In the 20 years since its inception, open source has turned out to be the most successful model for building software. The world today runs on open-source software (OSS). An ecosystem has been created around OSS. Businesses and software builders use OSS directly or indirectly, while others offer services and products based on OSS.

OSS is perceived as being free, fair and/or ethical. This perception, however, may not be entirely true. That may be counter-intuitive, but it’s at the heart of the debate around OSS. As OSS is growing up, it’s becoming more successful, more complex, and ubiquitous. It seems we are entering a new phase for OSS, and it’s not without growing pains.

Commercial OSS in the cloud

The four essential freedoms are a cornerstone of OSS. They refer to what users can do with the software, but they tell us nothing about the economic cost, or benefit, related to the software. OSS is free as in speech, but not free as in beer. Someone has to build the software, and then someone has to maintain, run, and manage it.

As far as the perception of OSS being fair or ethical goes: it’s just that – a perception. The perception stems from the OSS community ethos, but in reality, the OSS freedoms are at odds with notions of fair or ethical use. Anyone can contribute as much or as little as they please to OSS. Anyone can use OSS for any purpose, regardless of contribution.

This has led to where we are today. Cloud vendors like AWS, Google or Microsoft, have built their infrastructure based on OSS. Each of them also contributes to OSS in many ways, including code and outreach for existing OSS projects, as well as establishing new OSS projects. But use of, or contribution to, each OSS project is not really accounted for.

Recently, the Apache Software Foundation, one of the key OSS institutions, celebrated its 20th anniversary. The ASF claims the value of the software under its auspices is around $20 Billion, by its own estimates. Everyone is entitled to use the software for free, and many do. But the ones who create this value are the ones who contribute to OSS, be it in code or in other ways.

As analyses have shown, many OSS contributors do this because they are intrinsically motivated: the software is interesting to them, they need it, or they feel good about their contribution. In that respect, they are not much different from vendors that have chosen to build OSS products. Those vendors have invested in their OSS, and their ROI depends on it.

Which brings us to cloud vendors. As many pundits note, cloud vendors operate on a whole different plane. If commercial OSS vendors are about taking innovation from 0 to 1, cloud vendors are about taking it from 1 to n. This brings value in and by itself. Cloud vendors also release OSS projects of their own, and contribute to existing ones. Their strategies, however, differ, and this is where things get complicated.

AWS is the leader in the cloud market. The strategy AWS has adopted with regards to OSS, however, has exposed it to criticism. Recently, an independent data-driven analysis was done on GitHub, where OSS code lives. The analysis showed that in terms of code, AWS does not seem to be contributing much to the development of the OSS products it offers as a service.

It’s understandable why vendors building those products are looking to tweak their licenses to disallow AWS from running their software as a service. It’s also understandable why the OSI, which has control over OSS licenses, is pushing back: by introducing those tweaks, the software is no longer OSS.

If this was just a clash of commercial interests, we might be getting our pop corn to watch. But for something with such high value to society at large as OSS, the ramifications are important. Is there a way everyone involved can get a fair share of the profit, and keep contributing to OSS? Let’s hear what 2 CEOs from vendors who build OSS, and work with AWS, have to say.

The co-opetition view: one big act vs. many small ones

Dor Laor is the founder and CEO of ScyllaDB, an OSS vendor with an interesting story. ScyllaDB was built on a contentious premise, as it is a re-implementation of another OSS database: Apache Cassandra. Laor has shared thoughts on OSS license changes, as well as Amazon’s latest move to offer Cassandra as a managed service on AWS cloud.

Our discussion started touching upon ScyllaDB’s latest features. According to Laor, these features (most prominently lightweight transactions) do not just bring parity with Cassandra, but go one step further. Laor expanded on the technical aspects of ScyllaDB’s solution. As these seemed technically sound, yet conceptually simple, the discussion moved to a broader topic.

Laor claimed none of ScyllaDB’s closest matches, namely Apache Cassandra and AWS DynamoDB, have such features. When asked why he thinks that is, given the nature of those features, Laor offered 2 answers.

For Cassandra, he mentioned that for the last few years its former main contributor, namely DataStax, has taken a step back. Naturally, this has stalled Cassandra’s development considerably. As for AWS, Laor noted that AWS has the tendency to offer products that are good enough, but not necessarily the best in their league.

As ScyllaDB is also available on AWS, and Laor was present at AWS’s main event, re:Invent, in 2019, he offered a metaphor to explain this. Laor said there were a number of stages set up for various acts in the re:Invent after party, and he found all of them mediocre. Laor went on to add that he sees that as a metaphor for AWS’ philosophy of going wide, rather than deep in its undertakings. This is a point shared in other OSS vendor strategies, too.

But ScyllaDB went beyond that, to do something no other OSS vendor we know of has done before: offer a compatibility layer for one of AWS’ products, namely DynamoDB. ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB API support will be officially available soon, and it will enable DynamoDB users to migrate to ScyllaDB. Laor said there is a waiting list for this.

This is technically feasible, and legally permissible. Unless things change, there are no restrictions on using APIs, as per the famous Oracle vs. Google case verdict. While some of AWS’ own people questioned this move, Laor claimed users are better off using ScyllaDB. In turn, this opens up some interesting questions. What about ethics, and contribution?

Building a new implementation of an existing API seems cleaner than using someone else’s implementation, but it still means benefiting from a userbase others built. Laor acknowledged that, as well as the fact that ScyllaDB leverages contributions from Amazon, Cassandra, and DataStax. He also pointed out that this spurs innovation and benefits users, and measuring contribution is very hard.

ScyllaDB has an open core strategy. Some features are proprietary, while the OSS core is licensed under AGPL, which Laor said AWS avoids. So far this has worked in deterring AWS from offering ScyllaDB as a service, although it could also be that ScyllaDB has not reached critical mass yet. In any case, as Laor said, these things change.

The collaboration view: balancing OSS makers and takers

Most OSS products fall under one of two categories. Many products are largely driven by a single vendor, whose employees contribute most of the related effort and drive its directions. Other products leverage contributions that cross-cut organizations who employ the contributors; often, OSS work is the main activity for such contributors.

But there is an OSS product in which the vendor commercializing it only contributes 5% of its code while still being the largest contributor. The product is commercially successful, has a community-driven decision making process, and is a distinguished AWS partner, too. And these are not the only reasons why Acquia, the vendor commercializing the Drupal CMS, and Dries Buytaert, its founder, stand out.

Recently, Buytaert shared his thoughts on balancing OSS makers and takers in an elaborate blog post. In our discussion, Buytaert confessed it took him a couple of weeks to put his post together. This is understandable, considering how many aspects of OSS it touches upon.

Drupal started in 2000, while Acquia was founded in 2007. As Buytaert highlighted, Acquia and the Drupal community have a unique relationship, which is formally documented in a charter. The community includes about 80.000 contributors, while Aquia employs about 1.000 people.

Yet, Drupal’s governance is not with Acquia. The community sets Drupal’s roadmap, and elects people in leadership roles. People choose to contribute to areas that matter most to them, and Acquia does this, too. Buytaert said that even when there is a decision Acquia does not agree with, the decision is carried through, if there is substantial backing for it.

Buytaert builds on the notion of OSS as part of the Commons, introducing an important distinction. For end users, OSS projects are public goods; the shared resource is the software. But for OSS companies, OSS projects are common goods; the shared resource is the (potential) customer. Makers invest heavily in the software, takers are mostly interested in customers.

Buytaert, leveraging Elinor Ostrom’s work in addition to his own experience, seems to have gotten to the heart of the issue. Research shows that when the Commons are left unchecked, without governance or rules for contribution, they collapse: shared resources are either engulfed or exhausted.

Organizations like the ASF and the OSI have done a good job in making OSS successful. But now that OSS is successful, without a mechanism for fair reward in place, we have no reason to believe OSS will not have the fate of Commons that preceded it. This is why we wondered whether the OSI should perhaps reconsider. Apparently, we are not the only ones, and the OSI seems to be listening.

Ethical software

First off, there seems to be an ongoing debate within the OSI itself as to what should constitute an OSS license today. This goes to show that what worked 20 years ago is not necessarily what works today. In addition, more and more people seem to be realizing the OSS conundrum, and are sharing ideas to move forward. Buytaert, on his part, offers 3 concrete proposals.

One, don’t just appeal to organizations’ self-interest, but also to their fairness principles. Two, encourage end users to offer selective benefits to Makers. Three, experiment with new licenses. Those points were also backed by Laor, who prompted users to consciously vet their OSS providers for fairness, and pointed to precedents like the Open Invention Network.

One thing is clear: AWS should not be excluded, it’s a vital part of the OSS ecosystem. The fact that this is a complex ecosystem with many actors that need to strike a balance is something many people agree on. This includes Buytaert, Laor, and AWS VP/Distinguished Engineer Matthew Wilson, a self-proclaimed “OSS romantic”, to name but a few.

Buytaert also agreed with Laor that while AWS is a good partner to have, if it decided to start offering ScyllaDB or Drupal as a managed service on its own, there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Buytaert was also clear on something else: making OSS sustainable may require a break with OSS as we know it. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

This also seems to be the gist of Wilson’s position as stated in a number of Twitter threads: this is how OSS works. If you are not happy with it, do it differently – just don’t call it OSS. This is a fair point, made by others, too. Recently Stephen Walli, principal program manager on the Azure engineering team at Microsoft and an OSS veteran, shared his ideas on Software Freedom in a Post Open Source World.

Walli went through the history of OSS, the four essential freedoms, and the ways and reasons people challenge how OSS works. Walli’s message is along similar lines: “I am happy for people to challenge the ideas that define our software collaborations and culture of outbound sharing. But I want them to be bold. If you want to define a new movement then do so.”

Some people call it Commercial OSS, others Cloud Native OSS. Either way, it’s not just commercial interests that question how OSS works today. It’s also people concerned about the ethical implications of OSS. Although it could be argued that fairness touches upon ethics too, Coraline Ada Ehmke and the Ethical Source Movement (ESM) have a somewhat different angle.

Ehmke, who founded the ESM, is a software engineer, a public speaker, and has been an active OSS participant since the early 2000s. Ehmke, who previously stated that “OSI and FSF are not the real arbiters of what is Open Source and what is Free Software” is now running for the board of directors of the OSI, and the OSI’s VP seems open to engaging with her. The ESM states:

“Today, the same OSS that enriches the commons and powers innovation also plays a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racist policing, the deployment of cruel and inhumane weapons, and other human rights abuses all over the world.

