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We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not exist in the market economy and its system of metrics.

Essentially, Biocapacity is the dynamic balance point between the number of organisms within a given area and the amount of resources that are needed to support them within this area. Thus, agricultural biocapacity indicates the degree to which the population of a bioregion is greater or lesser than the food that is available from the bioregion to feed it.

By combining scientific reason with place-based knowledge, culture and history, biocapacity provides a baseline for sustainability by showing how different interventions will effect different outcomes. This allows communities to develop evidence-based guidelines for organizing their own resource sufficiency while regenerating the ecology of their life-places.

Excerpts

On Bioregionalism in the Bay Area

Gradually, this eclectic group of naturalists began to call their field “bioregionalism” (bio is the Greek word for life; regere is the Latin word for a place to be managed). So, bioregionalism is essentially the idea of lifeplace — a way of extending the life of a community to the life of the biosphere through the ecological renewal of a particular area. The new bioregionalists wanted to combine local knowledge, beliefs and values with the unique characteristics of the climate and topography, the soils and plants, and the animals and habitats where they lived.

These ideas spread across the United States, but San Francisco was the epicenter for this people’s movement. They called on citizens to stop running away from the problems of industrial economy to better understand the land around them, the limits to its resources, and how this could help meet the needs of the diverse species who live there, including homo sapiens. Their vision was the development of new social and cultural relationships within the context of geographical communities.

Bioregionalism was a unique perspective for addressing major environmental challenges on a human scale. It acknowledged that solving large ecological problems by ‘thinking globally’ is much too disempowering for the average person. Although ‘acting locally’ is clearly the practical first step, it operates on too small a scale to impact environmental governance. The activities of localization simply don’t generate enough political power within small communities to stop centralized governments and markets from exploiting these decentralized life-places for their own ends.

The bioregionalists explained why there are so few decision-making organizations or networks at regional levels, where harmful ecological problems could be most effectively addressed. They showed how history and economics had prompted leaders to draw artificial local, state and national borders that seldom conformed to the ecological zones which overlap with them. Hence, natural boundaries have little correlation with our present political, economic and social boundaries and their institutions. To be sure, many ecological problems — involving personal and collective choices and action, as well as their cumulative effects on human lives — cannot be resolved within existing political jurisdictions. Ultimately, we become inhabitants separated from our own habitats.

How is cooperation over resources even possible if our geographical borders cannot be redrawn to protect and manage the environment? An engaged movement for a more ecological society cannot succeed without some kind of graphic image of the bioregional boundaries which are hidden from view. Such a map would focus on a region’s hydrology, geology and physiography, but also reflect its culture, history, present land-use patterns and climate.

From the Conclusion

Based on our research, most of the region will exceed its biocapacity to produce food for its growing population within two or three decades.

Industrial pollution, climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, water diversions and loss of wetlands are threatening enormous swaths of human habitat. Before 2050, the prodigious agricultural production of the San Francisco Bay Watershed will fail to produce sufficient quantities of agriculture for its population due to uncertain rainfall, flooded coasts and inlets, depletion of aquifers, topsoil loss, an export-led business model and a lack of cooperative dialogue among its political subdivisions.

Our study indicates that locally-produced calories have more monetary and ecological value when consumed in the same life-places where they are produced. Yet as long as the San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward MSA continues to import agriculture from elsewhere, the community will be impacted by rising food prices. Importing food into the dense population of the Bay Area will be possible until its food suppliers — foreign, domestic and regional — face their own supply limits for finite energy and raw materials and the breakdown of their own their fragile infrastructures.

When the Bay Area becomes too severe a strain on the bioregion itself, the reversal will be rapid. The external dependency on food will collapse and the capacity of the entire San Francisco Bay Watershed to sustain itself will be overtaken by extreme costs in food, water, energy and housing.

Why do we exploit our ecosystems instead of restoring them as life-places for habitation? This was the basic question raised in 1968. Now, ironically, San Francisco’s ‘back to the land’ diaspora could turn into a mass evacuation from the region as its resources continue to decline and its self-sufficiency falters. How this existential crisis is addressed in the San Francisco Bay Watershed — and in bioregions everywhere — will determine the ecological future of all life-places and our sustainability as a species. The question then will be, not how sustainable but how inhabitable is my own bioregion?

Still, if there’s any area that can break down the barriers between people and their land-place, integrating the human community with the ecological community, it’s the Bay Area — the spot where modern bioregionalism began and remains a vital part of the cultural memory. Community members are the very organisms that depend on environmental resources for support.

Now we must learn how to restore this dynamic balance. The issue is not if we have the will to do this, but how soon can it be done?

For more information, please contact James Quilligan or Patti Ellis at economicdemocracyadvocates.org

Photo by RhyoR

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Robert Raymond: Lying a few miles south of Marin County and just across the bay from San Francisco, the city of Richmond, California, is situated within two of the wealthiest regions of the United States. Richmond, however, does not share in this wealth. Its downtown has been largely abandoned and its northern periphery is on the front lines of the Chevron Richmond Refinery, processing over 240,000 barrels of crude oil every single day and creating a toxic environment to those living in the surrounding vicinity. It’s an example of what we know as a “sacrifice zone” — a community that has been largely incapacitated by environmental damage and economic neglect.

