“We got to do something now, the company are not going to do anything and we got to protect ourselves”, proclaimed a shop steward at Lucas Aerospace when filmed by a 1978 documentary by the Open University.

He was explaining the rationale behind the so-called Alternative Corporate Plan, better known as the Lucas Plan. It was proposed by shop stewards in seventies England at the factories of Lucas Aerospace. To stave off pending layoffs, a shop steward committee established a plan that outlined a range of new, socially useful technologies for Lucas to build. With it, they fundamentally challenged the capitalist conception of technology design.

Essentially, they proposed that workers establish control over the design of technology. This bottom-up attempt at design, where not management and capitalists but workers themselves decided what to build, eventually failed. It was stopped by management, sidelined by struggling trade unions and the Labour Party, and eventually washed over by neoliberalism.

The seventies were a heady time, the preceding social-democratic, fordist consensus ran into its own contradictions and died in the face of a triumphant neoliberalism. With it, experiments such as the Lucas Plan died as well. Today, however, neoliberalism is in crisis and to bury it we should look back to precisely those experiments that failed decades ago.

Technology’s neoliberal crisis

One part of the crisis of neoliberalism is the crisis of its technology. The software and information technology sector, often denoted as “tech”, is facing widespread criticism and attacks, with demands for reform stretching wide across society.

Even an establishment publication such as The New York Times now publishes a huge feature headlining: The Case Against Google, about Google’s use of their near monopoly on search to bury competitors’ sites.

Other controversies revolve around companies such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter making use of insights into human psychology to make people interact with their products more often and more intensely. This involves everything from gamifying social interaction through likes and making the notification button on Facebook red, to the ubiquity of unlimited vertical scrolling in mobile phone apps.

This has a number of consequences. Studies show that the presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity, that Facebook use is negatively associated with well-being and that preteens with no access to screens for some time show better social skills than those with screen time.

In public discourse, this combines with fears that social media might harmfully impact political processes (basically Russia buying Facebook ads).

Or, as ex-Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya stated:

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works, hearts, likes, thumbs-up. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.

Early employees and execs at Facebook and Google even created the Center for Humane Tech that will propose more humanised tech design choices. Their website states:

Our world-class team of deeply concerned former tech insiders and CEOs intimately understands the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our minds.

Part of this are the usual worries about intergenerational change, technology and centrism starting to fall apart, but there is a core truth in the worries about social media: design of technology is political.

Technologies are designed by capitalist firms, and they do it for capitalist purposes, not for maximising human well-being. In the case of social media, it is designed to pull as much attention as possible into the platform and the ads shown on it.

As Chris Marcellino, a former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone, has said:

It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product, it’s capitalism.

The Lucas Plan

This brings us back to the Lucas Plan. At a time where the design of technology is under unprecedented scrutiny, a plan that pushes for workers’ control over it might be an answer.

The Plan was a truly remarkable experiment at the time. The University of Sussex’s Adrian Smith explains:

Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, “one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company” (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’.

The Lucas Plan eventually failed because of opposition from management, the trade union hierarchy and the government. Lucas Aerospace subsequently had to restructure and shed much of its workforce. Nevertheless, the plan provides great lessons for our current predicament.

Technology is political, yet its design is ultimately in the hands of capitalist firms. The Lucas Plan shows that workers, particularly in the more technically-oriented layers, have the skills and resources to design alternative technologies to those proposed by shareholders and management.

Workers’ control over the design of technology is thus a way to make it more ethical. Many of the problems we encounter with modern-day information technology are caused by unrestricted capitalist control over it, and workers’ control can be a necessary counterweight to push through human-centered design choices.

Composition

So how to build a modern-day Lucas Plan? Developing a plan reminiscent of the Lucas Plan for modern times needs, first and foremost, to be based on the present-day class composition of the workers in tech.

Tech, and more precisely sectors focused on information technology and software, have a notoriously dual composition. On the one hand there are the (generally) highly paid top-end workers, mostly composed of programmers and people employed in fields such as marketing and management. On the other hand there are large armies of underpaid workers employed in functions such as moderation, electronics assembly, warehouse logistics or catering.

The first group has very peculiar characteristics. They are often taken in by the classic Silicon Valley ideology consisting of “lean startup” thinking, social liberalism, and the idea that they are improving the world. Materially, they are also different from large sections of the working class. They earn extremely high wages, are often highly educated, possess specific technical skills, are given significant stock options in their employers’ companies and are highly mobile, notorious for changing jobs very easily.

Besides that, many also have an aspiration to start their own startup one day, in line with Silicon Valley ideology. This adds a certain petty-bourgeois flavour to their composition.

Yet these workers also have their grievances. They are often employed in soul-crushing jobs at large multinationals, some of which (for example Amazon or Tesla) have the reputation of making them work as much as they can and then spitting them out, often in a state of burn-out.

On the other hand, there are subaltern sections of tech workers. These people moderate offensive content on Facebook, stack Amazon boxes in their “fulfillment centres”, drive people around on Uber and Lyft, assemble electronics such as iPhones or serve lunches at Silicon Valley corporate “campuses.”

