Republished from Rosa Luxemburg New York.

Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria: Following the celebration of the “creative city” (as described by Richard Florida), the “smart city” has become the new flavor of the month—and a brand. It makes clever use of resources, and it attracts money, corporate power, and private industries. Offering us cheap, effective solutions to social and political problems, the smart city is functional, optimized, and safe rather than participatory, sustainable, and fair.

As Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria point out, however, the problem is not merely the regulatory impulse of smart technologies. Coming from a political-economic rather than a purely technical perspective, the authors argue that the smart city can only be understood within the context of neoliberalism. In order to remain competitive in the era of austerity politics, cities hand over the management of public infrastructure and services to private companies, both de-centralizing and de-personalizing the political sphere.

How can cities regain control not only over technology, data, and infrastructure, but also over the services that are mediated by smart technologies—such as utilities, transportation, education, and health? Offering a wealth of examples and case studies from across the globe, the authors discuss alternative smart city models, which rely on democratic data ownership regimes, grassroots innovation, and cooperative service provision models.

Evgeny Morozov is a prominent critic of digital capitalism, dealing with questions of how major technology companies are transforming society and democracy. The author of several books, he also writes for various newspapers, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. With a background in social science and innovation economics, Francesca Bria is an expert in digital strategy, technology, and information policy, who is active in various innovation movements advocating for open access, open technologies, and digital rights. She is currently Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at the Barcelona City Council.

Laying out what works and what doesn’t in the smart city of today, the authors do not simply advocate for a high-tech version of socialism in the fifth publication of our “City Series.” By carefully assessing what is at stake and for whom, this timely study offers practical solutions for how cities can be smart while retaining their technological sovereignty.

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DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT  (German)

Photo by chibitomu

The post Essay of the Day: Rethinking the Smart City : Democratizing Urban Technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Brief: Barcelona city administration has prepared the roadmap to migrate its existing system from Microsoft and proprietary software to Linux and Open Source software.

Great news from Barcelona. This article was originally posted at ItsFoss.com:

A Spanish newspaper, El País, has reported that the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer system to Open Source technologies.

According to the news report, the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution.

Barcelona will go open source by Spring 2019

The City has plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year. The transition period, according to Francesca Bria (Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council) will be completed before the mandate of the present administrators come to an end in Spring 2019.

Migration aims to help local IT talent

For this to be accomplished, the City of Barcelona will start outsourcing IT projects to local small and medium sized enterprises. They will also be taking in 65 new developers to build software programs for their specific needs.

One of the major projects envisaged is the development of a digital market – an online platform – whereby small businesses will use to take part in public tenders.

Ubuntu is the choice for Linux distributions

The Linux distro to be used may be Ubuntu as the City is already running a pilot project of 1000 Ubuntu-based desktops. The news report also reveals that Outlook mail client and Exchange Server will be replaced with Open-Xchange meanwhile Firefox and LibreOffice will take the place of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

Barcelona becomes the first municipality to join “Public Money, Public Code” campaign

With this move, Barcelona becomes the first municipality to join the European campaign “Public Money, Public Code“.

It is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation of Europe and comes after an open letter that advocates that software funded publicly should be free. This call has been supported by more than about 15,000 individuals and more than 100 organizations. You can add your support as well. Just sign the petition and voice your opinion for open source.

Money is always a factor

The move from Windows to Open Source software according to Bria promotes reuse in the sense that the programs that are developed could be deployed to other municipalities in Spain or elsewhere around the world. Obviously, the migration also aims at avoiding large amounts of money to be spent on proprietary software.

What do you think?

This is a battle already won and a plus to the open source community. This was much needed especially when the city of Munich has decided to go back to Microsoft.

What is your take on the City of Barcelona going open source? Do you foresee other European cities following the suit? Share your opinion with us in the comment section.

Source: Open Source Observatory

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Francesca Bria: Until today digital social innovation (DSI) has been mainly driven by grassroots social movements, hackers, geeks and civil society groups. Huge sums of public money have supported digital innovation in business, as well as in fields ranging from the military to espionage. But there has been very little systematic support for innovations that use digital technology to address social challenges.

We need bold thinking about the type of digital society we want. I think . It will be a hybrid between physical and digital, between representative and direct democracy. Cities will be the place to experiment, grow and scale bold policies related to DSI, such as basic income, data commons, and digital participation.

That is what we are doing in Barcelona where we have a Mayor, Ada Colau, that is a former social movement activist. Barcelona en comù and Podemos, the two new political movements that emerged from the 15M anti austerity social mobilisation in Spain, only use crowdfunding and organise their members through a collaborative platform that gathers policy input from thousands of citizens. It is the quality of the balance between top down and bottom up that will determine the success of the digital social transition.