We want to do something about this misuse of our software. But as developers we don’t seem to have any recourse, no way to prevent our work from being used to harm others. We want to change that”.

Fair software

The definition of Ethical Software breaks with the four essential freedoms of OSS, creating licenses such as the Hippocratic or the Atmosphere Licenses. This raises questions, including how to enforce such licenses. Though a definite answer is not readily available, for the time being the thinking seems to be that fear of exposure of illegal use should work on a first level. People seem sympathetic to the notion.

Ethical software licenses are not the only OSS variant around, however. There is also the Fair Source License, allowing users to view, download, execute, and modify code free of charge. Up to a certain number of users from an organization can use the code for free, too. After an organization hits that user limit, it will start paying a licensing fee determined by the software publisher.

Fair Source was created by Sourcegraph and drafted by Heather Meeker, a prominent OSS lawyer who also drafted the Commons Clause for RedisLabs. Fair Source got featured on Wired, and received praise from GitLab, but it does not look like it got much traction. The reason is probably that as things stand, Fair Source is also not an OSS compatible license.

This all seems to be pointing somewhere: perhaps we’ve reached the limits of what OSS in its current form can do. People are realizing it, and questioning the status quo. Whether that will lead somewhere, remains to be seen. But some first steps are taken, and the potential seems to be there. OSS was a bold step in its time, too, and its pioneers paved the way.

To wrap up, let us revisit the “quantifying OSS contribution is hard, and it’s not only about code” argument. This is true beyond the shadow of a doubt. But before dismissing quantification as mission impossible, we should consider a few things.

Commercial OSS vendors are building platforms to power today’s data-driven economy. As a 3rd party analysis on GitHub data shows, they -expectedly- seem to be key contributors to their own codebases. While there may be communities of practice built around the products, in most cases we would assume vendors do much of the non-code work too – promotion, support etc.

OSS vendors have people who contribute to these tasks in their payrolls. Presumably, these people leave the digital footprint of their work on all sorts of systems. From OSS code repositories to issue trackers, HR, project management tools and spreadsheets, to social media. Nobody should be more motivated or better positioned to develop a holistic, data-driven model for OSS contribution, than commercial OSS vendors.

Doing this would make their claims much more grounded. To be entirely fair, commercial OSS vendors should also apply this to external contributions, be it from individuals or from organizations such as cloud vendors. And to back claims about putting OSS sustainability and the common good first, changing their status to B Corporation to reflect that might help, too.

To get over the OSS midlife crisis, and make software great again, leadership is paramount. There is no doubt the amount of legal, social, software, and data engineering needed to evolve OSS is staggering. But OSS is so important, that it would be irresponsible to shy away from it. Some OSS leaders are showing the way. Opinions may vary, but the issue is being acknowledged. Who would not want to have ethical, fair, open-source software available on demand in the cloud?

This is a chance for everyone to put their data to good use. Amazon, as well as commercial OSS vendors, are leaders, each in their own way. They have great power, which comes with great responsibility. The way other cloud vendors deal with OSS vendors may not be perfect, but it’s a start. We’d like to see that taken to the next level, and involving the entire industry.

Coming up with a way to fix commercial OSS by measuring and rewarding contribution is something that will not just benefit vendors, but the world at large. So if not them, who? If not now, when?

Originally published on Linked Data Orchestration under CC BY-SA 4.0

The post Make software great again: can open source be ethical and fair? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Innovation is an obsession in our current society. We are enamored with technological innovations, we celebrate innovators. We want to be them. And yet when you look closely at the various crises and risks around the world, it becomes clear that the human propensity for innovation is again and again repeatedly at the heart of our collective crises.

Innovation in broad terms is responsible for the decline of critical ecosystems, the production of an unsafe climate, and an unprecedented level of risk that human beings face today. Nuclear weapons, which the US used against Japan to bring it to its knees and end the war, led to the Pandora’s box of weapons proliferation. Now US foreign policy is obsessed with the problem, involving North Korea, Iran, and the detente with Russia. The use of fossil fuels and the combustion engine, brought us among other things motorized vehicles, of course transformed our ability to travel. At the same time it is fundamentally complicit to air pollution in cities and carbon emissions, and of course automobile traffic!

Do not get me wrong I am actually a technological optimist! But my optimism does not come from thinking about the next great product, the next innovation. It comes from thinking about how as human beings we can change our consciousness, culture, worldview, our orientation towards how we interact with the world. So at the heart of innovation is a fundamental contradiction that as human beings we are being fundamentally confronted with today. Innovation and our capacity to transform the world around us is fundamental to our prosperity, our capacity to communicate with each other, indeed now it has become fundamental to the transformation of human knowledge. And at the same time it is brought an unprecedented scale of crises, risk and unintended consequences.

The solution is not to disown innovation, pretend that the 20th century didn’t happen. The solution as well is not to deny that innovation has a shadow — that it has contradictions. The solution is to engage with this contradiction actively and inquire into its transformation, the possibility of an integration, of a transcendent position that can hold the complexity of the contradictions we experience today. For thinking about our future, our shadow is our friend.

This is what I hope to develop in this talk. To do this we need a method like Causal Layered Analysis to help us go down the rabbit hole from symptoms to systems to epistemology and to core metaphors that help us understand our human predicament. So let’s begin.

Symptoms

The most basic symptoms that we see today are what most concerns us. A recent report highlighted the decline in insect numbers around the world. We see the collapse of bee colonies in many parts of the world. There is now a Great Pacific Garbage Patch that swirls around in the ocean, with the plastic slowly breaking down and filtering into every ocean-based ecosystem. And most reports on climate change are now saying that 1.5° to 2° warming is a conservative estimate, and when we look at the actual implications of 2° to 3° warming they are profound and disturbing. There are otherwise sane people talking about civilizational collapse. But, if we look at a deeper level, however, we begin to see that these are all symptoms of a system that ‘intentionally’ produces this as an outcome.

Systems

For example economies today are interlinked in a grand drama of industry, innovation and competition. This industrial innovation system is supported by every major player that is part of it. In the US this is largely funneled through the defense industries, which act as a subsidy for commercial applications. In Japan they have the ministry of industry trade and innovation. The EU has its own system. The field of foresight actually got its start supporting the industrial innovation system. I’ve call this the STIF model. Science technology and innovation foresight. Through futures research, research institutes identify the growth industries, technologies and opportunities, which helps governments to prioritize research areas, then the money funnels through. The system has been working for well over 70 years, at least since the 1950s. As R&D gets funded, the prototypes move into commercial application, driving industrial transformation. This has basically been the formula for the dramatic technological revolution that we have experienced over the last 70 years.

And yet, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck argued, the same system has produced risk at a grand scale — he defined this as the “global risk society”. Rather than some kind of fluky happenstance production of risk — his argument is that it is actually a systematic production of risk. And if we look at the complicity of this system in our most pressing challenges today, this becomes very clear. Today we see new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which herald an age of robots-as-servants. But it also has brought us into the potential death spiral of autonomous military robotics. We have systematically designed our global economic system to produce risk.

This of course was coupled with the growth mindset coming out of the 1940s and 50s. As a bulwark against communism, the West adopted Keynesian economics, with its emphasis on economic growth. Of course this economic growth was to be built on the back of this technological revolution, productivity gains and more jobs. And so we not just designed a global economic system to produce risk, but also to produce an unsustainable trajectory of economic growth, given the carrying capacity of our ecological systems. Current estimates show we are well beyond 1.5 planets of carrying capacity. A recent report shows that our capacity for resource extraction far outstrips the earth’s long term carrying capacity. We now have an “earth overshoot day” dedicated to highlighting this. We now use one Earth’s worth of resources in 7 months. The other 5 months are “deficit” or “loan” months — it will need to be paid back. And can I just add that eco-futurists and ecological economists like Hazel Henderson, Herman Daly and Donella Meadows have been talking about this since the 1970s! For 50 years!

Then there is capitalism. Now I am not going to argue here that markets and competition are not needed. I believe markets and competition are fundamentally needed. When I choose a cell phone provider I want to have some choice, and I want one group to be competing against another to provide me with the best service. When I want to go down the street and buy some bread, I don’t want to be limited to one business, whether private, public or otherwise. I want some choice where I buy my bread. I’m gonna buy my bread from the people that are friendliest to me and whose bread is the best and the tastiest. So we’re not talking here about markets and competition. But I am no Milton Friedman.

In simple terms capitalism is a system of accumulating value — by shareholder to accumulate value. This hasn’t changed much in about 400 years of history. The Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, for example practiced this through a variety of methods. They were backed by their shareholders, their investors and they were tasked with bringing back / accumulating more value. The problem is having been removed from the source of where that value was coming from, terrible things can happen — the company takes land, kills, even enslaved people. We know this from the history of mercantile colonialism.

But the core capitalist logic has not changed much. So when you look at an operation like Facebook, we say okay Facebook is different. It’s connecting all these people, it’s making all kinds of things possible. But capitalism creates social externalities. In the process of accumulating value for shareholders, the company creates a problem somewhere else. So for example now we see a lawsuit against Facebook by content moderators, who are arguing that they experience severe psychological trauma for having to moderate disturbing Facebook content for hours on end — they have posttraumatic stress disorder. It’s like that scene out of the Mexican sci-fi film the Sleep Dealer. Technology has replaced human labor but it hasn’t replaced human exploitation.

And this is not to mention the way in which Facebook has driven social polarization. To be fair it’s not just Facebook but it’s a whole suite of social media platforms. But research that has come out recently essentially argues that the way in which content gets contained within filter bubbles, and the algorithms that govern the content that we see produces a web of self-referentiality — people are more and more exposed to the same or similar ideas reinforcing their thinking, indeed making their thinking more entrenched and extreme. And it’s not in their interest to give you content that’s going to contradict your worldview. Why would they? They just want you to spend more time in front of the screen so they can sell you more advertisements. If you get confused, experience cognitive dissonance and then have to work this out, that is not more advertisements for them. So we have Trump and we have Bolsonaro… and other countries where, the social externality of capitalist driven social media is social polarization. If you ask me this is a very high price to pay. So at a deeper level we have innovation and technology embedded in political economy.

