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]]>In these almost ten years 创客 chuangke (Chinese for makerspace) have boosted, shrunk, evolved. In 2019 the panorama is capillary diversified throughout the country: the strong policies of incentives actuated by the government starting from 2015 and the great diversity of the cultural and business landscapes in cities of 1st, 2nd, 3rd tier make the “mass entrepreneurship innovation” policy interpreted and implemented differently.
During several sessions, we have interviewed Eduardo Alarcon Gallo, the communication officer for 新车间Xinchejian[1], on if and how the source of funding and revenues, as well as impact potential on learning and business models, have evolved in this decade.[1] the first maker-space in China, founded in 2010 by David Li (李大维), Min Lin Hsieh (谢旻琳) and Ricky Ng-Adams (伍思力) in Shanghai, renown to be a true hackerspace with Chinese characteristics.
What is the financial status of XinCheJian?
Xinchejian is a no-profit establishment run by volunteers: it survives cutting down the costs.
What is XinCheJian?
Xinchejian is a makerspace. It is a community. It is a place to learn and experience, a place for STEAM.
XinCheJian also embraces business, it’s a place to cooperate and create, to help to create start-ups, and create win-win connections with schools, universities and companies.
How has the government’s set of incentives following the policy “mass entrepreneurship innovation” supported you?
It has not, until spring 2019. We have been offered several times, but we preferred singular sponsorships from different companies throughout the years to focus on our independent community and activities.
This year, nevertheless, the rent of our historic venue has increased quite considerably, to a point where it was not sustainable for us. We have been offered some other venues for free, but after careful consideration, we considered our location a real value and an asset for our activities and legacy. We believe the strongest element of a makerspace is its community, of both memberships and at large. After all these years our community is here, where we are. Moreover, this neighbourhood, differently from others, has kept its initial population of small vendors, craftsman, industrial workshops, repairmen; we know them, we collaborate: in a way the neighbourhood it’s part of our community at large.
Therefore, in spring 2019 we have applied for government funding to sustain the rent’s cost. We have not participated in other ways to the government policy.
Has the 2015 policy “mass entrepreneurship innovation” changed or influenced your activities? Did you perceive the Bubble[2]?
We did not feel the Bubble, I did not even hear about it. We are not new makers trying to do good. Nobody ever came here and told me “… we do not trust the movement or your space”.
As a maker I know the spaces which are active and thrive both in China and abroad, I am not aware of the details of other situations.
My experience is that it could take a couple of years to establish a healthy community around a space; a sudden growth of 189 beautiful spaces in 6 months may lead to the fact that some could remain empty if they were not established to further collate a community already growing in the area.
How were you funded?
At the beginning we were sponsored by companies which were interested in relating their brand to our community and members, companies like BMW, Frog, DF Robot. From the very first start, we designed and held workshops for the sponsoring companies on themes like DIY, electronics, SW design, and others. These activities provided us with enough income to grow and thrive.
How has the companies’ interest evolved?
Today the interest of the companies has evolved and it is distributed among the offer of the 16 different Maker-spaces now active in Shanghai.
In addition to the workshops and courses on themes like DIY, electronics, SW design, now the companies are asking for an array of different activities: it is more complex, more sophisticated, layered and deeply integrated with companies’ HR culture. For example, alongside hackathons and DIY workshops, we are asked for courses on ideation processes, innovation management, sustainability, design thinking, and activities for team building and family days.
We are developing similarities to a service company.
How are you funded now?
We are funded by the companies which are interested in what our community can offer and our structured and custom-designed services. We are now leveraging our human resources in our community to allocate them to the project of our client. The most common topics are still related to machinery, hardware and software design, but we are also asked about soft skills. There is now a new project management layer added to the professional service: especially for those companies which, due to the specific project’s size and duration, won’t need to hire an employee, but just outsource with us. We can offer a vast database of people, competences and services. In the free-lancer hour-fee, there is a percentage for Xinchejian to help it continue to be the bridge.
Our community counts hundreds of people as Xinchejian members, thousands as collaborating non-members. We connect and collaborate with individuals, centres and also other communities (like Coderbanker) with a common focus on business.
Can we then refer to it as an organic and synergetic community’s business model?
Yes, sure.
As makerspace, our membership is 100 yuan per month. Being a non-profit based on a community, it is difficult to escalate our model and to run a business sustainably. The management is horizontal, not vertical, so, at times, the decision-making process can be slow or have not a clear and consistent direction. Therefore the makerspace needs to remain a makerspace.
On the other hand, the companies and startups that are born here in Xinxchejian give back a percentage of the revenues of the activities that are related to the space.
Also, as I mentioned, we provide services to companies through our pool of hackers of whom fees we receive a percentage.
Many companies come to Xinxchejian to collaborate with all aspects of our community because they are aware there is a symbiosis and a win-win; the very members act often as a connection to the industrial world. We have built a reliable brand.
From a business model point of view, what is opensource for you?
Opensource is a tool, one of the many. Well managed, it can support gaining a big community in and around the space, but it is hard to monetize. We do not push mandatory opensource, for us, it is one more tool to create and sustain healthy community learning and business models.
From a business model point of view, what is opensource for you?
Opensource is a tool, one of the many. Well managed, it can support gaining a big community in and around the space, but it is hard to monetize. We do not push mandatory opensource, for us, it is one more tool to create and sustain healthy community learning and business models.
Your community: how did you build it and how have you kept it? Can you tell us about its evolution?
I could summarize these years in three main phases.