But in the shadow of the looming refinery, and within the spaces between boarded up storefronts and abandoned lots, something is stirring in Richmond. Residents, organizers, and activists have come together to create an incubation hub for community revitalization and resilience. They call themselves Cooperation Richmond, and their aim is to empower the marginalized and exploited residents of this city to build community-controlled wealth and wellbeing.

Founded in October of 2017, Cooperation Richmond is plugged into a broader national movement that includes similar initiatives like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. These initiatives have largely been inspired by the Mondragon cooperatives, a highly integrated network of cooperatives that form a self-supporting ecosystem in the Basque region of northern Spain. Like these other initiatives, Cooperation Richmond’s mission is to build a cooperative economy that puts people and planet before profit. It does this through providing education, coaching, and both credit and capital development to cooperative businesses in Richmond.

Robert Raymond spoke with Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni of Cooperation Richmond about their work and the importance of the growing cooperative movement in Richmond and beyond.

Robert Raymond: There’s been a buzz around a new book recently written by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” I actually found out about Cooperation Richmond when I heard that one of your board members, Najari Smith, was going to be interviewing Kali Akuno during a book tour stop in Oakland. Can you tell us about Cooperation Richmond, what you see as your mission, and how you are connected to a broader cooperative ecosystem that includes, among others, Cooperation Jackson?

Gopal Dayaneni: Cooperation Richmond is a really good example of what we call trans-local organizing — autonomist, place-based organizing with a unifying vision, shared strategies, and common frames. We are connected with many other organizations who are doing or supporting cooperative development and who are all connected by a common vision. It’s a movement that is trying to build meaningful infrastructure for economic democracy in order to build a new kind of political power. We want to actually transform the very nature of the economy and of governance in our communities — that’s what we’re engaged in.

And so Cooperation Richmond is an organization that we have developed for the purpose of supporting worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives in Richmond, California, which is one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area — a majority people of color community. We provide coaching, connections, and capital. We’re focused on folks who are most excluded from the dominant economy, folks who we think should be the foundation of building the next economy.

Doria Robinson: The idea behind Cooperation Richmond is that we’re taking somebody from a place where they’re just getting started, somebody at the point where they really want to make an impact, and they want to take charge of their lives, but need some help making it happen. Maybe they have an idea for a business, but they don’t have much more than that idea. We’ve structured Cooperation Richmond to basically take it from there, to help them take it to the next stage.

You launched Cooperation Richmond less than a year ago, but you’ve already played an important role in fostering cooperative workplaces and community engagement in Richmond. Can you tell us about your first initiative?

Doria Robinson: Our pilot project was Rich City Rides, a bike and skate shop. It’s a really powerful story. It’s a small bike and skateboard shop in Richmond, a place that had no real bike shop. Before Rich City Rides, if you wanted to do any repairs to your bike, you had to go to Walmart or Target, which are not exactly bike repair places. That was it.

You know oftentimes bikes are associated with gentrification, or kind of an elitist kind of thing you do on the weekends. In Richmond, it’s really different. People can’t afford cars. Not a lot of people in low income communities have cars, or if they do, their car is constantly breaking down. So they’ll default to riding a bike just to get to work or just to get to the store, just to go get around. So people actually really needed to have a good place to be able to fix their bike. And so people mostly just threw out their bike if they got a flat — they would literally throw their bike out. It was painful to see. Or it would just sit in the garage once it had something wrong with it, and that was it. There was no access to any kind of bike tools or anything like that — people literally had no way to fix their bikes.

So three young men started to run a loosely associated collective bike shop out of different spaces that they could find. They worked out of a storage space for a while, they had a kind of pop-up bike shop going on for a while. They were finally able to get into a retail space across from the Richmond BART station, a space on the main street that had been boarded up for years. Rich City Rides was the first place that really started to revitalize the main street. I think it was one of the only places that’s locally owned on that block as well. But they were really running a pretty substantial business at that point with very little resources, and they needed capital. They also needed a facelift — the shop looked like somebody’s garage.

So we took them on and worked with them to create an action plan to strengthen the business. We got them their first loan and helped them incorporate as a California Cooperative. So now Rich City Rides is leading the effort to completely transform and revitalize the downtown, to create this opportunity for people to have healthy transportation; healthy in terms of environment and in terms of your own body. So yeah, it’s kind of an honor to just see them carry this vision forward.

And why is the cooperatives structure important? What role do they play in the broader mission of creating the next economy?

Gopal Dayaneni: Well there’s a few different pieces of that. So the first is that bosses just suck. You don’t need them. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of all of us being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor to meet our needs — and the needs of our communities — is very important.

It’s also important to share that wealth. Creating commons of wealth and commons of resources is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world, and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory, a knowledge of how to be in the world, to actually practice self-government on a daily basis, we need institutions and infrastructure that can do that.

The second part of it is really that cooperatives allow us to do things that the extractive economy won’t do. For example, we would never exclude folks because they were formerly incarcerated — because we don’t believe humans belong in cages. We would never exclude folks based on their their status as documented or undocumented because we recognize the border as an enclosure enforced through violence that fragments ecosystems and communities. So we are able through cooperation to actually live our values in a way that is foreclosed upon in the dominant economy, and particularly for those who are most excluded by the dominant economy.