These workers are generally underpaid, but conduct the drudging work that makes tech multinationals run. Without Facebook moderators watching horrible content all day, the platform would be flooded by it (and Facebook would have no one to train their AI on); without the fleet of elderly workers manning Amazon warehouses, packages would not get delivered; without the staff on Google and Facebook campuses, they would look a lot less utopian.

This section of workers can also be highly mobile in regards to jobs, but less from possibility and more from precarity. They also have fewer ties to the tech sector specifically— whether they work at the warehouses of a self-styled tech company like Blue Apron or the warehouses of any other company matters less for them than it does for programmers.

This bifurcation holds real problems for a modern-day Lucas Plan. If we simply move the control over the design of technology from management and shareholders to a tech worker aristocracy, it might not solve so much.

Yet there are some hopeful tendencies we can build on. Tech workers in Silicon Valley have started to bridge the divide that separates them, with organisations like the Tech Workers Coalition starting to help cafeteria workers organise.

A Guardian piece on their organising even observes some budding solidarity between these two groups arising:

Khaleed is proud of the work he does, and deeply grateful for the union. At first, he found it difficult to talk about his anxieties with coworkers at the roundtable. But he came to find it comforting: “We have solidarity, now.” A cost-of-living raise would mean more security, and a better chance of staying in the apartment where he lives. Khaleed deeply wants to be able to live near his son, and for his son to continue going to the good public school he now attends.

When I asked Khaleed how he felt about the two TWC Facebook employees he had met with, his voice faltered. “I just hope that someday I can help them like they helped me.” When I told one of the engineers, he smiled, and quoted the IWW slogan. “That’s the goal, right – one big union?”

This is precisely the basis on which a modern-day Lucas Plan should be based: solidarity between both groups of tech workers and inclusion of both. The Lucas Plan of the 1970s understood this. The main authors of the Plan were predominantly to be highly-educated engineers, but the people making the products were not. Hence they tried to bridge this gap with proposals that would humanise working conditions as well as technology, and by including common workers.

A shop steward, an engineer, would declare during a public meeting after showing how company plans decided how long bathroom breaks could be:

We say that that form of technology is unacceptable, and if that is the only way to make that technology we should be questioning whether we want to make those kinds of products in that way at all.

Furthermore, the humanisation of work inside tech companies, and not just the end product of it, would also positively impact the work of the core tech workers. In essence, it would serve as the glue to connect both groups.

A Lucas Plan today would thus analyse the composition of tech workers at both sides of the divide, include both of them and mobilise them behind a program of humanisation of labour for themselves and humanised technology for the rest of society.

How to do it?

The practical implementation of workers’ control over design decisions can base itself on already existing policies and experiences, mainly reformist co-determination schemes (where trade-union officials are given seats on corporate boards) or direct-action oriented tactics (where management power is challenged through workplace protest and where workers establish a degree of workplace autonomy).

The choice of these tactics would need to be based on local working class experiences. In some contexts co-determination would make more sense; in some cases direct action would take precedence. In most cases a combination of both will most likely be required.

The first option is a moderate one. Workers’ representation on the boards of companies has been common in industrialised economies, and particularly continental Europe. Even Conservative PM Theresa May proposed implementing it in 2017, before making a U-turn after business lobbying.

As TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has stated:

Workers on company boards is hardly a radical idea. They’re the norm across most of Europe – including countries with similar single-tier board structures to the UK, such as Sweden. European countries with better worker participation tend to have higher investment in research and development, higher employment rates and lower levels of inequality and poverty.

Expanding the control of these boards to also deciding what products to produce and how to design them in technologically-oriented companies—both software and more traditional industrial companies—would radicalise the non-radical idea of workers representation on company boards.

A second, more radical option, is the establishment of workplace control through organising. A good example of this are the US longshoremen who at certain times of their existence controlled their own work.

As Peter Cole writes in Jacobin:

West Coast longshoremen were “lords” because they earned high wages by blue-collar standards, were paid overtime starting with the seventh hour of a shift, and had protections against laboring under dangerous conditions. They even had the right to stop working at any time if “health and safety” were imperiled. Essentially, to the great consternation of employers, the union controlled much of the workplace.

The hiring hall was the day-to-day locus of union power. Controlled by each local’s elected leadership, the hall decided who would and wouldn’t work. Crucially, under the radically egalitarian policy of “low man out,” the first workers to be dispatched were those who had worked the least in that quarter of the year.

Imagine a programmer at Facebook refusing to make a button red because research shows it would not increase the well-being of users, and being backed up in this decision by a system of workplace solidarity that stretches throughout the company.

From bees to architects

Mike Cooley, one of the key authors behind the Lucas Plan, was fired from his job in 1981 as retaliation for union organising. Afterwards, he became a key author on humanising technology. He also worked with the Greater London Council when—during the height of Thatcherism—it was controlled by the Labour left, and where current Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell earned his spurs.