The following are some of the questions that I see for the future of DSI:

1. THE TECH FUTURE OF DSI WILL DEPEND ON DATA COMMONS

AI and machine learning is determining the future of our economy, from driverless cars, to precision agriculture, deep learning in the healthcare sector, to energy transition. Companies like Google and Amazon are spending over $10billion on infrastructure every year and are grabbing a huge amount of data. However, this kind of massive transformation cannot be left to big tech companies alone.

I think the future of DSI will depend on being able to strike a New Deal on Data to make the most out of data, while guaranteeing data sovereignty & privacy. We need distributed infrastructures to share data, encryption for the people, and new ownership regimes such as data commons to preserve citizens digital rights.

One of the main tech challenges for DSI will be striking a deal between full privatization and public control; between extreme centralisation and extreme decentralised; between data commons and data markets; between black boxes and algorithmic transparency.

2. THE ECONOMIC FUTURE OF DSI WILL BE ABOUT THE INTRODUCTION OF BASIC INCOME & THE GROWTH OF PLATFORM COOPERATIVES

The “sharing economy” is here to stay! Introducing fair regulation and algorithmic transparency to regulate incumbents is necessary but not enough. We need to empower sharing economy alternatives such as platform cooperatives, the maker movement that is reinventing manufacturing, and Maker Cities where circular economy models can be experimented and scaled. That’s what we are doing in Barcelona.

But going beyond this, one of the main economic challenges for DSI in the next 10 years will be reinventing the notion of work in relation to the rapid automation of labour. Economists predict that 100million workers will be replaced by the robot economy. Rethinking our social security system through for instance the introduction of basic income schemes will be crucial and DSI can stimulate our imagination to experiment on the future of health, education, work, care, and even money.

3. DSI WILL ENABLE A GENUINELY DIRECT DEMOCRACY VS RIGHT WING POPULISM

Finally, the future of our digital society has to be built with the people! In particular with the young generations that are disenfranchised in this moment of crisis of trust in the political and financial system. We need to engage the young generation in politics through an open democratic process or right wing populisms will prevail, together with the spreading of Fake News. This may seem difficult when oversees we see institutional closure, intolerance, racism, but I think a genuinely participatory democracy is the only way to build a stronger and more just Digital society leveraging social innovation movements.

THE NEXT 10 YEARS OF DSI

To end, I would like to provide a pretty positive picture of where DSI will go in the next 10 years:

1. More and more cities and public institutions will introduce social, environmental, ethical, open and innovation clauses in public procurement enabling the integration of DSI in public service delivery

2. Digital participatory democracy with thousands of citizens involved in policy making will be the norm

3. Basic income schemes will be tested and successfully introduced

4. Data commons will make platform cooperatives a solid alternative to Uber & Airbnb

5. Every City will have Maker districts for the circular economy & produce energy and food locally, moving towards productive and sovereign Cities

Photo by ario_

The post What’s the Future of Digital Social Innovation? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Albert Cañigueral: You were in London working for the U.K. innovation agency Nesta. Why did you accept the offer from the Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau?

Francesca Bria: I was working for Nesta and had already done a lot of work on a European level and with movements around open access, democracy and technology for social good. I was excited to come work for the new government in Barcelona because they have a very new approach to the city. They were making it clear that you cannot have a digital revolution without a democratic revolution. It was the start of my mandate to rethink the smart city, not just in technological terms, but in ways that put citizen needs and the city’s (political) questions at the core.

What have some of the key actions been on the Barcelona agenda since then?

One key point is access to housing. The government is not only tracking down big banks that leave apartments empty but also confronting platforms like Airbnb whose business model has a negative impact on affordable housing.

Another big theme is energy transition and renewable energy. Barcelona wants to create a municipal energy company to fight the current monopoly. We are also looking into more distributed energy models, like smart grids, models that are more affordable and which allow citizens to be in control of their data.

We are also rethinking urban planning with projects like the SuperBlocks(Superilles). Aimed at giving back public spaces to citizens, they were created in a very innovative process with a digital democracy platform for large-scale citizen participation. Opening the debate brought many great ideas, but it also showed us the complicated aspect of participation. There were many conflicting interests and it was learning by doing in an iterative way.

Finally, instead of working only with big companies as governments typically do, we are also rethinking the economic model to support new economies like the solidarity, collaborative and digital economy. This also helps us fight corruption since often a lock-in of the public administration with big companies leaves little space for other players.

