I steal from everyone.” Nevertheless, one is hard-​pressed to locate any enemies; rather than denouncing others, he tends to figure out a place for them somewhere in his system.

It was in and for Ecuador, together with his team, that Bauwens mapped out the next world-​historical phase transition for the first time. He believes that cooperatives are the event horizon. They’re bubbles of peer‑to‑peer potential that can persist within capitalism, and they can help the coming transition proceed.

They can decentralize production through local makerspaces while continually improving a common stock of open-​source designs. They can practice open-​book accounting to harmonize their supply chains and reduce carbon emissions. Open intellectual-​property licenses can help them share their resources for mutual benefit. As these networks grow, so will the commons they build, which will take over roles now played by government and private markets. Soon all the free-​flowing information, combined with co‑op businesses, will turn the economy into a great big Wikipedia or Linux—by anyone, for anyone. The industrial firm, whether capitalist or cooperative, will dissolve into collaborations among peers. Bauwens calls this process “cooperative accumulation.”

Co‑ops are not an end in themselves. They’re not the destination. But they’re the passageway to a peer‑to‑peer commons. “We see it as the strategic sector,” he told me. New cooperative experiments were spreading from Mississippi to Syria, and here was a chance to show how they could grow to the scale of an entire country.

The Quito convention center is a two-​story complex with stately white columns and hallways enclosed in walls of glass. Visible just a few blocks away is the National Congress building, the supposed destination of FLOK Society’s proposals. Volcanoes stand in the distance behind it, the city rising up as high on their slopes as it can manage. During the four days of the “Good Knowledge Summit,” as the event was called, bureaucrats in business casual worked alongside hackers in T‑shirts to develop and distill the discussions into policy.

The opening night included bold pronouncements. “This is not just an abstract dream,” said Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of knowledge and human talent. “Many of the things we talk about these days will become a reality.” Rather than tax havens, added the subsecretary of science, technology, and innovation, Rina Pazos, “we need to establish havens of open and common knowledge.”

Bauwens spent most of his time in the sessions on policies for cooperatives. In Ecuador, as in many places, it is harder to start a co‑op than a private company. The Canadian co‑op expert John Restakis, a member of Bauwens’s research team, called on Ecuadorian officials to loosen the regulations and reporting requirements on co‑ops, and to enable more flexible, multi-stakeholder structures. The officials pushed back; the regulations were there for a reason, after waves of co‑op failures and abuses. Restakis and Bauwens pressed on. They wanted Ecuador’s government to serve as what they called a “partner state,” nurturing commons-​oriented activities without seeking to direct or control them.

By the summit’s end, the working groups had amassed a set of proposals, some more developed than others: wiki textbooks and free software in schools, open government data, new licenses for indigenous knowledge, community seed banks, a decentralized university. Mario Andino, the newly elected governor of Sigchos, one of Ecuador’s poorer regions, wanted to develop open-​source farm tools for difficult hillside terrain. Before the summit, Bauwens visited Sigchos and received a standing ovation for his presentation. “We could be a model community,” Andino said. But there were no promises.

Over the course of his life, Plato made several journeys from Athens to Syracuse, in Sicily, with the hope of making it a model of the kind of society he described in his Republic. The rulers there, however, fell far short of being the philosopher-​kings he needed; he returned home to retire and compose a more cynical kind of political theory. If not quite so discouraged, Bauwens seemed adrift after the summit ended. The work of FLOK Society was now in the hands of the Ecuadorians, and by that time, there was little indication the government would take more from the whole effort than a publicity stunt. Bauwens was already starting to look toward the next iteration; thanks in part to the process in Ecuador, there were signs of interest from people in Spain, Greece, Brazil, Italy, and Seattle. The same month as the summit, Cooperation Jackson held its Jackson Rising conference.

“Recognition by a nation-​state brings the whole idea of the commons to a new level,” Bauwens said. “We have to abandon the idea, though, that we can hack a country. A country and its people are not an executable program.”

