Last week, 12 students of the OD&M training visited the training nodes (Florence, Bilbao, London, Dabrowa Gornicza) exploring the local ecosystems of alliances between Universities, makers communities and enterprises. The mobility gave the possibility to build mutual knowledge and relations between students from the four countries, and has been a very positive experience for both visitors and hosting organisations.

Student’s experiences describe the rich learning environment of the four nodes of the project:

• In Poland, students had the occasion to work together on robotics based on open source hardware, and visited Łódź where they were able to customize their robots and see how revitalization of textile city looks like.
• In the UK, the week has been focussed on Social Enterprise and Intellectual Property in a context of Open Design, Co and Participatory Design Practices. Through tours, design activities, and workshops the students worked in teams to develop enterprise propositions focused on OD&M activities.
• In Spain, mobility focused on transferring to students the experience of the exercise carried out in collaboration with Fekoor – Etxegoki, an association that manages a group of apartments that provide autonomy to people with reduced mobility. During the week the students had the possibility to know the city of Bilbao and its transformation model, and they visited the most important open work spaces in the city.
• In Italy, they visited the spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi, and reviewed the solutions for the space developed by Italian students, with the aim of adding elements draining from their local learning experience in their OD&M training. Mobility students also presented, as a moment of peer learning, the solutions developed on their own challenges/contexts. Moreover, they participated to the event “Erasmus4Ever, Erasmus4Future” organised by Impact Hub Florence and INDIRE – Italian National Agency for Lifelong Learning Education.

The mobility has been aimed at defining commonalities and differences with their local context and with the solutions prototyped in their learning experience to inspire and influence both visiting and local students and their ideas/prototypes. It has been a success that hopefully will be replicated in next years.

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The 5 teams have developed the following prototypes:

• MakeIT Manifattura: a set of physical installations to map values and meanings that citizens attribute to Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence (Team: Vincenzo Rizza, Christia Tsrimpa, Margherita Vacca, Riccardo De Mei, Alessandra Bonelli);
• NEST: a dynamic, creative and modular makerspace to host making and design communities across the city (Team: Sophie Defauw, Paolo Ciarfuglia, Edoardo Dalla Mutta, Elisabetta Simone, Alessandra Galli)
• Carriù: an innovative camper redesigned to bring educational services in remote areas (Team: Tommaso Scavone, Liang Shuang, Marco Berni, Zhou Min)
• Sma_Lab: a device to create and develop creative collaboration between artisans, students and makers (Team: Francesca Gianassi, Silvia Nicoli, Lu Ji, Li Meng)
• CamperJob: a camper hosting innovative labour services in remote areas (Team: Beatrice Bettini, Camilla Franchina, Alessia Macchi, Anna Eleonora Fabrizi)

The exhibition has been opened up by Cecilia Del Re (Florence City Councillor for Economic Development and Tourism), while Stefano Ciuoffo (Tuscany Region’s Councillor for Production Activities) has closed the day with the delivery of the diplomas to students.

The exhibition has also hosted a workshop on circular, collaborative and distributed production facilitated by Chris Giotitsas and Alex Pazaitis of the P2P Foundation.

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Milica Begovic, Joost Beunderman, Indy Johar: The intent of putting the Next Generation Governance (#NextGenGov) agenda at the centre of the Istanbul Innovation Days 2018 was to start to explore the future of the world’s governance challenges, and to debate how a new set of models are needed to address a growing ‘relevance gap’ in governance and peacebuilding.

Any exploration into the Next Generation of Governance requires us to recognize that in an increasingly multi-polar world, a world where power is increasingly more directly used and the singular rule of law we had ‘hoped’ for is being challenged, the future of governance is not only about the technocratic capacity to make rules (even if they are machine readable rules), but also our ability to construct new social legitimacy for all and by all.