Sounds like there are some real challenges ahead. How did you start to address them and what’s the role of technology here?

Over the past year, I created a Barcelona Digital City plan to address how technology and data can help solve urban challenges. It’s divided into three main areas.

The first is digital transformation of the government through technology. This involves aspects like procurement -how we purchase technology — avoiding lock-in by working with smaller companies and ensuring that public money is invested in open technologies. To increase transparency, the city hall is also testing an open and participatory budgeting system in Barcelona neighbourhoods with the Gracia projectfor example, which then can be scaled up.

Together with the activist group X-Net we have also created — and this is pretty unique- an encrypted infrastructure TOR that is integrated into the main city infrastructure. It functions as a whistleblower tool for public workers to denounce cases of corruption and help us open up the public administration.

In terms of procurement, we are also integrating clauses that address sustainability, gender and the solidarity economy. The goal is to get citizens more involved in how their money is spent and make them part of the procurement process.

We are also focusing on digital innovation with the new socio-economic innovation activity line inside Barcelona Activa as well as an incubator and accelerator for tech companies. However, most innovative are programs for digital social innovation (associated with https://digitalsocial.eu/) that acknowledge the impact of open technology on the economy, democracy and manufacturing. The Barcelona MADE project for example (Maker District in Poblenou or hosting the MakerFaire) is aimed at rethinking the future of production in cities and urban manufacturing in a circular economy way. It’s important that cities regain some industrial capacity to make them more sustainable again.

The third aspect addresses digital empowerment and collective intelligence. We are expanding this to many areas like city planning, cultural activities and citizens initiatives with experiments like PAM. But above all, the digital education project is aimed at rethinking education and the future of work. We not only need new skills to be able to transition to the digital society — or should I just say future —  but in a time of extreme automation, we also must invent new jobs. Along these lines, we are piloting a basic income scheme related to digital currency infrastructure as part of an EU-funded project. Barcelona also recently hosted an international  conference about alternative currencies.

A core topic in this tech strategy is “city data commons.” Why is data so important?

The question of data ownership and sovereignty, or “City Data Commons,” is particularly important because it raises the question of how we can make the most out of data by putting the digital right of the citizen at the core. In a world where machines are doing more and more, it’s important to acknowledge that this data belongs to the citizens, not governments. Cities should act as the intermediary and as custodians of these new rights.

What are the mechanisms you can put in place to progress in this direction?

One way to go is by changing the regulations. Another way is through decentralised and encrypted infrastructure that makes citizens aware of how the data is used. At the moment, when you use a digital service it’s not necessarily clear what happens to the data and how it’s monetized. People sign some terms of contract but it’s all very opaque.

DECODE is a new 5 million euro project we are currently working on together with 14 partners across Europe. We are experimenting with encrypted decentralized data management architecture using blockchain and distributed ledgers to make these data commons clearer.

There is no lack of technical tools. But are we, both citizens and adminstration, culturally ready for it?

Tools are not just technical devices, but regulation, economic models, technical infrastructure and cultural organizational change. Making them align is the difficult part, The problem is definitely not the tech, but the culture and the institutional boundaries. Even though at the moment there are citizens in the government who don’t think like bureaucrats, they still have to work within certain boundaries. Institutional hacking is great, but to truly expand these it must come from the bottom up. Sure you also need the right people in power, but if society can’t enter and do things, monitor and track activities, nothing will change.

For all these ideas Barcelona has been named a Rebel City, but you are not alone in this, right? What are the best practices to connect with like-minded cities? What cities are interested in Barcelona’s developments?

It’s interesting to see how in hard times cities are coming together to solve problems that governments are not (such as immigration, access to water, energy and affordable housing). These solidarity networks are important because they empower people with the feeling that you can actually transform something. Although we need to keep the big vision in sight, what we are doing institutionally are small but irreversible changes. Barcelona just hosted The Fearless Cities Municipalist Summit to strengthen links with like-minded cities as well.

Cities are also coming together to create a more local collaborative economic model that doesn’t rely on big U.S. corporations who dominate the market and take all the data. Regulation is one difficulty, but mainly we need to ensure that collaborative economy models that have a positive local impact can grow and flourish. We are collaborating with cities like Berlin, New York, Moscow and Amsterdam on this and demanding that big platforms give us their data. We need algorithmic transparency to regulate and understand the business model. Currently, it’s a black box.

But let’s be realistic. Cities have a lot of limitations in terms of creating regulation and fiscal leverage.