Excerpted from Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider. Copyright © 2018. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Photo by thisisbossi

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Today Brazil is the ninth largest economy in the world and the largest in Latin America. With an Internet penetration rate of almost 60%, including 42 million inhabitants with 4G connections. Brazil is definitely a digital leader in the region.

Despite good urban Internet access, Brazil faces challenges such as connectivity in remote areas, provision of universal eServices and accessible education to all of its citizens.

In this past decade the Brazilian government launched numerous digital initiatives, based on open source software, but few of them have been successful. Indeed, no national strategies or action plans have been deployed to outline the role of each stakeholder. Defining a clear strategy, based on open source software, could be the foundation of an open knowledge society. The strategy should support innovations, create a more efficient nation, empower citizens and boost the economy.

Thus, building an open knowledge society in Brazil could spread knowledge through the country, bring Brazilians closer to each other and facilitate business opportunities. Open source models could be used to strengthen organizational structure, allowing the government to coordinate stakeholders, ultimately shaping a more efficient nation.

The Concept of an Open Knowledge Society

In an open knowledge society, the state becomes a partner empowering civil society and regulating the market. An open knowledge society uses open data, open standards, open content and open source software as the basis of its foundations. Very often these concepts are developed through public collaboration to create digital commons like the Wikipedia encyclopedia or the Linux operating system.

Furthermore, an open knowledge society should be technologically neutral while individuals and organizations should have the freedom to choose the most appropriate and suitable technology, standard, or content for building their initiatives. These requirements should be free of any lock-in to avoid dependency and give the opportunity to organizations or individuals to improve their societies.

Open Source in Governments

Spreading open source software in governments is the first step to build an open knowledge society. Open source software is computer software with its source code made available and licensed in a way that allows the copyright holder the right to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Several countries have been working on open source initiatives during the last decade. Some of them, such as Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Mauritius and the United Kingdom, have been making impressive efforts using open source software inside their governments as well as promoting open source software in both the education and private sectors.

Australia: The government has defined in its open source software policy that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) procurement processes must actively and fairly consider all types of available software, government suppliers must consider all types of available software and Australian government agencies will actively participate in open source software communities, and contribute back where appropriate.

Canada: The Canadian government issued an official request for information on open source software to gather feedback and public guidance to help shape procurement policies. This move has been a prelude to broader adoption of free and open source software in the government’s IT infrastructure.

Ecuador: The National Plan for Good Living of Ecuador recognizes and stresses that the global transformation towards knowledge-based societies and economies requires a new form for the creation and distribution of value in society.

Mauritius: The Open Source Policy for Mauritius states that the future development of information society in the republic of Mauritius shall be based on a shared and open knowledge-based society, open standards, technological neutrality and broadly available ICTs to empower citizens and the private sector.

United Kingdom: The key points of the UK government’s policy are that the government will actively and fairly consider open source solutions alongside proprietary ones in making procurement decisions.

Advantages of Open Initiatives for Governments

A digital economic policy based on open initiatives increases transparency and makes governments more accountable to their citizens. Open sourcing allows nations to tailor solutions to their specific needs and include citizens in the design of their society. For most governments, the newest technologies are piled on older technologies creating layers of trouble while obsolete closed information systems offer barriers to integration with other agency systems because they fail to respect open standards and interoperability rules.

A well-tailored open source software policy could support governments in developing adapted open information systems where they could maintain control of the information systems’ functionality and methodology. That requires governments to have dedicated teams working on the political, functional and technical aspects of such policy.

A government should make decisions that maximize developer productivity, minimize total cost of ownership, avoid lock-in and make it easy for the government to share software that it creates. A proper policy should define open standards for software interoperability, data and document formats. These definitions should encourage collaboration, transparency, due process, fair access, market support and proper rights for implementation.

Policy implementation should increase citizens’ access to information and enhance public trust, allow citizens’ participation in decision-making, reinforce public officials’ accountability, strengthen civil servants’ integrity and boost innovation.

A Brief History of Open Initiatives in Brazil

In 1997, the National Educational Technology Program (ProInfo), an educational program, was created to promote the educational use of ICT in public schools. E-Proinfo has trained 50,000 students.

