I was happy to oblige by participating on a conference panel last Friday, February 22, called “The Multilateral System in the Public Eye: The Impact of Mass Communications.” (The conference itself was entitled “Emerging Challenges to Multilateralism: A Parliamentary Response.”)

This panel focused on the ways in which new communications media, especially the Internet, are affecting the effectiveness, credibility, and reputation of multilateral institutions such as the UN. The clear takeaway that I took from the conference is that certain players within UN are openly worried about the ability of multilateral institutions to solve the urgent problems of our time.

That’s a legitimate concern. As countless problems pummel the world order – climate change, inequality, cyber-warfare, data surveillance, the list goes on – the UN is an obvious forum in which to discuss issues. But with limited authority to solve problems and unwieldy internal governance structures and processes, no one expects bold, timely action. Yet the rise of participatory online media is showcasing the limits of the UN. Hence the open hand-wringing.  

I was pleased to learn that there is at least a glimmer of interest in commoning as an appealing option. Regrettably, my sense is that UN discussants are not prepared to explore the commons very deeply or seriously. This is not entirely surprising. Most participants in UN deliberations, after all, are representatives of their national government and are immersed in the bubble of state power and conventional politics. There is a general conceit that policy, legislation, and other top-down actions are the most meaningful and effective ways for dealing with problems.

They’re not, of course. There are other important approaches. Many centralized state and multilateral structures are themselves part of the problem. They tend to consolidate power too much, inviting political gamesmanship, media optics, and corruption at the expense of substantive on-the-ground results. They privilege capital-friendly “market solutions” at the expense of socially minded, creative innovation from the bottom-up. For their part, state bureaucracies often feel threatened by stable, locally grounded commons that assert their own interests and self-sufficiency. And so on.  

Below are my prepared comments for the panel, which a presented were abbreviated to accommodate the five-minute limit for each speaker. A video of the panel can be found here. My presentation is at the timemark 11:50 through 16:40.

Multilateralism and the Commons

It wasn’t so long ago that nation-states strictly controlled the types of news, information, and culture that citizens could see and hear. While certain authoritarian regimes still tightly control domestic communications – notwithstanding the Internet – the interconnected global village that Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s is well upon us. Cheap and easy transnational communications is the norm for a great many of the world’s people. Communications from other cultures and countries routinely influence our everyday lives.

It’s not just that people can hear or see unauthorized, novel, and foreign information, however. It’s that they can now generate their own news, videos, and podcasts. They can write their own software code, develop their own wikis, and start new movements with modest resources.

This is enabling people to assert moral and political claims to global audiences that was previously impossible – and that traditional state and media authorities cannot control. Distributed media technologies have essentially changed the political and cultural ecosystems of individual nations and global culture, often in profound ways.

Naturally, nation-states and multilateral institutions tend to find these developments disorienting and troubling. They may still be able to assert their authority, sometimes with sufficient coercive power to enforce their will. But the legality they invoke is not necessarily the same thing as perceived legitimacy. The latter is more of an open question – a question that national governments may try to influence, but which ultimately only the citizenry can address.

This tension is not going to go away. It is now baked into the very structures of modern telecommunications, the economy, and politics. Indeed, the Trump Administration is largely based on exploiting the tension between new media and legacy state institutions.

I characterize the problem as a deep structural conflict between the centralized, hierarchical, expert-driven institutions of a prior era – and the bottom-up, self-organized, participatory communities made possible by open networks and various apps. The very ideas of centralized state power and shared national identity are under siege when everyone can easily create a diversity of new publics and subcultures on their own terms.

While social media have plenty of proven dangers – fake news, Facebook algorithms, venues for authoritarian populism and hate – let’s remember that open networks – especially when organize as commons – hold some fairly significant creative, productive, and democratic powers. For me, the question is whether state power and multilateral institutions are capable of recognizing and supporting these constructive powers of the commons.

As an activist and policy strategist, I have been studying and working with commons around the world for the past twenty years. I’m not talking about the “tragedy of the commons” that Garrett Hardin made famous in his 1968 essay immortalizing that phrase. Contrary to Hardins claims, a commons does not consist of unowned resources. It is not a free-for-all in which you can take as much as you want.