Epistemology

But I want to take us one step deeper and explore something else. And this is that there’s been a fundamental disconnect in the way that innovation and technology have played out in the 20th and early 21st centuries, with respect to our understanding of ecological systems. It is a remarkable fact that in the West the systems literature only really emerged in the late 60s and 70s. Somehow in the madness of progress and modernity something profound was lost. There were presumptions about the distinction between man and nature. “Nature” is out there somewhere — “man” is here. I use the word MAN deliberately as this distinction emerged in a patriarchal era.

The fundamental premise here is that human beings are at the center of the world context. We can shape the nature to the will of the human. We can pour pesticides and fertilizers onto soils with abandon. We can divert water systems any way we want. We can operate as masters and controllers. Its humanity with a God complex! But in fact this worldview has fundamental blind spots. This is the same worldview that empowers a company like Monsanto to super-sell glyphosate to farmers as a way to kill weeds. The only problem is, the glyphosate also kills farmers. So in the US today there is a case in the upper courts where farmers are suing Monsanto for the effects of glyphosate. And it’s been implicated in colony collapse disorder. And what do farmers and bees have in common? Besides being very busy? They are both living systems. Glyphosate is both one of the key contenders as the culprit of colony collapse disorder, it is also a key contenders for a cause of cancer in humans.

Myth and Metaphor

This then brings me to the core premise of this talk — a fundamentally unprovable hypothesis, but to me it makes sense. I believe that hardwired into the human psyche is a technological bias. From our origins it was technology that became the success formula for our species. If wanted to defend ourself from lion, before technology we had our bare hands.

Some anthropologists argue that the physiological transformation of hominids was driven by the invention of cooking. By being able to cook raw food we were able to eat food quicker and digest faster — we were able to consume more calories. They argue that the evidence shows that the invention of cooking coincides with a rapid expansion in the size of the human brain, essentially that the capacity to absorb more nutrients through cooking was reflected physiologically. This might explain why cooking shows are so popular.

And this brings me to the wonderful image and metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. When the proto-human throws the bone into the air, it flies up and spins and becomes a space station. And we are projected hundreds of thousands of years into the future, to the year 2001 — (which for us has passed but those in the 1960s it was the future). The significance of this image cannot be understated. For me it is nothing less than the affirmation of who we are as technological beings. Humans don’t do technology — we are technology. But as we saw with the tragic unfolding in 2001 a Space Odyssey, the film itself, technology and innovation can have some unintended consequences. The artificial intelligence that ran the ship — Hal 9000 — went a little crazy.

And this brings me to the wonderful image and metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. When the proto-human throws the bone into the air, it flies up and spins and becomes a space station. And we are projected hundreds of thousands of years into the future, to the year 2001 — (which for us has passed but those in the 1960s it was the future). The significance of this image cannot be understated. For me it is nothing less than the affirmation of who we are as technological beings. Humans don’t do technology — we are technology. But as we saw with the tragic unfolding in 2001 a Space Odyssey, the film itself, technology and innovation can have some unintended consequences. The artificial intelligence that ran the ship — Hal 9000 — went a little crazy.

And so embedded in our dreamscape of who we are is also a nightmare. I believe films speak from the collective unconscious. It’s an idea from philosopher Susanne Langer. And I believe what the collective unconscious is saying is that at a certain level of awareness we know here is a fundamental contradiction, and this unease, this terror, expresses this feeling in our relationship to technology — indeed who we are as technological beings. Humanity’s disowned self is speaking to us through the medium of collective dreams and nightmares — film. And this gets reiterated in film after film after film. We see this in films like Terminator, in Ex Machina, in so many films.

Reconceptualizing

So now this is a very good place to come back to the core idea for the talk — that we have a problem with innovation. But that there are some solutions. And so I want to provide a few design principles that we might think about in terms of solving the problem of innovation — in the way that it “defutures” to use Tony Fry’s terminology — in its current manifestation, and how it might “refuture” in its next manifestation.

So innovation that refutures — that gives us a future rather than taking it away — this is anticipatory innovation. It is not the next cool gadget for the future. Because as I discussed the cool gadget of the future, whether it’s an iPhone or a plastic bottle or artificial intelligence or whatever, it is an expression of humanity’s ingenuity but also its shadow, it is contradiction embodied.

But innovations that that come from an an awareness of this contraction and which “refuture”, this is anticipatory innovation. It is not really a new idea. People like Bucky Fuller, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Hazel Henderson, many others articulated similar and profound sentiments decades ago.

So drawing from this conversation there are four design strategies for anticipatory innovation here:

• Piecemeal amelioration of symptoms
• Cosmo localization
• Understanding the web of life
• Owning our shadow as technological beings

Piecemeal amelioration

At the most basic level, at the level of symptoms, we need lots of projects and lots of new technologies. Let’s clean up the great Pacific Garbage Patch. We need renewable technologies, we need low carbon technologies. We need to sequester carbon as quickly as possible.

Cosmo localization

But at the level of political economy we have to do something completely different. Instead of designing and producing something in two different parts of the world, meant to compete with each other, proprietary and un-shareable, producing as many problems in the long-term as it solves, we need to mutualise the production of value for mutual sustainment. This is Cosmo localization (also known as “Design Global Manufacture Local“), a political economic vision shared by a number of people around the world.

The basic idea is that we are in the era of planetary challenges that have local manifestations. To solve local problems we need to enlist a globally distributed community which can pool knowledge, expertise and resources. In biological terms this is called “stigmergy” — whereby as a global community we build on each others work toward shared goals and outcomes. Thus a “planetary stigmergy” is the mutualization of value, designs, knowledge and strategy at a globally coordinated level. Cosmo-localism entails developing such planetary contributory systems, meaning that for any one problem or challenge, local or distributed, people contribute to the problem solving from everywhere.

Michel Bauwens argues that “cosmo-localization is a new paradigm for the production and distribution of value that combines the universal sharing of knowledge (cosmo), but the ‘subsidiarity’ of production as close as possible to the place of need (‘local’), essentially through distributed local manufacturing and voluntary mutualization. The general idea is not to impede technological progress though intellectual property, in an era of climate change where we cannot afford the 20-year lag in innovation due to patents; and to radically diminish the physical cost of transport through local production. Cosmo-localization is based on the belief that the mutualization of provisioning systems can radically diminish the human footprint on natural resources, which need to be preserved for future generations and all beings of the planet.”

Cosmo-localization describes the process of bringing together our globally distributed knowledge and design commons with the high-to-low tech capacity for localized production. It is based on the ethical premise, drawing from cosmopolitanism, that people and communities should be universally empowered with the heritage of human ingenuity that allow them/us to more effectively create livelihoods and solve problems in their local environments, and that, reciprocally, local production and innovation should support the wellbeing of our planetary commons.

Likewise, Vasilis Kostakis and Andreas Roos argue “what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local, and ideally shared. Design global, manufacture local (DGML) demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation. Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes application that is small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled.”

And thus Cosmo-localization is a conscious twining of a consequentialist cosmopolitan ethics with technology. It takes the view that technology is not value neutral, but rather proscribed by discourse, culture and worldview. The same cultural milieu that gave us “disruptive innovation” is one that is premised on individualism, disrupt or be disrupted, and lacks a concern for the social implications and applications for technology — and reflects an unconscious stance toward technology, as something “out there” rather than as an integral part of what human beings are.

This twining of a planetary ethics, with the emerging potential of open source design and the new localized production technologies being born augurs a transformation. A new universal human rights and ethics applies to the right to the human legacy of designs — a global design commons; This global design commons needs to be directed toward the production of goods and services within planetary boundaries; And thus a planetary contributory system emerges where people coordinate in solving shared problems. Problem solving is localized while simultaneously being supported by a global web of solidarity.

Understanding the Web of Life

At another level, though, we need to innovate with a clear understanding that we are embedded in the web of life. We are not masters of it, we are not controllers of it. In fact we emerged from it. In our DNA and in our physiology is the legacy of 4 billion years of evolution. So we need to innovate with a clear understanding of ecological principles. These principles can’t be covered here in great depth because it’s actually quite complex — there are many context and there’s a lot going on. There is permaculture, Panarchy, Regenerative agriculture, biomimicry, and a whole number of strategies and frameworks that can help us innovate using principles for ecological resilience.

For starters we need to understand that our fundamental life-support system is this complex living system which is our planet. This is the fundamental unit. At a bioregional scale we need to really understand the complex and nuanced interactions between species. At the level of the human body we need to see ourselves as living systems. Whatever we put into the environment will become us — whether it’s pollution or pesticides or radioactivity. And at the microlevel we need to understand the complex dynamics that provide the foundations for resilience — the health of soils, microbiological dynamics and what it means to have healthy gut bacteria flowing through our body. We are part of the web of life.

Already there’s plenty of projects that take ecological principles into account. The literature around the circular economy is inspired by how the web of life works — nothing is wasted, every output is an input for another process. And much of this also can be found in premodern systems of production. In Edo period Japan there were a very well developed systems of what we would call today a circular economy to deal with human waste in urban environments that was then used in rural farming, and how they had a complex artisanal system of repairing broken items. So today we also have the right to repair movement.

And in Mexico City, there is the precolonial legacy of Tenochtitlan. A city that, at the time of the conquest, had a larger population than any European city, and sustained itself through a complex system of what we would now call aquaponics. I don’t want to over-romantisize the Aztecs, but the main idea is that we can learn a lot from history — many of the “new” ways forward are embedded in the past.

The Commons

At the most fundamental level we are grappling with who we are as technological beings. Really until we fully accept the shadow of our technological self, we will continue to produce crisis after crisis, externality after externality. So the last key idea is the idea of the commons. I have defined the commons as that which we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, such that we are implied into new systems of collaborative governance of these commons. And when we look at what this is, there is a lot there — we depend on:

• Healthy soils
• A safe climate
• Water
• Honest media
• Good systems of governance
• The list goes on…

So when we think about our technological shadow, well indeed, we can also see that this is part of the commons. We need to innovate in a way that creates a future rather than takes it away — we need anticipatory innovation. We need to make sure innovation creates less risk and not more. And so, anticipatory innovation as a practice is part of our commons.

And indubitably, when we realise that we are mutually implicated in something that we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, well, that then is our call to action, that we need to engage in the governance of this, the management of this, that we become active shapers of it, rather than victims of inaction. This is “commons governance”, which has a rich literature, and as David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue, means we become “commoners” and practice “commoning”. In practical terms this means applying the precautionary principle more actively, as a partnership and political contract between citizens, the state and commercial sectors.

