The city of Cape Town is confronting an unprecedented water crisis. Because of a complex number of factors, including a prolonged drought, the city is facing a complete shutdown of its municipal water distribution. The city has already established a “Day Zero”, the day when all taps will cease to flow, and its inhabitants will have to walk, drive, taxi or take the train each day to one of 200 water distribution points set up around the city to pick up 25L emergency rations of water. Bottled water is flying off the shelves, and home-owners are locking up their faucets to discourage water theft. The city has levied heavy fines against those violating the strict quota of 50L of water per person per day. The Day Zero dashboard shows all the new water supply projects to supply water to the city, but as of this writing, most of them are behind schedule. The city of 4 million is in a race against time to stretch the remaining reserves of water to last until new water arrives. If the reserves run dry, Cape Town will be the first major city in the world with the dubious honor of shutting off its water supply.

The citizens of Cape Town are responding with an equally unprecedented show of creativity, demonstrating that even in a crisis, there is a silver lining. In response to the crisis, the global citizen collective Stop Reset Go, the Cape Town Science Centre,  the global Berlin-based Open Source Circular Economy Days, and Envienta are banding together to launch a global ideation hackathon to crowdsource open source solutions. The hackathon will physically take place on Feb 24 and 25 at the Cape Town Science Centre with guest speakers, panelists, workshops, displays, and spaces for DIY citizen innovators. The process will be supported by SAREBI, a South African Renewable Energy Business Incubator, who will help in judging various ideas and offering valuable Master Business Incubator classes to promising technical water innovations. Simultaneously, the hackathon will take place virtually at the Open Source Circular Economy Days community page. Local physical participants will transcribe local work onto project pages, where global participants can co-participate.

The rationale of the hackathon is to mobilize the sleeping giant of “the commons”, creating a systematic and large-scale process for a planet of innovators to help solve a local crisis. In other words, what if Cape Town were not alone in addressing its crisis, but had the solidarity of thousands of citizen innovators, engineers, organizers and technology developers from around the world? What if an open source platform were created where all contributions were available to every citizen around the world to draw upon and produce/manufacture in their own locale? The citizens of Cape Town would be able to draw upon an unprecedented resource array to solve the city’s water crisis. Enter Hack the Water Crisis.     

The hackathon follows a strategy called cosmo localization, understood through the expression “Design Global, Manufacture Local“. Leveraging the world wide web to mobilize designers to create a planetary design commons, we can create a resource accessible to local peer producers everywhere, empowered by old and new production technologies. Local South African journalist Daniel Silke writes: “…National government too, needs to move from its recent suspicion of the outside world to a new embrace. It’s not just about gaining foreign investment, it should be an embrace to harness global expertise – and Cape Town does need it urgently.” The hackathon event is part of phase 1, a global collaboration to gather ideas. In the following months, some of those ideas will be turned into prototypes and professional products then lead to a later phase 2 stage – the global distribution of the finalized designs to a network of local manufacturers and maker spaces to produce locally everywhere.

The critical question is can we establish such a planetary design commons that can help solve this crisis? Imagine a global open source alliance of cities drawing upon their citizens and resources to solve each other’s crisis. On a large scale this is what is being called “protocol cooperativism”, the development of protocols for sharing of knowledge and resources on a large-scale and systemic basis to mutualise our capacity to address the major challenges that we face.  Inspired by the terminology of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), we introduce the term MOOCC (Massive Open Online Commons Collaboration). Although the term may be new, MOOCC is not. The software world has leveraged MOOCC for decades to develop some of the most important open source software powering the internet, such as Linux,Ubuntu,GNU, MySQL, and Apache   Cosmo localization recognizes that we live in a brick and mortar world, and extends MOOCC methodology into production in general.

In traditional capitalism,  innovators seek financial investment capital to bring their ideas to market. Securing funds allows innovators to exchange it to obtain the resources they need to turn their idea into reality. A large portion of that investment capital is spent on human capital. For instance, labor costs make up half the R+D budget in OECD countries. MOOCC provides a way to bypass a significant portion of the traditional financial capital by going directly to the human capital. With money, it’s easy to buy the expertise we need, but without itl, we need a compelling vision of an end product that all the collaborators desire. And because, relatively speaking, so few innovators meet all the criteria of having the right skills, open source ethos and being able to work pro-bono, this requires casting the net for innovators far and wide. Appealing to the local community is not sufficient, we need to cast the net around the globe. The “massive” in MOOCC is therefore critical.