At the very first beginning, there was a clear separation between staff members and other members. At times there was not much awareness of one another within the two groups and members took the place (Xinchejian) for granted not knowing the existing challenges on economic sustainability and other issues.
In a second phase, the first generation of staff was growing bigger, through interests related to their history in Xinchejian, but outside of it, and there was some detachment.
Through long experience, we have grown into the opinion that to grow and keep a wide and solid community for our place, members’ participation to the various issues occurring was fundamental: it would facilitate stable commitment, spread a sense of responsibility on both staff and regular members, and transparency would bring trust.
Therefore, in this third phase, we have reorganised internal fluxes and added a management take on the activities. We have established several departments: maintenance, external communication, workshops, party committee, open night, finance. Our economic situation is now completely disclosed through a big whiteboard, visible for anyone who enters the space, with detailed incomes and expenses: not being fully aware proved to be a real barrier for our community.
Our choice has been proven to be the right one, now also the staff group has evolved: it comprises also active and committed makers who use the space every day. The heavy users have hence committed also into maintaining the space.
Which is the impact of XinCheJian on business models?
For what concerns the other makerspaces, we are often looked at as a model, for example, our membership is 100yuan/month and the other spaces follow.
For what concerns other businesses, I do not feel we can influence the sector since we are a non-profit.
On the other hand, the companies and startups that are born here are new and innovative: in my opinion, they are influencing the market with new ways and new business models.
–Precious Plastic, for example, is a 100 countries’ business model offering to all teams around the world blueprints and toolkits to create a recycling station. The Shanghai branch was born here and they create and sell mainly activities on recycling awareness, educational with universities and institutions, CSR with companies.
–Tokylab is an edutech STEAM company with the goal to empower anyone to invent and create in 5 minutes with no previous knowledge. It collaborates with companies and institutions. It is a new business, it is softwareless, this allows to major savings on the maintenance and updating.
–Vincihub organizes flight lessons with the helicopter flight simulator that they developed in XinCheJian.
As I mentioned before we also offer a support system for a new way to freelance.
How do you see XinCheJian’s impact?
The impact on society at large I reckon is substantial since the 21st-century skills are DIY. One learns how to learn, create, share, give and take within the community. Achieving your goals within a community enhances your soft skills.
Broadly it has an impact on innovation through products, services and business models.
What would you say is typically Chinese about XinCheJian?
Approximately 40 or 50 % of members and managers are Chinese.
Images source: https://www.facebook.com/xinchejian/
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[1] the first maker-space in China, founded in 2010 by David Li (李大维), Min Lin Hsieh (谢旻琳) and Ricky Ng-Adams (伍思力) in Shanghai, renown to be a true hackerspace with Chinese characteristics.
[2] From the implementation of the 2015 policy “Mass Entrepreneurship Innovation” China has experienced incredible growth, reaching the biggest number of incubators and makerspaces in the world. The first high-tech business incubator was born in 1987 (in Wuhan, Hubei province), the first makerspace in 2010 (Xinchejian in Shanghai), the second one in 2011 (Chai Huo in Shenzhen), and at the end of 2016 China owned 3.255 incubators and 4.298 makerspaces triggering the creation of 223.000 SMEs. The numbers of the active makerspaces fluctuate considerably between 2015 and 2018: this phenomenon of sudden opening and closing have been referred to as The Bubble.
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]]>The post Essay of the Day: Open and Collaborative Developments appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing knowledge and material artefacts can be found everywhere – from the free/libre and open-source software movement to citizen science initiatives, and from community-based fabrication labs and makerspaces to the production of open-source scientific hardware. Spurred on by the widespread availability of networked digital infrastructure, what such initiatives share in common is the (re)creation of knowledge commons, and an attempt to redistribute innovative agency across a much broader array of actors.
In this working paper we reflect on what these emerging practices might mean for helping to cultivate more equitable and sustainable patterns of global development. For many commentators and activists such initiatives promise to radically alter the ways in which we produce knowledge and material artefacts – in ways that are far more efficient, creative, distributed, decentralized, and democratic. Such possibilities are intriguing, but not without critical challenges too.
We argue that key to appreciating if and how collaborative, commons-based production can fulfil such promises, and contribute to more equitable and sustainable patterns of development, are a series of challenges concerning the knowledge politics and political economy of the new practices. We ask: what depths and forms of participation are being enabled through the new practices? In what senses does openness translate to the ability to use knowledge? Who is able to allocate resources to, and to capture benefits from, the new initiatives? And will open and collaborative forms of production create new relations with, or even transform, markets, states, and civil society or will they be captured by sectional interests?
Reposted from The Steps Centre
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]]>The post Hack-a-Home: put the means of production in the hands of those who need it appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>We’ve already covered Ability Mate’s Hack-a-Home project in the blog. Here is an inspiring update written by the hack-a-homies themselves. The following text was originally published in AbilityMate’s website.
MelT’s Summary
Imagine what it’s like to have a makerspace inside a residential area….
Imagine what it’s like to design your own assistive device from scratch….
Imagine what it’s like to work alongside designers and engineers to create innovative solutions….
That’s what AbilityMate did over the past month. Partnering with Northott Innovation and UTS, we launched a global first initiative, Hack-a-Home. This involved setting up makerspaces inside Northcott’s disability group homes at Beverly Park, Guilford and North Parramatta. Each house has four 3D printers installed, along with all the tools and materials needed for prototyping, and the staff and residents had one week to prototype and design assistive devices they need. We all know there is never a one-sizes-fits-all when it comes to assistive devices in the disability sector, so we want to give our users the opportunity to design something for themselves. Something that can be 3D printed. Something that can make everyday tasks just that little bit easier.