Just as McDonnell bridges the earlier, failed, resistance to neoliberalism, with our current attempts to replace it, Cooley forms an inspiration for post-neoliberal technology. In an 1980 article he concluded:

The alternatives are stark. Either we will have a future in which human beings are reduced to a sort of bee-like behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them; or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills and abilities in both a political and a technical sense, decide that they are going to be the architects of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of choice and expression rather than less. The truth is, we shall have to make the profound decision as to whether we intend to act as architects or behave like bees.

These words ring true today more than ever.

About the author: Felix Holtwell In real life, Felix is a tech journalist. After dark, however, he edits the Fully Automated Luxury Communism newsletter, a newsletter about the interactions between technology and the left. You can follow him on Twitter at @AutomatedFully.

Photo by OuiShare

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This book, in the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability series, looks at how six grassroots innovation movements around the world have developed and what challenges they face.

Download the Accepted Manuscript of Chapter 1 (pdf, Open Access)

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these ‘grassroots innovation movements’ identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools.

Grassroots Innovation Movements examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches.

With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.

This book is part of the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability book series.

CONTENTS

Part 1: Overview
1. Introduction
2. A Conceptual Framework for Studying GIMs
Part 2: The Cases 
3. Movement for Socially Useful Production
4. Appropriate Technology Movement
5. Peoples’ Science Movements
6. Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Fablabs
7. Social Technologies Network
8. Honey Bee Network
Part 3: Lessons
9. Grassroots Innovation Movements: Lessons for Theory and Practice
10. Conclusions: Constructing Pathways for Sustainability with the Grassroots

Order the book from Routledge (you can get a 20% discount by using the order code FLR40)

Photo by eoringel

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It was in January 1976 that workers at Lucas Aerospace published an Alternative Plan for the future of their corporation. It was a novel response to management announcements that thousands of manufacturing jobs were to be cut in the face of industrial restructuring, international competition, and technological change. Instead of redundancy, workers argued their right to socially useful production.

Around half of Lucas’ output supplied military contracts. Since this depended upon public funds, as did many of the firm’s civilian products, workers argued state support be better put to developing more socially useful products.

Rejected by management and government, the Plan nevertheless catalysed ideas for the democratisation of technological development in society. In promoting their arguments, shop stewards at Lucas attracted workers from other sectors, community activists, radical scientists, environmentalists, and the Left. The Plan became symbolic for a movement of activists committed to innovation for purposes of social use over private profit.

Of course, the world is different now. The spaces and opportunities for democratising technology have altered, and so too have the forms it might take. Nevertheless, remembering older initiatives casts enduring issues about the direction of technological development in society in a different and informative light: an issue relevant today in debates as varied as industrial policy, green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-production, and grassroots fabrication in Hackerspaces and FabLabs. The movement for socially useful production prompts questions about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development.

In drawing up their Plan, shop stewards at Lucas turned initially to researchers at institutes throughout the UK. They received three replies. Undeterred, they consulted their own members. Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, ‘one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company’ (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’. Despite this attention, shop stewards suspected (correctly) that the Plan in isolation would convince neither management nor government. Even leaders in the trade union establishment were reluctant to back this grassroots initiative; wary its precedent would challenge privileged demarcations and hierarchies.

In the meantime, and as a lever to exert pressure, shop stewards embarked upon a broader political campaign for the right of all people to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, one of the leaders, said they wanted to, ‘inflame the imaginations of others’ and ‘demonstrate in a very practical and direct way the creative power of “ordinary people”’. Lucas workers organised road-shows, teach-ins, and created a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) at North-East London Polytechnic. Design prototypes were displayed at public events around the country. TV programmes were made. CAITS helped workers in other sectors develop their own Plans. Activists connected with sympathetic movements in Scandinavia and Germany.

The movement that emerged challenged establishment claims that technology progressed autonomously of society, and that people inevitably had to adapt to the tools offered up by science. Activists argued knowledge and technology was shaped by social choices over its development, and those choices needed to become more democratic. Activism cultivated spaces for participatory design; promoted human-centred technology; argued for arms conversion to environmental and social technologies; and sought more control for workers, communities and users in production processes.

Material possibilities were helped when Londoners voted the Left into power at the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981. They introduced an Industrial Strategy committed to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, sacked from Lucas for his activism, was appointed Technology Director of the GLC’s new Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB). A series of Technology Networks were created. Anticipating FabLabs today, these community-based workshops shared machine tools, access to technical advice, and prototyping services, and were open for anyone to develop socially useful prototypes. Other Left councils opened similar spaces in the UK.

Technology Networks aimed to combine the ‘untapped skill, creativity and sheer enthusiasm’ in local communities with the ‘reservoir of scientific and innovation knowledge’ in London’s polytechnics. Hundreds of designs and prototypes were developed, including electric bicycles, small-scale wind turbines, energy conservation services, disability devices, re-manufactured products, children’s play equipment, community computer networks, and a women’s IT co-operative. Designs were registered in an open access product bank. GLEB helped co-operatives and social enterprises develop these prototypes into businesses.

