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Peer-to-peer-commons – The historical ‘third movement’ of radical science? It can only get better

Mike Hales — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Originally published 18 September 2018 at foprop.org

Mike Hales: When I first read Gary Werskey’s 2007 ‘three movements’ article – four years ago – I was sceptical. He discussed two British movements of radicals around science, in the 30s-40s and the 70s-80s, and speculated on the possibility of a third (which might possibly have an environmental impetus).

I was particularly unconvinced about the possibility of a Marxist movement, like the other two. But now, in 2018, I do have the sense that, yes, the peer-to-peer commons movement may be the thing that is in fact standing in that place. It would be worthwhile, at least, to proceed on the basis that it is – with substantial (if, for activists, secondary) implications for the field of science and technology studies (STS). I’m in no doubt that P2P-commons is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my activist lifetime . . and that it mobilises the stuff I’ve been cultivating these past 50 years, as a libertarian socialist with an orientation to the politics of knowledges and technologies.

It would be worth proceeding on the basis that P2P-commons is ‘the third radical science movement’

Lucy Gao and I have just finished a project to research and build a presentation at 4S Sydney 2018, the annual gathering of the academic research field of STS. The theme of the conference session – Lives in STS as a series of failed political experiments – was generated from a comment that Gary had made, and Lucy and I took his ‘three movements’ as a frame for narrating two stories of experimenting and ¿failing? in two ‘lives in STS’ – hers of ten years and mine of forty-five. The conference presentation is posted in Youtube (mirrored at hooktube) and a bundle of related materials on radical science and radical professionalism – including a one-page outline of the two stories and a transcript of several hours’ interviews – has now been posted here in 3 History, at Lives in STS. For length, a part of that presentation had to be dropped: an analytical framing of . . Fordism/post-Fordism and P2P as a mode of production in waiting . . STS academia and radical science activism, and . . organic-intellectual activism in-and-against the professional-managerial class (PMC). I had thought of making a ‘directors’ cut’ after the conference. However, too much other work waiting. So … regard this present blog post as the synopsis of the absent footage.

Three things stand out for me about this Lives in STS project, and the place that I got to through working on it with Lucy. Lucy is an Associate Professor in STS, in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was born 40 years after I was, and works in an academic field that burst full-formed upon the Chinese cultural world in the late 80s, with its churned and manifestly political (two-movements) history buried beneath a surface of glossy Westernism, managerialism and professionalisation.

‘Radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science?

The first thing is my own sense that ‘radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science, and that where I have gone to with it isn’t essentially ‘science’ either. I saw, and see, a bunch of cultural formations within a broad and deep generational movement of radical professionals. This has been theorised – among other framings – as a history of the PMC in what once (40 years ago!) was called ‘late capitalism’. In the past generation – I would say, as an aspect of the post-Fordist regrouping of capital and forces opposed to capital – there has been an emergence of a profound and historically new politics, of the producing and mobilising of knowledges, on a mass, globally distributed scale. In the 50s it was ‘Big Science’ and the underpinning of ‘the military-industrial complex’. In the 60s it was the ascendance of ‘science policy’ and arguments about the public or privatisable nature of research production. In the 80s (alongside computerisation) there began to be talk of ‘a knowledge economy’ and in the 90s ‘knowledge intensive business services’ and ‘innovation services’ were subjects of research in ‘national systems of innovation’. In the 90s I was part of this, as an STS researcher (more to be posted in due course).

But all the way through, in my perception, the sub-plot has been one of #organicintellectual production (Gramsci’s term, from Italian Marxism of the 1920s and 30s) and the increasingly clear possibility of – and need for – organising the production of knowledges – on a mass scale, on a class scale – to facilitate quite different modes of production, forms of living and relationships between professionals and other people who are ‘not paid to think’. This on-going story of organic intellectual practice is the concern of the 4 History thread here in FoP RoP. It also is why the analytical frame for the pattern language in the 2 Commoning thread has at its centre the choreography of ’the dance of knowing’, and the question of the historically altered production of #labourpower. In FoP RoP I’m proposing this as one of three spheres of literacy (see here) that can, combined, constitute a cultural-materialist ‘take’ on the historical evolution and ongoing activist production of a P2P-commons mode of production and everyday living.