A team of designers and engineers at AbilityMate spent two days per week at each house to lend a helping hand and sort out any technical difficulties with the printers and TinkerCAD. As a designer and peer mentor, it was incredibly rewarding to see our users head down the creative path and bring their own assistive devices to life. From the time they come up with an idea, to the minute they create a rough sketch on paper, to creating a prototype using different materials, up until the moment when their curious eyes watch the 3D printers bring their product to life layer by layer. The smile on their faces is a constant reminder of why I love what i do!
This is a list of some of the popular assistive devices created:
- Cup holder
- Straw holder
- Wheelchair joystick
It still amazes me see the potential of 3D printing and its ability to create life changing technologies.
AbilityMate’s rebel UX designer, MelT
Beautiful Kay with her new cup holder!
MelF’s summary
The Makers Movement is a massive driving force behind the work i do. Like many others, it gets me out of bed every morning. It’s a movement that is contributing solutions to so many of society’s biggest environmental and social issues like consumerism, supply chains and waste.
What excites me about this movement and the Hack-a-Home project specifically is that they blur the lines between designer, maker and consumer. Ever since joining the maker movement i’ve wanted to be part of a project that combines tools, equipment, culture and knowledge with design challenges at the exact location the problems are experienced. I can now tick that off my bucket list because Hack-a-Home exemplifies the positive impact co-design and location-based fabrication can have.
Where it all started
Lets face it, the Maker Movement could be more inclusive to people of all abilities, genders and backgrounds. I experienced this while travelling Australia and the USA in 2014 visiting 40+ makerspaces, fab labs, tech shops and artists co-ops etc. This is something that’s talked about a lot at AbilityMate. When Johan my co-founder and I met Samantha Frain and Liz Forsyth from Northcott Innovation back in 2015 we got talking about this and also about some of the challenges they were trying to solve with Northcott customers. The issue of Assistive Technology abandonment rates came up. It was at this time the concept of “popping up” makerspaces at Northcott houses was born. Someone said “What would happen if the people who needed bespoke one off products were able to design and make them in the comfort of their own homes” – Said the collective genius in the room. It was moments later that Hack-a-Home v0.1 was born!
What an incredible collaboration!
Now I’d like to congratulate a few key people and organisations who made Hack-a-Home not only possible but successful:
- Samantha Frain and Liz Forsyth – Northcott Innovation. Not only did they back the concept and commission the project they pumped it full of enthusiasm and momentum. Apart the major logistical task of co-ordinating 30 customers and 30 staff members from 3 separate houses Sam and the Northcott team particularly took the project to a new level by placing a research lens on it. Together we established Human Research Ethics approval and will be officially reporting on the project when the 6 month interviews are completed.
- The Northcott customers who embraced our team the tools and like always where the experts in creating their own solutions.
- The Northcott house manager and carers, couldn’t have done this without you guys.
- The AbilityMate team and volunteers who i just love and admire. The team took on this project and made it shine. They gave up their weekends and racked up a lot of mileage. Special mentions to volunteers Brodie Elliot, Conroy Bradley, Samuel Leung and Jack Frisch
- Michael Crouch Innovation Centre contributed generously to the project by providing tools equipment and their amazing staff member/maker extraordinaire Ade Ogunniyi!
- UTS Institute for Public Policy and Governance for assisting with the research element of the project
- The Northcott marketing team for doing a great job on capturing all the stories and PR.
What were we researching?
The research element of Hack-a-Home will be reported on after the last interview take place in 6 months. The aim of this research project is to answer the following research questions:
- How does the level of independence in everyday activities and social and economic participation experienced by people with high / complex (disability) support needs change when provided with customised Assistive Technology (AT) devices created through 3D fabrication?
- How are the retention rates and utilisation rates of AT devices impacted on by customisation?
- How does participation in person centred co-design practices impact on the experiences of people with high/complex disability support needs?
- How does establishing 3D fabrication technology within the home environment of people with disability impact on rates of AT utilization and/or abandonment?
Future Potential
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2012) about one in five or 4.2 million Australians are classified as having some form of disability. The ABS finds people aged between 15 and 64 and living with a disability have lower labour force participation and higher unemployment rates than people living without disability, lower levels of educational attainment, and lower participation in cultural, recreational and sporting activities.
Assistive technology is used extensively by the elderly and people living with disabilities in Australia and elsewhere and has a high and beneficial impact on quality of life relative to cost. According to the NDIA, around 40% of NDIS participants have identified AT as a support need in their individual and tailored NDIS Participant Plans.
3D printing has the potential to support the AT and disability services marketplace and enable new service delivery models. For people with disability, this pilot study of Hack-a-Home has the potential to enhance how innovation in AT product, service and system development can increase their independence and economic and social participation.
The pilot study also has potential to benefit families/carers that provide over 55 million hours of support annually to people with disabilities through new ways of working.
For AT providers and disability services, the pilot study will provide an understanding of critical success factors needed to foster AT innovation and upkeep.
Stay tuned for the final report, video and iteration of Hack-a-Home!
Ciao,
Mel Fuller
Ian’s golf picker-upper!
Brodie’s Summary
Hack-a-Home was a rewarding and exciting program that I enjoyed being a part of. In my role as a CAD designer, I worked with customers at each home and their carers to design solutions for day to day problems that the customers ran into. I was blown away in many cases by the level of participation and the creativity of ideas everyone had to offer. This guided me in many of the designs I managed to create and print out for the customers.
