This is a story about people who build their own machines. It’s a story about people who, due to necessity and/or conscious choice, do not buy commercial equipment to work their lands or animals, but who invent, create and adapt machines to their specific needs: for harvesting legumes, for hammering poles, for hitching tools onto tractors.

The machines are just one part of our story, and this article will talk about encounters between people, tools and knowledge and it will take us to various places: Paris and Renage in France, Pyrgos and Kalentzi in Greece, and Tallinn in Estonia.

Let us begin our journey in Greece. In Pyrgos (southern Crete), there is a small group of people called Melitakes (the Cretan word for ants) interested in seed sovereignty and agroecology. It is a group that cares about organic farming and that tries to form a small cooperative. One of the things the group does is to plant legumes in between olive-trees or grapes. While olive trees are abundant in Greece, the land in between individual trees is usually not cultivated due to the distance necessary to avoid shading and foster the growth of the trees. So the idea was quite simple: use the unused land. However, the members of the group soon faced a specific problem: it’s hard to harvest legumes by hand and there are no available tools to do this arduous job in a narrow line between olive trees. On the market, there are only big tractor accessories, suitable for such a job, and only for large crops. That is why the group sought the help of a friend in a nearby village, a machinist, to help them out. He liked the idea. He saw it as a challenge and started to develop a tool (see picture 1). At that time, there were no concrete ideas or talks of ‘open sourcing’ the tool and of ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) practices. The situation was rather a pragmatic one: ‘there is a need for a machine that does not exist in commerce, we need a person to build it… and that’s what we did, supporting that person as much as we could, during the process’.

DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Several weeks later, the two authors of this article met in Paris: Alekos, who knew about his compatriots who built the legume-harvesting machine met Morgan, who knew about l’Atelier Paysan, a French cooperative specialized in the auto-construction of agricultural equipment, based in Renage. Alekos explained his plans: carrying out his PhD at Tallinn University of Technology on convivial technologies, getting to know l’Atelier Paysan, and ‘implementing’ some ideas in Greece through creating a makerspace for building agricultural tools within the framework of an EU funded programme called Phygital. Morgan explained the trajectory of his research on/with l’Atelier Paysan: his involvement in a collaborative project on user innovation since 2015 and his analysis of l’Atelier Paysan through looking at the politics and materialities of open source technologies in agriculture. After their discussion about theoretical approaches, methods, concepts and fieldwork, it was time for Alekos to meet l’Atelier Paysan ‘on the ground’ by participating in a 5-day workshop to build two tools for organic grape crops.

Alekos gained several kinds of knowledge via the workshop. Practical knowledge on working with metals, cutting, and welding. He also gained theoretical knowledge from l’Atelier Paysan: its organizational structure, the problems faced (and how they are solved), the financial setup and how to run workshops (see picture 2).

Construction of the charimaraîch (a wheelbarrow/wagon adapted for market gardening). Source: l’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is one of the few collectives specialized in such activities (other notable collectives being Farmhack and Open Source Ecology). L’Atelier Paysan has developed a range of practices and tools for ‘liberating’ agricultural tools: a website, workshops, a book, video tutorials, and open-source plans. In their recent article, Chance and Meyer (2017) have analyzed l’Atelier Paysan by retracing their history and form of organization, studying how they enact the principles of open source in agriculture, and by describing their tools within their economic and political context.

When Alekos got back in Greece, he visited the Melitakes group again. He explained how l’Atelier Paysan works – its practices, philosophies, and ethics – and the various tools that have been designed and built. While thinking about the future development of Melitakes’ tool and its possible diffusion through some of the standards developed by l’Atelier Paysan, the collective faced a new problem: none of them was a mechanical engineer. None of them thus could draw the design of the components of the legume harvesting tool in situ. Yet this was a crucial step for digitizing the design and making it accessible online. So they sought the help of architects for how to best illustrate each part of the machine. Subsequently, they dismantled the tool, took photos of each component (more than 300 photos in total) in the correct angle (90 degrees) and with a tape measure visible on each photo. They also used big pieces of paper to trace some complicated parts (see picture 3). And they started looking for persons who, based on the pictures and imprints, would be able to (digitally) draw the mechanical design of the tool.

