For five weeks in a French castle, scheduled to coincide with the climate change conference in Paris (COP21), a dozen maker groups got together to simulate amongst themselves a circular economy, based on the freedom to share knowledge, sustainable production techniques in harmony with the survival of the natural world, and an idea of fairness in distributing the fruits of our common work.

For me, this represents an instantiation of the highest hope for humanity at this stage, that we can pull off a transition to a mode of production and exchange, a way of producing and distributing value, that is compatible with the survival of the planet.

One incident stands in my memory. In conversation with the makers of an open source agricultural toolkit Aker, one of the members told me that they get regular orders to send the toolkits abroad, yet, they refuse, because the whole intent of the project is that people are enabled to produce locally. These are exactly the kind of generative mentalities and ‘businesses’ that we need. If this feeling is genuine, we have already won, the world-changers, those that are in the world we need to become, are already here. The true revolutionaries today, are those that are effectively creating the sustainable economy we all need.

Below you will find the one-year anniversary report of POC21, don’t miss it!

The Poc21 Report by Open State on Scribd

• Lead image by Stefano Borghi

The post We are all Crew: The POC21 report appeared first on P2P Foundation.

One project that clearly recognizes this big opportunity for impact is POC21, an international innovation network whose participants create open-source, sustainability-related products like the 30$ Wind Turbine, Aker (open source urban gardening infrastructure), and Faircap (open source portable water filter). Co-organized by Ouishare co-founder Benjamin Tincq, POC21 has brought together hundreds of designers, makers and organizers to “prototype the fossil free, zero waste society.”

Shareable connected with Tincq to talk about the urgent need for open and distributed design and fabrication, why this movement provides an exciting alternative to traditional production methods, and the need to find a sexy term to describe open source, sustainable product design.

An open approach to design and production will allow for the biggest teams possible to create solutions in as little time as possible.

Shareable: There’s an urgency here, as we face so many pressing planetary issues, to come up with solutions fast. Why is open source design essential for sustainability? How can open sourcing designs and projects help address global warming, inequality and other priority issues?

Benjamin Tincq: I think there are at least four layers of why we need an open approach to solving the wicked problems of our times, including energy and climate, zero waste, biodiversity, democracy, etc.

1. We need the biggest team possible to create the solutions for wicked problems in very little time, which means not having everyone reinventing the wheel every time, but instead sharing knowledge and inventions into a common pool for humanity that everybody can build upon. This superior innovation capability is basically what the whole FLOSS (free / libre / open source) community has demonstrated in software.

2. Open design and open hardware can be seen as the ultimate “anti-planned obsolescence strategy,” or a “zero waste design” principle, if you prefer. Documenting the fabrication processes, materials and tools—ideally using standards as much as possible—will enable a longer product longevity, and easier repair. This is something that the OSCE Days (Open Source Circular Economy Days) is bringing awareness about.

3. The re-localization of manufacturing that goes along with distributed fabrication will save tons of carbon through shorter and local supply chains instead of shipping parts and products all over the globe in large containers. This long-term evolution is clearly articulated by the Fab City Network instigated by Tomas Diez, which grew out of the experiment in Barcelona aiming to re-localize at least 50% of fabrication in the next 40 years in urban centres.

4. This new production model can eventually drive a shift from the consumer mindset to the prosumer mindset, which enables citizens to better understand how products are made, lets them meet the producers in their city, and maybe even contribute to the design and production process themselves. This way, people are less likely to just buy, use and dispose of their things, but will instead care about what they use and make.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, practically a living legend by now, has opened all of Tesla’s patents. Why is this important? Who else is doing the same?

It is important because it sends the message that moving away from intellectual property to allow others to build on your platform is not only a fantasy for utopians and radicals, but can also be a viable business model for entrepreneurs. Tesla’s interest lies in the fact that by opening its electric vehicle technology, it will become a standard that will grow the market for the batteries and recharging stations they also provide.

In the automotive industry, we also see companies like Ford and Toyota experimenting with opening some components, but not entire vehicles so far.

“Moving away from intellectual property to allow others to build on your platform…can be a viable business model for entrepreneurs.” —Benjamin Tincq

On the other hand, Cradle-to-cradle production certification started as a proprietary system, and from what I understand, that limited its potential until the founders turned it over to an NGO to manage. Can you talk about that?

I am not super familiar with it, but, to my understanding, Cradle to Cradle is a biomimetic approach to the design of products and buildings that are regenerative by design. It is indeed sad that the methodology is protected, and it is certainly is a big hurdle to its development. However, similar approach and techniques have been developed in the biomimetism, circular economy, zero waste and sustainable design communities, so I don’t think is much of a problem now. It’s like holacracy: since the brand is protected, you cannot [use the name], but many people know similar principles and can apply them anyway.