Doria Robinson: I think that there’s some really vital things that being in a worker owned cooperative can provide. Democratization of the workplace is something that can’t be underestimated. In a worker cooperative, that’s really run through democracy, folks are voting through each owner having a say in the day to day decisions as well as the trajectory of the enterprise. That’s a really big deal, especially in communities like Richmond where power has really been taken out of the hands of the people. This transition of decision-making and profit-making back to the people — the transition of accountability and responsibility — is truly transformative.

If you take somebody who has never been in a place where what they do actually matters, where their whole livelihood actually depends on them completely showing up and making decisions — that’s transformative. And then once you start to get a taste of that it spreads and you don’t want to stop. As soon as people really get a taste of being in a position to make decisions that impact themselves and their community, it begins to extend out to other things. It doesn’t just stay within the realm of the workplace. You begin to realize that, for example, the city government impacts you. Or that decisions made around the streets impact you. You start to realize that you actually do have a voice in shaping the things that impact you, and that you can stand up and advocate for things. I think that is one of the most powerful and important reasons why we chose to focus on cooperatives. We want to thoroughly empower people in every place and in every way.

Gopal Dayaneni: Like I said earlier, Cooperation Richmond is part of a larger “just transition” vision and process taking place in Richmond but also in lots of other places in the United States and around the world. The idea is that for there to be meaningful political democracy, there has to be economic democracy. So the idea is not only about creating sustainable livelihoods in the workplace but also being able to reimagine the very nature of the work that we do and how we do it. So we could support worker-owned cooperatives that just do absolutely anything, or we could prioritize those that have ecological and social value. We do the latter. So Rich City Rides, for example, is not just a bike shop, it’s not just a bike shop run by folks who are normally excluded from the economy — you know, young men of color from Richmond — but it’s also an organized bike shop that supports community bike rides, transit justice, and bike safety. It’s really committed to a larger vision of reimagining our relationship to place, to home, and to the economy itself.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni by Robert Raymond/Shareable

The post How Cooperation Richmond is empowering marginalized communities to build an equitable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations that acquire land with the goal of creating permanently affordable housing. There are various regional CLTs whose purpose is to acquire land for low-income residents, and keep it out of the speculative market indefinitely. These CLTs would be able to do their job more effectively, however, if there were adequate funding sources and legal mechanisms to enable them to compete with private developers. As it is now, few private banks are willing to offer loans to housing cooperatives and other CLT projects. California law entitles nonprofits to intervene on tax-defaulted properties after five years of delinquency and before a private developer is given the opportunity to bid (CAL. REV. & TAX. CODE § 3791.4), but this law is rarely enforced. In a world where the poor, elderly, and disabled are being thrown to the streets without relocation fees because of loopholes in rent control laws (such as Costa Hawkins and the Golden Duplex Rule), CLTs must be adequately funded so that they can intervene when property becomes available.

In San Francisco, supportive legislation called the Small Sites Acquisition Fund was recently passed to help enable nonprofit developers to acquire properties before tenants are evicted through the Ellis Act. But the amount allocated by the fund per unit is still not enough to keep the property affordable to low-income tenants. Many CLTs are stuck waiting for land to be donated or sold to them below market rate in order to accomplish their mission.

Other housing models in the Bay have also challenged the status quo of property ownership. The Sustainable Economies Law Center and the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network have teamed up to create the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EBPREC), which combines features of CLTs, limited equity housing cooperatives, and self-organizing social movements. In addition to residents, members of EBPREC will include neighbors who want to support the initiative by investing what they are able (up to $1000) to empower the community to take ownership of their neighborhoods. Although this model has a broad base of support in its incipient phase, start-up funding is still necessary to acquire land and begin its first project.

Many private banks and lending institutions hesitate to fund projects that benefit local communities because they determine that it is too risky, or not profitable enough. The federal statute, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), was supposed to require banks to address the needs of low and moderate income communities where they do business. The CRA is currently under attack by the Trump Administration, and even without changes in the law, there is still inadequate oversight to require banks to live up to this standard. At least 97% of banks receive outstanding or satisfactory ratings under CRA standards, despite evidence that many have engaged in discriminatory practices, including but not limited to the predatory lending that took place during the 2008 foreclosure crisis. There are examples of banks doing the right thing, however. For example, OneUnited Bank in Boston created a loan fund specifically for Community Land Trusts. More banks must follow their example to invest in the communities and projects that need capital the most.

Instead of waiting for more banks to do the right thing though, we must take matters of capital investment into our own hands. Public banks have been proposed in the cities of Oakland and San Francisco. We must demand not only that they are created, and that these banking institutions refrain from investing in pipelines, prisons, and other destructive institutions, but also that these banks invest in enterprises and organizations that benefit the community directly, and that they be governed by the community, with adequate oversight that they stay true to their mission. (See this essay by the Defenders of Mother Earth – Huichin coalition for a discussion of how to create accountability over public banks.) The creation of permanently affordable and community controlled housing, the kind created by CLTs and the PREC model, must be prioritized and funded to benefit local residents at risk of being displaced.