The movement for P2P-commons may be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified

The second thing I note is that, although I’ve understood myself for 40 years now to be conducting an enquiry within #culturalmaterialism – rather than any kind of received Marxism – the movement for P2P-commons may also be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified by the kind of neo- (not post-) Marxian, carefully hybridised frame that I’m setting out to articulate in FoP RoP, and specifically, in 2 Commoning.

The #materialism within the P2P-commons movement is very obviously present in the core attention given to . . open architectures of apps and the peer-to-peer production of free code . . distributed web infrastructures . . open data, linked data/data ownership/document ownership . . licensing, and to infrastructural technologies of coordination over distributed fields of action including cryptocurrencies and credit-accounting mechanisms, hashchains, open-value supply-chain accounting systems and open-ledger algorithms and architectures.

The cultural-historical orientation is a little less visible. But it’s clearly present for example in the anthropological perspective that led Michel Bauwens to see the historical-evolutionary, post- and anti-capitalist significance of commons, and to inaugurate the P2P Foundation. Likewise it manifestly underlies the scholarly, activist research and development work of Bauwens’ partners in the Commons Strategies Group – David Bollier, Silke Helfrich – on cultural-historical stories of commoning, past and present, presented in their collections of essays The wealth of the commons and Patterns of commoning and under analysis in their work-in-progress towards a pattern language of commoning. See here for notes on the relationship between this and my own pattern-language work here in FoP RoP.

The P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in the 70s, ‘in-and-against the PMC’

The third thing I’m aware of is the way in which the P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – and expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in ‘the second radical science movement’ of the 70s. That was baby-boomers then. But now – although there are baby-boomers still on the scene – it’s another generation, who are discovering and enacting the organic intellectual mode differently. I began to see them only about 18 months ago. I’d been working on a notion of creating some kind of ‘college’ in which baby-boomer and twenty-something activists (and between) could engage in a cross-generation ‘legacy’ dialogue, theorising the ongoing practice of organic-intellectual, libertarian-socialist, activism. I sketched the idea in Humble origins 3 – Activists and the long march home. I’d decided the initiative called for an online platform of some kind (constituting a space for an ‘invisible college’) and had begun checking out the Loomio platform-for-deliberation www.loomio.org/. My ears pricked up here because Loomio was not only well-framed software with a wide and expanding voluntary-sector uptake across countries and cultures, but also because I clearly saw the attention to the #facilitation of group process that underlies the design. Here was a clear historical line, back to the discoveries and commitments of my own generation of community-oriented activism in the 70s (See ‘radical cultural R&D’ in 4 History and the Foreword/Preface to Location).

From Loomio the platform app, through Loomio the workers’ coop of developers, I came to Enspiral, the federation (family?) of post-Occupy activist hacktivist developers and cooperative entrepreneurs, among whom facilitation was a taken-for-granted dimension of activist culture. Thence, to Sensorica and an expanding world of anarcho-hackerist politics, Scuttlebutt infrastructure, a fediverse of code (and P2P producers of code and protocols); and wider formations of post-Occupy, anti-oligarch, direct-democracy research and development, ‘open-value’ value-chain accounting and ’agile’ post-Fordist cultural forms. This had all sorts of odd, contradictory resonances with my business-school experience of the 90s (when stealing the post-Fordist discoveries of Japanese and Italian flexible production systems was bread-and-butter for my colleagues in capitalist supply-chain innovation). Clearly, the histories were getting very mixed up, hybridising, rippling through, wave-fronts interfering. Clearly, there were younger radicals afoot now, in the teensies. who didn’t draw the same sorts of lines – between entrepreneurship and community, or solidarity and efficiency, or activism and technology, or politics and nurturing – that might have been problematic for an earlier generation, brought up in environments that were at once both more corporate, more professionally demarcated and careerist and more inclined to ‘design’ rather than ‘hack’ a solution. Then, it was corporate-competitive ‘right first time’, now it’s fail early, keep fixing and keep forking and federating.