Conclusion

If we bring on board these design principles, we can create innovations that refuture, rather than defuture. We can practice an anticipatory innovation that can make our world a healthier and safer place for all of us.

I use a technique called the anticipatory experimentation method, that helps to challenge “used futures”, create new ones, to bring the preferred future into the present through experiments that can scale for impact. It’s a methodology for anticipatory innovation.

The great futurist Hazel Henderson talked about our entire planetary existence is one great laboratory of learning. The challenges we face collectively are like a planetary classroom. We are being asked to learn something fundamental about ourselves, about how we behave in the world, about a new level of thinking.

We can take the crises we face as a signifier of many different things, how terrible the human species is, how difficult the challenges is …. There are some lazy ways of thinking that lead to fatalism.

I prefer to take our current dilemma as a way to frame humanity’s evolutionary leap. We need to ask “what is this planetary era asking us to learn collectively today?”

If we can use Henderson’s metaphor, then the lesson plan for humanity becomes pretty clear.

The post Anticipatory Innovation: Integrating the Shadow of Design appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We human beings for most of our history have solved the problems of the present. Problem arises, people respond. See problem, act on problem. But now we find ourselves in a new context, beset by not just the problems of the present but as well of the future. These include automation and robotic’s impact on jobs, climate change, potential pandemics, energy transformations, youth bulges, the list goes on…. That golden or peaceful time, if it ever existed, when we could just pretend that the future would take care of itself is long gone. Today this attitude is tantamount to negligence.

So, today we need to solve the problems of the future — we need anticipatory action. This is new, and we are just beginning to get our heads around what this actually means. The fields of foresight and futures studies would seem a logical place for addressing this. But my own journey in futures studies, in this regard, started with some disappointment. Back in 2000, as a masters student in my early 30s, I noticed a disconnect — that futures studies and futurists were teaming with long-term speculations, forecasts, scenarios and the like. There was a lot of future-philia, but the present seemed to be disowned. Some futurists talked about how the future should be a principal of present action, but there were very few tangible methodologies that truly explicitly connected the future with present day problem solving.

In these early days I was inspired by people like Robert Jungk who developed an early participatory futures workshop for citizen empowerment. I also got inspired by action research in general and began exploring how one might use or comingle an action research approach with a futures studies approach.

Anticipatory Action Learning was a wonderful development in this regard, and its mature expression through the Six Pillars method of Sohail Inayatullah. Fast forward almost 20 years and today there are a variety of ways developed which link foresight and action in powerful ways.

My own modest contribution to this about a decade ago was to develop the Futures Action Model as a nonlinear research and development framework for how global foresight may inform localized action.

Feeling powerful?

When I’m with students, clients or just colleagues and friends, the question consistently arises, how can we have some agency, power, in this context of seemingly overwhelming change? We are beset by what seems like overwhelming complexity, overwhelming speeds of change, and overwhelming scale in the challenges.

A major concern for me has been how we recover a sense of agency and power in order to navigate these challenges we face. A sense of confusion or ambivalence or distraction or apathy or despair that many of us experience with regard to big problems are mind-body phenomena that stop people, stop us, from fully participating in the transformations or transitions our world needs.

If we each knew that we have the power to engender transformations and breakthroughs that our communities and societies need, then we would not hesitate to jump right in and begin doing so. It is this very mind-body phenomena, expressed as a sense of powerlessness, that acts like a suppressant on our capacities to jump into projects for change that indeed can change the world.

Creating social change is a social technology. Humans are unique in our adeptness and attachment to technology. From the most basic tools that we created over millions of years, a rock blade for cutting animal skins, or a basket woven from the long grasses around us that can hold and store food, we excel at technologies for transforming our environment.

Today we have a variety of social technologies developed to engender positive social change, from the many varieties of Action Research to Collective Impact, and many other methodologies, all of these in one way or another addresses questions of our power and capacity to navigate and engender the changes that we want and need to create. But can these empowering social technologies be bent toward addressing anticipated challenges?

Acting out used futures

There is a big problem with action that does not reflect on our assumption about the future. We live in a social context in which we are being told repeatedly to innovate, innovate, innovate, to be social innovators, to be technical innovators, to be anything innovators. I remember at a conference in 2016 at Tamkang University, Taiwan, in a debate with Jim Dator where he stopped the room when he said (paraphrasing) ‘we’ve got too much innovation already — we need less innovation!’. When we got through the initial confusion and shock of the statement, we learned that he meant that all too often our practices of creativity are locked into yesterday’s thinking. We fetishize innovation without considering the underlying patterns of creativity being expressed.

If we create ideas, designs, enterprises and other innovations from the uncritical or unconscious ‘used future’, as Sohail Inayatullah puts it, we will simply perpetuate and even exacerbate the problems that we are dealing with today. It reminds me of a recent article I read. Engineers had a ‘great idea’ to create little drone bees to replace the ones that are dying off en mass due to colony collapse disorder. Cue forehead slap. It is this instrumental mindset that created the problem in the first place. That nature is replaceable. A lack of fundamental understanding of the complexity of biological systems. An inability to see humans as part of the web of life rather than engineers on it or masters of it. It’s the old story of the lady who swallowed a fly. She swallows a spider to get the fly, she perpetuates a used future, I guess she’ll die! We do actually know why she swallowed the fly, the spider, bird, etc etc… because she never stepped back from action to see the world in its systemic complexity, she just acted out her unexamined assumptions and misguided confidence that the easy and simple way to solve the problem was to do what she had always done — and each time she does this the problem gets worse.

That is why it is so critical to unpack and challenge the used futures and to create alternative futures that expand options, and to create a new vision before even entering into the space of ideating action, be they ‘designs’, ‘models’, whatever. We need qualitatively new responses to the problems of the future. That old expression that one cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s thinking applies but needs updating too: ‘We cannot solve tomorrow’s problems with today’s thinking!’ Which does sounds a little absurd, given that all we have is the present, really. But we might say more accurately that we cannot solve tomorrow’s problems until we challenge today’s thinking, our assumptions and images about the future and our vision of our options.

Some metaphors and a framework

I’ve been at this for almost two decades. Sometimes I have felt like Captain Ahab chasing the white whale, obsessed with the prize. At other times I have felt like Prometheus, searching for the secret of fire. And at others Don Quixote, chasing windmills. None of these stories ended well!

These myths, however, symbolize some big lessons. First, we learn from Melville, practice non-attachment — or we’ll get sucked into the vortex of our obsession. Secondly, from the Greek myth, that any invention has a cost — something that is hidden or disowned, with unintended consequences. Creativity is a two way street. Thirdly, from Cervantes, we are all limited in our imagination by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the used future — our actions are often just expressions of old patterns of thinking from days gone by — but the context has changed. What all of these myths are collectively saying are to take a step back from action itself and reflect upon the nature of being and thinking in the world — if we are to be action oriented — then we must marry agency and action with philosophy and reflection.

And so, two years ago, from the depths of reflection sprang the next iteration in this journey for me. It emerged from owning a new metaphor of the self. This new metaphor had the logic of life, of living systems.

In one manifestation it was the seed from the tree, or inversely the tree that is born from the seed. It is the logic of birth, growth, propagation, and mutation. It showed nature’s way of doing experiments, through variation. And how the future is enfolded into the present as possibility through the logic of the ‘seed form’.

In another manifestation it was a solar system in its infancy, where one small intervention could have profound long term implications. This represented that our work today is on behalf of future generations. And intuitively, from the metaphors came the framework.

The method brings together three key dimensions and influences. The first two parts of the Bridge brings in futures studies as a major dimension, especially the work of Sohail Inayatullah with his emphasis on critical, deconstructive and integrative foresight. The keystone of the Bridge brings in my emphasis over many years on ideation of initiatives and enterprises, expressed through the Futures Action Model. And finally the last two steps in the Bridge express action research as a fundamental influence.

Practically the method entails five stages:

1. Challenging the used future

2. Developing a preferred future and open ended narrative

3. Ideating a number of prototype ideas from the vision or narrative

4. Choosing which prototype ideas to experiment with and running real-world experiments

5. Scaling and investing in the experiments with the best promise

Steps

First, the ‘used future’ must be challenged, as invariably we hold presumptions about the future that are uncritically held or untested. If we act from the used future we perpetuate the problems associated with such perspectives. This follows the age old adage that one cannot add anything to a cup that is already full. We can think of the metaphor of the teacup which is completely full. Nothing can be added to it. It is only when we empty the cup when we can add something new. Likewise we must empty our assumptions to renew our understanding and vision for the future, so as to not be hostage to old patterns of thinking, unconscious assumptions, and so that new ideas can emerge. As well, as we learn about the emerging issues, trends and weak signals that are transforming our social horizons, new and alternative images of the future emerge. This ensures that visions and pathways for the future are informed by an empirical understanding of change, not just unexamined assumptions, and that multiple possible futures inform action.

Secondly, we develop an integrated vision and a transformational futures narrative. Integrated visioning, first developed by Inayatullah, is a way to do visioning with a particular sensitivity to our psychological blind spots. It is often the case that our visions, whether idealistic or pragmatic, disown key aspects of what we need. Integrated visioning is a way to develop visions and pathways that are more holistic and, because they take a fuller account of an organization’s dimensions, are more likely to align across it and therefore succeed. Then we create an open ended narrative, the movement from our past to present to preferred future. This needs to articulate the way in which the world participates in its fulfilment, a call to action for others to work with us to create this future. This open ended narrative addresses the false presumption that an individual or single organisation can create the future on their own, and acknowledges that it is actually an ecosystem of coordinated actors (organisations, communities, networks, etc.) that are able to create the future together.

Thirdly, I use the Futures Action Model to bridge the preferred futures and narrative with ideation. The Futures Action Model (FAM) is a “keystone” method that integrates all phases of the Bridge, by providing a way for problem-oriented thinking to relate with solution-oriented thinking in a futures-oriented way. It relates foresight research and knowledge with identification of pioneer projects and responses from around the world, to the “design ecosystem” (stakeholders critical in the development of the initiative), and finally provides a space for articulating the bare bones DNA of an initiative. FAM can include the use of an interactive role-playing game, an R&D process, and workshopping. The output of FAM are initiative ideas that are deeply grounded across multiple critical spaces: empirical evidence on social change, real world pioneer examples from around the world, and present day stakeholder considerations.