Absolutely. Cities have to solve all these challenges but they have neither the law-making power nor the fiscal leverage. This is a conflict that we see happening a lot in Spain, and it’s a complex dialogue between city and state.

One way European cities are circumventing this is by articulating themselves as metropolitan areas within a region. The European investment bank is working with cities and regions for example, and also the fact that cities are municipalization infrastructure is interesting. The example of the rebel cities shows that despite fiscal and law making limitations, governments are beginning to feel pressure from cities.

Nevertheless, I believe in federalism, as you need to be able to work at different levels, city, regional, national, global and European. And you have to make them work together.

Let’s fast-forward to the future. When citizens are fully empowered, what will be left for the public adminstration?

We will see after the mandate in Barcelona, but the fact that you can have a citizen movement enter the institution, govern and take power shows that there is already a new approach in policy in terms of political class. This is not a cyber thing, a purely digital model, but the opposite. I think we are going towards hybrid models where citizens will have a type of self-governance and be directly involved in things like allocating budget, taking decisions and managing projects. I really believe that the future will be more and more of these political movements and approaches that are based on the common good.

Meet Francesca Bria at OuiShare Fest, she will share a new exciting vision of where city governments start to think and experiment with what technology would look like if it served the people.

This piece has been re-published from OuiShare Magazine. All images courtesy of OuiShare Magazine

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Cities and Technological Sovereignty 3 – Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty: Winning Back Technology for the People

(14 mins) Francesca Bria – While the platform economy has a clear potential to generate economic impact, there are several important issues that need to be resolved: first and foremost, around ownership, control and management of personal data. One key reason cities and municipalities have so far failed to foster local data-intensive platforms that can compete with Uber and Airbnb is missing access to raw data. Data has become a key part of the urban infrastructure. It helps make better, quicker, and more empirically sound decisions; it promotes socio-economic development and innovation; it improves public services and empowers citizens. But who should own it? Many technology firms aspire to turn data into a new asset class, the key ingredient of what has been called “surveillance capitalism.” But is this the only option? Can cities embrace a different model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? How can cities help ensure that such data is not locked in corporate silos, but is rather turned into a public good?

The post Francesca Bria on Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Barcelona city government is led by former housing activist Ada Colau, who was elected mayor in May 2015.  She is a leader of the movement that became the political party Barcelona En Comú (“Barcelona in Common”). Once in office, Colau halted the expansion of new hotels, a brave effort to prevent “economic development” (i.e., tourism) from hollowing out the city’s lively, diverse neighborhoods. As a world city, Barcelona is plagued by a crush of investors and speculators buying up real estate, making the city unaffordable for ordinary people.

Barcelona En Comú may have won the mayor’s office, but it controls only 11 of the 44 city council seats. As a result, any progress on the party’s ambitious agenda requires the familiar maneuvering and arm-twisting of conventional city politics. Its mission also became complicated because as a governing (minority) party, Barcelona En Comú is not just a movement, it must operationally assist the varied needs of a large urban economy and provide all sorts of public services:  a huge, complicated job.

What happens when activist movements come face-to-face with such administrative realities and the messy pressures of representative politics? This is precisely why the unfolding drama of Barcelona En Comú is instructive for commoners. Will activists transform conventional politics and government systems into new forms of governance — or will they themselves be transformed and abandon many of their original goals?

The new administration clearly aspires to shake things up in positive, transformative ways.  Besides fostering greater participation in governance, Barcelona En Comú hopes to fortify and expand what it calls the “commons collaborative economy” – the cooperatives, commons and neighborhood projects that comprise a remarkable 10% of the city economy through 1,300 ventures.

For example, there is the impressive Guifi.net, a broadband telecommunications network that is managed as a commons for the benefit of ordinary Internet users and small businesses.  The system provides welcome competition to the giant Telefónica by providing affordable Internet access through more than 32,000 active wifi nodes.

The city is also home to Som Energia Coop, the first renewable energy coop in Catalunya. It both resells energy bought from the market and is developing its own renewable energy projects – wind turbines, solar panels, biogas plants – to produce energy for its members.

Barcelona En Comú realizes that boosting that commons collaborative economy is an act of co-creation with commoners, not a government project alone.  So the city has established new systems to open and expand new dialogues.  There is a group council called BarCola,  for example, which convenes leading players in the collaborative economy and commons-based peer production to assess the progress of this sector and recommend helpful policies. There is also an open meetup called Procomuns.net, and Decim.Barcelona (Decide Barcelona), a web platform for public deliberation and decision-making.