A commons is a self-organized social system for the stewardship of shared wealth over the long term. It’s a distinctly different form of governance and provisioning than either the market or state. Commoners devise their own rules, social practices, traditions, and rituals that are suited for their particular context and culture. They self-monitor for free-riders and they impose punishments on those who violate the rules.

The commons is not just small bodies of natural resources such as farmland, fisheries, forests, and irrigation water, as studied by the late Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for her work in 2009. The commons also consists of shared management of systems in higher education, in cities, in diverse social settings, and in digital spaces. 

Commons are especially robust in the world of free and open source software and Wikipedia; open access journals that are making science and scholarly accessible to everyone; open educational resources that are making textbooks and curricula more affordable to students; and Creative Commons-licensed sharing of everything, bypassing the monopoly rents imposed by the intellectual property industries. 

There are many other commons to which I will turn to in a moment. But my basic point is that commons are generative and value-creating, not a “tragedy.” And they are huge potential partners for state and multilateral institutions, if the latter can understand commoning properly.

If we want a world of greater inclusion and participation, and greater freedom in both a political and consumer sense, then we need to be talking about the commons. It is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s concept of power. She wrote in her book The Human Condition that power is something that “springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”

In other words, power does not inhere in our institutions themselves. It must be constantly created and re-created constantly, socially. In this respect, many state and multilateral institutions are losing their struggles to retain power and perceived legitimacy. They are not offering credible, effective responses to urgent societal needs. I’d like to suggest that state institutions would do well to enter into partnerships with various commons to:

1) leverage the generative, creative power that commons can offer;

2) empower peer governance and responsibility among people in ways that can nourish wholesome participation and, indirectly, state legitimacy; and

3) support locally appropriate, stable, self-supporting solutions that affected people can create themselves; and

4) enable transboundary cooperation on ecological problems.

In other words, state and multilateral institutions need to see the challenge of social media in a much bigger context. It’s not just about clever messaging and better tweets. It’s about developing a deeper modus vivendi with the largely unrecognized power of the commons. This, in fact, is what the French Development Agency has been doing recently as it explores how commons could enhance its development strategies in Africa and other Francophone countries.

So imagine an expansion the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, DNDi, which is a partnership among commons, state institutions, and private companies to reduce the costs of drug R&D and distribution. DNDi releases medically important drugs under royalty-free, non-exclusive licenses so that benefits so that the drugs can be made available everywhere inexpensively.

Or imagine how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has helped various states in the wake of natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti. HOT brings together volunteer hackers to produce invaluable Web maps showing first-responders and victims where to find hospitals, water, and other necessities. This is a notable commons-driven solution, not a bureaucratic one.

The System of Rice Intensification is a global open-source community that trades advice and knowledge about the agronomy of growing rice. Working totally outside of conventional multilateral channels, SRI has brought together farmers in Sri Lanka and Cuba, India and Indonesia, to improve their rice yields by two or three-fold.

We should think about how Community Land Trusts are decommodifying land and making them more available to ordinary people. Let’s consider the Open Prosthetics Project that is producing affordable, license-free prosthetics….and cosmo-local production that shares knowledge and design globally, open-source style, while producing physical things (farm equipment, furniture, housing) locally. 

The King of the Meadows project in the Netherlands is a commons that has mobilized citizens to steward biodiversity connected with cultural heritage. The Bangla-Pesa is a neighborhood currency in Kenya that is helping people exchange value and meet needs without the use of the national fiat currency. 

I think you get the idea. If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.

The post Multilateralism and the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This online map quickly became the default basemap for a wide variety of responders – search and rescue teams, the United Nations, the World Bank, and humanitarian mapping organizations such as MapAction. It turned out to be the first step in the formation of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, which has gone on to organize dozens of similar humanitarian mapping projects over the past five years.

The project amounts to a “mapping commons” whose freely available geographic data is invaluable to humanitarian responders to natural disasters and crises. The maps are also widely used by communities to help them formulate and pursue their own development goals.

The heart of the HOT project is a large corps of concerned volunteers who are committed to creating online maps freely available to anyone. The maps – all based on the open source collection of maps hosted by OpenStreetMap, the Web map wiki project – are especially valuable in places where base map data are scarce, out of date, or rapidly changing.

