A technology is considered ‘open’ when it gives users the freedom (a) to study it, (b) to use it any way they wish, (c) to reproduce it and (d) modify it according to their own needs. By contrast, closed technologies are those that restrict these freedoms, limiting users’ ability to study them, reproduce them and modify them so as to adapt them to their needs. That is precisely the advantage of open technologies from the perspective of end users: whereas closed technologies limit the spectrum of possibilities of what end users can do, open technologies ‘liberate’ them, giving them the possibility to tinker with them and evolve them. Paradoxically, despite the fact that open technologies are greatly appreciated by the global technological community because of the freedoms they offer, the technology products manufactured and marketed by the vast majority of technology firms around the world are ‘closed’. This, of course, does not happen because of technological reasons: most of these companies supply their clients with closed machines and tools simply because in that way they can easily ‘lock’ them into a relationship of dependence.

It is not hard to see why this type of client-supplier relationship is particularly harmful for SSE organizations, as it implies their dependence on economic agents with diametrically opposed values and interests. To put it simply, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for SSE organizations to evolve into a vehicle for the transition to a truly social economy when they are dependent on the above economic agents for the tools they need on a daily basis. By contrast, open technologies may well be strategic resources for their autonomy and technological sovereignty. As brazilian activist-philosopher Euclides Mance remarks, SSE organizations should turn to open design and free software tools (like the Linux operating system for computers) in order to extricate themselves from the relationship of dependence they have unwillingly developed with closed technology companies.

A documentary about Sarantaporo.gr

To find the tools which fit their needs and goals, SSE agents should turn to the ‘community’ itself: in most cases, the development and the transfer of open technology to the field of its application and end-use is carried out by collaborative technology projects with the primary aim of covering needs, rather than making a profit. A great example is that of Sarantaporo.gr in Greece, which operates a modern telecom infrastructure of wireless networking in the area of Sarantaporo since 2013, through which more than twenty villages have acquired access to the Internet. The contribution of those collaborative projects – and that is crucial – is not limited to high-technology products, but extends to all kinds of tools and machines. A characteristic example is the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Catalonia and L’Atelier Paysan in France, which develop agricultural (open design) tools geared to the particular needs of small producers of their region.

The above examples show clearly the great potential of the SSE for positive change. However, for that to happen, it should have sufficient support structures for reinforcing its entrepreneurial action. That is where it is lagging behind. The SSE does not have structures analogous to the incubators for start-ups, the ‘accelerators’ and the liaison offices operating at most universities for the transfer of know-how to capitalist firms. Addressing this need is an area in which government policy could play a strategic role: in that regard, it is extremely positive that the recent action plan of the Greek Government tries to combat this problem through the development of more than a hundred cooperatively-organized support centres for the SSE across the entire country by 2023. That is precisely the kind of impetus that the SSE needs in order to grow. Of course, the capacity of these centres to support the SSE technologically will be of decisive importance: those are the structures that can and must make open technology accessible and user-friendly at local level, supplying the SSE organizations of their region with technology tools that promote the principles of the SSE and ensure its autonomy.

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Maps shape our perception, they direct our transitions and they inform our decisions. Whoever doubts the power of mapping, might think of Google maps impact on the lives of the many. But not all, because there is an alternative: Open Street Map. The difference between the two becomes crystal clear when asking: Who owns the maps? Who owns the data? And who reaps the benefits?

Open Street Map is based on free software. It is owned and governed by you. It is constantly in the making, and open to all those who wish to contribute to it on the basis of the collective Open Street Map community criteria. Open Street Map is the topographic sister of Wikipedia.

When TransforMap was initiated, back in 2014, the community sought to combine the Open Street Map approach with the ambition of making the plethora of socio-economic alternatives – TAPAS: There Are Plenty of AlternativeS – visible. We wanted to add to the many crowdsourced maps a possibility to see TAPAs unfolding at a glance, all at once, on people’s devices, in a user-friendly way without being patronizing nor concentrating data. That was and still is TransforMap’s ambition: to challenge both the dictatorship of corporate-owned data and the cultural hegemony of a an economy stuck in a neoliberal or neoclassical Market-State framework through bringing plenty of Alternatives to everybody’s attention, among them the Commons.