Traditional capitalism is based on competition but the emergence of the sharing economy has pointed the way to a collaborative economy. To distinguish between these two types of economy, it is convenient to introduce the terminology of the MEconomy as an economy based upon competition, and the WEconomy as one based upon collaboration. The distinction is subtle because even in the MEconomy, collaboration is still a fundamental requirement. The distinction is one more based on a shift in narratives, that drives a shift in behavior. In reality, we all live in a schitzophrenic world. When we are inside our homes, we practice the WEconomy, where social capital is high and the need for money is almost nonexistent. But as soon as we open the door and enter the larger world, we are forced into the MEconomy, and to use money to negotiate all our social transactions. Pyschologically, we feel much more comfortable when we are sharing and have a sense of community, but we forfeit that each time we leave our homes and communities. The MEconomy and WEconomy dualism does not follow the traditional dualism of capitalism vs socialism, a polarizing and false dichotomy. Human beings are both physiologically distinct individuals and yet, require social groups to live and maintain our emotional wellbeing.  Homo Sapien is an altricial species. We are born helpless and immobile – our very survival is dependent on the social support of our parents. Hence the WEconomy is not so much the opposite of MEconomy as it is a balance between taking care both of ourselves and others.

Intersecting with contemporary circular economy theory, the concept of a circular WEconomy is a further refinement of the WEconomy concept, one which recognizes and attempts to correct a politically incomplete definition of the circular economy. For in the current definition of a circular economy, there is no inclusion for democratization of production. The means of production within an idealized circular economy can still support large wealth inequality. Wealth equality is not separate from industrialization and production. It is no accident of history that exploitation of indigenous people around the globe, slavery and industrialization are all intertwined. The current global geographical and corporate polarization of wealth is part and parcel of the means of production that evolved out of the Industrial Revolution.  It is only by defining a circular WEconomy that we introduce the important dimension of wealth democratization into the ecologically necessary circular economy, and redress generational inequality propagated by mainstream economy theory which has traditionally ignored it.  

This project is an example of emerging projects which take a nontraditional approach to addressing development challenges. In addition to the open source and cosmo localization strategies, the project also takes an “urban planetary boundary approach”, to investigate the reasonable limits that should exist in a city’s ecological footprint if we are to create sustainable cities that do not overstep our planetary carrying capacity. Thus, while this project will leverage planetary solidarity to solve Cape Town’s water crisis, the city itself can be working toward making a contribution to solving our global ecological challenges.  

For those interested in supporting or participating in the hackathon, please find out more at  hackthewatercrisis.org  

The post Hack the Cape: crisis or opportunity? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this second newsletter from procomuns.net we want to refer to the new European Collaborative Economy agenda, which establishes guidelines for Member States on how they should regulate and what should be the Collaborative Economy policy of Members States. Is also an invitation to rethink those guidelines with a focus on the Procomuns declaration and its recommendations for Commons oriented policies, as well as with the perspective of platform cooperativism from Trebor Scholz. Also, Thursday 9th June at 18:30h (Barcelona local time), we have organized the first Procomuns meet up with the debate “From the corporate sharing economy to platform cooperativism” with Scholz, taking place at CCCB (Barcelona) and online here http://dimmons.net/cooperativismo-de-plataforma/streaming-cccb (among other events taking place the coming weeks).

European collaborative economy agenda

The European Commission just made public on June 2nd its agenda for the Collaborative Economy:http://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/strategy/collaborative-economy/index_en.htm From Procomuns.net – space for the promotion of commons collaborative economy – we would like to initiate a debate. Procomuns started as an event that brought together 400 people linked to experiences of commons collaborative economy in March 2016, in Barcelona, with the aim of defining public policies for commons collaborative economy. The European agenda does not refer to the commons collaborative economy model. It mainly adopts the “unicorn” model as a reference of large corporations like Uber and Airbnb, without distinguishing models and without considering other kind like small businesses, free/libre technology and / or licenses that encourage open knowledge, like the digital commons model or platform cooperativism. They are different economic models for their formats and their impacts, and they require a different regulatory approach.

Moreover, the agenda does not pay enough attention to the dilemmas and the needs for protecting citizens producers and workers. It is positive that the Commission emphasizes the qualities of collaborative economy on environmental impacts; but is not considering that, apart from the impact on the natural environment, the collaborative economy mainly takes place on the Internet, so we must also keep in mind the impact of different models on the internet sustainabilit. . Models based on open protocols, open data and open source are more beneficials to Internet preservation itself, and facilitate the impact assessment and collaborative economy management by citizens and administrations.

Finally, since important impacts are taking place nowadays -especially in cities- but many effects of the collaborative economy are still unknown, we believe that the European Commission should aim at the role of governments to preserve the general interest, enhancing models that could better give answer to social challenges, with open information processes and consulting citizens.