HOT relies on OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative global project started by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004 following the success of Wikipedia. Relying on crowdsourced data from more than 1.6 million registered users, OSM maps are compiled entirely by people who survey land with GPS units, digitize aerial imagery, and collect and liberate existing public sources of geographic data. Unlike many other providers whose maps are made by paid professionals and sold as proprietary products, OSM allows anyone to contribute information, correct mistakes and access it anywhere in the world. This allows vast quantities of information to be gathered together on one platform in highly participatory and efficient ways.

The maps themselves are licensed under an Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), which means that the maps are freely available to anyone to “copy, distribute, transmit and adapt” so long as any derivative map information is also available under the same terms.¹ This licensing is very important in disaster situations because it allows responders to have quick, no-cost access to accurate information about a region – something that conventional commercial maps do not ordinarily allow. The freely licensed geographic data also makes it far easier for responders to adapt the raw data to create printed maps and mobile applications.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team was incorporated as a nonprofit shortly after the spontaneous collaboration of humanitarian mappers in response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010. While HOT has a board of directors and a voting membership that comprise the legal body of the organization, anyone with an OSM user name can contribute to the HOT mission via its “Tasking Manager,” a tool that divides up a mapping job into smaller tasks that can be completed rapidly.²

HOT is part of a sprawling global commons of geographic mapping volunteers who apply open-source principles and open data sharing to improve the welfare of communities in which they work, especially those at risk of natural disaster or other crises. The project engages participants in two ways: by coordinating volunteers from around the world in using satellite imagery to compile maps, and by providing training and support to OpenStreetMap communities in countries prone to disasters. HOT also globally advocates the importance of free geodata in saving and improving lives in times of political crisis and natural disasters.

In late 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest typhoons on record, hit the Philippines, destroying thousands of homes and displacing thousands of people. The OpenStreetMap Philippines (OSM-ph) community and HOT were not strangers prior to such scenarios; a colleague group of humanitarian mappers, MapAction, had used OpenStreetMap to develop an official response map in 2009 after tropical storm Ondoy.³ In the case of Typhoon Haiyan, both the OSM-ph community and the HOT community began mapping the city of Tacloban together even before the typhoon made landfall. Thirty-three mappers used open satellite imagery to add 10,000 buildings to the map, or about one-quarter of all buildings in Tacloban. This data about the location of health facilities, government buildings, water and electricity sources, and so forth have obvious value to responders who must plan activities in rapid, on-the-fly ways from remote locations. The Red Cross has used the map data, for example, to assist in performing a damage assessment. Over 1,600 volunteers from all over the world contributed some five million map changes in the first month after the typhoon. This data was extremely useful to the Philippines government and international response organizations.

In responding in 2014 to the massive Ebola outbreak, which has infected an estimated 24,000 people and killed 10,000, HOT’s volunteer mapping was quite helpful to Doctors Without Borders (Medicins sans Frontieres, MSF), CartONG and the Red Cross. Detailed, accurate maps were vital in helping emergency field workers to navigate Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and to identify infected people who needed medical care.

Not all of the work of the HOT community is focused on this type of intense disaster response. Often mapping of places that do not have detailed data occurs in preparation for an event. In the case of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo the goal was to create a detailed street map of the city so Doctors Without Borders could better track community health and know when a full-scale response was needed.

This interaction began with a “mapping party” in Berlin at which volunteers got together to extract information from satellite imagery. Once they had mapped much of the city remotely, a member of HOT traveled to Lubumbashi to collaborate with MSF.⁴ There, they worked together with the University of Lubumbashi to collect even more detailed street data using a tool called Field Papers, a tool that lets one print a map from OpenStreetMap and then write on it.⁵ This provides a way for people to write annotations on paper copies of maps, and then to take a picture of the annotations with a mobile phone. The digital image with notes are then loaded into an OSM editor, and volunteers in remote locations can get together at scheduled mapping events to transcribe the notes and add them to the online OSM.⁶

This is a common pattern of HOT engagement with a community – remote volunteers map communities in need whose settlements and landscape are not well mapped. Ideally, the volunteers are also connected to OSM mappers in those communities, though in some places this is not practical. Another common HOT approach is to teach communities how to use OSM tools to map themselves, often through field missions such as the one in Lubumbashi.

Much is learned through these collaborations and trips, and that information in turn is used to improve OSM globally. For example, the learning tool LearnOSM⁷ was first developed in Indonesia during trainings by HOT. LearnOSM offers clear introductions to key elements the OSM technology with step-by-step instructions in nine languages.