Fourthly, ideas that emerge need to be vetted and selected for experiments. The experiment is that small piece of the preferred future we are bringing into the present. Experiments make sure that as individuals or organizations, we limits the scale and the risk to us, a tolerance zone for experiments that allow them to fail safely. They provide ways of testing the assumptions embedded within them, to make sure learning happens that builds in systemic capacity for renewed experiments.

Finally, experiments can be evaluated to see which ones showed the most promise and are best aligned to enact the vision or pathway. If an experiment holds little promise, it can be discarded. Or it can be adapted if it showed some promise. If it is demonstrated to work it can then be upscaled and invested in, in a way appropriate to the resources and risk tolerance of the organisation. This ensures that experiments can scale for impact when they and the organization driving them are ready. (Many thanks to my colleague Gareth Priday for helping me to see the importance of this last step).

In summary, first we must challenge the used future and deconstruct the unconscious patterns that dictates our awareness and images of the future. Otherwise we act out used futures. This then creates the space for new visions and preferred futures, and the new narratives that express this. And on the back of these new narratives and visions we ideate — we create ideas for change. Let’s have fun and let’s be bold. As we have deconstructed the used futures and created new visions, our ideas for change are bound to be interesting, different, potent. Then, filled as we are with these ideas for change we can choose one or some to bring into the world, through real-world experiments that will drive learning. These experiments will be the appropriate size, they will be safe to fail, they will be the seeds of the new. And finally, based on this learning and the evaluation of these experiments we can adapt, we can discard and we can scale them for impact.

Giving the baby a name

We can call this the Anticipatory Experimentation Method (AEM) or ‘Bridge Method’. It is a method for bringing the preferred future into the present through experiments that can scale for impact. It is a bridge between a preferred future and real-world experiments that bring that future into being. It combines a visioning approach with an ideation method that can bridge future vision with specific and implementable ideas, which culminate in experiments.

The method focuses on bringing a preferred future into the present, by running experiments that have maximum alignment with the enactment of the preferred future. Why do an experiment that is not aligned to our preferred futures? Let’s experiment with that which is going to get us there. Experiments are a vehicle for enacting new futures because they are “small pieces” of the preferred future brought into the present. Experiments are also time and resource savers because, rather than commit a whole organization or community to a new path (which is both risky and potentially costly), experiments are small scale and cost effective ways of testing a new direction. If some experiments show promise they can be scaled and invested in, accelerating organizational momentum toward enacting the vision. If experiments don’t work, the investment was limited and the risk was measured, people can still learn a great deal and nonetheless develop confidence in the experimentation process.

How do we respond, indeed create breakthroughs or transformations within a variety of domains of social life, where change is needed? There are many methods for social change, and as a student, practitioner and teacher of futures studies and foresight I have a deep appreciation for the variety of complex ways our societies change. There is no one size fits all. It is my hope that the Anticipatory Experimentation Method (AEM) or ‘Bridge Method’ adds meaningfully to the capacity for us to respond to our shared and emerging challenges, as anticipatory experimentalists, playfully yet purposefully to be in the service of long-term global foresight and the well-being of future generations and life on earth.

José Ramos is director of the boutique consulting / research / facilitation business Action Foresight.

The post Mutating the Future: the Anticipatory Experimentation Method appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Milica Begovic, Joost Beunderman, Indy Johar: The intent of putting the Next Generation Governance (#NextGenGov) agenda at the centre of the Istanbul Innovation Days 2018 was to start to explore the future of the world’s governance challenges, and to debate how a new set of models are needed to address a growing ‘relevance gap’ in governance and peacebuilding.

Any exploration into the Next Generation of Governance requires us to recognize that in an increasingly multi-polar world, a world where power is increasingly more directly used and the singular rule of law we had ‘hoped’ for is being challenged, the future of governance is not only about the technocratic capacity to make rules (even if they are machine readable rules), but also our ability to construct new social legitimacy for all and by all.

In a world where we are facing urgent calamities and deep-running risks like never before, organizations like UNDP are witnessing a growing gap between the incremental progress in practice and a rapidly accelerating set of challenges — whether rampant inequality and its impact on social cohesion, growing ranks of forcefully displaced people, the fragmentation of state agency, rapid depletion of the commons, or the seemingly intractable rise of new forms of violence. This gap — between the emerging reality (strategic risks) and existing practice — is set to exponentially grow unless there is a major rethink of development practice and how we remake governance fit for the 21st century.

Earlier, we hypothesized that across the world, our governance models are broken: we are holding on to 19th century models that deny the complexity of the ‘systemocracy’ we live in : a world of massive interdependencies. #NextGenGov therefore is an exploration — the first of many — of the type of experiments that chart a way towards a future in sync with the Sustainable Development Goals. It aims to explore the lessons, challenges and gaps emerging with governance not relegated to a single goal (SDG 16) but as the prerequisite of achieving the SDG agenda as a whole.

A very 21st century kind of failure

It could be argued governance is the central failure of the 21st century — sidelined as an inconvenient overhead, governance innovation has seen consistent underinvestment and a lack of attention. Our means of governance and regulation have become relics in an age of growing complexity. New capabilities and trends like rapid real-time data feedback loops, algorithmic decision making, new knowledge of the pathways of injustice and inequality, and the rise of new tools and domains of power are challenging established ways of decision making. Frequently hampered by simplistic notions about the levers of change, awed by networked power dynamics in the private sector and undermined by public sector austerity, many of us seem scared and disoriented in responding to the scale of failure and new needs we are witnessing. Worse still, we seem unable to make the case that ultimately, good governance should not be a means of state control but a means to unleash sustainably the full and fair capacity of all human beings.

In this context, the growing strategic risks of our age are making past governance protocols and processes increasingly incoherent and misaligned to the need of both member states and our broader global ecosystems; both real-world precedents and statistically derived probability are collapsing as viable decision-making tools. This incongruity is revealed at different scales and conditions:

1. The existing structures, governance and business models, skills, and institutional cultures are producing solutions that do not fit the new nature of problems they are supposed to be addressing (IPCC’s 1.5 C report and genetically engineered baby in China as most recent proxies of misalignment of current practice and emerging existential threats).

2. Business-as-usual as a method to address the entirely new scale and modality of problems is a recipe for decline and irrelevance (consider ongoing efforts to apply current regulatory paradigms to distributed technologies like blockchain).

3. Governments and investors too are experiencing the lack of coherence between existing solutions and emerging problems, and are therefore eager to restructure their relationship with UNDP and similar organisations.

Towards new Zones of Experiment

Searching for fresh perspectives, our approach was to hone in on a series of Zones of Experiment — a range of domains that could unlock some of the great transitions the world is facing. We looked at new ways to protect and restore the commons, to actualize the human rights of landless nations, and to prevent conflict and empower civic actors in revealing abuses. We also explored science fiction, arts and culture as seedbeds for imagining alternative economic systems, the role of new technologies in urban governance, and new practices in the way power is organized, manifested and influences decision making.

Across these zones of experiment, we are seeing how a new generation of edge practitioners is challenging the status quo, and how their experiments enable us to learn both context-specific and transferable lessons. Together, they point the way to the #NextGenGov agenda as a new approach to strategic innovation (and feedback coming in after the IID2018 indicates the need to explore additional Zones of Experiments with emerging new practices such as governance of digital financial markets and impact of systemic structural issues, such as decline of trust on single point sectors including attitudes towards vaccination).

Underlying all these is the double edged sword of rapid technological progress in a multi-polar world that is challenging established ethical certainties. The unexplainable AI is one such manifestation, where the advanced identification of correlation is argued to be sufficient to guide decision-making be judicial or even law enforcement, challenging — even perhaps regressing — us to a pre-scientific age and undermining the basic principles of governance — accountability and equality of treatment (as argued by Jacob Mchangama).

As Primavera de Filippi outlined in her keynote speech, new technological capabilities always carry the potential both to disrupt the status quo or conversely reify existing structures of power and inequality. If we want to put the new tools of power in the hands of the many not the few, we need to focus on the governance of the new infrastructures rather than rely on governance by those infrastructures. However, whether in blockchain applications (Primavera’s domain) or elsewhere, it is evident that often we simply don’t know yet what kind of detailed issues, unintended consequences or unexpected feedback loops we might face when applying new technological capabilities. This means experimentation can’t be seen as an add-on but should be at the core of exploring the future and rapid learning about implications of emerging trends.

This is not the place to summarize each zone of experiment discussed during the Istanbul Innovation Days. But we can outline a series of shared lessons and implications for the future of governance and peacebuilding.

1. Micro-massive Futures — A series of new micro-massive data, sensing, processing and influencing capabilities (as revealed in the work of Metasub, PulseLab Kampala and Decibel) is enabling state and non-state actors to transcend the tyranny of the statistically aggregated average, and instead focus on the micro, the unique and the predictive — early warnings on looming epidemics or weather-related crop failure, emerging signs of microbial antibiotic resistance, or the compound impacts of pollution on individuals, particularly in disadvantaged populations. The much more fine-grained understanding they enable (whether through big data, social media mining, or specific sampling and real-time blockchain-anchored measurement) creates radical new pathways to harboring and enhancing the public interest. Achieving decent average outcomes (of health, pollution, human development…) has more than ever become obsolete as a goal: the geographically, individually and temporally hyper specific data we can obtain, and the wicked nature of the issues at hand, require new ways of understanding ‘risk’ — and acting on it. This same micro-massive future on the other hand is also weaponizing the capacity to mine data in order to influence outcomes at the societal scale — opening up huge new questions about the meta governance of these new capacities in the first place. This implies a double set of responsibilities: if we can now govern and influence outcomes at the micro-level of the individual and molecular detail, and at the massive scale of societal bias, with at both scales growing capabilities to understand risk and predict possibilities — how do we govern in this new reality in order to use these powers for good? Or conversely how to ensure that the emerging capabilities of new governing realities are not resulting in human rights abuses, discrimination and violence?

2. From control to ennoblement — Where such distributed data generating and analysis capacity comes into its own is through new contracting agreements that change our capacity to manage shared assets. The multi-party contributory contracts, e.g. the blockchain-based agreements at the heart of the Regen Network, show us how the collective inertia around agricultural restoration could be overcome. Crucially, rather than disincentivizing ‘bad behaviours’ through control, such ennobling regulatory systems can now be imagined to incentivize, communicate and verify contributory systems. Equally, this capability is paving ways for entirely new class of governance mechanisms for the commons — including bestowing legal rights on rivers and the Amazon. How do we reimagine governance if such ennoblement and restoration would structurally be our objective?