Recalling the movement now, what is striking is the importance activists attached to practical engagements in technology development as part of their politics. The movement emphasised tacit knowledge, craft skill, and learning by doing through face-to-face collaboration in material projects. Practical activity was cast as ‘technological agit prop’ for mobilising alliances and debate. Some participants found such politicisation unwelcome. But in opening prototyping in this way, activists tried to bring more varied participation into debates, and enable wider, more practical forms of expression meaningful to different audiences, compared to speeches and texts evoking, say, a revolutionary agent, socially entrepreneurial state, or deliberative governance framework.

Similarly today, Hackerspaces and FabLabs, involve people working materially on shared technology projects. Social media opens these engagements in distributed and interconnected forms. Web platforms and versatile digital fabrication technologies allow people to share open-hardware designs and contribute to an emerging knowledge commons. The sheer fun participants find in making things is imbued by others with excited claims for the democratisation of manufacturingand commons-based peer production. Grassroots digital fabrication (pdf) rekindles ideas about direct participation in technology development and use.

Wherever and whenever people are given the encouragement and opportunity to develop their ideas into material activity, then creativity can and does flourish. However, remembering the Lucas Plan should make us pause and consider two issues. First, the importance placed on tacit knowledge and skills. Skilful design in social media can assist but not completely substitute face-to-face, hand-by-hand activity. Second, for the earlier generation of activists, collaborative workshops and projects were also about crafting solidarities. Project-centred discussion and activity was linked to debate and mobilisation around wider issues.

Workers at Lucas Industries, Shaftmoor Lane branch, Birmingham, 1970. Photograph: /Lucas Memories website, lucasmemories.co.uk.

With hindsight, the movement was swimming against the political and economic tide, but at the time things looked less clear-cut. The Thatcher government eventually abolished the GLC in 1986. Unionised industries declined, and union power was curtailed through legislation. In overseeing this, Thatcherism knowingly cut material and political resources for alternatives. In doing so, the diversity so important to innovation diminished. The alliances struck, the spaces created and the initiatives generated were swept aside as concern for social purpose became overwhelmed by neoliberal ideology. The social shaping of technology was left to market decision.

However, even though activism dissipated, its ideas did not disappear. Some practices had wider influence, such as in participatory design, albeit it in forms appropriated to the needs of capital rather than the intended interests of labour. Historical reflection thus prompts a third issue, which is how power relations matter and need to be addressed in democratic technology development. When making prototypes becomes accessible and fun then people can exercise a power to do innovation. But this can still struggle to exercise power over the agendas of elite technology institutions, such as which innovations attract investment for production and marketing, and under what social criteria. Alternative, more democratic spaces nevertheless for technology development and debate.

Like others before and since, the Lucas workers insisted upon a democratic development of technology. Their practical, material initiatives momentarily widened the range of ideas, debates and possibilities – some of which persist. Perhaps their argument was the most socially useful product left to us?

Adrian Smith researches the politics of technology, society and sustainability at SPRU and the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. He is on Twitter @smithadrianpaul. A longer paper on the Lucas Plan is available at the STEPS site.

Originally published in The Guardian.

Photo by Daniel Kulinski

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He saw the existing strategies as rigidly centralized processes dominated by establishment “experts” and hostile to the idea of public participation. There were neither infrastructures nor organizational models to support a culture of creativity and innovation. Martin wanted to develop a culture in which openness, sharing and cooperation could drive new forms of participatory regional development.

When the two of us set out to find solutions to this challenge, we found answers in the community workshops, Fab Labs and hackerspaces in urban areas. These are the spaces where tech-savvy people, hackers, and people interested in science or digital art come together to exchange ideas and produce new things. Unfortunately, these spaces seemed entirely unsuited to rural areas because they are usually tailored to very narrow groups of specialists. Also, a feasibility study for introducing such spaces in rural regions stressed the importance of collaborating with people from various business, education, media, and political communities. We also realized that is would be crucial to create a structure that would allow any projects to be financially independent.

We imagined Otelos as places where ordinary people could find pleasure in sharing knowledge and building things together. The projects could be about constructing autonomous spider robots or building raised beds for gardening. They could be about making soap and crafting jewelry from recycled materials. The people who might wish to participate in the Otelos could be children, people interested in agriculture, cultural networkers, “mechatronics” technicians, do-it-yourselfers, game developers, and many others.

Capturing People’s Imaginations and Making Things Possible

The first Otelos began in 2010 in cooperation with the municipalities of Vöcklabruck and Gmunden. The municipal councils decided that the municipalities would provide the physical spaces and budgets for the Otelos for at least three years (a commitment that many municipalities have since extended to an unlimited period of time).

Those municipal council decisions fulfilled an initial requirement for the independence we desired. In each community, we tried to identify people who were interested in forming a group that would organize and design the individual Otelo venues. In each place, at least five members came together who enjoyed hosting and networking with other people – a model of volunteer organizing that has proved quite successful. This group keeps an eye on new trends and initiates experimental projects of the sort mentioned above.