Here are a number of ways you can get involved:

• Sign up to be a community stakeholder with the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative! http://ebprec.org/community-stakeholder-pledge

• Donate to preserve another permanently affordable housing project in Oakland! https://www.crowdrise.com/newton-house-collective

• Support the creation of a public bank in Oakland! https://friendsofpublicbankofoakland.org/

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Photo by byzantiumbooks

The post Permanently Affordable Housing: Challenges and Potential Paths Forward appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nithin Coca: Loconomics is a platform cooperative that allows service professionals working in areas like dog walking, home care, child care, massage therapy, and tutoring to connect and offer their services on a platform that they own. Founded by Joshua Danielson in 2012, Loconomics, which is based in San Francisco, California, aims to provide an alternative to investor-owned platforms such as Wagg (dog walking), Taskrabbit (gig work), or Handy (home cleaning). The company also just announced a collaboration with Doing What MATTERS for Jobs and the Economy, a program by California Community Colleges. The Loconomics platform will be used as part of a course on the gig economy, which will help bringing cooperative economic principles to students. We spoke with Danielson and Kyra Harrington, Loconomics’ Brand Marketing Manager, to learn more about Loconomics’ vision, their new partnership, and how a platform cooperative could empower service professionals and serve as a tool for economic empowerment.

Nithin Coca, Shareable: Where did the idea for Loconomics come from — and why did you feel it was necessary?

Joshua Danielson, Loconomics: In my 20s, I spent a lot of my money on services and I knew that the platforms, back then mostly temp agencies, often take 30-40 percent of people’s pay. Local services were something I believed in. The world’s full of products, while services are sustainable and personable. They enrich people’s lives in a way that products don’t. Ethos behind it is to do something that doesn’t increase wealth inequality. This is what many traditional businesses [with venture capital] end up doing.

We – Joshua and I – first met more than two years ago, and even then, Loconomics had been around for some time. Can you tell me about your progress, and the challenges you’ve faced in getting the platform cooperative set up?

Joshua Danielson: It’s taken much longer than expected, which is not atypical for any first-time entrepreneur. I started out neither having been a project manager nor having the technical expertise to move quickly. I’ve acquired a lot of those skills since then, and we’re able to execute things in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Loconomics started out as a benefit corporation, and our first round was a desktop version launched in 2012. It was bad timing. No one knew what a benefit corp was, nor did they care. It wasn’t true ownership, it wasn’t that differentiated from other platforms, and we didn’t have a mobile app. I began to wonder how this would look as a cooperative, but as most service professionals are freelancers, I didn’t know how that would work. I met Janelle Orsi with the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and she had been speaking out about the sharing economy/platform economy.

The conversion to a platform cooperative took a lot longer than expected because we wanted to do it right. The bylaws alone took over a year to write. Janelle has a lot of expertise and is in the cooperative movement. I let her lead, and I made sure to bring a healthy dose of business strategy to it, to ensure it was a sustainable platform, and we’d have staff that would want to work here.

What was the cooperative structure you ended up deciding on, and how does it work in practice?

Joshua Danielson: We officially converted in June 2014 to a California cooperative. We were a patronage based co-op at that point, with no shareholders. That means Loconomics is owned by workers and nobody else. We felt that keeping our focus on local services, and creating a platform that works for service professionals and clients has a lot potential to shift wealth inequality, so that gradually services can be booked without the middlemen.

Our revenue model is that service professionals will pay $20-40 for our ownership plans. With the $20 a month plan, they gain access to dividends, vote, can run for board, and get access to our sister platform where they can communicate, gain support, and have networking opportunities.

For $40, they also get access to scheduling software and new project management tools, in addition to being part of the cooperative. When there are profits leftover, they are entitled to dividends based on what they have paid into the platform. There are no commissions, and they elect the board, so they oversee the platform. Staff, like myself and Kyra, will be doing day to day activities — we are entrusted with the mission on their behalf. We’ve removed the traditional incentives and are self managed, have capped salaries, and  don’t have a bonus system. Staff elect one board member, two are nonprofit appointed, and six members are elected by service professionals. We get dividends based on how many hours we work, but this will roughly end up being the same as a service professional member who paid their dues.

So, can Shareable readers find services on the platform right now?

Kyra Harrington: Right now we’re focusing on recruiting on service professionals. Just over the last year, we’ve found there are a lot of challenges they are coming up against. They are often by themselves and face challenges on their own. That’s why we’re trying to build community through our sister platform — Loconomomics.coop — where service professionals can congregate. There are a lot of professional advantages they get from joining coop.

Service professionals have created nearly 600 listings on the site so far — and as we transition out of beta and going to do a full push this winter to onboard new members.

Service professionals can be a huge category. Any specific fields or sectors you are focusing your outreach on?

Joshua Danielson: Currently we’re focused on handful of services that include self-care professionals, such as massage therapists, acupuncture, cleaning professionals, handymen, and also dog walkers, pet sitters, child care, and tutors. Existing platforms for dog walking and cleaning take commissions up to 40 percent. They also proved that service professionals are looking at these platforms to get services booked, so that shows demand.

Kyra Harrington: When you start talking about co-ops, people often have not heard about it. To focus our messaging, we’re focusing on what’s in it for them as a service professional. Our focus is on tangible benefits: software, marketing, community, and no commissions. No one is getting rich of your back. And we’re a platform co-op, so you have a voice in our future.

Joshua Danielson: Most platform workers don’t feel like they’re being taken advantage of. Not many people have done the math. We want to have the numbers to say that, for example, dog walkers on Loconomics earn X more than on Wagg. That works better than telling them they are being taken advantage of.

That definitely sounds like a stronger message. So, what are your goals further ahead — where do you hope to see Loconomics in the near and medium term?