3. Making the invisible visible — New ways of building the politics of change are continuously emerging. Using mapping, animation, arts and other visualization tools, practitioners like Forensic Architecture and Invisible Dust — and in different ways, Open Knowledge Germany — are empowering citizens and civic groups to reveal issues which for a wide range of reasons tend to remain hidden — whether in the case of state agents committing human rights abuses or pernicious, slow-moving killers like air pollution (which in many case of course equally implicates states in failing to uphold human rights). By involving distributed civic networks and creative professionals from right across traditional disciplines, and by connecting to the aspirations of populations in different ways, such emerging tactics act as a powerful complement to established tools to build the demand for change.

4. Hybrid participatory futures — Getting to a next level of citizen engagement in the transitions we face requires a next generation of platforms that enable engagement with complexity, new technology and alternative imaginings of the future. This is about new settings for deliberation, new ways of extending invitations to take part, and tapping into the creative resources of science fiction and the arts to reimagine social contract and alternative economic systems. Medialab Prado in Madrid, the Edgeryders community, the deliberative citizens’ assemblies in Ireland or, at local scale, RanLab’s deliberative polls across Africa, show in different ways that new settings for participation can engender new cultures of participation cutting across ‘online’ and ‘offline’. Their deep investment in the tactics of convening people enable the creation of new and highly constructive new communities of concern around difficult topics, as well as building legitimacy for bold experimental approaches. This in turn enables the prevention of potential policy failure or the addressing of topics hitherto thought untouchable by established political players. In an era that frequently bemoans the decline of trust in the abstract, such cultural infrastructure rebuilds avenues towards greater trustworthiness across different parties, and an ability to imagine futures unconstrained by current divisions and biases, as the mitigation of risk. As differing platforms have differing biases in terms of who they attract an what behaviors they foster, such participation will always needs to be hybrid — well curated online platforms, temporal gatherings and permanent physical spaces all play a role in building the shared legitimacy for civic innovation. Enabling the participatory co-creation of the future is a fundamental component of the governance architecture in a complex world: we must complement the nudging of people’s behavior (a crucial tactic which has been applied with considerable success) with nurturing human imagination and facilitating deliberation and engagement with evidence.

5. Public goods & rights beyond the state — In an era where about 68 million people are currently stateless and this number is expected to rise significantly in the coming years, we are seeing state players as unable, unwilling or simply absent in the anchoring of fundamental human rights like people’s individual and family identity, and unable to access public goods provided outside the national boundary. The Rohingya project and IRYO show powerful alternatives and lessons for the remaking of public services like healthcare for both refugee populations and other contexts where access to such services is patchy. These positive alternatives are equally matched by more challenges examples of the quasi privatization of justice — where large technology multinationals are already acting something like a judicial system — “one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.’ They also reveal the need and possibility to reimagine not just service provision but also new architectures of governance beyond the nation state — consider the incoherence of applying national laws to growing numbers of stateless people, para-state futures around the world. The fundamental question arises whether the seemingly limitless rise in populations on the move and para state governance could compel us to imagine and construct at a more structural level new domains of service provision potentially disinter-mediated from the state — and whether that might be more than just dire necessity but also an opportunity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

6. From Evidence based to Experimentation Driven Policy — In an age of increasing complexity, the danger of traditional evidence based policy leading us by the rear view mirror is evident. Instead, the zones of experiment — whether EcoLogic’s futuristic urban landscapes or the service design innovation shared by Pia Andrews from both New Zealand and New South Wales — show the possibility of a new arc of policy formation: experimentation is used to create new forms of situated intelligence and learning, consisting of both new evidence and new insights to underpin the ongoing and iterative development of policies and programmed. These pathways enable institutions to make sense of changes, (re)formulate intent and execution pathways, and thus co-evolve in an open and collaborative process. Fundamentally this is about recognizing 21st century governance will be structurally different: the new institutional capacity can clearly not be designed in vitro but has to grow in-situ, informed by strategic portfolios of experimental options in order to grow the evidence necessary for policy intervention.

7. Sovereignty 2.0. In an age where a vital commons governance can now also be advanced either by imbuing ecological entities — such as rivers in Columbia and elsewhere — with legal rights or by emerging new sets of capabilities like smart contracts and machine learning — as indicated by Regen Network — could this mean the massive scaling of strategies that imbue new types of bodies with ‘sovereign’ powers and capabilities for e.g. machine-based contracting and fining? If so, and heeding Primavera de Filippi’s warnings, the governance of these infrastructures will be a crucial field of innovation.

Whilst even individually these are important new trajectories, when taken together these emerging lessons show how we need to challenge our existing practices at a deeper level. Given the degrees of uncertainty and emergence we face, this implies a call for strategic investment in a broad portfolio of experiments can guide us to the future; fundamentally these are learning options that enable UNDP and its partners to seed and test new ways of governing across different domains. In parallel,#NextGenGov also pointed towards a further set of questions and challenges we face when staring into the future of Governance in a multi-polar tomorrow.

1. BEYOND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

In a world of sped-up complexity and change, the social contracts and legitimacy underlying our governance systems are constantly in question, not least because the relevance gaps affecting nearly all players (between needs and capabilities; between promise and delivery; between aspiration and capacity) means that not just trust, but actual trustworthiness is in decline. Across the world, we are seeing broadly two cultural-societal paradigms that underlie potential future social contracts: both of which could be argued as falling. Where individualism is the main tenet, we all too often fail to mainstream and anchor societal innovations that would reduce collective risk, whether vaccination rates or distributed flood prevention strategies. Where the collective is seen to take priority over the individual, the possible inability to accommodate divergence and diversity risks undermining the distributed creativity, energy and drive needed (and available!) to address wicked issues. The challenge we face is to move towards social contracts based on an explicit recognition of interdependence — reaffirming the need for the hybrid participation structures suggested above to provide the distributed fertile ground for this, as well as opening the space for discussions on system governance beyond the human governance. In future Innovation Days and Next Gen Gov experiments we need to transcend natural rights and embrace new sovereignty 2.0: such as sovereignty for rivers, trees and forests, opening the scope for dynamic interactions of such rights frameworks for a new social ecological contract.

2. MORE THAN ONE DEMOCRACY?

Irrespective of scale or context, it is clear that no sole actor — whether state, civic sector, corporate or start-up — has the ability to tackle the wicked issues of our time alone. This means that discourses on good governance and democracy fundamentally have to be about the distributed power to co-create society. Clearly this is conditioned both by the openness of institutional infrastructures and by the socio-economic fundamentals that enable or hinder people’s agency. Recognizing democracy as creating the positive freedom of ‘being able to care’ (whether about individual life choices, the craftsmanship of work, and about wider social and planetary interdependencies) implies not just a concern about the trends that reduce such capabilities (such as declining economic growth, growing job insecurity or the disasters that uproot people’s lives) but also a focus on the multitude of avenues that enable such care to be expressed and acted upon. The challenge we face is that in this reality, seeing multiparty parliamentary systems as the sole mechanism for delivering democracy seems increasingly hollow: citizen assemblies and participative, high-frequency accountability & feedback systems are examples of vital complementary mechanisms for the enhancement and preservation of public and shared goods. The examples we have seen are evidence of how they can unlock positive, inclusive new avenues to the future at any scale from the local to the global — in ways that ‘politics’ as usual cannot.

3. BUREAUCRATIC REVOLUTION.

In the non-pejorative sense of the word, bureaucracy is at the core of governance. Innovation and experimentation in the realm of our everyday bureaucracy can change the nature and people’s experience of governance and everyday life itself — look no further than Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the role of bureaucracy to create new markets. Just like the 19th century centralized bureaucracies shaped the notion of the modern state, the present ‘boring revolution’ in our capabilities (e.g. around data insight, zero overhead cost of micro transactions and transparent multi-actor contributory contracts) can drive a radical reinvention of the notion of governance and power. This is what is at stake. The challenge we face is evident in the many salutary lessons that IID2018 provided, on how positive outcomes of this process should not be taken for granted. Instead they can only result from clear intent, human-centered design and an approach to strategic innovation that is up to the magnitude of the issues at hand.

Beyond IID2018…to be continued

The IID2018 was an effort to manifest the strategic relevance gap between our rapidly growing needs and risks, and our all-too-slowly developing practice — in this case that of increasingly inadequate global governance models and implications across a range of interdisciplinary policy spaces. If revealing strategic risks and their interrelated nature is about building the demand side for ambitious change — Invisible Dust’s credo of “making the invisible visible” clearly struck a chord — then what comes next has to be a strategic innovation response that goes beyond organizational tweaks or individual responses. After all, in a show-of-hands poll on the first day of IID2018, only 5 people thought the world is on track in achieving Sustainable Development Goals — hardly surprising, given recent news on climate change or the accumulating impact of air pollution on health and learning. Addressing governance failures is at the heart of delivering the SDGs and it will require concerted belief, effort and strategic scale investment.

By virtue of its cross-sectoral strategic development role, UNDP has a natural and unique responsibility to focus on addressing the strategic, entangled and systemic governance risks facing us at a national, transnational and global level — and in doing so it needs to act as integrator on a country and transnational levels, whilst recognizing and respecting the necessity of a multipolar yet machine advanced interoperable future — where the notion, means and conceptions of governance are fully reimagined and socially co-created for a 21st century. Practically, this means NextGenGov was just the beginning of investing in and building a strategic portfolio of experiments that enable partners to learn, manage risk, and effect system change, in order to rebuild the (technical, political, informational, financial) capability of states and civic actors for agile, iterative governance that is premised less on building solutions and more about dealing with our new certainty — uncertainty.

*Special thanks in developing a part of this blog (strategic relevance gap) go to Luca Gatti of Axilo.

The post 7 Lessons & 3 Big Questions for the Next 10 Years of Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Find out more on the Cosmolocalism Website.

Extended summary

COSMOLOCALISM will document, analyze, test, evaluate, and create awareness about an emerging mode of production, based on the confluence of the digital commons (e.g., open knowledge and design) with local manufacturing and automation technologies (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts). This convergence could catalyze the transition to new inclusive and circular production models, such as the “design global, manufacture local” (DGML) model.