I’ve heard this space referred to as the sustainability commons. Do you use that phrase? Is there a better one that’s being used to define this intersection?

This is the first time I’ve heard the term “sustainability commons.” It sounds good but I am not sure it will speak to everyone since the “commons” concept is still not very mainstream, but used more by academics and experts.

What you are refering to is the intersection of distributed fabrication (local production and open source designs) and sustainable product design that will ideally translate into social enterprises aiming to tackle sustainability challenges with open technology. I would call that “open sustainable production,” but that’s not super sexy.

What would you say to those who don’t support the open design mindset, who feel like it’s important to patent their innovations?

I would tell them to take some time to think if they would not benefit from including a much larger community into their R&D process, and if their business model really depends on patenting their technology. Technology is everywhere and it is becoming more and more a commodity (except maybe for very advanced ones). The value will be more and more in intangible things such as the brand and the ecosystem, the know-how and the services, the relationship with the partners and the ecosystem, the network and the platform.

A key struggle today is to find investors who are ready to support social entrepreneurs that do not have intellectual property and are building their inventions in open source. There are still too few of them because very few investors understand how value lies in things other than the IP itself. It is slowly changing though.

Bicitractor prototype at POC21

Is there a balance between retaining intellectual property ownership and opening things to the sustainability commons? For instance, with a photo, I can give it a Creative Commons (CC) license, which enables people to use it in the manner I’ve decided. Are there similar licenses in the open design movement?

In Open Hardware, you can use a combination of software licenses (GNU GPL, MIT License, etc.) and Creative Commons for the designs, but CC does not really protect the fabrication process itself—only the blueprint file. For the processes, there are specific open hardware licenses like the TAPR OHL and CERN OHL licenses. They are more robust but less well-known, so the CC version can also have the “community advantage” in the way that everybody understands the spirit of it.

All of these licenses allow for the use, reproduction, modification and redistribution of the product blueprints. What they lack though are restrictions on materials. For instance, it would be great to have a license that says: “You can modify this table and distribute your new version, as long as you use local, sustainable wood”.

What are the key challenges the sustainability commons movement faces? How are they best addressed?

Looking back at the 12 prototypes that have been developed at POC21, which are all great ideas, none of them has really moved into the scaling phase yet. The most advanced of them is probably Faircap, the open source portable water filter, which recently raised funds from the U.N. Innovation Fund and has found manufacturing partners.

I think for open hardware sustainability to scale and become a serious alternative in the cleantech scene, we need to address two main issues in parallel:

The first one is providing better access to capital investment that cares about the impact more than the profit. I believe there are many interesting models to look at in the Impact Investing scene, such as longer fund lifetimes, capped returns, or revenue participation instead of equity (avoiding the “exit imperative” in which investors put money in startups with the only goal to sell their shares for a much higher price).

I am currently working on creating such a fund that would be focused on open and decentralized technologies for social and environmental impact. It will also be able to mentor the social entrepreneurs on finding the right, viable business model for their sustainable tech.

The second one is raising the bar in terms of “dealflow quality,” to speak like an investor. This means developing more polished and finished products, with user experience in mind—something we called “sexy like Apple, open like Wikipedia” in our vision for POC21—and a clear development/scaling strategy. We are working together with the Open State team, OuiShare’s partner in crime for POC21, on a project that aims to help in this area as well, but the concept is still too early-stage at this moment so I cannot say more.

What are some of your favorite sustainability commons projects?

Well as a start, all the POC21 projects were great. I’m really looking forward to how Faircap (a water filter), SunZilla (a portable solar generator), Solar OSE (a solar concentrator for steam generation), AKER (snap together garden kits), Bicitractor (a bicycle tractor), Open Energy Monitor (energy monitoring tools) and Showerloop (a real-time water filter for showers) will develop in the future.

Others include OSVehicle , a modular, open source, electric car platform; L’Increvable, an open source washing machine made to last 50 years; Smart Citizen Kit, an open source technology for political participation; Fairphone (though it’s not exactly open yet), a modular, ethically-made, open smartphone; Wikihouse, an open source building system.

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Top photo: Rémy Artiges. All others POC21 Flickr (CC-BY). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

Cross-posted from Shareable.

The post Benjamin Tincq on constructing a Sustainability Commons movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But the question that so many of them have in common is about bootstrapping: how do I go from this idealistic concept to a highly functioning non-hierarchical purpose-driven organisation? They have a more-or-less clear aspiration for the 21st century organisation they want to build, but don’t have a clear idea of how to get there. There’s a vague hope that if we just put it on the blockchain, maybe that will bypass all the difficult problems of working with humans.

So people ask me for the recipe. My five years experience as a member of Enspiral (decentralised network of 300 people ‘working on stuff that matters’) and a cofounder of Loomio (software coop with 13 workers and no boss) makes me some kind of granddaddy in this scene, so people ask,what’s the recipe? What are the three easy steps to success?