Joshua Danielson: First goal is to reach financial sustainability, and that we can achieve with 2,000 member service professionals. That would give resources to hire staff, and ability to scale and build partnerships across the world. Scaling helps everybody through increased bargaining power and network effects.

Kyra Harrington: It’s about helping each other versus fighting each other for business. The co-op element allows members to get to know each other — and you are more likely to refer your clients to others via a trusted referral network. Loconomics also allows members to market their services collectively versus paying a platform to compete against each other.

Joshua Danielson: The power of the marketplace is that you can book different services with Loconomics. You might first find your dog walker, but when you are also looking for a massage, you can find that on Loconomics too. It’s another value proposition to any service professional: They’re likely to get clients from other professionals. Our cooperative business model lends itself to members helping each other in ways that other platforms cannot.

It may have taken longer than I thought it would, but we’re excited to get to that point. The financials back it up, and there’s a place for Loconomics in the market. We need to reach a critical mass to get the ball rolling faster, so we’d love for people to check us out and refer professionals who could benefit from the power of a co-op. We’re committed to reducing wealth inequality, and we feel ownership is the way to do that — ownership over the tools you use and the way that you access work.

Nithin Coca: I’d also love to hear more about your new partnership with California Community Colleges?

Joshua Danielson: Under the Doing What Matters for Jobs and the Economy Small Business Sector program, twenty-four colleges are participating in a Self-employment Pathways in the Gig Economy project starting February 2018. Students will create job listings as part of this program, and Loconomics will assist them in finding work opportunities, tracking their earnings, and supporting them in transitioning into the independent workforce as small business owners. This group of students is going to be introduced to cooperative platform ownership as an alternative to traditional gig economy platforms.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Header image courtesy of Loconomics. 

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“At Ceptr we’re building a platform for distributed applications that will power new forms of human collaboration and help the world successfully navigate the daunting challenges we face. Designed using the organizational patterns found in nature, we’re opening new possibilities for more more equitable and regenerative forms of governance and wealth creation.

You don’t program? Cool! Because the project needs all sorts of skills; storytellers, marketeers, organizers, community developers and more. We are looking for summer residents to join our team as we build and launch initial applications, share discoveries, and grow a movement that will change the planet. As a Resident of the Ceptr team you will help awaken people’s minds to possibilities that they’ve never imagined and create the tools that will make that future a reality.

As an Open Source project, Ceptr is not a profit-driven organization and has no short-term revenue. Most people participate as volunteers. We operate as a “do-acracy,” empowering people to participate in whatever ways they see fit within self-directed teams.

Residencies include room and board. There will be domain-specific teams located in San Francisco(CA), Albuquerque(NM), and Ashland(OR). More important than specific job skills or experience is communication, competence and commitment. We can provide training and development on particular skills, although it is also great if you’re already bringing some good ones.

Types of Residencies – Ways to Participate

There are many ways to participate and contribute. Below are some that our teams have identified, maybe you can bring some of the skills, talents, and interests we need.

• Software Development – Skills/Interests in Go, JavaScript, protocols, blockchain, or distributed computing.
• Writing, Blogging, & Editing – Good writing skills. Actually enjoy writing and editing. Research, develop, and write engaging blog posts, website content, video scripts, crowdfuding copy. Edit new and previously written documents and prepare them for public distribution. Find supporting images and/or work with photographer to capture useful visual content.
• Executive Assistant, Admin & Organization – Competent, detail oriented, and excited to learn. Support founders and team leaders on a wide range of tasks including training, calendar management, travel logistics, email communication, editing, and report writing.
• Marketing, Social Media & PR – Good communication skills, facility with many social media tools. Support for the social media strategy. Listen to conversations, analyze data, engage with audience, track questions, monitor influencers and hashtags, identify opportunities. Help design strategic vision and lay groundwork for broadcasting that vision.
• Crowdfunding, Communications & Outreach – Experience running a crowdfunding campaign. Coherency holder for one or two of our crowdfunding campaigns. Ability to communicate effectively with a team of broadly skilled individuals including writers, videographers, and marketing strategists to engineer a brilliant campaign in a short amount of time.
• Graphic Design – Skills in visual communication and graphic design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. Work with our UX, Web, and Marketing teams to create style guides, branding, and online experiences that are compelling, yet intuitive. Your work will be critical for both our products and community relations.
• Web Site Development – HTML, JavaScript, Jekyll, and basic layout & design. Create websites for Ceptr and for specific projects and applications that are engaging and delightful. We are building new ways of computing, but many of these need to interface with or be marketed on the world wide web. Work with our graphic design and backend software development teams to drive engagement and adoption.
• UX Design – Design and iterate on user-centered experiences. Expertise in UX software such as InVision, UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer.js, Quartz Composer, and the like is a must. Basic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills are a plus. Design and deliver wireframes, user stories, user journeys, and mockups that lead to intuitive user experiences. Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new, functions and features. Collaborate with Graphic Designers, User Interface Designers, Web Developers and Software Engineers.
• Infrastructure and Deployment Engineering – Automating cloud and metal infrastructures with tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Storage, Networking, Security.
• Test Engineering – Creating test suites for automated distributed app test-driven development processes. Holochain application development includes a testing-harness to automate tests across many automatically instantiated instances of the application. This work includes developing and enhancing that testing-harness and it’s Docker integration. Expertise in Test-driven/Behavior-driven development, Docker, go, unix system scripting all helpful.
• Videographer, Video Editor – Natural storyteller with video filming and editing experience. Experience editing with Adobe Premier (preferred), Final Cut Pro or similar software. Create videos for social media, online education and community onboarding to help build understanding of – and nurture participation in – our work to re-design internet communication, collaboration, and work itself.
• Animation & Illustration – Natural storyteller with experience in graphic illustration and/or digital animation. Experience creating 2d animations or motion graphics with After Effects or similar software. Illustration chops and experience with Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign a plus. Create video and web animations that help communicate world changing ideas and engage audiences..
• Community Development, Event Organizing – Good communication skills, eagerness to learn and create value. Contribute to event organizing and production online and offline. Learn to produce e-learning materials in Learning Management Systems (LMS), be in service to the needs of people in the community. If proficient in the content, then contribute to forum moderation. Contribute to activities related to community development like potlucks, be-ops and others.”