Countless mapping projects around the world have similar ambitions. Just like TransforMap, they are committed to enhancing the visibility and impact of all those projects, initiatives and enterprises that contribute to a free, fair and sustainable future. However, most of them receive little attention in mainstream media and general culture, because they are:

•   utterly disconnected from each other
•   partly enclosed on proprietary platforms – like Google maps
•   built on different taxonomies, and
•   (luckily) highly diverse in their mapping approach

In short: not interoperable.

Working towards the interoperability of the countless alter-maps is widely perceived as a key element for enhancing their impact. Thus, the need for  convergence and for atlasing maps based on a ‘mapping as a Commons’‚ as opposed to ‘mapping the Commons’. The former is a mapping philosophy and crucial for distilling the governance principle of emancipatory mapping projects; the latter is just one out of many ‘objects’ or ‘items’ to be mapped.

The following lines roughly sketch out our understanding of ‘Mapping as a Commons’. Later on, they might turn into a manifesto for ‘Mapping as Commoning’‚ for many, many maps and through a multitude of mappers. They are written in an un-imperative manifesto form, to be used from now on as a guideline or quick analytical tool to evaluate the own mapping practices.

Mapping as a Commons: what does it mean? (0.2)

The following is based on the raw notes from Commons Space at WSF 2016 and an initial summary by @almereyda. The principles are the condensate of globally dispersed, locally found initiatives which collaborate for building and maintaining a shared mapping commons.

1. Stick to the Commons,  as a goal and a practice
The challenge is twofold: contribute to the Commons as a shared resource and do it through commoning. Your mapping project is not a deliverable, nor a service/product to compete on the map market. Hence, it is paramount to systematically separate commons and commerce and to integrate the insights (patterns?) of successful commoning practices into your mapping initiative. Strive for coherence at any moment!

2. Create syntony on the goal
Discuss your common goal and your understanding of “mapping as commoning” again and again. And again! Everybody involved should resonate in the essentials and feel in syntony with mapping for the Commons through commoning at any time.

3. People’s needs first
Maps provide orientation to common people but they also provide visibility of power and policy-driven agendas. Make sure your map doesn’t feed the power imbalances. People’s needs trump the desires of institutions, donors or clients.

4. Keep an eye on interoperability and use web technology
To map as a commoner implies caring for other mappers’ needs and concerns. You will take them into account through dialogue with partner-mappers and make sure interoperability is a shared goal.

5.Contribute to the Federated Commons
Mapping the World through Commoning is a double contribution: among commons projects and initiatives toward a Federated Commons and between Commons projects, solutions or initiatives and other socioeconomic alternatives.]

6. Provide open access
Always. To everything.

7. Use free software
Working with free software at all levels is critical, as it is not about the freedom of the software, but about your freedom to further develop your mapping projects according to your own needs.

8. Self-host your infrastructure
Only use technology which allows to be replicated quickly, and document transparently how you do it. Transparent documentation means understandable documentation.

9. Build on open technology standards
Ensure your map(s), data and associated mapping applications can be reused on a wide diversity of media and devices. Ergo: hands off proprietary technologies and their standards. Don’t consider them, not even as interim solution. If you do, you risk adding one interim to another and getting trapped into dependencies.

10. Make sure you really own your data
‘Mapping as a Commons’ strives for mapping sovereignty at all levels. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing data for geo-location or copying and pasting what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent being sued or having your data being enclosed. Make sure you really own your data. It prevents the real nightmare of at some point losing your data without being able to do something.

11. Use free open data licenses
To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your common data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. What is in the Commons must remain in the Commons. Free licences protect the result of your collective work at any moment. Make use of them. It’s simple.

12. Guarantee the openness of taxonomies
A taxonomy is incomplete as a matter of fact. It is one out of many entry points to complex social worlds. The more you learn about these worlds, the better you can adjust your taxonomy. An open taxonomy allows your peer mappers and users to search it for a concept, link them – via tags – to a parent category, to add missing concepts (if you allow), or to merge tag structures.

13. Make the Data Commons thrive through your usage
Link to WikiData and OpenStreetMap from the beginning! It’s just nonsense to maintain your single data set. There is so much to benefit from and contribute to the data commons. Explore abundance and contribute loads to our shared data.