In a world where we are facing urgent calamities and deep-running risks like never before, organizations like UNDP are witnessing a growing gap between the incremental progress in practice and a rapidly accelerating set of challenges — whether rampant inequality and its impact on social cohesion, growing ranks of forcefully displaced people, the fragmentation of state agency, rapid depletion of the commons, or the seemingly intractable rise of new forms of violence. This gap — between the emerging reality (strategic risks) and existing practice — is set to exponentially grow unless there is a major rethink of development practice and how we remake governance fit for the 21st century.

Earlier, we hypothesized that across the world, our governance models are broken: we are holding on to 19th century models that deny the complexity of the ‘systemocracy’ we live in : a world of massive interdependencies. #NextGenGov therefore is an exploration — the first of many — of the type of experiments that chart a way towards a future in sync with the Sustainable Development Goals. It aims to explore the lessons, challenges and gaps emerging with governance not relegated to a single goal (SDG 16) but as the prerequisite of achieving the SDG agenda as a whole.

A very 21st century kind of failure

It could be argued governance is the central failure of the 21st century — sidelined as an inconvenient overhead, governance innovation has seen consistent underinvestment and a lack of attention. Our means of governance and regulation have become relics in an age of growing complexity. New capabilities and trends like rapid real-time data feedback loops, algorithmic decision making, new knowledge of the pathways of injustice and inequality, and the rise of new tools and domains of power are challenging established ways of decision making. Frequently hampered by simplistic notions about the levers of change, awed by networked power dynamics in the private sector and undermined by public sector austerity, many of us seem scared and disoriented in responding to the scale of failure and new needs we are witnessing. Worse still, we seem unable to make the case that ultimately, good governance should not be a means of state control but a means to unleash sustainably the full and fair capacity of all human beings.

In this context, the growing strategic risks of our age are making past governance protocols and processes increasingly incoherent and misaligned to the need of both member states and our broader global ecosystems; both real-world precedents and statistically derived probability are collapsing as viable decision-making tools. This incongruity is revealed at different scales and conditions:

1. The existing structures, governance and business models, skills, and institutional cultures are producing solutions that do not fit the new nature of problems they are supposed to be addressing (IPCC’s 1.5 C report and genetically engineered baby in China as most recent proxies of misalignment of current practice and emerging existential threats).

2. Business-as-usual as a method to address the entirely new scale and modality of problems is a recipe for decline and irrelevance (consider ongoing efforts to apply current regulatory paradigms to distributed technologies like blockchain).

3. Governments and investors too are experiencing the lack of coherence between existing solutions and emerging problems, and are therefore eager to restructure their relationship with UNDP and similar organisations.

Towards new Zones of Experiment

Searching for fresh perspectives, our approach was to hone in on a series of Zones of Experiment — a range of domains that could unlock some of the great transitions the world is facing. We looked at new ways to protect and restore the commons, to actualize the human rights of landless nations, and to prevent conflict and empower civic actors in revealing abuses. We also explored science fiction, arts and culture as seedbeds for imagining alternative economic systems, the role of new technologies in urban governance, and new practices in the way power is organized, manifested and influences decision making.

Across these zones of experiment, we are seeing how a new generation of edge practitioners is challenging the status quo, and how their experiments enable us to learn both context-specific and transferable lessons. Together, they point the way to the #NextGenGov agenda as a new approach to strategic innovation (and feedback coming in after the IID2018 indicates the need to explore additional Zones of Experiments with emerging new practices such as governance of digital financial markets and impact of systemic structural issues, such as decline of trust on single point sectors including attitudes towards vaccination).

Underlying all these is the double edged sword of rapid technological progress in a multi-polar world that is challenging established ethical certainties. The unexplainable AI is one such manifestation, where the advanced identification of correlation is argued to be sufficient to guide decision-making be judicial or even law enforcement, challenging — even perhaps regressing — us to a pre-scientific age and undermining the basic principles of governance — accountability and equality of treatment (as argued by Jacob Mchangama).