Here you can find more initial reactions to the Agenda by members of BarCola (node on collaborative economy and commons production in Barcelona): Mayo Fuster from Dimmons.net (in Catalan) http://dimmons.net/agenda-europea-economia-collaborativa/ and Albert Cañigueral from OuiShare (in Spanish) http://www.consumocolaborativo.com/2016/06/06/3-destacados-y-5-olvidos-de-las-nuevas-directrices-de-la-cee-sobre-la-economia-colaborativa/

1st Procomuns meet up: Platform Cooperativism with Trebor Scholz

We would also like to invite you to the Procomuns firts meet up event that will take place on Thursday 9th June at 18:30h in Barcelona (CCCB) and through streaming under the title “From the corporate sharing economy to platform cooperativism”, with the participation of Trebor Scholz presenting and discussing platform cooperativism and Mayo Fuster about the Collaborative Economy public policies resulting from Procomuns (http://procomuns.net/en/policy/).

“From the corporate sharing economy to ”
Thursday, 9th June at 18:30 (CET) – 20:30 followed by a networking meet up.
C/ Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona (Sala Mirador)
Video streaming: http://dimmons.net/cooperativismo-de-plataforma/streaming-cccb
(Simultaneous translation from English to Spanish will be available).

For more information about the event and for signing up: http://www.meetup.com/Barcelona-procomuns-meetup/events/231045332/

This procomuns meet up is organized with Dimmons and CCCB support, in collaboration of Barcelona Activa, IGOPnet.cc and P2Pvalue project.

Barcelona OSCEdays and other local activities

This visit from Trebor Scholz is also connected to OSCEdays 2016, which will also take place in Barcelona:https://oscedays.org/barcelona-2016/ OSCEdays is a global event to develop a sustainable Circular Economy through Open Source collaboration

There, on Saturday 11th at Fabra i Coats (Carrer de Sant Adrià , 20) we will organise several sessions among the many that have been proposed: a discussion about business models for open projects of circular economy; a collective interview with Trebor Scholz; the presentation of non-profit open source exchange platforms; a debate on licenses for the Commons and another one about the European economy collaborative agenda in the light of the Procomuns’ recommendations of public policies.

And there’s still other important local events in the agenda!

On 17th June Netcommons, a European research project on open, neutral and free networks, organises a workshop about network infrastructure community :
http://netcommons.eu/?q=content/workshop-community-networking-infrastructures

On 18th and 19th June there will be the next edition SAX (Salut, Amor i Xarxa), the yearly community gathering of the guifi·net community: https://sax2016.guifi.net/index.php/Inici

On 6th July in Barcelona Activa the European project Digital DIY is organising workshops and talks about low cost prototyping and manufacturing of physical artefacts from digital specifications: https://didiyproject.hackpad.com/6-July-DiDIYBarcelona-Community-Day-NR8YFuKTxf9

Ah, and save the dates for OuiShare Fest Barcelona the 25th-27th October… http://bcn.ouisharefest.com/

Salut,

Facilitated by BarCola (node on collaborative economy and commons production in Barcelona) and the Dimmons.net research group at IN3-UOC, with support from the P2Pvalue project (IGOPnet.cc at the local level)

Photo by rosalux-stiftung

The post Reflections on the European Commission agenda on the Collaborative Economy and discussion about Platform Cooperativism with Trebor Scholz appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The shift to a circular economy presents a wicked, multidimensional problem: how can we redesign our operating system so that it works in the long term, and reflects the current context in terms of resources, energy and economic pressures?

It’s hard to know where to start. After all, with our once-successful linear economy reaching its limits, you could say that designing economies that last has, never really worked that well for us in the past. The challenge is really about enabling an ecosystem to emerge which effectively (re)uses materials and resources, and rebuilds economic, social and natural capital.

When we look at the circular economy field now, it’s dominated by large corporate players – and we do need these businesses taking on responsibility and leading with their considerable research, manufacturing and marketing clout. But redwoods and rhinos don’t make a whole ecosystem, there are many more parts to be played. To live up to the rhetoric and develop a real circular economy we need diversity of size, of focus, of motivation, and perspectives.

Diversity of scale – key to a healthy economy.

Reaching this goal will require a shake-up of not just our products and services, but also the way in which we develop them and interact with each other.

Much like the steam engine was able to power the rapid economical, social and – for better or worse – environmental change of the industrial revolution, at this stage it seems we’re waiting to see what invention will propel us headlong into a thriving 21st century circular economy. Will it be some magical nanomaterial? A molecular assembler in every home? Or some other fantastic Star Trek technology, beamed down to our production lines?

I believe that the ‘steam engine’ for the circular economy has already been invented – but it’s not a machine, it’s open source collaboration.

Currently much circular economy development is being done company-by-company, focused on individual proprietary solutions. If limited collaboration is happening, it’s behind closed doors in bureaucratic consortia. Following this trajectory there is still a chance that we may, in time, reach our goal of a functional circular economy – but time is perhaps the most precious of all the resources we’re fast running out of.