DGML describes the processes through which design is developed as a global digital commons, whereas the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check. DGML seems to form economies of scope that promote sustainability and open innovation while celebrating new ways of cooperation. However, such claims rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations.

COSMOLOCALISM is a pilot-driven investigation of the DGML phenomenon that seeks to understand relevant organizational models, their evolution, and their broader political economy/ecology and policy implications. Through the lens of diverse case studies and participatory action research, the conditions under which the DGML model thrives will be explored.

COSMOLOCALISM has three concurrent streams: democratization; innovation; and sustainability. First, DGML governance practices will be studied, patterns will be recognized, and their form, function, cultural values, and structure will be determined. Second, the relevant open innovation ecosystems and their potential to reorient design and manufacturing practices will be examined. Third, selected DGML products will be evaluated from an environmental sustainability perspective, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. The interdisciplinary nature of COSMOLOCALISM will explore new horizons to substantively improve our understanding of how to create sustainable economies through the commons.

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But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

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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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Abstract

Critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of makerspaces, that is to say, those emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices; exercise community-based forms of governance; and utilize local manufacturing technologies. A bird’s-eye-view of the history of makerspaces is provided tracing their roots back to the hacker movement. Drawing from secondary sources, their community-building, learning and innovation potential is briefly discussed. Makerspaces, this essay argues, can serve as hubs and vehicles for citizen-driven transformation and, thus, play a key part in a more inclusive, participatory and commons-oriented vision of the smart city.

Excerpts

Introduction

Urbanization is a trend of our times, with the largest share of the human population globally living in cities; a trend that is only increasing. Cities are economic centers that through the consumption of massive resources lead to heavy environmental impact as well as to social contestations and conflicts. This creates the need for new conceptualizations for a city that will be able to deal with the current issues in more imaginative, inclusive and sustainable ways.

In this paper, critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices and commons-based peer production.

In light of the rise of the collaborative commons, i.e., shared resources, the concept of urban “makerspaces” is discussed. The latter are community-led, open spaces where individuals share resources and meet on a regular basis to collaboratively engage in creative commons-oriented projects, usually utilizing open source software and hardware technologies. Through the intersection of digital technologies and urban life, several initiatives have emerged that attempt to circumvent the dependence on private firms or governments to provide solutions.

What is the community-building, learning and innovation potential of makerspaces towards a more inclusive, commons-oriented smart city?

Community-building potential

Makerspaces can be viewed as community-run hubs that connect citizens not only of the same city but also of other cities worldwide. Approximately 66% of the UK-based makerspaces collaborate with other UK-based or foreign makerspaces on a regular basis, while 46% contribute to commons-oriented, open source projects which normally have a global orientation. Yet, individuals are more engaged and committed to one local makerspace. Further, two of the top reasons people use makerspaces are socializing and learning. Hence, makerspaces can be platforms that cultivate relationships and networks, building social capital, i.e., “social networks and the attendant norms of trust and reciprocity”.

However, claims around the potentialities of makerspaces are still speculative and depend on how individuals associate with such places. While makerspaces have been built in ethnically and geographically diverse environments, there is yet a lack of racial and gender diversity within many of them. For instance, membership is predominantly male in 80% of UK makerspaces and 77% of China’s makers are male. Additionally, 81% of U.S. makers are male with an average income of $106,000. These are indications that participation in the maker movement is heavily dominated by affluent men.

As an attempt to correct this lack of diversity, some feminist and people of color-led makerspaces have emerged, such as Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna and Mothership Hackermoms in Berkley (feminist spaces created in 2008 and 2012 respectively) or Liberating Ourselves Locally in Oakland (a “people of color-led” space created in 2012). However, such strategies have been met with controversy, since they are deemed to go against the principle of openness.

Learning potential

The learning potential of making coupled with open learning environments; project-based learning; informal tinkering; and peer collaboration can motivate the social learning and personalized involvement of participants. Makerspaces exhibit the aforementioned characteristics and, thus, show great promise as emerging learning hubs. That is why makerspaces have recently generated much interest in diverse educational circles. For example, several libraries and museums have created spaces with the aim to empower creative activity, resource-sharing, and active engagement with making, materials, processes, and ideas in relation to their collections and exhibits.

It appears that makerspaces offer the capacity for informal community activity as well as a proper learning environment with a focus on productive processes rather than skill-set building. Varying activities may be combined (like programming and hardware building and even manufacturing tools development), following the approach of constructionism.

Nevertheless, inclusivity and participation in such educational activities is not assured. Although more than 50% of UK makerspaces offer support, courses and tool inductions, the majority of makers are well-educated and technologically-confident. Likewise, 97% of makers in the U.S. have attended or graduated from college, while 80% say they have post-graduate education. Thus, to facilitate learning for diverse users, makerspaces should be staffed by qualified educators who are knowledgeable about theories of teaching and learning as well as about user needs and behaviors.

Innovation potential

In makerspaces people innovate and learn together by making things and using the Web to globally connect and share designs, tutorials and code. They offer creative environments where sustainable entrepreneurs, potentially with diverse motives and backgrounds, can meet and interact and thus benefit from synergies and the cross-pollination of ideas. Moreover, in makerspaces designers can come together and collaborate in participatory explorations during the use phase by prototyping, adding small-scale interventions and, therefore, moving from a “design-in-the-studio” to a “design-in-use” strategy.

Several innovative entrepreneurial endeavors and start-ups have emerged through makerspaces. This article refers to some prominent cases with the aim to provide an overview of the most mature examples that cover a wide spectrum of areas, from ICT and local manufacturing technologies to farming, culture and neuroscience.

In all, makerspaces should not be viewed merely as experimentation sites with local manufacturing technologies but as places “where people are experimenting with new ideas about the relationships amongst corporations, designers, and consumers”. The review of makerspaces-related innovation illustrated that they mainly produce user-led, incremental product and process innovations. Some of the aforementioned projects and eco-systems, such as the RepRap- or Arduino-based eco-systems, may represent both the Schumpeterian and social-oriented understanding of innovation. They seem to create win-win situations for both instigators/entrepreneurs and society, and inaugurate commons-oriented business models which arguably go beyond the classical corporate paradigm and its extractive profit-maximizing practices.

Conclusions

Are makerspaces a manifestation of the “new spirit of capitalism” that has successfully incorporated and adapted several of its various critical cultures? Or could we consider makerspaces as sites with non-negligible post-capitalist dynamics? Both possibilities still exist.

If we subscribe to the idea that at least some makerspaces can be seen as CBPP in practice, then, makerspaces may belong to a new form of capitalism but, at the same time, also highlight ways in which this new form might be transcended. If the dominant discourse of the “smart city” project is aligned with a neoliberal, corporate vision for urban development, then the “makerspace” could simultaneously be a source of legitimacy for the project and also serve as an institution for citizen-driven transformation.

An alternative vision for the smart city may be possible through a commons-oriented approach, geared towards the democratization of means of production. The basic tenet of this approach encourages citizens to participate in creating solutions collectively instead of merely adopting proprietary technology. In addition to virtual connections observed in several sharing economy initiatives, makerspaces can be the physical nodes of a collaborative culture. Further, they can serve as a new “design template”, where knowledge/design is developed and shared as a global digital commons while the actual customized manufacturing takes place locally, thus initiating a decisive break from the current production model.

Full title: “Making (in) the Smart City: The Emergence of Makerspaces”.

Originally published at Telematics & Informatics.

Find this and more articles here.

Photo by olabimakerspace

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There is an important role for international trade and global exchange of goods and services, but not when it comes to meeting basic regional needs. Wherever feasible we should meet our needs as locally or regionally as possible and restrict the global exchange of goods to those that cannot be produced in a particular place.

Open innovation and knowledge-sharing at a global scale will be an important part of the process of re-localizing production and some global companies are already beginning to explore how to reinvent themselves as facilitators of the shift towards ‘distributed manufacturing’ and ‘the circular economy’.

Since 2013, together with Forum for the Future, I have been involved in conceiving and implementing a long-range innovation project for the Belgian manufacturer of ecological cleaning products and detergents Ecover. The project uses the unique island conditions of Majorca as a test field to explore how a global company like Ecover can help to facilitate a shift towards localized production for localized consumption based on local material and energy resources and in collaboration with local business partners. In the process we studied the potential of the Majorcan bioeconomy to deliver — in a regenerative way — enough biological raw materials (from waste streams) to produce cleaning products for the local market.

The island is particularly dependent on imports of consumer products and food, due to the increased demand caused by 16 million tourist visits each year. While the long-term sustainability of such mass tourism is more than questionable, these visitor numbers provide the economic engine that can finance the transition towards local production, food and energy infrastructures.

Ecover and ‘Forum for the Future’ collaborated with an on-island network of multi- sector stakeholders to create a showcase that, if successful, could serve as a transferable example and a model for a region-focused shift towards a renewable energy and materials-based circular economy (see Glocal, 2015).

Slide from one of my presentations about the Mallorca Glocal project with Ecover and Forum for the Future

We learned some very important lessons. Simply embarking on the process of co-creating an inspirational experiment like this and involving diverse stakeholders in it contributed to the wider transformation towards a regenerative culture. The conversation about re-localizing production and consumption on Majorca has started.

The regional experiment aimed to take a step towards a circular economy based on re-regionalizing production and consumption. It was motivated less by the potential for short-term economic success and more by the power of experimentation as a way to make sure we are asking the right questions. It catalysed a local design conversation while Ecover explores how it could reinvent itself as a global knowledge and business partner with a wide network of regional collaborators enabling distributed manufacturing and promoting regional economic development.

The transformation of our systems of production and consumption is a creative design challenge that will require whole-systems thinking and transformative innovation at its very best. The resulting disruptive innovations will ultimately make the existing system obsolete.

We were effectively trying to redesign production and consumption of chemical products, creating a local product by trying to operate more like an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, materials are sourced locally and assembled in non-toxic processes based on renewable energies.

The promise of this regionalized production system is a more diverse regional economy that generates jobs, encourages efficient use of regional waste streams as resources of production, helps local farmers get a good price for the food and biomaterials they grow, creates resilience by increasing self-reliance, reduces dependence on expensive imports, and contributes to the effort to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing transportation of feedstock and finished products.