As Primavera de Filippi outlined in her keynote speech, new technological capabilities always carry the potential both to disrupt the status quo or conversely reify existing structures of power and inequality. If we want to put the new tools of power in the hands of the many not the few, we need to focus on the governance of the new infrastructures rather than rely on governance by those infrastructures. However, whether in blockchain applications (Primavera’s domain) or elsewhere, it is evident that often we simply don’t know yet what kind of detailed issues, unintended consequences or unexpected feedback loops we might face when applying new technological capabilities. This means experimentation can’t be seen as an add-on but should be at the core of exploring the future and rapid learning about implications of emerging trends.

This is not the place to summarize each zone of experiment discussed during the Istanbul Innovation Days. But we can outline a series of shared lessons and implications for the future of governance and peacebuilding.

1. Micro-massive Futures — A series of new micro-massive data, sensing, processing and influencing capabilities (as revealed in the work of Metasub, PulseLab Kampala and Decibel) is enabling state and non-state actors to transcend the tyranny of the statistically aggregated average, and instead focus on the micro, the unique and the predictive — early warnings on looming epidemics or weather-related crop failure, emerging signs of microbial antibiotic resistance, or the compound impacts of pollution on individuals, particularly in disadvantaged populations. The much more fine-grained understanding they enable (whether through big data, social media mining, or specific sampling and real-time blockchain-anchored measurement) creates radical new pathways to harboring and enhancing the public interest. Achieving decent average outcomes (of health, pollution, human development…) has more than ever become obsolete as a goal: the geographically, individually and temporally hyper specific data we can obtain, and the wicked nature of the issues at hand, require new ways of understanding ‘risk’ — and acting on it. This same micro-massive future on the other hand is also weaponizing the capacity to mine data in order to influence outcomes at the societal scale — opening up huge new questions about the meta governance of these new capacities in the first place. This implies a double set of responsibilities: if we can now govern and influence outcomes at the micro-level of the individual and molecular detail, and at the massive scale of societal bias, with at both scales growing capabilities to understand risk and predict possibilities — how do we govern in this new reality in order to use these powers for good? Or conversely how to ensure that the emerging capabilities of new governing realities are not resulting in human rights abuses, discrimination and violence?

2. From control to ennoblement — Where such distributed data generating and analysis capacity comes into its own is through new contracting agreements that change our capacity to manage shared assets. The multi-party contributory contracts, e.g. the blockchain-based agreements at the heart of the Regen Network, show us how the collective inertia around agricultural restoration could be overcome. Crucially, rather than disincentivizing ‘bad behaviours’ through control, such ennobling regulatory systems can now be imagined to incentivize, communicate and verify contributory systems. Equally, this capability is paving ways for entirely new class of governance mechanisms for the commons — including bestowing legal rights on rivers and the Amazon. How do we reimagine governance if such ennoblement and restoration would structurally be our objective?

3. Making the invisible visible — New ways of building the politics of change are continuously emerging. Using mapping, animation, arts and other visualization tools, practitioners like Forensic Architecture and Invisible Dust — and in different ways, Open Knowledge Germany — are empowering citizens and civic groups to reveal issues which for a wide range of reasons tend to remain hidden — whether in the case of state agents committing human rights abuses or pernicious, slow-moving killers like air pollution (which in many case of course equally implicates states in failing to uphold human rights). By involving distributed civic networks and creative professionals from right across traditional disciplines, and by connecting to the aspirations of populations in different ways, such emerging tactics act as a powerful complement to established tools to build the demand for change.