The plan, at the moment of writing this article, is to draw the plans of the tool, open source them by publishing them on the Internet under a Creative Commons type of license and then organize workshops to teach people to build it. So while the full story about the legume-harvesting tool has yet to be written, some features can already be told: a practical problem has been translated into a technical tool; this tool has been disassembled and photographed in order to make it ‘drawable’ and thus available via Internet. The hope, for the future, is that many more people, in many more places, will be able to build this tool, further improve it and share the improved design with the global community. But alongside the tool, something else will travel and be reinforced: the principles of agroecology and the practices of open source.

Imprinting of some complicated parts from the DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Our second story begins in a village called Kalentzi in Northern Tzoumerka region, Greece. The local community of farmers (called Tzoumakers) had another practical problem: finding an appropriate tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground. Several tools have been used for this task for ages. But not without its difficulties and dangers: there are farmers who climb ladders and hammer the poles, and others who climb on barrels to do the job. But the combined efforts of hammering the poles into the ground and, at the same time, maintaining one’s balance on the ladder/barrel proves difficult – plus, you need two people to do the job. That is why several local farmers and makers got together, tried to find a solution and set up a plan to build a tool that can do the job without the need for acrobatic moves by making it possible for one person to hammer the poles while standing firmly on the ground (see picture 4).

Testing the newly constructed tool for hammering fencing-poles from the Tzoumakers group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

The next phase, after the current prototyping of the tool, will be the design of a booklet that will include a detailed presentation, an explanation of the usefulness of the tool, a list of all the equipment and material needed, instructions for building the tool (and the risks thereof), drawings and pictures.

It is time, now, to move back to France and give more details about l’Atelier Paysan. The first tool construction workshops took place in 2009 by a group of innovative organic farmers that was eventually formalized and structured into the cooperative l’Atelier Paysan in 2014. At that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already begun situating its practices theoretically, by mobilizing various vocabularies and concepts (agroecology, open source, social/circular economy, common good, appropriate technologies, etc.) as well as various authors and academics (André Gorz, Jean-Pierre Darré, etc.). Active collaboration with several academics in the social sciences was sought from 2015 onwards.

By that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already perfected its general methodology: doing its TRIPs (Tournées de Recensement d’Innovations Paysannes / Tours to Make an Inventory of Peasant Innovations); developing tools via testing, prototyping, upgrading and realizing workshops; and ‘liberating’ the collectively-validated tools via publishing detailed plans and tutorials on the Internet. One of its most prominent tools is the quick hitch triangle, which replaces the usual three-point linkage between a tractor and the tool to be fixed behind it. For the quick hitch triangle, l’Atelier Paysan has produced a 10-minute video, taken many pictures, issued a 47-page booklet, drawn several plans – all of which are freely available on its webpage (see picture 5).

Design, making and testing the quick hitch triangle from the l’Atelier Paysan. Source: l’Atelier Paysan.

It is important to stress a key feature: it is not l’Atelier Paysan that develops new tools from scratch ‘in house’; rather, they actively look out for individual farmers’ innovations. Only thereafter, through collective construction work, after testing the tool in the field and various processes of representation (plans, pictures, videos), are the tools released. Put differently, while user innovations are already there, ‘in the field’, the role of l’Atelier Paysan is to collect, formalize and disseminate these innovations.

In Greece, the situation is somewhat similar: local peasants already have several ideas in mind for tools that they would like to materialize. The idea is now to continue building tools with the local community, a practice that is usually experienced as positive and empowering. Ideas – like seeds – need fertile ground. Yet, a model like the one from l’Atelier Paysan, cannot simply be copy-pasted to another country and another context unmodified: a thorough understanding of both realities is needed. For example, in Greece, there are no public funding streams available for such endeavors, and the specific plants, soils, and morphologies of the country also call for specific, locally adapted tools. Apart from the political and natural peculiarities, socio-cultural characteristics also differ. For example, farmers’ skills are not the same in Greece than in France, and the collective memory and experience of building cooperatives in Greece is different. The conditions under which people can cooperate have their local ‘flavours’ rooted in habits, perceptions and social imaginaries. Therefore, l’Atelier Paysan’s model can act as an inspirational starting point but needs to be adjusted through continuous local experimentation.