It remains to be seen how these bodies will evolve, but their clear purpose is to strengthen the commons collaborative economy as a self-aware, active sector of the city’s life.  The administration is exploring such ideas as how existing coops might migrate to open platforms, and what types of businesses might be good allies or supporters of the commons collaborative economy.

Some sympathetic allies worry that Barcelona En Comú is superimposing the commons ethic and language onto a conventional left politics – that it amounts to a re-branding of reform and a diluting of transformational ambitions.  Critics wonder whether the commons is in danger of being captured by The System. They ask whether “participative governance” in existing political structures is a laudable advance or a troubling type of co-optation.

While such questions may be inevitable, I think the answers cannot necessarily be known in advance, or even while pursuing them. When the commons start to go mainstream, there are so many unknown contingencies. Inventing an unprecedented new system within the matrix of the old one entails many unknown developmental factors. There will always be gaps, uncertainties and complexities that are encountered for the first time, which can only be addressed on-the-fly with creative improvisations.

Many of these improvisations will invariably be seen as politically motivated even if they are unintentional. Progress will involve two steps forward and one step back. Some smaller coops in Barcelona complain that they are not able to participate in city procurement projects.  Others are worried that the re-municipalization of the city’s water system will ultimately fail and result in it becoming privatized once again.

Francesca Bria, Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona, works at the epicenter of many of these forces. At a public panel that I shared with her last week, she noted that many “small but irreversible changes” have already been made in the city.  She also conceded that transformational change is difficult because “the public sector was not designed to serve the people.”

Sadly, this is absolutely true. City governments are usually designed to cater to wealthy developers, investors and corporations. A charmed circle of dominant players tend to get the most lucrative city contracts, the most valuable tax breaks and subsidies, and the special legal privileges. Transforming city systems to make them commons-friendly is a daunting structural challenge fraught with many administrative, legal and political complexities.

At a more subtle level, we are captives of a very language that can inhibit change. Consider the word “smart city,” which was the name of the event that I was invited to speak at – the Smart City Expo World Congress.  This is an annual event in Barcelona that is physically adjacent to two massive trade shows – for vendors of “smart city” information technologies and municipal water technologies.

The term “smart city” is a technocratic/marketing term that the IT industries love because it highlights their sales pitch.  Their products purport to make city systems more flexible and efficient for energy, water, traffic management, governance, etc. The term implies a private black box of proprietary technology that can be purchased, but is off-limits to ordinary mortals. Not quite a vision of the commons. Systems, not people, lie at its heart.

As the host for the Smart City Expo, the city government wanted to broaden the discourse of “smart cities” at this event, and so it invited the likes of me and David Harvey, among others.  Harvey is the celebrated Marxist scholar who has written so brilliantly about global capitalism and the “right to the city” movement. His talk, which occurred before I arrived, surely must have struck many participants as provocative and curious.  I can only imagine how Harvey regarded the buzzing, shiny corporate trade show 100 yards away.

My keynote presentation, on the “city as a commons,” introduced the commons paradigm and described many enclosures of the city.  I also focused on a variety of commons-based urban initiatives such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, participatory budgeting, data commons and platform cooperatives.  (I will post a link to the video when it is available.)

For the corporate vendors, it must have been a bit of jolt to consider whether real citizens can be integrated into the “smart city” and given some genuine sovereignty.  Tech people don’t generally consider the politics of enclosure or the idea of commoning.  Within a few minutes of finishing my talk, however, I was surprised to receive an email from a Dutch banker who had been in the audience.  “Don’t you think cities have grown too big to become a commons?  Haven’t people become too opportunistic to create and share fairly?”  (I replied:  “Institutional structures and social norms can achieve a lot despite humanity’s less attractive side.”)

But the deeper point remains:  How to integrate commons-based systems with the complex realities of city governments and markets as they exist today?  Or must commons occupy a different sphere entirely?

I confess that I do not have a fully satisfying answer to these questions.  For a workshop held the next day, however, I did come up with a rough typology of hybrid commons that attempt to “make nice” with city government and markets.  I’d love for commons to open up new lines of interaction with the logic of government and market, but it is paramount that in doing so commons affirmatively protect their sovereignty and integrity of vision.

I am reminded of the grim conclusion of Lewis Hyde, the gift economy scholar. In his book Trickster Makes this World, based on his study of mythological tricksters as change-agents, Hyde argues that the inevitable fate of any subversive with dangerous powers is either to be cannibalized or exiled.  Powerful institutions must “either expel or ingest their troublemakers.”  A third, more precarious option is to “stay on the threshold, neither in nor out.”  But is that sustainable?

!

Photo by Luc Mercelis

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