Soon, the first Otelo jam sessions and “DenkBars” were held – DenkBar being a play on words: “denkbar” means “imaginable” in German, so a Denk-Bar would be a bar or pub for open meetings not dominated by experts imparting knowledge, but by interested amateurs who share a passion for a topic of common interest. We also developed what we call the “node model,” which enables groups to use space in the Otelos long-term, free of charge, and without any pressure to achieve results. The only requirement is that the groups share their knowledge and experiences and provide opportunities for others to participate. The nodes let a creative economy project evolve and do in-depth experiments with public funding support.

The resulting projects have been quite diverse. There are electronics do-it-yourselfers who build Tesla coils for making music, light painters and people developing municipal energy-saving projects. There are people exchanging ideas about innovative educational models and others organizing new forms of consumer-producer partnerships for sourcing food. An important aspect of all of the nodes is that participants come from very different contexts. Most of them would never meet each other in “normal” life.

Belonging and Being Able to Grow

What began as an experiment in 2010 became the first major challenge for the Otelo Association in 2012 when two new venues were opened. How should they be managed and relate to each other? It quickly became clear that decentralization would be necessary in order to maintain Otelo’s vitality as well as our ability to make decisions.

It was decided to invite individual local projects to start local Otelo associations if they wished. Today, these associations are the governing bodies for local Otelos – with the Otelo Charter serving as a networking element. The Charter outlines our cultural ethic of innovation and formulates the fund­amental perspective of all Otelo venues. Today, the associations meet twice a year as a network and participate in activities involving various Otelo venues, such as festivals.

By the end of 2014, there were twenty-six Otelo nodes in eleven locations in Austria and Germany. Otelos are places where people can delve into all sorts of arts and crafts, electronics, projects and alternative educational approaches. They are places where people play and dance together, produce free media, design new forms of work, and pursue countless other passions. All of the ideas and projects developed in the Otelos are made available under a Creative Commons license or through workshops or various forms of documentation. This is in keeping with the motto, Knowledge is a commons!

In a few years, the term “Otelo” could be defined like this in the dictionary:

ōtelō, adjective: Welcoming; being part of a diverse, open community; invited to join in actively; keen to experiment; free, touched, inspired and alive; having found one’s place.

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

Martin Hollinetz (Germany) is a social pedagogue, vocational educator and regional developer. An Ashoka Fellow since 2013, he is a lecturer at the University of Art and Design Linz and was elected Austrian of the Year in the field of creative industries in 2013.

Hannelore Hollinetz (Germany) is a musician and educator. She works as an actress, project developer and facilitator for projects for children and youths, and is a cofounder, with Martin Hollinetz, of the Otelo network and Otelo eGen.

Photo by Robert Lender

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The maps serve many purposes at once. They help amass new groups of commoners by giving them shared digital platforms. As the maps become dense with user-contributed information, they show the growth of horizontal, participatory power, especially in reclaiming rights to manage shared resources. These resources include everything from valuable urban spaces and lakes to fruit orchards accessible to anyone, environmental projects and hackerspaces. The many maps depicting commons and people-centered economic projects tell the story of communities rejecting the status quo, reconnecting with the places they inhabit, and creating a renaissance through new relationships.

Below, we describe some of the more notable projects that map commons. (A complete list of maps and weblinks is included below.)

A significant number of mapping projects focus on urban commons. Mapping The Commons(.net), founded in 2010, uses an open-workshop process to ask people to identify important common assets in their cities. Developed by principal investigator Pablo de Soto in conjunction with local research fellows, the Mapping the Commons workshop methodology has been used in Athens, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Quito and Grande Vittoria. Workshop participants describe their relationship to each city’s commons and name the unique natural resources, cultural treasures, public spaces, digital commons and social actions that matter to them. Short videos are then produced and overlaid on an online map of the city. De Soto’s paper, “Mapping the Urban Commons: A Parametric & Audiovisual Method,” received the Elinor Ostrom award in 2013 in the category of “Conceptual Approaches on the Commons.”

Italians are forging some of the most innovative projects. World of Commons is a map that identifies forms of collective governance that constitute “best practices” for a variety of resources such as housing, public space, pastures, forests, and lands that have been treated as common property since medieval times. The project was created by LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons in Rome, which itself is a collaboration between Labsus (Laboratory for Subsidiarity) and LUISS Guido Carli Department of Political Science. LabGov is attempting to develop experts on commons govern­ance and new institutional forms. To promote its ideas, LabGov offers a series of educational workshops in partnership with the cities of Rome, Bologna, Taranto, and the province of Mantua. The Bologna Lab has been particularly focused on developing new types of collaborative governance for urban commons. It has mounted a campaign to bring the principle of “horizontal subsidiarity” to Italian cities as a way to give citizens a constitutional right to participate directly in all levels of government.

Another mapping project in Italy is Mapping the Commons(.org) – unrelated to the Pablo de Soto venture of the same name. The mapping initiative was part of the initial unMonastery project launched in Matera in early 2014. The unMonastery is a social commune that is trying to help communities suffering from unemployment, empty buildings and a lack of social services.¹ The project engages skilled people and local citizens in a collaborative process to develop innovative solutions. Mapping the region’s cultural assets, local traditions, knowledge and stories are used to assist this process.