We still don’t know how the circular economy will work on many levels, but we know we want to get there. Fortunately, each improvement, each small step along this road can still be useful and practical for individuals, for business, society and the environment. It just so happens that this combination of an epic goal and diverse motivations is where open source shines.

Open source is a methodology which enables people to work effectively and invite collaboration with unknown others – whomever and wherever they are in the world. It provides a system wherein organisations and individuals can all autonomously contribute to and benefit from a shared ecosystem, tackling different parts of a larger problem without wasting time on redundant replication of work.

In practice, open source means publishing how things are made, such as a recipe, software code, production data, or design files so that anyone can study, use, and build upon this information. This often occurs through decentralised and distributed online collaboration: diverse groups discussing project ideas, giving feedback, fixing bugs, prototyping solutions and building useful, customisable software, hardware, tools and culture.

It’s interesting to compare the guidelines and best practices for developing a circular economy with those of the open source world, you’ll see many similarities – practical requirements for transparency, repairability, modularity, long-term perspectives, open standards…

Many people have already seen these connections and are developing open source circular economy solutions to recycle plastics , building extendible modular design systems like Open Structures , or open platforms for the transport industry like OSVehicle .

To some, open source sounds like chaos, like design by committee – it could never work.

But designs that are ‘free for all’ doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all: open source means that anyone can contribute, but it doesn’t mean that all contributions are accepted as is. A project leader can still pick and choose from open source components, and they maintain control over their version of a project. If you don’t think OSVehicle’s two-seater has enough trunk space, you can duplicate the designs and develop a van based on the OSVehicle ‘DNA’.

But poor OSVehicle, you might think! Or perhaps ‘those stupid chumps’… a competitor has ‘stolen’ their work and is making money off it! But in fact, the van market hardly ‘competes’ with the small hatchback market. In this scenario, the utility of the the OSVehicle platform has increased dramatically with an extra model, meaning that more third-party suppliers of seats, steering wheels, other parts or services will see more value in supporting the OSVehicle system, lowering costs and increasing choice for OSVehicle and their customers. And any improvements the van company makes to the underlying system will benefit the hatchback company too.

The collaborative development of the Linux Kernel

In order to develop solutions to fit a diverse range of problems and opportunities, this kind of genetic mutation is not just desired, it’s necessary. It’s evolution. In the digital world, the open source approach is now well established and successful part of business. In the server market, Microsoft has been soundly beaten by open source, thanks to multi-party collaboration and investment on the GNU/Linux operating system. Now Linux dominates not just servers, but also supercomputers, mobile and embedded devices. Every major player in tech is using open source to achieve their goals in some way – even the old holdouts seem to have come around.

Despite this growing movement, many (business)people outside of the tech world are understandably sceptical of the idea – 30 years ago when today’s CEOs were learning how the business world works, there was no way to collaborate effectively with unknown others around the world, and there didn’t seem to be a reason to. There was no way to ensure trust, no tools for distributed collaboration, no network of engaged individuals and organisations, and no open source business models. Allowing one’s competitors to study, improve upon or sell a company project would have been seen as madness.

But now we live amongst a growing global culture in which collaborating and working online is fast becoming the norm. We have professional tools for distributed co-creation, for documentation, for version control, we have trustworthy legally-tested open source licenses, and an ever-growing pool of individuals and companies with a range of motivations, skills and resources, keen to collaborate wherever their goals may be aligned with others.

There’s also a huge range of effective open source business models based around new markets, open collaboration, reduced R&D costs, and services or customisation. These business models work not despite their open nature, but because of it.

The world has changed. The old rules are no longer relevant everywhere.

But of course, open source is not magic. Merely having designs online doesn’t mean that people will actually engage with them – in order to get the best out of open source development, projects should be designed with collaboration in mind from the start. Knowing how to do this is tricky without the right experience.

So we want to spread this idea and make it easier for everyone to understand the opportunities that open source can offer them, and learn to work more effectively together on specific projects building towards a circular economy. We’re providing an opportunity for people and companies to try out this collaborative open source approach during the second edition of the Open Source Circular Economy days, an event taking place in more than 40 cities around the world between June 9th-13th 2016.

Over these days experts, citizens, and companies come together to discuss, design and prototype circular economy solutions, and share their findings for others to learn from. We work in the open and connect people from around the world, from the grassroots to the corporate level, across industries and cultures. And anyone is welcome to participate  – simply find an event in your local area, an interesting challenge to work on, or start your own.

Organisations all over the world are embracing the circular economy framework. However, if we are to truly accelerate this transition, a collaborative and transparent open source approach will prove vital in overcoming challenges and realising the full opportunities of a regenerative, restorative circular economy.

How open source can accelerate the circular economy shift by Sam Muirhead is licensed under CC BY SA.

The post How open source can accelerate the circular economy shift appeared first on P2P Foundation.