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was (post-Fordism is far further on). Most directly, it’s a successor to the radical technology arms of that movement, all the way from the alternative energy community, committed to off-grid or anarcho urban-artisan living, to the ‘human-centred’ and participatory, labour movement-oriented design movements in corporate-industrial settings. Work on other things – ‘radical science’ history in 4 History, organising within the world of ‘platform cooperativist’ activism in 3 Platforming – is preventing me really getting to grips with the pattern language of commoning in 2 Commoning. But I’m in no doubt that that theorising venture is just as relevant (and on the same cultural-materialist basis) for today’s P2P-commons movement, as was 70s neo-Marxian labour-process theorising in the Radical Science Journal collective, for 70s radical professionalism. Except . . it’s a bigger field, the stakes are raised, the pluriversal cultural challenges sit more obviously and crucially on the face of things; and the Beyond the fragments challenge that faced baby-boomers at the end of the 70s has hatched many fresh forms. Things are on the move. Goodness knows what the ‘third movement’ will look like in China, where my STS colleague Lucy Gao is coming at things 40 years later, with no ‘second movement’, an established, otiose, first movement, and with all the waves of all the Fordisms crashing in a tsunami of history and economy, in the wake of the ‘Great Enlightenment’ of the late 80s.

Whatever . . Yes Gary, there is a third (Marxism-inheriting) radical science movement! It can only get better.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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Interview with Douglas Rushkoff and Michel Bauwens

James Burke — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 14:42:45 +0000

An interview between these two thinkers where they discuss finance, value, business and the Commons including a historical perspective. What follows is a list of items covered during the discussion.

00:00 Douglas Rushkoff
1:52 Michel Bauwens
3:13 Michel asks Doug about the evolution of society and guilds.
4:09 Guilds: “the wheels of commerce”, Fernand Braudel’s books on capitalism and civilization.
4:50 After the Crusades, late middle age, trade guilds emerged, economy, work
7:30 Aristocracy got crushed by p2p economy so broke up guilds and local currencies – chartered monopolies
8:20 Michel talks about what might be contemporary versions of guilds – Enspiral, Sensorica,
10:34 How can we create value sovereignty? Open value accounting
11:50 Open Coops, Cap return,
14:47 Douglas: How to get buy in to these new kinds of company form – freelance union
16:10 Michel: Smart – Belgian payment service – http://smartbe.be/ – mutualizing – alternatives
18:30 Douglas: Mutualism.
23:00 Developing sustainable businesses: example : Acre – Open farm toolkits –http://www.poc21.cc/aker-2/ one of 12 projects at POC innovation camp http://www.poc21.cc/
24:57 Netarchical capitalism http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Netarchical_Capitalism , Platform cooperativism – http://platformcoop.net/ , Can existing companies change?
26:30 Borrowing instead of buying
27:50 Flexible versus brittle in highly financialized landscape.
29:40 Open Accounting – Sensorica – transvestment – http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Transvestment
30:30 Derivative markets led to amplification of capital, local currencies will end up more stable then central currencies
31:42 Madison mapping summit – mutual aid network –
34:13 Asking Doug how he applies P2P to government and governance? (direct democracy, Loomio)
35:50 P2P form of democracy – cities, city states and nation states
37:00 We live in the spectacle of a democracy, trans-nationality, trans-local, guilds to counter global corporations
40:28 Currency + nationality. National economies, federal banks, fiscal policy.
42:10 Crypto and LETS, critique on using blockchain
44:27 DAO – we need ethical, sustainable forms not more rent extraction schemes, legacy advantage
46:46 Platform Cooperitivism – {Doug}
50:00 Distributed ownership
51:30 Open Coops {Michel} – coop as distributed capitalism not good enough, actively creating common goods, Fairshare

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Interfacting Sensorica’s Open-Value-Accounting based Peer Production with classical institutions

Michel Bauwens — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 09:54:27 +0000

“SENSORICA is not a corporation, it is not a coop, it is not an non profit, it is not an LLP. It is an open value network. From a legal perspective, it is a non-registered association. It is an open network of freelancers that coordinate and co-manage their work using some IT tools (the NRP-VAS) and some special governance. If you still don’t understand what SENSORICA is and how it operates please don’t panic. It is something new and it takes a bit of time to get accustomed. It is new, but at the same time it is very similar to other new things that have emerged recently, like Bitcoin for example. We can say that

Tiberius and his colleagues try to explain how Sensorica succeeds in transferring value from the classic economy to the new peer production economy.