The final leg of our trip brings us back to our respective academic homes (in Paris and Tallinn), to our keyboards to write this article, and to the theorizations that we are currently working on. Our stories have been about the work – and sometimes difficulties – that go into transporting ideas, machines, practices, and knowledge from one site to another. This is not a simple move, it is not just a matter of copy-pasting an idea, a practice or a technology from one place to another. Ideas, practices, and technologies are not immutable objects, but they are, in a sense, ‘quasi-objects’. In order to move ideas and technologies, they need to be transformed, disassembled and reassembled, translated, represented, adjusted. It is only via a variety of interlinked actions – imagining, testing, photographing, drawing, theorizing, sharing, rebuilding – that objects can travel and multiply. For these technological devices to be open, ‘convivial’ and low-tech, they need to be opened up in several ways. Our argument is that this opening up is both a technical practice and a social endeavor. Our stories are thus not only about the practices of open sourcing agricultural tools, but also about the (geo)politics, ethics, aesthetics and collective dimensions thereof.

(Note: the authors of the article would like to thank Luis Felipe Murillo, Evan Fisher, Chris Giotitsas and Vasilis Ntouros for their suggestions and comments. Alekos Pantazis acknowledges financial support from IUT (19-13) and B52 grants of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, COST Action CA16121 project and the Phygital project which is funded via the Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg V-B Balkan – Mediterranean 2014-2020)

Lead Image: L’Atelier Paysan

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Alice Casey and Peter Baeck: 2016 was the year the collaborative economy established itself as the big disruptor of everything, how we travel, shop and manage our money; 2017 was the year the tide began to turn and the sector came under increased scrutiny. 2018 will be the year of construction – collective action that will create new forms of collaborative economy models for a wider benefit.

In recent years we have seen rising opposition and campaigns against gig work. This was initially led by incumbents worried about disruption to their businesses and by gig economy workers themselves who felt they got a poor deal from the platform giants. Consumers, citizens, and politicians soon followed suit – and all increasingly began asking questions about workers’ rights, regulation, local impact and the sustainability of many of the business models in play, in particular how power and profit was shared between platform and workers powering the collaborative economy.

Creative construction

While most criticism of the platform giants has so far been focused on whether or not their business models treat workers fairly; in 2018 we predict that those workers who power large parts of the collaborative economy will take constructive, collective action. Inspired by the disruptive nature of the platforms they work through, they will create services and organisations that themselves disrupt and evolve the marketplace, rebalancing power and distributing revenue differently.

This will be driven by a number of factors including: access to ever cheaper and customisable organising technology; maturity and size of the collaborative economy; and an increase in peer networks of those trialling new forms of ownership and organising. It will be fuelled by the continued dominance of centralised collaborative platforms and their drawn-out legal battles, giving workers an incentive to rapidly create their own solutions.

We think that two parts of the collaborative economy will be reinvented in 2018 –  the organisation and the union.

The new organisations: platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives connect dispersed resources and workers through the web, offering a collectively governed alternative to the centrally-owned platforms. This affects how revenue flows to workers, and beyond into communities. Workers share ownership, and take a role in governance and allocation of any surplus income generated. Instead of focusing on creating profit for shareholders, a cooperative model focuses on distributing income generated in line with members’ wishes. These innovative organisations are increasing in numbers and testing a range of operating models.

Platform coops offer the following features in contrast to dominant centralised platforms:

Surplus

Surplus funds generated above the operating cost of the organisation are voted on by members – and often shared among them. They may be reinvested in the organisation’s development or in some cases to support agreed causes. There is no one size fits all approach to allocating revenue surplus. Stocksy paid out $200,000 in dividends to its photographer members and offers high royalty rates, turning over $7.9 million. Open technology makes it easier to allocate and distribute income generated in various ways that were previously impractical; digital agency Outlandish uses cobudget to allocate openly; Fairbnb intends to donate surplus to improve the neighbourhoods where rental properties are located.