A few of my favourite projects included Kay, who wanted a cup holder for her walker. With her help, we managed design a customised cup holder that bolted on using the holes that were unused for adjustment of the walker. Being able to be part of a completely customised design for a certain problem was very rewarding and I think Kay enjoyed having something that worked specifically for her.
Another project I found enjoyable was Marina’s toggle. Given the range of motion in Marina’s right hand, comfort and accuracy whilst controlling her motorised wheelchair was difficult for her at times. Through speaking with Marina, we created a toggle which was taller and a more effective shape to facilitate the knuckles she used to drive her wheelchair. Marina was very pleased and appreciative with the new design and seeing her drive around with the new toggle brought a big smile to my face.
Working and sharing time with each of the customers was not only educational but a great deal of fun. I felt very privileged to be so welcomed into their homes and being able to discuss and work on problems that they wanted solved.
Brodie
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]]>The post Tooling Up: Civic visions, FabLabs, and grassroots activism appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>São Paulo’s authorities join a range of civic bodies casting an eye over the – potentially – empowering possibilities of FabLabs. Yet these initiatives raise many issues: who, exactly, is being empowered by access to tools? What kind of technological citizenship and forms of urban governances do they support, and why? To start unpicking these questions, it is instructive to look to Barcelona where a program to open an Ateneu de Fabricació Digital in every city district has been running for two years.
A brief history of digital fabrication workshops
FabLabs are part of a larger global movement of community-based digital fabrication workshops. These spaces also include hackspaces and makespaces, and are typically equipped with both contemporary versatile technologies – CAD, 3D printers, laser cutters, routers – as well as traditional machines and tools including lathes, drills, sewing machines, and welding equipment. Emerging from the free culture and autonomist movements, community workshops have moved into hardware hacking, using tools that allow their members to modify, personalize, and manufacture anything from toys and vehicles to wind turbines and home energy systems (FabLab Barcelona even made a prefab eco-house). Members share ideas, design, code and instructions online – what gets designed in one workshop can theoretically be made in any other in the world.
The growth in FabLabs might seem like an organic outgrowth of this people-led movement. Its roots, however, come from an outreach initiative of MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms, who had intended to gradually roll out FabLabs in a few countries. Technology carries unexpected consequences, and the model soon took on a life of its own as other groups decided that yes, they would quite like to set up their own fabrication labs independently of MIT. Right now, there are around 440 FabLabs across 33 countries.
Barcelona and the Ateneus Project
And so to Barcelona, which opened its first FabLab at the Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalunya (IAAC) in 2006. Originally intended for relatively closed use – for students, prototyping, and architectural commissions – the lab garnered global attention for its pioneering vision of urban governance. More than simply making new widgits, IAAC founder, and now City Architect, Vicente Guallart envisioned maker-citizens using new tools such as 3D printers and open source designs as a means of taking an active, material role in city development.
This image of the technologically empowered civic citizen appealed, and FabLab Barcelona’s model went on to provide the template for the Ateneus program as part of the city leaders’ vision for transforming Barcelona into a smart, self-sufficient city. Supported by Barcelona’s civic leaders, each Ateneu receives public funds to run popular local events – family days and school visits; training courses and social innovation programs: everything necessary to equip citizens with the digital fabrication nous necessary to ‘materialise their ideas and create their worlds’ (according to the Ateneus slogan). By this vision, high-tech public infrastructure will make it easier for Barcelona’s citizens to lock into a global ‘maker’ network – uploading designs which folks, say, in Singapore, might use; or collaborating in prototyping with FabLabs in São Paulo, adapting ideas produced globally to fit their own local needs.
What does a citizen of this exciting new world look like? Technologically active, certainly, and willing to embrace digital fabrication tools, yes – but in a relatively trouble-free and depoliticised way? In adopting the term ‘Ateneu’ for their workshops, city authorities have evoked a Catalan tradition of social centres where people used to meet up, build bonds, and debate issues about the type of society they want – but which in this case civic leaders wish to associate with selectively.
Opening up Ateneus
The first Ateneu opened in July 2013, in an abandoned silk ribbon factory in the Les Corts district. A further 20 workshops are planned to some degree for later down the line. In speaking to me, the Ateneus network director stressed how embryonic and exploratory the programme is. A community workshop for digital fabrication is a strange concept for public administrators to get their heads around. Councils traditionally produce conventional public services for people to receive and consume; conversely, Ateneus offer a space where citizens do the producing. Simply convincing city bureaucracies to experiment with this concept is already an achievement.
Whilst setting-up is also relatively straightforward – installing machinery, running courses – the real challenge comes in weaving the workshops into the everyday fabric of the local community. It takes time to build familiarity, confidence and commitment amongst neighbours, and considerable resources and patience on the part of the city authorities before the possibilities loaded onto Ateneus can be realised.
The experiences around the Ateneu in Ciutat Meridiana highlight these tensions. Ciutat Meridiana is the poorest neighbourhood in Barcelona – unemployment exceeds 20 percent, and family incomes are one third of city averages. The neighbourhood association is constantly in battle with the council over changes to social services, and resisting evictions from mortgage lenders.
So what, exactly, does a high-tech, MIT-inspired workshop, with no immediate role in alleviating the daily crisis of people’s lives, have to offer the neighbourhood? Very little, it would seem – at least initially. The people of Ciutat Meridiana needed food, not 3D printers, and the project didn’t help itself by siting the workshop in a building that neighbours were already using as a food bank. (The Mayor’s support for Ateneus also counted for little in a neighbourhood that felt ambivalently towards him). Rather than embracing the project, locals were alienated and occupied the Ateneu in protest. Negotiations ensued, eventually leading to two conditions of agreement – the food bank was re-established, albeit elsewhere in the neighbourhood; and the Ateneu would emphasise training and work for young people.