Excerpted from Tiberius Brastaviceanu, Scott Laughlin, and Jim Anastassiou:

“How do you sign a contract with a loose network of individuals? Who is going to show up to do the work? How can we guarantee that a swarm of people converging on tasks from all four corners of the planet via the Internet will deliver on time, and with the required specifications? Who is responsible and accountable?

In our opinion, SENSORICA is the most advanced commons-based peer production network applied to hardware production, using infrastructure and methodologies that have been specifically tailored for open networks. We claim that the OVN model is able to sustain deterministic economic processes and accountability, while preserving the open and fluid nature of networks, while maximizing individual autonomy. This new ability of open innovation and peer production networks to generate predictable outputs, demonstrated by SENSORICA, was the main topic of the meeting with Jenn Gustetic from the White House, in June of 2015.

The role of SENSORICA in the service cases enumerated earlier shaped as the interface between the crowd and the classical institution. In other words, input from the crowd can be structured and channeled towards solving someone’s problem, through SENSORICA’s infrastructure, methodologies and governance. But let’s not get confused, we are not talking about a crowdsourcing platform. So what is the difference? A crowdsourcing platform like Upwork is an intermediary between companies and the crowd: the company posts a problem with a prize for someone who can provide the solution; the platform takes a cut. Taskrabbit is the Uber of cheap labor, connecting people who need chores done with people who can do them, while taking a cut from their transactions. In both cases, the intermediary platform is owned by a company and those who supply the work aren’t organized, they respond individually to demands. In the SENSORICA model, no one in particular really owns the platform. Affiliates of the network organize, they form groups to tackle complex problems for long periods of time. In the cases discussed here, the size of a project is comparable to a startup, reaching up to 10 individuals. The longest duration of steady work is 6 months and ticking. These are the first pilot projects, but the potential is for thousands of individuals per project, which amounts to a large size enterprise, for long-term projects that can take years. SENSORICA is really showing the signs of a new system of production that can operate at large scale. But as an R&D service provider, it can be already be seen by classical institutions as R&D on demand, as an adjacent, very cohesive R&D operation open to the crowd, funneling in low cost and rapidly evolving open innovation. Practically the entire revenue generated is split among participants, with only 5% going to maintain and to develop the infrastructure, which is under the total control of participants.

At the third iteration, the service beneficiary gets a fast paced innovation at a quarter of the normal cost. Even more interestingly, the cost cuts aren’t transferred to those who provide the service. They are actual cost savings that result from a heavy use and rapid remix of open source, from the mutualization of resources within the network, from the collaborative nature of activities, from the elimination of bureaucracy, and other inefficiencies that come from lack of motivation. On the contrary, everyone is paid with the same measure, according to the Canadian labor market, no matter where the contributor lives. More precisely, within SENSORICA those who live in Pakistan aren’t paid less. And if that wasn’t enough, on top of providing rapid innovation at a fraction of the cost to classical institutions, so that they can maintain jobs, at the same time sensoricans increase the value of the global commons, because everything they do is open source. All the data about the economic activity within SENSORICA is open to the public, we can’t make this up!

This mutually beneficial economic relationship between classical institutions and SENSORICA, as an open innovation and peer production network, can be seen as a bridge between the classical capitalist economy and the p2p economy, as a channel for transfer of resources from the old economy to the new.”