Collective governance

Membership models mean that workers can have a say in an organisation’s governance, and multi-stakeholder models such as Fairshares also give others, such as buyers or beneficiaries, a say too. Enabling meaningful members’ input at scale may be tackled in part through using collaborative technology such as Liquid Democracy and Loomio. This could help focus on quality and accountability.

Alternative growth

Federated coops offer a way for technology to be owned centrally, but governed by groups of coops or social value organisations. The marketplace Fairmondo creates units within countries, currently powered by Sharetribe technology. Networks such as Enspiral offer digitally-enabled ways to grow organisations, currently numbering 300 contributors. Decentralised organising offers another way to distribute governance and finance at scale, exploiting blockchain to verify transactions. Commune and Arcade City are experimenting with this in transportation. Resonate music offers a ‘stream to own’ model, which charges you a price per play until you’ve paid for the track.

Social impact

There is a need to support further experimentation in joining coops with platform technology to address social challenges differently. Increased worker involvement and platform tech offers some promise for social challenges such as adult social care. Inspiration is offered by Buurtzog, a non-profit foundation – though not a coop – it empowers care workers to manage their own workload, focus on quality and take decisions using tech to support this way of working, turning over €280 million. Pioneers include Care and Share Associates, a coop model of social care, and icare, a platform created to manage care data.

The new unions: worker networks

Just as digital platforms have allowed companies to coordinate large, dispersed groups of individual workers to perform coordinated gigs and tasks without them connecting to each other, workers are now using the same technology to connect, support each other and take collective action for themselves, rebalancing power in favour of the worker.

In 2018, this way of organising workers in the collaborative economy will move into the mainstream and operate alongside, in partnership with, and perhaps even in some cases replacing, traditional unions. The call in the Taylor Review for A WorkerTech Catalyst and the pioneering work done by tech for good accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures, in partnership with Resolution Trust, on incubating startups that support low-wage workers is likely to lend further momentum to this.

The growth in worker tech has been characterised by solutions focusing on:

Rights

The US-based Coworker platform is one of the most established examples of organised worker rights campaigning. The platform came to fame when Starbucks decided to end ‘Clopenings’ (where people work back-to-back shifts) after more than 10,000 Starbucks employees signed a petition against this. Ten per cent of Starbucks staff have joined Coworker.

Accountability

More recently an Etsy employee launched a Coworker campaign to mobilise employees (and sellers and customers) to ‘ensure the company doesn’t stray from its values’, and Uber drivers used the platform to lobby for changes to the app, such as a tipping function, which was subsequently followed up by the company.

Ratings

In Germany, faircrowd.work has been set up to allow workers in the collaborative economy to share and access information and reviews of platforms including ratings of working conditions, including a guide to the different established and new unions that can help workers.

Dispute resolution

In a further evolution, eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association, and the German Metalworkers’ Union established a joint Ombuds Office in 2017, tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Peer support

Closer to home, Welsh cooperative Indycube provides a voice for freelancers, carrying out invoice chasing and legal freelancer support services as well as operating a coworking space. Cotech offers support to its 29 technology cooperative members, running a network turning over £9 million and a workspace in London.

Insurance

As the setup of the work has changed so has the need for insurance. Some commercial operators like Zego provide ‘pay as you go insurance’ for riders in the gig economy. Others are experimenting with setting up insurance and mutual support between peers of workers. One example of this is Breadfunds. Now being trialled in the UK, but originally a concept developed in the Netherlands, bread funds are groups of 25 to 50 people who contribute money each month into a fund to support any of its members who become unable to work through illness or injury.

Disrupting the disruptors: Why now?

These developments represent growing demand for disruption and redistribution of power and profit in the collaborative economy.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.