In April 2000, the government launched the Electronic Government Program with the creation of a working group to propose policies, guidelines and standards related to eGov services.

In May 2000, the first Free Software International Forum was organized at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Su. It is an interesting example of a mainstream event focused on open source, which is now in its 17th edition. This national event brings together universities, entrepreneurs, public authorities, users, groups, hackers, NGOs and activists for freedom of knowledge.

In 2003 the government of Brazil urged ministries and other agencies to use open source software.

In November 2004, the Information Technology Institute (ITI) and the Korean IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) signed an agreement to exchange open source software experiences.

In 2005, the Brazilian Guide of Use of Open Source Software was available online.

In June 2006, the government set up 485 culture points to train citizens in the production and exchange of digital multimedia using FOSS. The objective of this program was to promote social and economic development of the communities, reducing social exclusion and creating digital inclusion opportunities to citizens.

In 2007, the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management created an Open Source Software portal, which offers open source software developed by government bodies.

In 2008, Brazil’s Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software was created.  Institutions such as the Ministry of Finance turned open source, and the idea of an open source policy was discussed.

Also in 2008, Brazil started its owned Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative based on a community made of educators, scientists, engineers, ICT professionals, lawyers and OER enthusiasts.

In 2011, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation implemented the Aquarius platform, a Web-based Government Business Intelligence System to enable public transparency on public funding for research and development.

Since 2013, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics has offered several datasets in open formats.

Since May 2016, the Ministry of Transparency, Monitoring and Control looks to improve transparency and fight corruption in public authorities.

Today, Brazil is ranked #12 in the 2015 Global Open Data Index. 1,124 datasets are available on the Brazilian open data portal concerning education, health, transportation, election results and public budget. Brazil is part of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) since its creation in September 2011. Brazil is committed to implement 52 measures of transparency and open government in its second action plan focusing on increasing public integrity, improving public services, increasing corporate accountability, creating safer communities and managing public resources more efficiently. The startup scene is present and dynamic in Brazil to develop adapted services. Some associations are grouping entrepreneurs like ABStartups in Rio de Janeiro.

Currently, the free and open source economic model sounds to be less supported by the Brazilian government. Why should a government import technology and ship billions of dollars outside their economy rather than creating software and jobs locally? Reasons are unclear but could be linked to simple government inefficiency, unwillingness to empower other social bodies or improper alignment with foreign companies’ interests.

Building an Open Knowledge Society in Brazil

In the last decade, Brazil has seen numerous open initiatives, but few of them have been sustainable. Indeed no proper strategy has been developed to conduct institutional reforms in order to build functional capabilities and to spread knowledge in order to build an open knowledge society.

Brazilians needs to reimagine the role of their state in building a society enabled by digital commons, created with public funds to stimulate social goods and benefits. Thus, Brazilians should reinvent a democratic model based on distribution, cooperation, civic relationships and directing governance and economy to social profits.

The government of Brazil should be a leading partner in this transition framework to improve access to technology, empower social organizations, and mutualize or create social infrastructures. Brazil should empower its citizens to build technology adapted to their needs by using global knowledge through the creation of local solutions.

In an open knowledge society, values are created by citizens and enabled by a government, which creates the right balance between stakeholders. The government essence changes to become a platform to coordinate and regulate stakeholders. The government turns out to be accountable to its citizens to facilitate information flows between governmental, civil society and market bodies. Thus, the state guarantees proper public knowledge dissemination in the society.

The Marco civil da Internet is the civil rights framework for the use of the Internet in Brazil, through principles, guarantees, rights and obligations to those who use the network as well as guidelines for state actions. The Marco civil was design in a collaborative manner. The first draft received about 800 substantive contributions to protect privacy rights, net neutrality, freedom of expression and safe-harbors for service providers. This policy also promotes eGovernance, universal access and innovation.

Thus, Brazil already has a clear civil rights framework, an OGP action plan and several digital initiatives, but a methodology is missing to reorganize the current digital ecosystem into an open knowledge society to benefit more from digital commons.