Example 1: The Barda case

The Barda periscope project was the first implementation of a new open project development methodology designed by Fernando, Tiberius and Lynn, in the context of a service provided to a client. This methodology was formalized in SENSORICA’s network resource planning (NRP) software through a concept named Workflow recipes, which are time-dependent and deliverables-dependent bundles of Processes associated with a Project (a context of work). This methodology consists of the following steps: Project initiation, Design considerations, Design, Prototyping, and Product. All the contributions to the Project were logged within this structure.

In order to reduce the perceived risk for the client, the Project was divided into milestones. A cost estimation was produced for the client for every milestone. The agreement was to get paid at the end of every milestone. Every milestone was to be delivered with complete documentation, open source style. The client could stop the process at the end of any milestone and decide to switch to another organization to complete the Project. The documentation provided a guarantee for rapid continuation. The burden was on SENSORICA to provide a good service, at the level of satisfaction of the client, in order to complete all the milestones.

Moreover, the activity logs in the NRP and the associated documentation provided the client with full and real time access to the process. Coordination on different issues and tasks took place in context, directly in the working documents, and the client was invited to provide feedback.

A problem emerged during this project: very rapidly, the work documents became long and the client’s ability to follow the process was hindered. We spent time formatting the documents to make their content more transparent, but these measures didn’t diminish the time spent by the client to effectively follow the process. The situation was more complex, because this was a three parties relation, between the SENSORICA team, Barda and Parcs Canada, Barda’s client. Information produced by sensoricans had to be reformatted to match Barda’s project management structure and the language used between Barda and Parc Canada. In the end, Barda provided sensoricans with a template for 3-way communication, based on their own open issues and tasks.

The Barda periscope project was a small project, involving only a few contributors (see project in SENSORICA’s NRP-VAS). Coordination was fairly easy at this small scale.

Example 2: The Queen’s University case

Joshua Pearce is a professor at Queen’s University and Michigan Tech University. He is dedicated to open science and sustainable technologies, and had been following SENSORICA since 2013. He is the author of the Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development paper. For years, Joshua’s team has designed multiple scientific instruments by building on various open source projects. These instruments have been released under open licenses. In 2015, he decided to take a risk and transfer to the SENSORICA network the task of designing an instrument used in the characterization of photovoltaic materials. This was an important shift in Joshua team’s approach, from in house development with inspiration from open source projects to crowdsourcing development through the SENSORICA distributed network. The main goal was to create an instrument with a community around it, which would increase the speed of innovation, insure continuity of the product, and increase its diffusion rate to universities around the world. At the same time, the PV characterization project was also seen as a pilot project to build an interface between the crowd and a classical institution, Queen’s University, through SENSORICA’s p2p infrastructure, open project methodologies, and governance.

The open science movement is building momentum. It started with open publications, increasing access to scientific knowledge. This initiative became more nuanced, proposing early stage sharing of data and information (prior to the publication), sharing of unpublished past results and even sharing of lessons learned from failed experiments. In parallel with the development on the distribution side, the movement also built infrastructure for data sharing in resource-intensive domains of inquiry, like genomics for example, as well as social networking platforms designed for scientists and scientific projects (like Research Gate). Recently, we have seen initiatives for redesigning scientific instruments that are in tune with the open science philosophy. New instruments are acquiring new characteristics: they become shareable, they facilitate socialization of scientific activities, they become modular and interoperable, as well as easily serviceable and upgradable. Efforts also go into redesigning scientific labs, making them more collaborative, interconnected, accessible through teleproxmity, etc. SENSORICA leads the way to open science, as one can see in this presentation. The PV characterization project incorporates many of these new aspects.

This project was started by incorporating all the lessons learned in the Barda periscope project. There was a difference in scale: more individuals contributed to the design and the prototyping of the PV characterization device (11 affiliates and over 200 logged contributions). The requirements for accountability and responsibility were also higher, since we were now dealing with a University. All this put more pressure on our support processes. We created a Project responsible role, to be the interface between the University and the SENSORICA OVN. Financial incentives were attached to it. Moreover, the roles of outreach (find skills), orientation (help new affiliates get accustomed), coordination (make sure that all affiliates are on the same page) and facilitation (make sure that all affiliates get the help they need) became very important. We experimented with new tools for orientation that proved to be more effective. A specific forum was created for the project, in order to focus discussions. The PV project was also more complex, its documentation proliferated faster, which lead to the need of content maps in order to ease the navigation.