However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

In 2018, this new wave of disruptors is set to leapfrog the first wave of collaborative economy innovations to produce new socially and financially sustainable alternatives.

The rapid increase in demand for worker-led platform services, and the digital, open and decentralised nature of worker tech and platform coops means that they have an easy and flexible route to create new ways of working.

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

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Creative Commons has just issued a report documenting usage patterns of its licenses.  It’s great to learn that the number of works using CC licenses has soared since this vital (and voluntary) workaround to copyright law was introduced twelve years ago, in 2003.

According to a new report, the State of the Commons, recently released by Creative Commons, the licenses were used on an estimated 50 million works in 2006 and on 400 million works in 2010.  By 2014, that number had climbed to 882 million CC-licensed works.  Nine million websites now use CC licenses, including major sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Public Library of Science, Scribd and Jamendo.  The report includes a great series of infographics  that illustrate key findings.

For any latecomers, CC licenses are a free set of public licenses that let copyright holders of books, films, websites, music, photography and other creative works choose to make their works legally shareable.  The licenses are necessary because copyright law makes no provisions for sharing beyond a vaguely defined set of “fair use” principles.  Copyright law is mostly about automatically locking up all works in a strict envelope of private property rights.  This makes it complicated and costly to let others legally share and re-use works.

The CC licenses were invented as a solution, just as Web 2.0 was getting going.  It has functioned as a vital element of infrastructure for building commons of knowledge and creativity.  It did this by providing a sound legal basis for sharing digital content, helping to leverage the power of network-driven sharing.

The licenses have also helped commoners develop their own alternatives to conventional, proprietary forms of corporate culture – Hollywood, commercial television, the major record labels, the big book publishers. Instead of a system that separates producers from consumers, and privileges the power of (corporate) intermediaries in market-based culture, CC licenses have enabled commoners to collaborate among themselves, generating a bottom-up flow of mostly noncommercial creative content.

A big issue in many free culture circles is how “free” are the licenses.  Some CC licenses prohibit commercial and derivative uses of a work, which makes them “less free,” while other licenses that allow both adaptations of a work and commercial use are “free.”  (“Free as in freedom, not as in free beer,” as Richard Stallman famously put it.)  According to the new CC report, roughly 56% of the 882 million CC-licensed works out there allow for both adaptations and commercial uses of a work (“free culture licenses”).  This percentage is up from 40% in 2010.  A full 76% of works counted allow adaptations, and 58% allow commercial use.

A breakdown of license usage showed these interesting numbers:

CC0:4%

CC BY:19%

CC BY-SA:33%

CC BY-ND:2%

CC BY-NC:4%

CC BY-NC-SA:16%

CC BY-NC-ND:22%

Usage of CC licenses around the world fall into these inter-continental percentages, as this infographic shows:

The international proliferation of the licenses has spurred an interest in all sorts of initiatives to make government information, scholarly journals, culture and educational curricula more accessible to people.  Fourteen countries have made formal national commitments to open education through legislation or projects that “lead to the creation, increased use, or improvement of open educational resources by requiring an open license like CC BY.  Open textbooks – i.e., CC licensed and therefore more easily shareable and inexpensively produced – have saved students over $100 million.

For years, there were CC licenses for more than 170 legal jurisdictions around the world.  This was the only way to make the licenses legally enforceable.  But as the legal terms of the licenses were gradually adapted to the laws of more than 35 countries, there has been a greater convergence of licensing terms transnationally.  To reflect this, Creative Commons in December 2014 released Version 4.0 licenses that are designed to be more useable by the global user community.

The new licenses include new provisions related to database rights, personality rights, and data mining – provisions that have already been endorsed by the European Commission for use by public sector institutions, and by the White House for federal government datasets.

The CC report concludes with a few warnings about the threats to the sharing of information and culture. These include things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a treaty that, if passed, will extend copyright terms by another 20 years beyond its current, mandatory term.  In other words, a giveaway worth billions of dollars to existing copyright holders (primarily large corporations) that will do little to serve the public.  Creative Commons also hopes to improve the technologies that will enable wider usage of its licenses.

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