Apply to the Summer 2017 Residency here.

More information can be found here.

Photo by Randy Wick

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Among the standout projects in the archive are a history of the now-vanished amusement park, Playland-at-the-Beach, a personal history of the Hunter’s Point riot, a project documenting the history of Sixth Street, a glimpse into the hidden mural at Mission Dolores, and a history of the General Strike of 1934 and the mechanization of the port.

Shareable connected with Chris Carlsson, founder and co-director, along with LisaRuth Elliott, of the project. We spoke about the importance of looking at the social, political and ecological elements of history, how history belongs not in dusty old shelves, but as a part of our everyday lives, and the need to see our shared history as a commons that we all contribute to and draw from. Here are the highlights of our conversation.

Shareable: Before there were online archives, Shaping San Francisco was collecting stories, photographs and local histories—originally putting them onto cd roms and even a book. What sets Shaping San Francisco apart from other history projects?

Chris Carlsson: Shaping San Francisco always served a dual function of being a place where you could learn about history by browsing and reading and researching. And what sets it apart is all the stuff from unusual sources, such as oral histories and obscure publications. It comes out of the radical tradition and includes radical publications. Content and photographs from a lot of underground publications have been freely used on our site.

When people look for the history of San Francisco, they end up on our site eventually. We have no pretense that we have the final answer or the final say about much of anything. There’s lots of stuff we’re really good at. We’re really good at ecological history; we’re really good at labor history; we’re really good at social history that most people don’t cover or leave out.

We come out of that long tradition that looks at history over a longer period of time and situates it in a geographic place—the multitude of human experience in that place over time, including the cultural experience as well as the geographic and economic experiences.

We feel like we’re part of this river that is looking at history from below, and history as a creative act. Our motto is that history is something we do together. People think of history as a pile of dusty facts in a file cabinet, and only specialists know how to find the facts. We try to fight that tradition. We’re trying to create resources for future historians, as much as we are using the history that we’ve already received by bringing them forward and put them in critical context with each other.

We go to a place and peel back the layers and talk about the landscape beneath the cement, because it’s still there. Once you point that out to somebody, you’ve changed their imagination about the urban life they’re living forever. We call it an ecology of critical thinking. If there is an agenda for the project, it’s to get people to think critically about the city.

San Francisco sand dunes. Shaping San Francisco brings together the social, political and ecological history of the city. Photo: Willard Worden, courtesy OpenSFHistory.org

You use oral histories from ordinary San Franciscans to help people understand what you describe as the “complex fabric of life at various times in history.” In what ways do you see this project shaping or influencing how people see and experience the city?

It’s important for people to understand that nothing is or was inevitable at any given moment. There are always points of contestation along the way. The more you can excavate those episodes of clashing, you can try to make some sense of what that was about. There are always multiple points of view and we’re happy to accommodate conflicting views of history

It’s hard to get the different views of history. One of the reasons is because so many people who do have something to contribute to history are self-disqualifying, thinking that they don’t write or they don’t have anything to say.

Beyond that, there’s the importance of demonstrating the malleability and ephemerality of the physical environment, that seems so permanent and timeless. A lot of our work is to show how recent it is, and how short-term it is, and how quickly it disappears

Then there’s the social contestation and the social relationships. They’ve changed again and again. How we produce together at work, who controls it, what the agendas are, what kind of work is done, who has the money and control of land, what decisions get made in this city that effect the entire Pacific Rim, etc.

We help people begin to understand how we shape our narrative of history. It’s not a “great man” theory of history, it’s a theory of conflict and contestation being key to understanding points of divergence, points of opportunity, points of creativity as human beings working together. Collective possibilities are inherent in every moment. The more you can recognize them behind you, the more you might recognize them in the present and it will allow you to make different decisions about how to affect the future.

The face of San Francisco is changing rapidly, as people—some of whom have lived in the city for generations—are pushed from it, unable to afford to live there. What kinds of stories are being told on Shaping San Francisco about this shift?

I live in the Pigeon Palace. We’re already an example of minor success at resisting this tidal wave of displacement that’s going on in the city. We became a land trust a year ago and got Office of Housing money that helped buy this building and help maintain our cheap rent and our ability to stay. It made us unevictable. That’s been a great boon for my ability to do this work, because I get paid hardly anything to do this.