4. Hybrid participatory futures — Getting to a next level of citizen engagement in the transitions we face requires a next generation of platforms that enable engagement with complexity, new technology and alternative imaginings of the future. This is about new settings for deliberation, new ways of extending invitations to take part, and tapping into the creative resources of science fiction and the arts to reimagine social contract and alternative economic systems. Medialab Prado in Madrid, the Edgeryders community, the deliberative citizens’ assemblies in Ireland or, at local scale, RanLab’s deliberative polls across Africa, show in different ways that new settings for participation can engender new cultures of participation cutting across ‘online’ and ‘offline’. Their deep investment in the tactics of convening people enable the creation of new and highly constructive new communities of concern around difficult topics, as well as building legitimacy for bold experimental approaches. This in turn enables the prevention of potential policy failure or the addressing of topics hitherto thought untouchable by established political players. In an era that frequently bemoans the decline of trust in the abstract, such cultural infrastructure rebuilds avenues towards greater trustworthiness across different parties, and an ability to imagine futures unconstrained by current divisions and biases, as the mitigation of risk. As differing platforms have differing biases in terms of who they attract an what behaviors they foster, such participation will always needs to be hybrid — well curated online platforms, temporal gatherings and permanent physical spaces all play a role in building the shared legitimacy for civic innovation. Enabling the participatory co-creation of the future is a fundamental component of the governance architecture in a complex world: we must complement the nudging of people’s behavior (a crucial tactic which has been applied with considerable success) with nurturing human imagination and facilitating deliberation and engagement with evidence.

5. Public goods & rights beyond the state — In an era where about 68 million people are currently stateless and this number is expected to rise significantly in the coming years, we are seeing state players as unable, unwilling or simply absent in the anchoring of fundamental human rights like people’s individual and family identity, and unable to access public goods provided outside the national boundary. The Rohingya project and IRYO show powerful alternatives and lessons for the remaking of public services like healthcare for both refugee populations and other contexts where access to such services is patchy. These positive alternatives are equally matched by more challenges examples of the quasi privatization of justice — where large technology multinationals are already acting something like a judicial system — “one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.’ They also reveal the need and possibility to reimagine not just service provision but also new architectures of governance beyond the nation state — consider the incoherence of applying national laws to growing numbers of stateless people, para-state futures around the world. The fundamental question arises whether the seemingly limitless rise in populations on the move and para state governance could compel us to imagine and construct at a more structural level new domains of service provision potentially disinter-mediated from the state — and whether that might be more than just dire necessity but also an opportunity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

6. From Evidence based to Experimentation Driven Policy — In an age of increasing complexity, the danger of traditional evidence based policy leading us by the rear view mirror is evident. Instead, the zones of experiment — whether EcoLogic’s futuristic urban landscapes or the service design innovation shared by Pia Andrews from both New Zealand and New South Wales — show the possibility of a new arc of policy formation: experimentation is used to create new forms of situated intelligence and learning, consisting of both new evidence and new insights to underpin the ongoing and iterative development of policies and programmed. These pathways enable institutions to make sense of changes, (re)formulate intent and execution pathways, and thus co-evolve in an open and collaborative process. Fundamentally this is about recognizing 21st century governance will be structurally different: the new institutional capacity can clearly not be designed in vitro but has to grow in-situ, informed by strategic portfolios of experimental options in order to grow the evidence necessary for policy intervention.

7. Sovereignty 2.0. In an age where a vital commons governance can now also be advanced either by imbuing ecological entities — such as rivers in Columbia and elsewhere — with legal rights or by emerging new sets of capabilities like smart contracts and machine learning — as indicated by Regen Network — could this mean the massive scaling of strategies that imbue new types of bodies with ‘sovereign’ powers and capabilities for e.g. machine-based contracting and fining? If so, and heeding Primavera de Filippi’s warnings, the governance of these infrastructures will be a crucial field of innovation.

Whilst even individually these are important new trajectories, when taken together these emerging lessons show how we need to challenge our existing practices at a deeper level. Given the degrees of uncertainty and emergence we face, this implies a call for strategic investment in a broad portfolio of experiments can guide us to the future; fundamentally these are learning options that enable UNDP and its partners to seed and test new ways of governing across different domains. In parallel,#NextGenGov also pointed towards a further set of questions and challenges we face when staring into the future of Governance in a multi-polar tomorrow.