As you can probably guess, there is no recipe. This challenge is so context-specific and so emergent, you have to make it up as you go along. But in the conversations I’ve had with emerging ventures like Part Up and Yellow Seed, I’m starting to notice a pattern:

1: Make your collective purpose your boss.

If you articulate your purpose, that becomes the ultimate authority in your organisation, and the criteria by which you design your structure and processes.

Ask: what impact do we want to have in the world?

2: Invest in people above all else.

The number one risk to your new venture is your relationships with each other. You can recover from a bad product or a bad business model, but if your relationships break down, your idea is most likely lost.

If you’re not willing to use coercive authority to align people’s efforts, you have to learn how to work together, which requires a great deal of emotional intelligence, humility, and willingness to change.

Ask: how do we want to relate to each other on our journey to impact?

3: Use rhythm to your advantage.

There is no map or compass when you’re navigating through emergent multidimensional space. The one thing you can count on is the steady passage of time.

For instance, in Loomio, we have tempos at different time scales:

• Daily: the whole team checks in every morning, synchronously: what did you do yesterday? what are you doing today? what support do you need? what are you doing for your wellbeing today? This generates abundant accountability, support, agility and focus, in 10 minutes per day.
• Fortnightly: we start by committing to what work we’ll deliver over the next 2 weeks. Then we finish with a retrospective where we stop to reflecton what we learned and what we’ll do differently next time. If you’re not stopping, you’re not learning.
• Quarterly: we have 13 people working with high autonomy, but we create focus by setting 3 or 4 measurable objectives that everyone is working towards.

Having these rhythms in the organisations means you can maintain your agility, without pivoting every 5 minutes. You can agree on a course for 3 months, and fine tune your direction every day. Our organisational structure is evolving every 2 weeks and everyone in the team has access to changing it. And probably the most important rhythm is our 6 monthly retreat. We go away for 3 days, crack open our chests and weave our heart stories together. This creates the affective bonds and trust that make our bossless organisation extremely productive, aligned, and mutually accountable.

That’s how Loomio works right now, but it took us years to get there. We didn’t design that blueprint first, and then start working. In our bossless organisation, we use minimum viable structure, codesigned just in time, implemented by experiments.

Building a bridge while walking across it

You need half a dozen components in place before you can function smoothly as a mature organisation: shared vision, accountability, governance, shared identity, a decision-making protocol, and oh yeah a sustainable business model would be nice.

The challenge is that you need all of them before any of them really work. It’s like spinning plates: while you’re busy spinning up the business model, your governance starts wobbling so you quickly run over to re-balance that. Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this impossible situation. You have to run off the cliff and build a bridge at the same time.

Organisational design is political

Most likely there’s some people in your team that are totally allergic to structure, and some that are basically obsessed with it. The two personalities can create a huge tension that sucks all the fun out of the room.

Org chart for the Loomio cooperative in April 2016

@imhaileycoop uses the ‘maturity model’ to help teams navigate this challenge. If your fully functioning mature organisation is a butterfly, think about the stages it goes through to get there: egg, larva, caterpillar, etc.

You can’t skip to the end, but you need to make sure you’re heading in the right direction. Bring this model into the room and ask the team: What are the characteristics of your butterfly? (i.e. what’s your vision for the best possible workplace?) Are we an egg or a caterpillar right now?

If you’re an egg, put your energy into egg problems, don’t worry too much about the caterpillar stage until you get there. There’s no use designing a structure for a phase you’re not in.

For example: this weekend I met the Open State crew in Berlin. They have a problem where there are too many opportunities and not enough resources to deliver them all. They need some system for prioritising work and allocating resources.

If it were my team, I’d start by getting consensus on the problem. Then I’d invite solutions, and propose some of my own ideas. Then we’d develop the ideas together until we come up with one we are reasonably comfortable with. e.g. we might invent a new role called the “unicorn” and give them some responsibilities and a process to try. Then finally, we implement the new structure, role or process, on a time-limited basis.

The time limit is critical. Some people will always be anxious about new structure. They see their beautiful dynamic leaderless swarm crystallising into a horrible static bureaucracy. But if you can agree that there is a problem, that creates the shared will to find a “good enough” solution together. Then try it for 3 months. At the end of the trial, you review and decide to continue, improve, or reject it.

So why not get started!

It’s tremendously difficult, but it’s tremendously rewarding. Doing meaningful work in a truly collaborative environment creates the deepest solidarity I’ve ever experienced. Everyday I’m growing and learning, and I’m super stoked to share my experiences, just ping me on twitter @richdecibels if you want to chat.

p.s. check out a beautiful response to this post from Theodore Taptiklis:Getting from a Bossy to a Bossless Organisation in 3 Painful Steps :-}

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