If I had to pay San Francisco rent, I would be gone and this project would be grinding to a halt. It’s very nice of the city to figure out a way to help me, and others who are major contributors to San Francisco’s history stay.

Cheap rent is the key to an interesting culture so when we talk about the displacement that’s going on in San Francisco right now, we are talking about the gutting of a culture. The curious question is, after this boom busts, which it will, because they always do, is, what will be possible to pick up from the wreckage afterwards?

A lot of my allies and people I want to be here with are gone. It’s a terrible sensation that’s unlikely to be reversed. Since before World War II, San Francisco has always been a mecca for dissenters of different types, whether culturally or sexually or politically or literarily or musically or whatever. They come here and reinvent themselves and reinvent the world. That always was possible because it was easy to find cheap rent in San Francisco. That is gone. They’ve absolutely destroyed that.

Most of the people who come here now are app developers or techies who see the world through technology and spend all their time working. They’re working 10, 12, 14 hour days routinely and think it’s quite OK because they’re going to cash out and move somewhere else. Not very many people do. It’s a whole societal fantasy based on being the winner and the vast majority of people are the losers because winners depend on losers to exist. That’s how society works.

This boom is not all that different from the ones that have come before. There was a huge tech boom in the 1850s. It was the technology of metalworking and metallurgy to serve the needs of the mines, to be able to wash away the mountains of California. They essentially washed away the equivalent of eight Panama Canals worth of debris into the Central Valley. It’s an ecological consequences we’re still living with.

Sit-in during SF State College strike, 1968. Photo: Jeffrey Blankford

It seems to me that, as the demographic and landscape of San Francisco is changing, telling the stories of the city and its inhabitants becomes more important than ever. Is that how you see it?

One of the things that gave rise to this project is that we live in an amnesiac culture, and that’s no accident. There’s a systematic effort to eliminate a sensibility of continuity to the past in American culture that’s rooted in the earliest periods in America. It was about turning your back on where you came from and what you used to be and what you used to do and reinventing yourself as something different.

California and San Francisco, in particular, are the exaggerated versions of that. It’s only more exaggerated than ever in that it’s so deeply rooted in the culture to look forward. We tell ourselves that we’re unmoored from the past and we’re unmoored from an ethical connection to what’s happened before us.

For us, this project was always about confronting that amnesia head-on. Calling it what it is and calling out who benefits from it and why it’s a systematic effort to inculcate it in our culture.

There’s an interesting goal for Shaping San Francisco to “define a new kind of public space around a shared interest in our interrelated social histories.” What does this mean to you?

We think of it as a history commons. The idea is that history is, and should be, something that we collectively share and participate in. No one owns history. The problem is that, for most people, history gets locked up in archives and in books and they can’t get it.

Luckily, recently, archives have become much more open. Most archivists who have entered the field in the last 10 years understand that their mission is to get their archives in use and in the public eye, and not locked up. We’re excited about that because we were part of the effort to blow them open for years.

I respect and honor a living artist or photographer or writer’s need to control their art and make a living. But, if it’s a family claiming that they get residual royalties forever and ever from their 19th century grandfather, I think, give me a break. It’s our job to challenge that.

The whole world is moving toward openness and access. The history commons is a public space in which people both shape it by contributing to it and critically engaging with it, and consume it openly and freely and reuse it.

This participatory aspect of the project is very exciting. By engaging everyone in the creation of our shared history, you draw in a very human element. What kind of community has been built around Shaping San Francisco? Who do you see contributing the most to the project?

There have been a lot of bursts of contributions from individuals over time. Several hundred people have contributed material to the project, including Dick Walker, a well known geography professor at UC Berkeley. He recently gave us all of his writings.

We don’t get that many interesting essays or well-thought out collections from just average citizens. My role as curator and director of the project is to seek out what we want.

Looking south along Dolores Street after the devastating 1906 quake and fire, viewed from today’s Mint Hill above Market.

What’s the big picture for Shaping San Francisco? What would you most like to see happen?

We’re in a consortium of other community history groups that has met the last two years. A year ago, I realized that we live in this city that’s the epicenter of new economy and the new economy is all based on networking and memory. We live in a city that can’t even realize that we have a network museum.

There are all these efforts going on throughout the Bay Area that are, together, preserving and enhancing the collective memory of the city. And there’s not one dime of public support for it. Almost all of it happens for free by people working in their garages in their spare time. We’re just one group of many.

We are the Department of Memory. Let’s start branding ourselves that way and do an inventory of all the resources that exist. There are plaques and installations all over the city, on sidewalks and waterfronts, museums. I’d like to advance the concept that it’s a network museum that exists in multiple locations around the city.

It’s crazy how underfunded we are. The grandiose vision is to get the city of San Francisco—that is to say public dollars—to finance the work that is going on to some extent. We don’t need to be paid top dollar salaries, but just give us something to work with.

A lot of the groups have no place, so why not finance three or four storefronts throughout the city that could be programmed by neighborhood groups that are already doing the work. We want to facilitate that process. It’s about taking what exists and enhancing it by showing how it’s already there, then expanding it.

The simple version is to create the San Francisco Department of Memory, which is an autonomous grassroots network of social history groups doing the work, funded by public tax dollars provided by the city, to present history to its own people.