Ciutat Meridiana shines a light on the tension between what citizens wanted from their city now, and what city-leaders envisage for future citizens. Even if local stakeholders are engaged beforehand, as happened with the first Ateneu in Les Corts, opening up a workshop is the easiest part of the project. Embedding the facility into community life is more challenging by far.
Making other forms of citizenship
Whilst the Ateneu program is being rolled out, other self-organised and spontaneous workshops are also flourishing across the city. Over in Ciutat Vella, the Maker Convent offers open and informal training programmes for their machinery. Vailets Hacklab run courses for kids in a variety of locations, and now including the Ateneus. Similarly, the Fab Café, run by the Makers of Barcelona and other groups, offer workshop space, education, and tools for anyone walking in off the streets. The ethos of these spaces borrows heavily from a Silicon Valley-esque, Kick-started, ‘can do’ form of urban entrepreneurship, in which people happily share enthusiasm for digital fabrication and explore new forms of collaboration together. Whether citizens suffering precarious employment and other economic hardships wish to embrace this form of citizenship is perhaps a moot point.
Despite the public imaginary of hackspaces as user-led spaces, neither the Ateneus nor these other makerspaces are particularly grassroots phenomena. One test for whether the Barcelona civic vision of digital fabrication workshops can co-exist with grassroots activities will come with Can Batlló, a massive disused textile mill proposed as a potential site for an Ateneus workshop. Can Batlló is in the Sants district of Barcelona, and working-class Sants has a long tradition of political and community organisation – including many squats and social centres – and a history of their own autonomist and co-operative activities.
In response to the economic crisis, Sants activists have already occupied and renovated Block 11 of Can Batlló. The building has been converted into an autonomous, self-organised community centre and co-operative working space, housing a library, carpentry workshop, bar, urban gardening space; and the Sants activists have aspirations to seed local, co-operative economic activity for the neighbourhood through the centre.
If activists are already involved in this type of community building, does a project like Ateneus offer anything more than a shiny technological patina to the process? Or could an Ateneu provide useful tools that unlock wider possibilities, and plug the district into a global community of design activists experimenting in digital fabrication for DIY urbanism and commons-based economic development? The association of Ateneus with Mayor Trias’s smart city vision has been considered by critics to be the latest in a series of city makeovers, prioritising international capital markets and speculative investments in the city over the real needs and aspirations of its residents. According to Ivan Miró, an activist from the Ciutat Invisible co-operative, the smart city is merely a different brand of the same neo-liberal model of urban regeneration, whose democratic and local economic credentials are deeply suspect. In Barcelona, the council’s (sometimes violent) evictions of long-established squatted social centres have deepened suspicions of the smart city plan, and heightened antagonism with the city’s grassroots activists.
Making is political
The Ateneus programme, with city-leaders’ notions of an orderly cultivation of technological citizenship, has unintentionally uncovered very different forms of citizenship in action, and the role that tools play in them. Ateneus are trying to establish themselves in a context where people feel the strain of economic crisis, and increasingly question whose interests are truly being served by future visions of their city.
Many in the wider ‘maker’ movement can be reluctant to engage in politics overtly, as to do so would appear to constrain the notion of giving tools to people in a way which offers them unconstrained agency around their purposes, deployment and use. Yet, as I have explored in my work on community workshops in London in the 1980s, these types of ‘making’ spaces are always opened in very specific social, political and economic contexts. Such contexts already influence the relative ease and kinds of support available for putting tools to particular purposes. If communities are truly to be liberated to debate, use, and resist tools in a way that they see as appropriate (rather than those encapsulated in elite visions), one must engage with the politics of these contexts. This is something that earlier advocates of providing tools for the people have made very clear – think of William Morris and his argument for socialism, or Murray Bookchin on post-scarcity anarchism.
Deployed sensitively, the Ateneus programme could provide important spaces for exploring technology, citizenship, and urban governance in very practical ways, supporting diverse forms of neighbourhood-led development. The programme is still young, and patience is required. The longer-term promise of Ateneus rests with it becoming a community resource owned by the neighbourhoods in which it sits, rather than tied up with the patronage of local politicians. São Paulo, and wherever else public authorities become involved in community workshops, including here in the UK, should take note: bringing tools to people requires skilful community development as well as skills in digital fabrication. A controlled opening up of urban governance and experiments in cultivating particular forms of citizenship is not an easy task.
Originally published in the Guardian in 2015. Lead image by Adrian Smith.
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]]>The post Book of the Day: Grassroots Innovation Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>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)
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]]>The post Can open and collaborative approaches change the world? appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing knowledge and material artefacts can be found everywhere – from the free/libre and open-source software movement to citizen science initiatives, and from community-based fabrication labs and makerspaces to the production of open-source scientific hardware. Networked digital infrastructure – including ever-faster internet access in far flung places – makes these experiments more possible.
Though diverse, these initiatives have important things in common: they create or recreate knowledge commons, and attempt to get a broader array of actors involved as ‘agents’ in innovation.
In a new working paper, ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’, researchers in STEPS America Latina, the STEPS Centre and SPRU reflect on what these emerging practices might mean for helping to cultivate more equitable and sustainable patterns of global development. For many commentators and activists such initiatives promise to radically alter the ways in which we produce knowledge and material artefacts in ways that are far more efficient, creative, distributed, decentralized, and democratic. But can open and collaborative approaches fulfil this promise?