During the course of the project we noticed that the outreach function was very important and not so easy to finetune. The answers to our signals propagated on social media were slow to come and the conversion to an active contributor was low. We attributed part of that to a poor general understanding of SENSORICA’s OVN model, including its system of incentives. At the beginning of the project, we grossly underestimated the efforts required for outreach, for generating the content to be broadcasted, for establishing a constant social media presence, for mapping the open source ecosystem, targeting specific pools of talent, and establishing trust relations. The project was run below the critical mass of open projects and therefore required a more centralized form of governance.

Example 3: The IoT for heavy industry case

NOTE: We cannot publicly disclose the name of our sponsor in the IoT for heavy industry applications case.
In December 2015, sensoricans were contacted by a Montreal-based company to help develop an IoT solution for applications in heavy industry. They wanted to make their product “smart” and able to predict its life expectancy. The requirements consisted of a mesh network of sensors that send data to a cloud for analysis, in order to predict failure. The race to be first to market set the pace for fast innovation and low cost. The company crafted a business model based on services, not on selling the hardware, which is fully compatible with the open source development that SENSORICA can offer. The agreement was that everything that SENSORICA develops can be released under an open source licence, with no restrictions for Sensoricans to remix this technology in other projects, including commercial ones.

Thus, the company became the sponsor of an open source IoT applications development project. CAKE, the custodian of the SENSORICA OVN takes in financial contributions from the company and distributes them to network affiliates, as a reward for their involvement to the project, as fiscal sponsorship. The company is not a client of CAKE, since this a three party relationship, between the company, CAKE and the world, the later benefiting from the open source IoT applications design, and not simply a one-to-one service exchange between two organizations, even if the company can draw a direct benefit from this relationship.

The Sensor Network project started almost in free form. The first tacit agreement was that the sponsor informs development based on their knowledge about these applications. Decisions on development were to be made during scrum meetings between Sensoricans and employees of the sponsor, Sensoricans would work on tasks, log their time contributions and get some financial compensation every two weeks, relative to their efforts. As the project unfolded, we felt the need for better planning and cost estimation. The first improvement was to manually create a map of content generated by SENSORICA’s R&D activities. This brought the idea of being able to generate dynamic content maps, either from the NRP-VAS (every development process has R&D documents as deliverables) or from our CRM (content management system), which is not yet implemented. In order to allow the sponsor of the project to follow almost in real time metrics about the project, we created an experimental dashboard. In the end, we realized that we needed to synchronize the sponsor’s ERP with SENSORICA’s NRP. We crafted a shared language and project development structure, and the agreement was to keep track of work in both places. This brings the need to create interfaces between the two management systems, which hasn’t yet been implemented. Moreover, we also decided to produce cost estimates for future tasks, to allow the sponsor to better plan its budget. All these measures had a positive impact on our relationship by making our activities much more predictable and auditable, and by increasing the level of reliability of the network.

As the value created during this project increased, the project sponsor realized its first-to-market advantage was in potential danger if the technical work was put in the context of their direct business interest in a public way. This sparked an interesting debate on openness (access to participation) and transparency (access to information). We drew on SENSORICA’s past experience with a project that was sensitive to transparency, and implemented an open and semi-transparent project model. In more concrete terms, anyone can join the project, which preserves the openness aspect. Most of the technical information generated is public from the start, but some documents that contain information about how different components can be used in an application similar to the business case of our sponsor were made non-public. Project affiliates need to sign a non-publication agreement for these documents clustered into a separate folder, but there is no restriction related to the use of this information in any other project. All these non-public documents have a date for publication, which is related to the sponsor’s market deployment strategy and pace. We believe that in through this arrangement we preserved the nature of the SENSORICA OVN, while mitigating the risks perceived by the sponsor, which led a stronger synergy between the two entities.”

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