The Great Lakes Commons Map is unique in its focus on a bioregional ecosystem. The map was launched in May 2012 by Paul Baines, a teacher in Toronto, during a multicity educational tour organized by the Council of Canadians, an activist group that focuses on water as a commons. The Great Lakes Commons is a collaborative effort among many groups – including the Council of Canadians, On The Commons, indigenous peoples, municipalities, and urban and rural citizens – to create effective stewardship and governance of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Commons Map invites people to tell their own stories of personal experience and community healing and environmental harm at various locations around the lakes. The map includes lively videos and narratives as well as map layers that identify the locations of First Nations, pipelines and bottled water permits as well as supporters of the Great Lakes Commons Charter. The map is itself a commons in several respects: its stories and data come from people who love the Great Lakes, the map is shareable under a Creative Commons license, and the map platform is powered by Ushahidi, an open-source crisis mapping platform.

The P2PValue project maps a wide variety of digital projects created through Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), which is a form of online social collaboration among large numbers of people in producing valuable information and physical products. P2PValue was created by a consortium of six academic partners to support the creation of public policies that benefit the commons.² P2PValue has identified over 300 CBPP projects from which it has identified best practices and favorable conditions for horizontal collaborative creations. Because digital commons as artifacts of cyberspace cannot be mapped geographically, P2PValue’s projects are listed in a searchable directory. The project is open to public contributions, and all project data and source code are freely available.

Some mapping projects focus on resources and organizational forms in the “new economy” and solidarity economy. Shareable and its global Sharing Cities Network have hosted dozens of “mapjams” in 2013 and 2014 to bring together urban commoners to compile notable sharing projects. The mapjams produced more than seventy urban maps that identify local coops, commons, public resources, and sharing-oriented platforms and organizations. Shareable cofounder Neal Gorenflo says, “Taking stock of your resources is frequently a precursor to action. Such maps indicate an intention, change the mindset of participants, and are a practical organizing tool.”

The focus of Vivir Bien’s mapping project is the solidarity economy and a variety of noncapitalist, not-for-profit initiatives and organizations. Founded in Vienna in 2010 by the Critical and Solidarity University (KriSU), the Vivir Bien mapping project has a European focus. The project website is Creative Commons licensed and utilizes OpenStreetMap.

The explosion of new mapping projects is itself creating new challenges that are currently being addressed. One of the most remarkable is surely TransforMap, which emerged in early 2014 from a collaboration of programmers and various people developing alternatives to the prevailing economic model in Germany and Austria. They concluded that all the maps being created need a common digital space. So they began working on an open taxonomy based on the criteria of human needs, which can be used globally. The global mapping process is guided by the motto: “There are many alternatives. We make them visible.” TransforMap is intended to make it just as easy for people to locate the closest place for sharing, exchanging, or giving things away in their own neighborhood as it is to find the nearest supermarket. Standardizing the datasets – a mid-term goal – will make it possible to amalgamate data from various existing maps into a single, open and free map, most of which will be made available on OpenStreetMap.

CommonsScope is a project of CommonSpark, a Texas-based nonprofit. CommonsScope features several collections of maps and visualizations about commons and common-pool resources. The website is a portal to several hundred commons-related maps including ones focused on food, community land trusts, social movements, public assets, indigenous cultures and sharing cities. Some of the more notable maps of specialized concerns include FallingFruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forageable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trust directory maps. CommonsScope also features in-depth profiles for existing commons projects. The TransforMap initiative and the P2P Foundation also steward large collections of commons and new economy maps.

Thanks to many enterprising cartographers, a growing universe of commons and new economy maps is helping people see and reclaim all sorts of resources that have been systematically destroyed by colonial and capitalist cultures. The maps are also helping people create new forms of community self-governance and increase awareness of commons stewardship. Taken together, these maps tell the big story of this historic moment – how system-change originating from the grassroots is radically altering civilization from one that exalts private wealth to one where wealth is shared. The maps are far-seeing tools that empower us with the means to accelerate the emergence of a just and thriving world.

Ellen Friedman (USA) is project lead and founder at CommonSpark. Her work as an activist and professional counselor focuses on individual and collective wellness and liberation.

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

Photo by rvacapinta

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Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create value. This included open-source software, all the open X movements inspired by open source, Creative Commons, the resurgence of an economy based on solidarity, the rise of carsharing, bikesharing, coworking, cohousing, open government, participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, hackerspaces, and more. We were in the midst of a sharing transformation.

Soon, however, money began to pour into a handful of these tech start-ups, most notably Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. The media quickly shifted its attention to them, and they became synonymous with the sharing economy. However, as the money rolled in, the communitarian element rolled out. Exploiting peer providers, purposely breaking regulations, strong-arming local governments, and unethical competitive tactics became the norm. The very thing that earned these start-ups traction in the first place — how they recast relationships between strangers in radically constructive terms — was sacrificed to growth. Instead, they became a particularly aggressive extension of business as usual.