A well-tailored strategy could guide public authorities to build functional capabilities, spread knowledge and empower its population. This national initiative would boost the economy, spread transparency, extend participative democracy and bring each Brazilian to a better standard of living. To reach this point, Brazil should exceed the clan-based interests. Brazilians should support new leaders, who could implement a vision more aligned with democratic principles that could better serve the development of society as a whole.

Olivier Alais is an Affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a Fellow with the Instituto de Tecnologia e Sociedade de Rio de Janeiro. He is interested in the social impacts of open data and open source. He has been working on numerous public programs such as supporting the Mauritian government to design their Open Source Software policy, improving the Internet penetration in Comoros, designing the eGovernment Web Development Strategy for the Government of Liberia or implementing a low-cost health insurance for migrants in Thailand.

Photo by sandeepachetan.com

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Originally published in FLOK Society’s website

The Buen Conocer / FLOk Society research project, presents the results of its work in the book Buen Conocer / FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador. The book analyzes and proposes lines of political action and productive projects in 14 subjects of the Ecuadorian economy considered strategic to change the productive matrix, such as education, science, culture, agri-food and bio-diversity, design and manufacturing, software, hardware, connectivity, ancestral knowledge and the popular and solidarity economy.

The launch of the book Buen Conocer / FLOK Society: public policy and sustainable models for a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador will take place on June 16, 2015 in Quito, Ecuador.

The book contains the results of the research on public policies for the construction of a social economy of common and open knowledge in Ecuador; the edition of the book includes along its 800 pages, 14 documents, 27 authors, 14 reviewers, 911 comments of 122 people on the digital platform Co-ment, 196 participants (co-creators) in the Buen Conocer Summit in Quito and a total of more than 1,500 participants.

During the presentation of the book, the content of the Declaration of Buen Conocer, issued at the end of the Summit, held in Quito from 27 to 30 may 2014, will be re-edited. This declaration synthesizes the proposals of this transition to a common and open knowledge economy.

The Buen Conocer / FLOK Society book will be available for download since Tuesday, June 16 2015, at the site http://book.floksociety.org/, licensed by Creative Commons BY-SA (attribution share equal) Ecuadorian (v.3.0) and international (v.4.0) and GFDL (GNU free documentation license. The book was published in its digital version for the Buen Conocer /FLOK Society community, with the collaboration of aLabs association. It also has a co-edition in print by IAEN/CIESPAL.

The Buen Conocer/ FLOK Society project could be done under agreement between the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Ministerio Coordinador de Conocimiento y Talento Humano and Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación.

Book Index

Introduction

The Buen Conocer /FLOK Society process

PART 1. Enhance the collective intelligence

1. Education: Open educational resources

2. Science: Collaborative, participative and open research

3. Culture: Access and sustainability on an open culture era

PART 2. Productive material capacities aimed to commons

2.1 Agri-food: Open and sustainable agri-food system in Ecuador

2.2 Bio-diversity: Citizen science, ancestral knowledge and bio-diversity applied to social knowledge economy

2.3 Manufacturing: Open design and distributed manufacturing

2.4 Energy: Free/libre knowledge, distributed energy and social empowerment for energetic matrix change.

PART 3. Institutions, society and communities

3.1. Institutions: Knowledge society, social economy and partner State

3.2 Communities: Original, traditional and popular knowledge

PART 4. Open and free/libre technical infrastructure

4.1 Hardware: Innovation and production ecosystems based on open hardware

4.2. Software: Free/libre and open code programs in public administration

4.3. Connectivity: Accessibility, sovereignty and self- management of communications infrastructures.

Lead image by abstractartangel77

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This article was written by Pilar Sáenz and Maria Juliana Soto. In collaboration with Carolina Botero of the Karisma Foundation – http://www.digitalrightslac.net/en/flok-society-procomun-en-ecuador-una-conversacion-con-michel-bauwens/

Last April, we received in Colombia the visit of Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation founder and Research Director of the Ecuadorian FLOK Society project. Bauwens conducted a series of workshops and conferences in Medellin and Bogota, and in its way through Karisma Foundation, he talked about the FLOK project and what means opting for a pro-commons-based economic model in the Latin American context.