1. BEYOND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

In a world of sped-up complexity and change, the social contracts and legitimacy underlying our governance systems are constantly in question, not least because the relevance gaps affecting nearly all players (between needs and capabilities; between promise and delivery; between aspiration and capacity) means that not just trust, but actual trustworthiness is in decline. Across the world, we are seeing broadly two cultural-societal paradigms that underlie potential future social contracts: both of which could be argued as falling. Where individualism is the main tenet, we all too often fail to mainstream and anchor societal innovations that would reduce collective risk, whether vaccination rates or distributed flood prevention strategies. Where the collective is seen to take priority over the individual, the possible inability to accommodate divergence and diversity risks undermining the distributed creativity, energy and drive needed (and available!) to address wicked issues. The challenge we face is to move towards social contracts based on an explicit recognition of interdependence — reaffirming the need for the hybrid participation structures suggested above to provide the distributed fertile ground for this, as well as opening the space for discussions on system governance beyond the human governance. In future Innovation Days and Next Gen Gov experiments we need to transcend natural rights and embrace new sovereignty 2.0: such as sovereignty for rivers, trees and forests, opening the scope for dynamic interactions of such rights frameworks for a new social ecological contract.

2. MORE THAN ONE DEMOCRACY?

Irrespective of scale or context, it is clear that no sole actor — whether state, civic sector, corporate or start-up — has the ability to tackle the wicked issues of our time alone. This means that discourses on good governance and democracy fundamentally have to be about the distributed power to co-create society. Clearly this is conditioned both by the openness of institutional infrastructures and by the socio-economic fundamentals that enable or hinder people’s agency. Recognizing democracy as creating the positive freedom of ‘being able to care’ (whether about individual life choices, the craftsmanship of work, and about wider social and planetary interdependencies) implies not just a concern about the trends that reduce such capabilities (such as declining economic growth, growing job insecurity or the disasters that uproot people’s lives) but also a focus on the multitude of avenues that enable such care to be expressed and acted upon. The challenge we face is that in this reality, seeing multiparty parliamentary systems as the sole mechanism for delivering democracy seems increasingly hollow: citizen assemblies and participative, high-frequency accountability & feedback systems are examples of vital complementary mechanisms for the enhancement and preservation of public and shared goods. The examples we have seen are evidence of how they can unlock positive, inclusive new avenues to the future at any scale from the local to the global — in ways that ‘politics’ as usual cannot.

3. BUREAUCRATIC REVOLUTION.

In the non-pejorative sense of the word, bureaucracy is at the core of governance. Innovation and experimentation in the realm of our everyday bureaucracy can change the nature and people’s experience of governance and everyday life itself — look no further than Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the role of bureaucracy to create new markets. Just like the 19th century centralized bureaucracies shaped the notion of the modern state, the present ‘boring revolution’ in our capabilities (e.g. around data insight, zero overhead cost of micro transactions and transparent multi-actor contributory contracts) can drive a radical reinvention of the notion of governance and power. This is what is at stake. The challenge we face is evident in the many salutary lessons that IID2018 provided, on how positive outcomes of this process should not be taken for granted. Instead they can only result from clear intent, human-centered design and an approach to strategic innovation that is up to the magnitude of the issues at hand.

Beyond IID2018…to be continued

The IID2018 was an effort to manifest the strategic relevance gap between our rapidly growing needs and risks, and our all-too-slowly developing practice — in this case that of increasingly inadequate global governance models and implications across a range of interdisciplinary policy spaces. If revealing strategic risks and their interrelated nature is about building the demand side for ambitious change — Invisible Dust’s credo of “making the invisible visible” clearly struck a chord — then what comes next has to be a strategic innovation response that goes beyond organizational tweaks or individual responses. After all, in a show-of-hands poll on the first day of IID2018, only 5 people thought the world is on track in achieving Sustainable Development Goals — hardly surprising, given recent news on climate change or the accumulating impact of air pollution on health and learning. Addressing governance failures is at the heart of delivering the SDGs and it will require concerted belief, effort and strategic scale investment.