Despite this, the real sharing economy did not disappear. We at Shareable helped catalyse two related movements to help draw resources to this real sharing economy. In 2011, we hosted Share San Francisco, the first event framing cities as platforms for sharing. The city of San Francisco incorporated our thinking into their Sharing Economy Working Group, which then inspired a former social justice activist and human rights lawyer, Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, to launch Sharing Cities Seoul in 2012. Sharing City Seoul’s comprehensive package of regulations and programmes supported a localized version of the sharing economy where the commons, government, and market work together to promote sharing and the common good. Many cities have followed suit, including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Lisbon, Warsaw, five cities in Japan, and at least six other cities in South Korea. Last year, Mayor Park won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for his sharing cities work.

In late 2014, we published a feature story by Nathan Schneider, “Owning is the New Sharing,” which reported on an emerging trend — tech start-ups organizing themselves as cooperatives. This, together with a conference about platform cooperatives, proved the stimulus for a new movement. One of the cornerstone examples of this movement is Stocksy United, a growing online stock photo marketplace where the photographers own and control the business. In other words, Stocksy is a 21st-century worker cooperative. Another example is Fairmondo, a German eBay-like site for ethical products owned and controlled by sellers. It’s expanding by recruiting cooperatives in other countries to a federation of cooperatives that, together, will maintain local control of each country’s market through a single technology platform. Fairmondo exemplifies an approach to impact that philanthropists ignore because, too often, they are as obsessed with scale as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist and don’t see the virtue of impact through replication instead.

In this regard, philanthropists today should follow the instructive example of Edward Filene. Filene played a leading role in developing an institution that allowed ordinary people to build their own wealth — credit unions, a high-impact model that could be and has been replicated. Philanthropists should use their resources to help do the same across a whole range of new institutions including sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and much more. This will help ordinary people build and access wealth, reduce resource consumption, and reweave the social fabric. Now, that’s what I’d call a real sharing economy.

This piece was originally published on Alliance Magazine.

Photo by Avariel Falcon

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Hacker communities are no different. From the social and techno justice conglomerate known as Anonymous to the state-sponsored espionage groups, to the ransom-ware syndicates, hackers exhibit a broad range of ethics.

But combine the hacker ethic with the ideal of the commons and it is easy to envision a creating society. Technic, aka Technologia Incognita, is such a society.  Their collective embraces a hacker ethic complementary to the emerging commons ideal.

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Extracted from: http://techinc.nl/node/1

About Techinc

Technologia Incognita is a hackerspace in Amsterdam.

We are a collective of people who creates a space where people can meet each other, exchange ideas, learn learn, work and have fun together, we try to run and organise this space as a collective from a DIY-perspective.

Our group at the moment consists mostly of IT profesionals, freelancers, consultants, artists, students with some overlap other fields aswell. “Hacking” for us is a passion, a hobby and a dream. Our current interests seem to focus on computer hard-&software, fabrics&clothing, electronics, security&privacy, hacktivism, physical production such as 3d-printing and DIY in general. Most projects get documented on our here: Projects Wikipage

We have a vereniging as a legal body with a small board of around 7 members who handle the regular bureaucracy and around 80-90 members who organise, run and pay for the space in general.

Extracted from: http://techinc.nl/

A hackerspace is a place where people with a technically creative spirit gather to work on projects or to talk. During this open day, it is possible to see some examples of hacking projects and see what happens in a hackerspace.

Some examples of activities are:
* Learning how websites, networks and other computer-based systems can be vulnerable to attackers and what can be done about this.
* Programming electronics and microcontrollers like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Hackers can show you how these can be used to build CNC milling, laser cutters, 3D printers, home automation, clocks, pick&place machines or autonomous robots.
* The use of 3D printers, for example to develop a jaw prosthesis, keys to copied from a picture, or a broken part to replace a household appliance.
* Discuss the use of personal data by companies or the government and the effects of this on our privacy and other aspects of society.
* There are also different presentations in hackerspaces of individual projects carried out in there.

Hackers find ethics an important subject, and distinguish themselves from cyber criminals by a strong sense of ethical behavior. During the open-hackerspaces-day it will be explained how hackers contribute to a better world by looking with fresh eyes to society, technology and organizations, and how they share their knowledge with the community. Additionally hackerspaces are also places where people are welcome who just make beautiful things and can find common space, tools, like-minded and can find inspiration. This can be in many forms from jigsaws to artisan smiths, to biohacking, or to molecular cooking.

Photo by Jaime_GC

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Originally published in Transrural Initiatives – a collaborative magazine on the rural world – and republished in Bastamag – an independent media site that focuses on social and environmental issues – the realities this interview explores are a good example of what we can accomplish when we work together – and how much fun we can have in the process! The article was translated by Travis Shearer and edited by Jane Loes Lipton.

“As artists, engineers, researchers, hackers and farmers we all asked ourselves how digital technologies could be merged with nature, heritage and agriculture. Our urban hackerspaces, including their philosophy and practices, can be seamlessly transposed onto rural areas.”

They open up areas struck by digital exclusion. They develop autonomous Internet networks in mountainous areas, install organic solar panels and let local Internet radio emerge. They can even transform abandoned water troughs into eco-jacuzzis. “Hackerspaces,” user-friendly spaces where technological tools are crafted, are spreading throughout the rural environment. Interview with Philippe Langlois, one of the founding members of the first French hackerspace.