FLOK Society (Free/Libre and Open Knowledge) seeks to be “investigative process that will define and create policies and regulatory principles in order to guarantee the success of a productive model based on the open commons of knowledge.” In other words, it aims “to change the productive matrix towards creating a society based on common, free and open knowledge in Ecuador.”

It certainly is a political and economic interest by Ecuador. It is a project of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, in cooperation with the Coordinator Ministry of Knowledge and Human Resource and the National Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation. It deals with a topic of interest for all pro-commons activists, who participated in an investigative and participatory design process that will result in a series of policy documents, to be discussed at the ‘Summit of the Good Living’ in late May, which will bring together activists and well-known national and international researchers.

Below you will find some passages from our conversation with Michel Bauwens, following his lecture at the Javeriana University on April 30, 2014.

Karisma Foundation (KF): What is next after the Summit of the Good Living in developing the FLOK project?

Michel Bauwens (MB): After the Summit, it should be a commitment by government institutions in 12 lines of actions, in which they agree to become part of the project. From my point of view, this is a breakthrough, good news, because never before had there been a government that would have proposed a transition project like this.

In this sense, I am cautiously optimistic about what will happen. The most important for me, as a global activist, is establishing a global minimum standard. It is no longer a thing of grassroots organizations, it has become a political fact and it is great news. It raises the impact of the pro-commons and P2P movements.

What I would like to see is that FLOK becomes a global, open political platform for participatory policy-making in this field. I would imagine, for instance, FLOK Medellin or FLOK Seoul. Having someone from the team saying “It was already done in Ecuador, why not now Medellin or Seoul or a province?” I think the process was good: gathering people, investing in wages so that people can make a living thinking about policies, open participation, formulating proposals; it is a good model of taking commitments from the authorities to move forward with it. For me, the ideas are as important as the results, going out to networks and having references. It does not mean being right, having done everything right, but at least there is a reference, something to which people can react and build on that.

K F: What does it take to make, for instance, a FLOK Medellin?

M B: In particular, political will, a mayor who wants to do it, gets funding, and makes agreements over the future for transforming them into laws. In other words, there are two models: a particular model and a more holistic one, the latter is in which we believe. For instance, we do not think we can say, “Let’s provide broadband”, if it is not accompanied by literacy and cooperative culture. Without that culture, then you have teachers who lock up the computers in a room and this will not work. If you work at the same time with teacher and student capacities, in addition to bringing more computers, video cameras, broadband, then, there are actually an infrastructure and is more likely to work. To change a country, we look at everything at the same time. A single person does not have to do all. We are talking about mobilizing a country, and, if there is political will, there is enough people within a country for achieving this.

K F: What do you consider is Ecuador’s political interest, or what is the place you want to fill in the region to do a project like FLOK Society?

M B: The problem is that I do not know how they think. What I know is what they say, but surely there are several answers. But I do think this gives Ecuador a distinctive identity and a way to reassert itself in regional policies. Brazil has its own way; Venezuela has its own way; and by implementing FLOK, Ecuador develops a very regional way of acquiring an identity with its neighbors and of gaining influence.

K F: How people are engaged in the FLOK project?

M B: We had a first phase in which participation was made; we have a methodology that we have applied with some success. We now have a second phase in which the documents are online, where people can leave comments and criticism. The third phase will be the Summit with government officials and international experts. So, the three phases are open to participation, but the response has not been massive.

K F: What the FLOK project means for the region?

MB: If we see it from the free software view, it is a first draft, open to scrutiny for development.

To learn more about FLOK Society, see the following links:

http://floksociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/presentacion_FLOK-Society.pdf

http://floksociety.org/

http://cumbredelbuenconocer.ec/

*Karisma Foundation is an organization of civil society to support and spread the good use of technology in digital environments, in social processes and public policies in Colombia and Latin America

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This column was published in STIR’s spring issue and is available to buy here

With the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society project, peer-to-peer commons-based economics have a good chance of being institutionalised in Ecuador, or in other words, of entering at a nation-state level through the front door. This would be a world first.