Challenges for open and collaborative practices
The key to answering this question is a set of challenges about the knowledge politics and political economy of the new practices. What depths and forms of participation are being enabled through these new practices, for instance? In what senses does openness translate to the ability to use knowledge? Will open and collaborative forms of production create new relations with, or even transform, markets, states, and civil society, or will they be captured by sectional interests?
Sharing and sticky knowledge
To take one example, a key assumption underpinning many open and collaborative initiatives is that knowledge and information can be shared, then used, modified or further developed, among actors who are far apart from each other (either geographically or institutionally). In effect, this is a promise to radically redistribute access, power and agency over the way that knowledge and materials are produced.
For those in the global South, this is an intriguing prospect. Many developing countries are characterized by acute knowledge dependencies, very narrow production structures, and constrained scope for innovation. In many cases, global firms have control over the frontier of knowledge and technology. So sharing knowledge openly and collaboratively across nations ought to give more options for innovation and participation for people in those countries.
The problem is, though, that knowledge is ‘sticky’: it is immobile, or at least costly or difficult to move from one setting to another. There are several aspects to this; each of which complicates further the challenge of ensuring widespread, equitable internet access and digital information flows.
One aspect to knowledge stickiness is that knowledge possesses important tacit dimensions, particularly in the form of skills and competences. These are most readily shared and learnt in apprentice relationships and through social practice, they often take years to develop, and they are extremely difficult to codify or render explicit, and so are not easily shared through digital networks. Tacit knowledge and the skills to put knowledge to material effect in development are, however, critical to producing and utilizing any and all forms of knowledge. Even successfully using databases of codified information requires skills to select, interpret, and practically use what is relevant.
Some areas of open and collaborative production cope more effectively with knowledge ‘stickiness’. For instance, absolutely central to the success of the open and highly collaborative international Green Revolution in plant breeding (albeit in pre-internet days) were long and intensive international exchanges and field training of thousands of young scientists.
More recently, community-based makerspaces have managed to combine digitally shared, non-proprietary knowledge platforms, with collaborative physical spaces that enable shared learning by doing and using locally. They may, as a consequence, manage to get around many of the problems posed by the immobility of tacit knowledge and the need to re-interpret appropriately and re-embed codified knowledge in local practices.
But other practices, such as citizen science initiatives or the sharing of scientific information via open access repositories may struggle to overcome these kinds of challenges without analogous developments locally. In such circumstances, meaningful access to knowledge and the ability to participate effectively in its (re)production and use are likely to remain very limited.
The obstacles are not necessarily insurmountable, but they do require careful attention to how sharing and collaboration is practiced on the ground, and to the development and distribution more generally of capabilities in knowledge production and use.
Three challenges
Our paper as a whole highlights three sets of challenges in the emerging field of open and collaborative production.
One, as in the example above, concerns the ways in which important attributes of knowledge itself limits aspirations for a more democratic innovation culture.
A second concerns the operation of power internal to the process of producing open and collaborative knowledge. Can open and collaborative production transcend existing hierarchies, asymmetries in the distribution of resources and capabilities between collaborators, and wider patterns of social privilege and structure?
A third concerns the nature of political and economic power within the wider settings and structures in which initiatives in open and collaborative production are situated. Put somewhat crudely, will the new practices constitute ‘novel inputs for existing processes’ or ‘novel inputs for transformed processes’?
None of these three challenges is insurmountable, as we conclude in our paper. But they do imply that any promise in the open and collaborative practices will be realised through accompanying, wider developments. These must be attentive to issues of local capabilities (material and social) in diverse contexts, and include the capability to grapple with issues of relative power and autonomy.
The authors of this blog post are co-authors of the working paper ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’(STEPS Working Paper 98). You can read the abstract here and download the paper (PDF, 900KB).
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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.
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]]>The post Universities, Enterprises and Maker Communities in Open Design & Manufacturing across Europe: an exploratory study appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Which knowledge, skills and learning environments can boost Open Design & Manufacturing at meaningful scale? How can OD&M become the ground of collective experimentation and co-creation between Universities, Makerspaces and Enterprises?
OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and collaboration to create new value chains of innovation in design and manufacturing oriented to the social good.
Through inspiring international mobilities, dedicated events, project-based trainings and innovative systems of learning outcomes certification, the OD&M community is committed to create a valuable environment of capacity-building for students, university staff, enterprises and highly creative and passionate people.
The P2P Foundation and its sister organization, the P2P Lab, are part of Open Design and Manufacturing platform, which has recently released an report. The report can be downloaded in it’s integral and reduced versions. Below you will find the report’s introduction, (written by Laura Martelloni, from LAMA agency) followed by its Executive Summary.
Introduction
Often, new professions and jobs emerge from transformations in the market.
They tend to remain in a grey zone where they mostly take shape through progressive adaptation and training on-the-job, until institutional education and training systems are able to recognize, codify, embed and scale them up into coherent learning journeys and learning outcomes, understandable by the labour market and the wider society.
Manufacturing in Europe is going through a major, almost unprecedented transformation. While it is suffering heavily from the effects of the global crisis and ongoing globalization, we are witnessing the emergence of a social technology-based movement, the Maker movement, spreading fast across the globe. Supported by ICT networks and by the establishment of physical spaces such as Fablabs, this movement is expanding its outreach across the globe, involving people with different backgrounds and mindsets that converge around common values such as ‘sharing’ and ‘openness’, generating a multi-faceted and complex knowledge.