14. Care for your Data Commons
Strive for accuracy and remember at the same time, that there is always subjectivity in data.

15. Protect the ‘maps & atlases commons’ legally as commons
Remember: each commons needs protection. Innovative legal forms help to prevent cooptation. Make sure the resulting maps and atlases own themselves instead of being owned by any specific person or organization.

16. Crowdsource your mapping
Do so whenever you can and for whatever is needed: money, time, knowledge, storage space, hardware, monitoring, etc.

Last resort

17. Remember always why you are making the map and who you are making it for. Remember that everyone is a mapmaker. Share what you can and if everything looks dark, take a break, keep calm and continue commoning.

18. Archive the map when it doesn’t work for you anymore. Others might want to build on it, sometime.

PLEASE HELP US  TESTING AND IMPROVING THESE PRINCIPLES.

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Patents destroy innovation

We hear about patents everywhere. They are commonly included in indexes of progress and innovation, used for the purpose of rating research institutions, universities and companies. The proponents of the patent system believe that patents are helping to stimulate innovation, by making the knowledge publicly available and by granting the inventor the right for exclusive commercial exploitation.

Unfortunately, the patent system currently is doing the opposite^[1,2,3,4] . We have patent trolls^[5], companies who buy or file patents just to stop competitors from innovating, lawyers writing patents just to make them obscure and incomprehensible, and hundreds of court cases, or “patent wars” as they are known, where companies actually try to prevent one another from engaging in the process of innovation. Another less known problem is the cost to acquire a patent, in terms of money and time. The cost for a European patent is around 30,000€^[6] making it almost impossible for start ups and SMEs to apply for and obtain a patent. As a result, knowledge and innovation remains buried in drawers. Just in the past 3 months our social co-op took part in a competition and was thinking to apply for a EU development fund, both of which had in their point system a bonus for a filed patent. The problem is, firstly that we do not have the financial resources to file a patent and most importantly we do not want to do so since we are an open-source company, although we are positive that our product could acquire a patent. Traditional institutions and organization across the world do not yet understand the benefits of open-source innovation. So, in order to follow up on the example of the GPL^[7] and the Creative Commons licenses,^[8] which hacked the copyright law, we propose to hack the patent system.

Open Patents

We suggest a simple ways to mark a patent as open in a way that is similar to the Creative Commons licenses.

• Open Patent Attribution – OP-BY
• Open Patent Attribution, Share Alike – OP-BY-SA

Following the example of business man and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who publicly declared that anyone can use Tesla’s patents, because “[they] believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform”^[9].

So we propose that the cost of applying for a patent marked as “open” to be free or very low (i.e. under 500€), thus enabling inventors, SMEs, social innovators and even students to apply for patents which promote knowledge sharing, while allowing them to acquire the recognition they deserve and granting them the corresponding score in the indexes that take into account filed patents. Also, this can help Europe’s policy making around open source and social innovation, by suggesting that in the future all publicly funded innovation should be made publicly available through open patents. For example, it seems very unfair that  private research institutes or even universities, who do research funded by European taxpayers’ money, acquire patents on the results of that research and claiming ownership over them, thereby forcing us to pay licensing rights for access to the products that come out of the research that we funded in the first place.

This text is released into the Public Domain under the Creative Commons CC0 “no copyright reserved” license.

References

1. “A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not”, Michael Fitzgerald, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/yourmoney/15proto.html
2. “The case against the patent system”, Pierre Desrochers, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
3. “Our Broken Patent System at Work: Patent Owner Insists the ‘Integers’ Do Not Include the Number One”, Vera Ranieri, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/our-broken-patent-system-work-patent-owner-insists-integer-does-not-include-number
4. “The ‘broken patent system’: how we got here and how to fix it”, Nilay Patel, http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/11/broken-patent-system
5. “Patent Troll”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
6. “Study on the Cost of Patenting”, Roland Berger Market Research, https://effi.org/system/files?file=cost_anaylsis_2005_study_en.pdf
7. “GNU General Public License”, Free Software Foundation, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
8. “Creative Commons Licenses”, Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
9. “All our patent belong to you”, Elon Musk, https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

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