Ecuador may not be particularly advanced as far as urban P2P dynamics are concerned, but its indigenous and rural communities have a long history of sharing knowledge. And since the election of a progressive government in 2007, the country is politically ahead in its determination to continue developing an economy based on the creativity of its citizens and on the sustainable leverage of its internal resources.

The focus here is to transition away from cognitive capitalism where value is commonly extracted via technology transfers through intellectual property rights mostly held by large foreign companies, generating dependencies on the global north and increasing the internal social divide. The goal is to shift towards a ‘social knowledge economy’ where knowledge is freely accessible, produced and shared through co-operative and open processes, and where the resulting knowledge commons can be built upon to accelerate innovation and the distribution of wealth.

Integrated commons-based initiatives exist around the world. Co-operative systems such as Cooperativa Integral Catalana and Las Indias in Spain, or local and regional partnerships such as Villes en Biens Communs and Territoires Collaboratifs in France are examples. But nothing has ever been done at the national level. The challenge is to scale microeconomic initiatives into systems that can operate at a macroeconomic level as well. Such transformations require an institutional framework supported by political and social infrastructure, in particular to bridge new structures with existing ones during the transition phase.

The FLOK Society thrives on the interactions between a civil society empowered by peer learning and open education, a partner state that provides the institutional support and infrastructures required, and a commons based ethical market. This is a model developed by FLOK Society’s research team lead by P2P foundation founder Michel Bauwens.

The process is under way. A policy framework will be presented to the Ecuadorian people for national debate in May. Proposals are derived from existing and new research as well as participatory input collected from commoners around the world and from Ecuadorians both in urban and rural contexts through informal workshops where needs and challenges are discussed.

The key element of the framework is the introduction of the Peer Production License, a copyfarleft type of reciprocity-based license by which commons are freely accessible to those who contribute to create them, while companies generating profits from them without contributing are charged license fees. Revenues returned to value creators allow co-operative accumulation and the constitution of community-managed commons funds and community investment funds.

This empowers a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy, where commoners can develop their commons for wider use including the creation of market value on top of them, encouraged by legal frameworks that support the organisation and operations of co-operative entities.

The expected outcome is the creation of a distributed network of microfactories using open hardware designs available from the internet to produce machinery and tools for local domestic industry, sustainable community farms or science labs at fractions of the cost of licensed equipment, enabling more resources to be allocated for further investment. Arduino electronic boards, RepRap 3D printers, and Motorola’s Ara smartphone project are examples of such open designs for ‘connected’ manufacturing. Farm Hack, Slowtools, Open Source Ecology provide blueprints for small industry and farming machinery.

These new forms of production, which create converging peer innovation networks where people customise solutions to specific needs at various levels and scales, are intended to transform Ecuador’s productive matrix. Further learning and the development of new capacities and know-how are supported by an infrastructure of hacker spaces, media labs and coworking spaces, complemented by the release of all publicly funded research and innovation under GPL license in formats adequate to a generalisation of open education.

The reciprocal Peer Production License provides means to protect natural and biological resources such as seeds and plants as well against the danger of private enclosure also known as biopiracy, while enabling their wider use. In particular, indigenous communities who have historically been reluctant to share their knowledge on plants and cures, after they witnessed multinationals generating significant amounts of income by patenting and exploiting existing knowledge and plants with nothing coming back to them, will be able to benefit from the development of a bioeconomy and sustainable agriculture that serves them, supported by community seed banks and open source seed sharing networks.

We are looking at large scale systemic change here that can set a precedent and revolutionise economic and social policy. Whichever the outcome of the political process in Ecuador, the FLOK Society project will provide the building blocks for other places in the world to develop autonomy and resilience while getting rid of enclosures as well as extractive and dependence-generating practices, whereever they may originate from.

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