Abstract

An infrastructural gap (IG) emerged after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 and it refers to the difficulty of the state and the private sector in sustaining the level of infrastructural networks in the Western world. Yet, infrastructures comprise the realm where the state or the market materialize a great proportion of the social contract. Citizens therefore often experience IG as a challenge of the entire political paradigm. Nevertheless, as research in the country that is at the center of the current euro-crisis—Greece—records, we have novel and innovative forms of civil activity focused on the IG. Such activity, applying principles of self-organization and peer-to-peer relationships, along with practices of social solidarity and ideals of commons, attempts to address IG in innovative ways. However, such practices call for theoretical and empirical innovations as well, in order to overcome the social sciences’ traditional understandings of infrastructures. This paper—based on the inaugural professorial lecture I gave in acceptance of the Chair in Social Anthropology at the Vrije University Amsterdam—seeks to initiate a framework for understanding this shift in the paradigm of infrastructures’ governance and function, along with the newly emerging infrastructural turn in socio-cultural anthropology.

The full article is available here.

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‘using systems thinking to architect a strength-based systemic global P2P organization aimed at identifying, interconnecting, amplifying and refracting successful solutions, teaching people how to infect others with similar ideas and in the end helping humanity become the best it can be in fair, sustainable and free ways.’

‘We therefore propose to build a global organization using Systems Thinking principles (among others) that have been around since tens of years. Where such principles have been successfully used mostly in business consideration (and at least one governmental situation), it is time to leverage that knowledge and put it to use to the whole humanity.’

The ‘governmental situation’ is Project Cybersyn, so basically it would be to build up-to-date locally modified versions of that for the common good.

And:

‘We propose to use the team syntegrity systemic method to allow field matter and p2p experts to interact together in the most efficient way in order to design a roadmap to allow for a full blown transition from the current world to a more if not full p2p mankind.’

They need:

‘Systems Thinkers to further refine the systemic aspects of this proposal or clarify it; Field workers in NGOs or local associations to challenge our thinking and improve the proposal on how an organization like the one we envision could help contribute and deliver its value; P2P and Commons researchers to inform this proposal about that aspect and how to connect Commons and those in need.’

Being a collaborative document on GitBook, I was enthused to correct some of the errors and lack of good style in the English (the author is French), but it turns out GitBook is horrible to use and super-complicated for a newcomer, plus there appears to be no simple ‘getting started’ guide, which is a shame as it also seems like a very good idea in theory. I’m sure if anyone would like to collaborate on the project they will be warmly welcomed.

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Violeta Cabello Villarejo

“Water has always been considered either a public good (in most cases) or a private one when it is appropriated to generate economic value, for instance in bottled water. Only at very local scales, water users communities have created institutions that manage water as a common pool resource as has been extensively documented by the work of Elinor Ostrom. The basic problem with water is that it is, by nature, a multi-scale resource: water is used for many purposes and managed at many different levels (local, regional, national, international). It is also multidimensional, its management requires dealing with social, economic, hydrological and climatic data, which is difficult to collect and usually not shared and coordinated among different institutions and scales.

So, what could an Open Infrastructure for water management look like? I will draw some initial ideas that will for sure be further developed in the International Conference on Information and Knowledge for Water Governance in the Network Society next June in Sevilla (@WaterP2P).

As a basic legal requirement, water should be declared a common resource (not public neither private) implying a co-reponsability of users (and by users I refer to any citizen that drinks water everyday) and managers. Its governance regime should be based on the principles of Openness as stated in Michel Bauwens presentation, with a real:

• Public participation. Decision-making processes should be clearly design and explicitly approved by law involving real participation in them

• Transparency on all data and information used in decision-making processes

• Access and Shareability of all type of datasets, models and derived information required for participation

Open Water Infrastructures could be developed as means to coordinate the different water management institutions operating at different scales (irrigation communities, urban areas, river basins, regional governments, etc.).

These platforms could be a means to enable what many current water management organizations lack:

• Polycentric data collection and harmonization in databases

• Forkability of hydrological, economic and socio-ecological models used in the planning process, thus generating a positive feedback over the information used for decision-making

• Tools for public participation (discussions, wikis, voting, etc.) enabling coordination at higher scales than the local, like the river basin

This requires of course a new way of understanding management of natural resources based on open standards and collaboration between citizens, researchers and managers. These platforms could be hubs for these different actors engaging in collaborative governance regimes that could improve both efficiency and democratic practices of water management organizations.”

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