The maker movement has opened the way for a new paradigm of production, called from time to time open manufacturing, p2p production, social manufacturing, maker manufacturing; although the plurality of definitions hints at the lack of maturity of the sector, its keywords – open hardware, open software, distributed networks, collaboration, transparency, among others – all point to the movement’s vocabulary and narrative.
These new forms of production are enabled by open source ICT and rooted in social innovation principles, they adopt open-ended business models and act at the level of ecosystem, they harness distributed networks and ubiquitous communities to unlock the inventive of peer to peer collaboration, and are able to imprint production processes, products and organizational forms with social purposes and outcomes. Considered in its potential to infuse production processes with social innovation principles and values, open manufacturing opens room to cultivate radical changes in the economy and society, able to preserve and grow the public good while steering disruptive paths of innovation (Johar et al., 2015). Open manufacturing has already reached a stage that offers the prospect of new jobs and businesses, but education and training systems across Europe are still stuck in the grey zone of unaware and fragmented intervention.
Within this framework, the OD&M project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe)[1] works to create a trust-based and collaborative Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, traditional manufacturers, and innovation communities of digital-savvy makers and open manufacturing businesses across Europe and beyond. The Alliance’s ultimate goal is to build a European enabling ecosystem that fully embeds the key approaches, values and principles underlying the open manufacturing paradigm, and turns them into drivers for a more competitive, sustainable and socially innovative manufacturing in Europe.
Focussing on the co-creation of new teaching and learning processes, as well as on new methods and models of knowledge exchange and capacity-building between the nodes of the Alliance, OD&M works to unleash a new generation of highly skilled and entrepreneurship-oriented designers and manufacturers, able to boost open design and manufacturing towards meaningful impacts.
The present report contains the results of an action-research carried out by OD&M between March and August 2017. The core objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.
The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole. The overall goal of the action-research was ultimately to identify gaps and opportunities for strengthening connections and collaborations within the OD&M Knowledge Triangle, enabling in particular Higher Education Institutions with new capacities and assets to play a valuable role in this field.
The action-research has been coordinated by LAMA Agency and has actively involved teams of researchers from: University of Florence – DIDA (Italy), University of the Arts London (UK), University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering (Spain), University of Dabrowa-Gornicza (Poland), University of Tongji (China), P2P Foundation (Netherlands), Furniture and Furnishing Centre (Italy). The other partners of the project (i.e. Fablab London, Fablab Lodz and Tecnalia) have contributed as key informants and hubs of connection with relevant stakeholders in the targeted countries.
As the report will highlight, the action-research confirmed that the maker movement is a complex phenomenon that is nurtured by a continuous serendipitous melting-pot among cultures, skills, knowledge, learning styles, languages and attitudes. If this richness represents a fertile ground for innovations across manufacturing sectors – and probably beyond them -, it also represents a challenge for the codes through which Higher Education Institutions embed new topics and shape new mindsets on the one hand, and through which companies demand and search for new, innovation-oriented skills and competences on the other hand.
More research is needed to further encompass and systematize the wide geography of knowledge, competences and skills underlying the maker movement, as well as to better understand how and to what extent they can be encoded in a framework that is portable across life’s domains, and recognizable by different actors. However, the OD&M research represents an important step in this direction, providing insights and identifying a possible scenario of education, training and business innovation built upon an unedited Alliance between Higher Education, manufacturing businesses and maker communities, able not only to prepare the next generation of designers and manufacturers, but to spur innovation – and, in particular, social innovation – across the whole open design and manufacturing value chain.
[1] The OD&M project is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand. The project started in 2017 and will run over three years. It actively involves the following organizations: University of Florence – DIDA, University of Dabrowa-Gornicza, University of the Arts London, University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering, University of Tongji, Furniture and Furnishing Centre, Tecnalia, Fablab Lodz, Fablab London, P2P Foundation, LAMA Agency. The project also involves a number of Universities, SMEs, Foundations, local innovation communities and networks across Europe as associate partners.
Executive Summary
The present Report contains the results of an action-research developed in the context of the OD&M Project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe), funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand.
The main objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.
The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole.
Indeed, the different levels of maturity of the maker movement – and, more generally, of the open design and manufacturing paradigm – in the different countries, poses clear challenges in the implementation of this type of research; on the other hand, it reflects the reality of an emerging phenomenon and points to both the challenges of a common path, and the opportunities of building common experimentations at European level.
Read the full version of the report here
Read the reduced version
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]]>The post Patterns of Commoning: Medialab-Prado: A Citizen Lab for Incubating Innovative Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>It may seem odd to think that passionate amateurs, open source hackers, various professionals and ordinary citizens could actually collaborate and produce interesting new ideas. But that is precisely what Medialab-Prado has succeeded in doing in the last eight years. It has invented a new type of public institution for the production, research and dissemination of cultural projects. It is committed to exploring collaborative forms of experimentation and learning that are emerging from digital networks, especially those practices that enact the commons such as free software, hacker ethics, the Internet as an open infrastructure and peer production dynamics. Medialab-Prado serves as a municipal cultural center that promotes commons-based research, experimentation and peer production, especially through its “Commons Lab.”
The model is quite simple: Medialab-Prado acts as a platform where anyone who has an idea can meet other people and form a work team to develop and prototype the idea. Projects developed at the lab vary immensely, as the list above suggests.
The beauty of the Medialab-Prado process is the inclusive invitations to anyone with the knowledge, talent or enthusiasm to develop a new idea. Through different kinds of open calls for proposals and collaborators, teams are often formed to develop projects in production workshops. Each group is an experiment itself in team- and community-building as it blends people with different backgrounds (artistic, scientific, technical), levels of specialization (experts and beginners) and degrees of engagement. Each group, overseen by the promoter of the project, needs to self-organize and arrange the rules and protocols by which the contributions of participants will be incorporated or rejected, and with what types of acknowledgments. This is why Medialab-Prado has been sometimes defined as an incubator of communities – and commons.