Could you define what hackerspaces are?

Philippe Langlois: A hackerspace is a physical, autonomous place where people gather around tech-related projects. We often hear about “the evil computer pirates” in the media, but hackerspaces have nothing to do with any of that: we’re simply people who reclaim technology in a cheerful, independent and creative way. The goal is to create tools that can be reappropriated and replicated by everyone, freely distributed, and which can be modified and improved upon.

Hackerspaces originated in Germany in the 1990s, but didn’t truly develop until 2005. Since then, more than 500 have appeared throughout the world, bringing together nearly 40,000 people. These are people who originally came from the world of open source and free software ¹ and transposed their methods onto the physical world, while making their technological know-how accessible.

What kind of projects do you work on? How do they fit into your broader relationship with technology?

There are projects dealing with energy self-sufficiency, collaborative mapping and digital art, as well as local plastic recycling or even site cleanup. Our relationship with technology revolves around several ideas, the first of which is to enjoy the positive process of creation. The second one is the belief that what we create shouldn’t only benefit a restricted group of people, but rather the whole of society. Finally, we don’t want to embark on overly conceptual projects: we are, above all, about doing things. The ethics that can be found in hackerspaces are based on practice, tinkering, the right to be wrong, and an all-encompassing, non-dogmatic approach.

How did hackerspaces end up in rural areas?

First of all, because it’s hard to maintain such places in the city: it’s expensive, and one needs big and stable spaces to create in. In 2010, there were some one-off events in hackerspaces (see below) like Péone in the Alpes-Maritimes, for instance. The goal, among others, was to find out whether we could create a 100% autonomous space out of nothing, in a totally natural setting. Several of these ephemeral rural gatherings ended up leading to the creation of permanent sites – “hackerlands”. There are dozens of them in France, such as the Vallé à Conques project (in Cher) or ZAP1 in Allier.

As artists, engineers, researchers, hackers and farmers we all asked ourselves how digital technologies could be merged with nature, heritage and agriculture. Our urban hackerspaces, including their philosophy and practices, can be seamlessly transposed onto rural areas. We realized that many people living in the countryside either already fiddle with digital technology, or came from that culture in the first place.

How do these hackerspaces integrate on a local level? What can they contribute to rural areas?

Rural towns often suffer abuses motivated by engineering consultancies and large corporations’ financial interests. Certain hackerlands arise as an alternative to these structures, turning into local, non-profit consultants of sorts. They meet some of the rural area’s needs – particularly digital de-isolation – by creating independent Internet networks that work in mountainous or isolated areas, setting up local, democratic servers, regional Internet radios, etc. Many of these hackerlands work on agricultural or energetic practices. They’re open spaces, where one is welcomed with no prejudice, in the spirit of working together. Some of them create reproducible, self-building modules, organic solar panels, automated greenhouses. Even jacuzzis from abandoned water troughs! Sometimes there are more temporary initiatives like experiments in agroforestry, for which sensors are built that analyse fungal activity around trees. In short, we could define these places as open, local research labs.

“A Pado loup,” an ephemeral hackerspace amidst the mountains.

Mathilde Leriche: “We want to encourage people to take action, to do things that make them more self-sufficient…A Pado Loup’s main goal was the development and democratisation of technological know-how in a rural setting”, explains Ursula Gastfall, one of the organisers of this self-managed festival, which took place for the first time from the 12th to the 22nd of August 2012, in Breuil (Alpes-Maritimes). At more than 1,500 metres above sea level, around a hundred people from various origins (Spain, Brittany, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Canada…) gathered to set up this rural, ephemeral hackerspace, after a call for proposals was broadcasted by the urban hackerspace “/tmp/lab/” in Vitry-sur-Seine (in the department of Val-de-Marne).

In the hamlet of Pado, near the village of Beuil, festival-goers swapped and discussed amidst artistic performances and workshops on electronics and experimental ecology, inspirited by the “Do It Yourself” culture. On the event’s program: building wind turbines, solar ovens and 3D printers, making free software and doing research on fermentation, as well as concerts and lighting and analog photography laboratories…all of this, right in the heart of the Alpine mountains.

“If we take a look at the etymology of the word ‘hacker’, it refers to hacking wood”, comments Ursula Gastfall. “Being self-sufficient means looking for practical solutions that meet our needs in a specific context”. In Pado, there is no water or electricity. Festival-goers put together a rain-water collection system that filtered the water before consumption, and set up solar panels – wired to batteries – to supply the electricity to the electronic equipment used for the event. “I hope that A Pado Loup will have offspring”, wishes Ursula Gastfall, “and that others will be motivated to organize events on different kinds of terrains, a challenge that will bring out the creativity and inventiveness in everyone involved”.

^{1. Open source designates a software development practice whereby the basic code is accessible (but not necessarily free) and therefore transformable. The free software movement promotes principles such as free access to information, mutualisation or keeping things free (of charge).back}

Proposals collected by Mickaël Correia – Transrural Initiatives

Image sources

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