Another example is the special Humanitarian map layer of the OSM map, which contains data of great interest to disaster responders – the location of water and sanitation facilities, road quality, fire hydrants, electricity networks, street lights and social facilities.⁸ The map layer can also reveal informal shops clustered together – information that is not usually disclosed by traditional Web cartography that doesn’t update the rapidly changing urban environment nor allow Web users to zoom in closely enough.

The HOT experience illustrates the contagious nature of local acts of commoning. What is initially useful to people in one disaster zone often proves valuable to people in another part of the world, and so a cycle of learning and access to tools expands from one community to another, and around the world.

Kate Chapman (USA), a geographer by training, worked extensively in Indonesia to build an OpenStreetMap community and was Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team from its inception in 2010 until 2015.

Photo by Peter Ito

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commoning in Times of Disaster – The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team appeared first on P2P Foundation.

the Great Lakes Commons Map (a bioregional map of healing and harm), World of Commons (innovative forms of citizen-led governance of public property and services in Italy), Falling Fruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forgeable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trustdirectory maps.

As the varieties of maps proliferate, there is growing concern that the mapping projects truly function as commons and be capable of sharing data and growing together. But meeting this challenge entails some knotty technical, social and legal issues.

A group of mappers met at the Commons Space sessions of the World Social Forum in Montreal last year to try to make progress on the challenge.  The dialogues continued at an “Intermapping” workshop in Florence, Italy, last month. After days of deep debate and collaboration, the mappers came up with a document that outlines twelve key principles for developing effective data and mapping commons. The Charter for Building a Data Commons for a Free, Fair and Sustainable Future is the fruit of those dialogues.

The Charter’s authors describe the document as “the maximum ‘commons denominator’ of mapping projects that aspire to share data for the common good.” If you follow these guidelines,” write the mappers, “you will contribute to a Global Data Commons. That is, you will govern your mapping community and manage data differently than people who centralize data control for profit.”

“The Charter does not describe the vision, scope or values of a specific mapping project.  It is rather an expression of Data Commons principles. It will help you reimagine how you protect the animating spirit of your mapping project and prevent your data from being co-opted or enclosed.”

Here is version 0.6 of the Charter, which is still a work-in-progress:

1. Reflect your ambition together.  Discuss the core of your project again and again. Everybody involved should always feel in resonance with the direction in which it’s heading.

2. Make your community thrive.  For the project to be successful, a reliable community is more important than anything else. Care for those who might support you when you need them most.

3. Separate commons and commerce.  Mapping for the commons is different from producing services or products to compete on the map-market. Make sure you don’t feed power-imbalances or profit-driven agendas and learn how to systematically separate commons from commerce.

4. Design for interoperability. Think of your map as a node in a network of many maps. Talk with other contributors to the Data Commons to find out if you can use the same data model, licence and approach to mapping.

5. Care for a living vocabulary. Vocabularies as entry points to complex social worlds are always incomplete. Learn from other mappers’ vocabularies. Make sure your vocabulary can be adjusted. Make it explicit and publish it openly, so that others can learn from it too.

6. Document transparently.  Sharing your working process, learnings and failures allow others to replicate, join and contribute. Don’t leave documentation for after. Do it often and make it understandable. Use technologies designed for open cooperation.

7. Crowdsource what you can. Sustain your project whenever possible with money, time, knowledge, storing space, hardware or monitoring from your community or public support. Stay independent!

8. Use FLOSS tools. It gives you the freedom to further develop your own project and software according to your needs. And it enables you to contribute to the development of these tools.

9. Build upon the open web platform. Open web standards ensure your map, its data and associated applications cannot be enclosed and are prepared for later remixing and integration with other sources.

10. Own your data. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing or copying what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent you from being sued or your data being enclosed. Ban Google.

11. Protect your data. To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. Use appropriate licenses to protect your collective work!

12. Archive your project. When it doesn’t work anymore for you, others still might want to build on it in the future.

(Earlier versions of the document can be found here and here. If you have comments or new points to add to the Charter, here is a hackpad for new contributions.)

These twelve principles represent a lot of hard-won wisdom into the functioning of data commons!

The post A Charter for How to Build Effective Data (and Mapping) Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.