At the heart of Medialab-Prado’s “innovation hosting” of projects is its commitment to free software tools and free licensing. This facilitates the local participation of those that want to contribute to the common good. It facilitates online participation as well, and also in the proper documentation of projects, which is crucial in replicating them elsewhere and in tracking the reasons for the success, failure and procedures of commoning experiments.
Since its creation in 2007, the Commons Lab has evolved from a seminar in which members’ unpublished working documents on the commons were discussed, to an open laboratory that invites the participation of any collaborator, including amateurs, academics and professionals, who wish to join a project.
The Commons Lab has been remarkably productive. Its projects include Memory as a Commons,8 which explore the collective creation of shared memory during conflicts; guifi.net Madrid,9 which imagined and produced a local telecomunications wifi infrastructure that works as a commons; Commons Based Enterprises, which examines recent models of business management that have made contributions to the commons;10 and Kune, a web tool to encourage collaboration, content sharing and free culture.11
Besides such projects, the Commons Lab has hosted many public debates on commons-related themes involving cities, rural areas, digital realms and the body. It has also made public presentations about projects such as Guerrilla Translation, a transnational curator and translator of timely cultural memes,12 and Mapping the Commons, a “research open lab on urban commons.”13 Guerrilla Translation is a P2P-Commons translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain. It consists of a small but international set of avid readers, content curators and social/environmental issue-focused people who love to translate and love to share. The group seeks to model a cooperative form of global idea-sharing, by enabling a platform and method for opening dialogues. Guerrilla Translation does not rely on volunteers, but on building an innovative cooperative business model which “walks the talk” of much contemporary writing on the new economy and its power to change.14
Since moving to a new venue in 2013, the Commons Lab has been less active, even as commoning practices and the commons paradigm have played an increasingly important role in other lines of work and projects at Medialab-Prado. In the near future, the Commons Lab is going to reinvent itself as a project and pull together a history of its achievements to date and comprehensive and introductory material for the general public on the commons theory and practice.
Through public policies and institutions that incubate new commons projects, and enable civil society to create value directly, the commons paradigm may allow us to reinvent public institutions. It can engage people more directly, developing their capacities and participation, and providing accessible open infrastructures that require what anthropologist and free software scholar Christopher Kelty calls “recursive publics” – “a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public.”15
Medialab-Prado, as a public institution that is part of the Arts Area of Madrid City Hall, tries to advance this point of view. It tries to learn from commons-based practices and apply them in the public realm – sometimes succeeding, and sometimes not. But as an organization committed to commons as a model of governance, Medialab-Prado regards its workshops, convenings and events as an indispensable way to continue this important exploration.
Marcos García (Spain) is Director of Medialab-Prado, an initiative of Madrid City Hall devised as a citizen laboratory for the production, research and dissemination of cultural projects.
Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.
References
| 1. | ↑ | http://medialab-prado.es/article/colmenasurbanas |
| 2. | ↑ | http://medialab-prado.es/article/floren_cabello_laboratorio_del_procomun |
| 3. | ↑ | http://medialab-prado.es/article/playlab_experimentacion_con_videojuegos |
| 4. | ↑ | http://www.intheair.es |
| 5. | ↑ | http://medialab-prado.es/article/air_quality_egg |
| 6. | ↑ | http://medialab-prado.es/article/from_stone_to_spaceship |
| 7. | ↑ | http://programalaplaza.medialab-prado.es |
| 8. | ↑ | http://medialab-prado.es/article/memoria_procomun |
| 9. | ↑ | http://madrid.guifi.net |
| 10. | ↑ | http://www.colaborabora.org/proyectos/empresas-del-procomun |
| 11. | ↑ | http://kune.ourproject.org |
| 12. | ↑ | http://guerrillatranslation.com/en |
| 13. | ↑ | http://mappingthecommons.net/en/world |
| 14. | ↑ | http://www.guerrillatranslation.com |
| 15. | ↑ | Kelty, Christopher, Two Bits, The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2008, at http://twobits.net/read. |
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]]>The post Project of the Day: Hack-a-Home appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>We’re working with AbilityMate, UTS and Northcott on a global first project to give people with disability the opportunity to learn about 3D printing and create their own assistive technology. We want people with disability to be active creators of their own technology solutions, not passive recipients of a solution designed by others.
Hack-a-Home is a fantastic opportunity to change the way the disability sector sees assistive technology and how they view supported living environments.
For every piece of assistive technology given to a person with disability, 70% of those devices will be abandoned. We hope to change that by putting the choice and control into the hands of our customers and our frontline staff. Using the principles of co-design and wrap-around supports we will give every customer, support worker and manager from Northcott centres in Beverly Park, Guildford and Parramatta the opportunity to learn about digital fabrication and make their own customised solutions.
How it works
The Hack-a-Home pilot puts MakerLabs into three of Northcott’s long-term accommodation services over 4-6 weeks. The 30 people with disability living there will have the opportunity to identify daily living activities where customised assistive technologies could increase independence, enhance wellbeing or increase social and economic participation. It builds on elements of the ‘Remarkable Enabled-by-Designathon’ which saw the AbilityMate team work successfully with people with disability and students over three days to develop assistive technology prototypes.
Want to know more? Get in contact with us.
Samantha Frain
0438 373 336
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