The first steps towards achieving this are already being explored in many industrial ecology projects around the world (see Chapter 6). Even if some of these current projects are hybrid systems that still rely on fossil energy and non-renewable material resources, they are achieving increases in material and energy efficiency by connecting previously separate industrial processes in ways that turn one industry’s waste (whether material streams or waste heat) into another industry’s resource of production. They are second horizon(H2) stepping-stones to renewable energy-powered regenerative systems.

Unleashing the full potential of such ecosystems of production and consumption based on integrative industrial design requires regional collaboration across all sectors and all industries. The synergies that can be generated when previously separate industries are linked through ecological design thinking are substantial.

The book Blue Economy summarizes a number of such ground-breaking design solutions that are being implemented or are in advanced stages of development (Pauli, 2010). It offers inspiration for green entrepreneurs to get involved in H2+ transformative innovation.

The overall shift is away from a fossil fuel-based industrial system with centralized production facilities that rely on bringing raw materials from all corners of the Earth only to then distribute the finished products globally again. This wasteful system is based on outdated industrial design solutions developed during the first industrial revolution where the economics of mass-manufacturing meant bigger was better, and cheap abundant fossil fuels and non-renewable materials were taken for granted.

Currently, the vast majority of our consumer products contain petroleum-based materials. During the first half of the 21st century we will witness the transformation of this global system of production. We will begin to co-create a material culture that relies on locally available materials, green (plant-based) chemistry and renewable energy sources for regional production and consumption.

Integrative design based on whole-systems thinking and the kind of nature-inspired design solutions explored in the next two chapters will help us create ‘elegant solutions predicated by the uniqueness of place’. This is how my mentor Professor John Todd, a pioneer in his field, defines ecological design. Such solutions are an elegant blend of the best of modern technology and a rediscovered sensitivity to place, culture and traditional wisdom. New technologies are opening up a 21st-century, design-led re-localization enabled by global resource-sharing and cooperation.

Distributed manufacturing is becoming a reality as new 3D printing technologies enabling additive manufacturing at a small scale are developing rapidly alongside revolutionary approaches to open innovation based on peer-to-peer collaboration, the spread of ‘Fab-labs’ and a new maker culture, breakthroughs in material science, as well as diverse bio-economy projects. Much work is still needed in the area of developing locally grown and regenerated feedstock for 3D printing technologies.

The Open Source Ecology project started by Marcin Jakubowski demonstrates how inventors and technologists are already collaborating globally to recreate regional means of production that are increasingly independent of the centralized mass-production systems of multinationals.

The project’s aim is to create the ‘Global Village Construction Set’, an open-source design and engineering library of detailed blueprints that will enable people with basic engineering and technical skills to create the 50 most important machines needed to build a sustainable civilization. We are beginning to ask:

How can we implement the global shift towards increased regional production for regional consumption?

How can we create effective systems of open-source innovation that enable people globally to share know-how and design innovations?

How can we ensure that re-regionalizing production and consumption will happen within the bioproductivity limits of each particular region, and strike a balance between growing food and growing industrial resources regionally?

How can we make 3D printing technologies sustainable by ensuring that they use locally produced, renewable and up-cyclable feedstock in environmentally benign ways, powered by decentralized renewable energy?

How can we use bio-refineries and advanced fermentation technologies to facilitate the shift from a fossil fuel-based organic chemistry to a solar- powered, plant-based and non-toxic chemistry in order to re-invent our material culture?

An early lesson we learnt in Majorca is that a successful bioeconomy requires widespread collaboration between sectors. Policy interventions are needed to regulate access to biological resources and their sustainable (regenerative) production and use. With limited bioproductive potential within a particular region, we must find ways to create ecosystems of collaboration that optimize the use of available resources.

Regenerative design solutions require whole-systems design conversations across all sectors of society. From these conversations a guiding vision will emerge. This vision can be made reality, one place at a time, by all of us. [At the time of writing, the Ecover Glocal project is not advancing, due to a lack of funding. It created a network of collaborators and planted a vision that is likely to be taken up again in the future.]

Image Source

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by POC21 – Proof of Concept

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Abstract

Critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of makerspaces, that is to say, those emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices; exercise community-based forms of governance; and utilize local manufacturing technologies. A bird’s-eye-view of the history of makerspaces is provided tracing their roots back to the hacker movement. Drawing from secondary sources, their community-building, learning and innovation potential is briefly discussed. Makerspaces, this essay argues, can serve as hubs and vehicles for citizen-driven transformation and, thus, play a key part in a more inclusive, participatory and commons-oriented vision of the smart city.

Excerpts

Introduction

Urbanization is a trend of our times, with the largest share of the human population globally living in cities; a trend that is only increasing. Cities are economic centers that through the consumption of massive resources lead to heavy environmental impact as well as to social contestations and conflicts. This creates the need for new conceptualizations for a city that will be able to deal with the current issues in more imaginative, inclusive and sustainable ways.

In this paper, critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices and commons-based peer production.

In light of the rise of the collaborative commons, i.e., shared resources, the concept of urban “makerspaces” is discussed. The latter are community-led, open spaces where individuals share resources and meet on a regular basis to collaboratively engage in creative commons-oriented projects, usually utilizing open source software and hardware technologies. Through the intersection of digital technologies and urban life, several initiatives have emerged that attempt to circumvent the dependence on private firms or governments to provide solutions.

What is the community-building, learning and innovation potential of makerspaces towards a more inclusive, commons-oriented smart city?

Community-building potential

Makerspaces can be viewed as community-run hubs that connect citizens not only of the same city but also of other cities worldwide. Approximately 66% of the UK-based makerspaces collaborate with other UK-based or foreign makerspaces on a regular basis, while 46% contribute to commons-oriented, open source projects which normally have a global orientation. Yet, individuals are more engaged and committed to one local makerspace. Further, two of the top reasons people use makerspaces are socializing and learning. Hence, makerspaces can be platforms that cultivate relationships and networks, building social capital, i.e., “social networks and the attendant norms of trust and reciprocity”.

However, claims around the potentialities of makerspaces are still speculative and depend on how individuals associate with such places. While makerspaces have been built in ethnically and geographically diverse environments, there is yet a lack of racial and gender diversity within many of them. For instance, membership is predominantly male in 80% of UK makerspaces and 77% of China’s makers are male. Additionally, 81% of U.S. makers are male with an average income of $106,000. These are indications that participation in the maker movement is heavily dominated by affluent men.

As an attempt to correct this lack of diversity, some feminist and people of color-led makerspaces have emerged, such as Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna and Mothership Hackermoms in Berkley (feminist spaces created in 2008 and 2012 respectively) or Liberating Ourselves Locally in Oakland (a “people of color -led” space created in 2012). However, such strategies have been met with controversy, since they are deemed to go against the principle of openness.

Learning potential

The learning potential of making coupled with open learning environments; project-based learning; informal tinkering; and peer collaboration can motivate the social learning and personalized involvement of participants. Makerspaces exhibit the aforementioned characteristics and, thus, show great promise as emerging learning hubs. That is why makerspaces have recently generated much interest in diverse educational circles. For example, several libraries and museums have created spaces with the aim to empower creative activity, resource-sharing, and active engagement with making, materials, processes, and ideas in relation to their collections and exhibits.

It appears that makerspaces offer the capacity for informal community activity as well as a proper learning environment with a focus on productive processes rather than skill-set building. Varying activities may be combined (like programming and hardware building and even manufacturing tools development), following the approach of constructionism.

Nevertheless, inclusivity and participation in such educational activities is not assured. Although more than 50% of UK makerspaces offer support, courses and tool inductions, the majority of makers are well-educated and technologically-confident. Likewise, 97% of makers in the U.S. have attended or graduated from college, while 80% say they have post-graduate education. Thus, to facilitate learning for diverse users, makerspaces should be staffed by qualified educators who are knowledgeable about theories of teaching and learning as well as about user needs and behaviors.

Innovation potential

In makerspaces people innovate and learn together by making things and using the Web to globally connect and share designs, tutorials and code. They offer creative environments where sustainable entrepreneurs, potentially with diverse motives and backgrounds, can meet and interact and thus benefit from synergies and the cross-pollination of ideas. Moreover, in makerspaces designers can come together and collaborate in participatory explorations during the use phase by prototyping, adding small-scale interventions and, therefore, moving from a “design-in-the-studio” to a “design-in-use” strategy.

Several innovative entrepreneurial endeavors and start-ups have emerged through makerspaces. This article refers to some prominent cases with the aim to provide an overview of the most mature examples that cover a wide spectrum of areas, from ICT and local manufacturing technologies to farming, culture and neuroscience.

In all, makerspaces should not be viewed merely as experimentation sites with local manufacturing technologies but as places “where people are experimenting with new ideas about the relationships amongst corporations, designers, and consumers”. The review of makerspaces-related innovation illustrated that they mainly produce user-led, incremental product and process innovations. Some of the aforementioned projects and eco-systems, such as the RepRap- or Arduino-based eco-systems, may represent both the Schumpeterian and social-oriented understanding of innovation. They seem to create win-win situations for both instigators/entrepreneurs and society, and inaugurate commons-oriented business models which arguably go beyond the classical corporate paradigm and its extractive profit-maximizing practices.

Conclusions

Are makerspaces a manifestation of the “new spirit of capitalism” that has successfully incorporated and adapted several of its various critical cultures? Or could we consider makerspaces as sites with non-negligible post-capitalist dynamics? Both possibilities still exist.

If we subscribe to the idea that at least some makerspaces can be seen as CBPP in practice, then, makerspaces may belong to a new form of capitalism but, at the same time, also highlight ways in which this new form might be transcended. If the dominant discourse of the “smart city” project is aligned with a neoliberal, corporate vision for urban development, then the “makerspace” could simultaneously be a source of legitimacy for the project and also serve as an institution for citizen-driven transformation.

An alternative vision for the smart city may be possible through a commons-oriented approach, geared towards the democratization of means of production. The basic tenet of this approach encourages citizens to participate in creating solutions collectively instead of merely adopting proprietary technology. In addition to virtual connections observed in several sharing economy initiatives, makerspaces can be the physical nodes of a collaborative culture. Further, they can serve as a new “design template”, where knowledge/design is developed and shared as a global digital commons while the actual customized manufacturing takes place locally, thus initiating a decisive break from the current production model.

Full title: “Making (in) the Smart City: The Emergence of Makerspaces”

Find this and more articles here.

Photo by miskaknapek

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