If you propose something like this, the first response is that you should find a corporate sponsor. I refuse to be a billboard. We have never been one and we never will be. It’s just not happening and I’m not participating in that corporate or religious propaganda. I believe that the public has a right to its own memory. It’s very difficult to do it on a volunteer basis, although I have done it for 20 years. I’m willing to do it for the rest of my life, but I don’t know if that means that there’s a big future for the past

Anything you’d like to add?

Our project has been free from the beginning. It always has been, it always will be, and we love that. We are also desperately in need of support. We try to encourage people to think of this as a public utility. We’re all paying a lot of money every month to entities we really despise. It would be nice if people took that same level of commitment and responsibility towards a resource like what we produce. You can’t believe how much we can do with so little.

Cross-posted from Shareable.

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Young wannabes doing their thing at a Techcrunch Disrupt conference in 2012. Photo via Flickr user JD Lasica

At the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, ads for Oakley sunglasses are everywhere. “Disruptive by design,” they declare—or, rather, #DESRUPTIVEBYDESIGN. Behind those words are gray images of blueprints and lasers and factories with big bolts like in Charlie Chaplin’s spoof Modern Times. Fittingly, the campaign is a collaboration with Wired, the foremost media enterprise devoted to the worship of all things new. In the Silicon Valley lexicon, disruption is such an overused incantation that it’s almost dull. Now even sunglasses can do it.

The truth, however, is that disruption is not boring at all. It impacts people’s lives every day—though much more often the lives of vulnerable working people, rather than those of the complacent fat cats all this talk of “disruption” is supposed to threaten. We need to be a lot more careful about how we throw that word around and, much more importantly, how we actually disrupt.

Jill Lepore’s recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Disruption Machine,” offers an important intervention. She questions the economic logic of the gospel of disruption being taught at business schools and startup accelerators—that forever disrupting the way of things means endless innovation, growth and progress. Lepore points out that this worldview overlooks the great bulk of the economy that rests on relative stability and rather marginal improvements. Compared to them, disruption is a bit of a sideshow. Even in tech.

A good way to start thinking about disruption is by asking questions like this: Who is being disrupted most? And who really benefits? 25-year-old startup CEOs—the people we hear talking about disruption the most these days—come and go. Some of them will manage to make a living on the basis of their disruptive ideas, and a few will get very rich, but most will end up going through cycles of boom and bust, disrupting themselves until they wind up working for someone else. The venture capitalists who fund them, and who so eagerly egg on their disruptive talk, hedge their bets and diversify their portfolios and will probably end up with plenty of money no matter what.

The most serious disruption of our economy in recent memory, the 2008 financial crash, is a particularly troubling example of this pattern. What caused the crisis? A financial industry gone recklessly amok, disruptively innovating complex instruments like derivatives and new ways of packaging mortgage-backed securities without regard for the consequences. Who suffered those consequences? Some well-paid bankers were laid off, but millions of people across the United States lost their homes, their jobs, or both.

A bailout arrived for the banks, and soon they rehired most of those who’d been laid off and kept—or even increased—their stratospheric executive bonuses. For people in other sectors who were able to get back to work, it was generally to lower-paying jobs. Foreclosed homes in many communities were acquired by big companies on behalf of Wall Street, rather than being bought back by individuals and families who lived in them. That disruption, in the end, only helped the fat cats.

No matter who causes a disruption—or, in some respects, even what kind of disruption it is—those who are best prepared to take advantage of it are the ones who win out. In 2008, the banks had lobbyists and PACs and their own former co-workers at the highest levels of government. The people left homeless or jobless, meanwhile, had little recourse but silence and a misplaced sense of shame. Disruption, then, tends to make our rampant inequality even worse.

Another kind of disruption is that of a resistance movement. We all watched, often with surprise and dismay, what happened in the wake of the 2011 uprising in Egypt. The initial pro-democracy wave created a massive disruption and forced a ruler from power. But the democratic forces were fairly marginal in Egyptian society, and that was just about the last we heard from them. Soon, the Muslim Brotherhood took power, having joined the protests only reluctantly. The group won elections not because its members sparked the unrest, but because for decades they had been building formidable networks throughout the population. Before long, they were crushed by the military, a vast apparatus fueled by billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Once again, entrenched power prevailed over the agents of disruption, and those who’ve suffered most have been working class Egyptians.

Disruption is essential, and a fact of life. This is a world rife with injustice and cruel inertia, and we should definitely explore creative ways of resisting those tendencies. We should be in the streets protesting when we need to, and we should be creating new kinds of organizations that push the boundaries set by old ones. But disruption, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a good thing unless those who are most vulnerable in society are poised to benefit.

There are ways communities can make that happen, or at least make it more likely. They can build strong, disciplined coalitions. They can organize workers and develop habits of self-reliance. An important recent conference in Jackson, Mississippi, for instance, focused on building resilient cooperative enterprises in black communities, which were especially hard-hit by the 2008 crisis. African Americans in the South know this lesson well. Decades earlier, the civil rights movement turned its disruptions into victories because of tight-knit networks like churches and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Disruption is not a word we should use lightly, or cynically, or in order to sell more eyewear. It is not a mere business model. Perhaps it should be treated more like a swear word, in the sense of being especially potent and rather seldom used. We draw our swear words from sexuality and religion—important things that can have dire consequences. Disruption is important and dire, too, and it’s time we talked about it that way.

Originally published in VICE

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