By virtue of its cross-sectoral strategic development role, UNDP has a natural and unique responsibility to focus on addressing the strategic, entangled and systemic governance risks facing us at a national, transnational and global level — and in doing so it needs to act as integrator on a country and transnational levels, whilst recognizing and respecting the necessity of a multipolar yet machine advanced interoperable future — where the notion, means and conceptions of governance are fully reimagined and socially co-created for a 21st century. Practically, this means NextGenGov was just the beginning of investing in and building a strategic portfolio of experiments that enable partners to learn, manage risk, and effect system change, in order to rebuild the (technical, political, informational, financial) capability of states and civic actors for agile, iterative governance that is premised less on building solutions and more about dealing with our new certainty — uncertainty.

*Special thanks in developing a part of this blog (strategic relevance gap) go to Luca Gatti of Axilo.

The post 7 Lessons & 3 Big Questions for the Next 10 Years of Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract

Blockchain technologies have generated excitement, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterised by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organisation; and critical accounts of such discourses which, whilst contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralised institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. Therefore the question arises, can we build perspectives of blockchain-based governance that go beyond markets and states? In this article we draw on the Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualisation of affordances that this technology may provide to communities. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focussed on blockchain-based commons governance. By carrying out this analysis, we aim to expand the debate from one dominated by a culture of competition to one that promotes a culture of cooperation.

Introduction

In November 2008 a paper published anonymously presented Bitcoin: the first cryptocurrency based purely on a peer-to-peer system (Nakamoto, 2008). For the first time, no third parties were necessary to solve problems such as double-spending. The solution was achieved through the introduction of a data structure known as a blockchain. In simple terms, a blockchain can be understood as a distributed and append-only ledger. Data, such as the history of transactions generated by using cryptocurrencies, can be stored in a blockchain without the need to trust a third party, such as a bank server. From a technical perspective, blockchain enables the implementation of novel properties at an infrastructural level in a fully decentralised manner.

The properties most cited by blockchain enthusiasts at this infrastructural level include immutability, transparency, persistency, resilience and openness (Underwood 2016; Wright & De Filippi 2015), among others. Certainly, some technical infrastructures could previously provide these properties, e.g. the immutability and openness provided by content repositories like Github or Arxiv.org, or the persistence and resilience provided by large web services such as Amazon or Facebook. However, the implementation of these solutions relied on a trusted third party. There have been other decentralised technical infrastructures with varying degrees of success which also reflect some of these properties, e.g. the Web has been traditionally shown as an example of openness, although with uneven persistence (Koehler 1999), or BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing networks are considered open, resilient and partially transparent (Cohen 2003). However, none of the existing decentralised technologies have enabled all these properties (and others) at once in a robust manner, while maintaining a high degree of decentralisation. It is precisely the possibility of developing technological artefacts which rely on a fully distributed infrastructure that is generating enthusiasm, or “hype” according to some authors (Reber & Feuerstein, 2014), with regards to the potential applications of blockchain.

In this article we focus on some of these potential applications of blockchain. More precisely, we reflect on the relationship between blockchain properties and the generation of potentialities which could facilitate governance processes. Particularly, we focus on the governance of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) communities. The term, originally coined by Benkler (2002), refers to an emergent model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other to produce shared resources without a traditional hierarchical organisation (Benkler, 2006). There are multiple well-known examples of this phenomenon, such as Wikipedia, a project to collaboratively write a free encyclopedia; OpenStreetMap, a project to create free/libre maps of the World collaboratively; or Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects such as the operating system GNU/Linux or the browser Firefox. Research carried out drawing on crowdsourcing techniques (Fuster Morell et al., 2016a) found examples of the broad diversity of areas in which the collaborative work on commons is present. This includes open science, urban commons, peer funding and open design, to name but a few. Three main characteristics of this mode of production are salient in the literature on CBPP (Arvidsson et al., 2017). Firstly, CBPP is marked by decentralisation, since authority resides in individual agents rather than a central organiser. Secondly, it is commons-based because CBPP communities make frequent use of common resources, i.e. shared resources which are openly accessible and whose ownership is collectivised. These resources can be immaterial, such as source code in free software, or material, such as 3D printers shared in small-scale workshops known as Fab Labs. Thirdly, there is a prevalence of non-monetary motivations. These motivations are, however, commonly intertwined with extrinsic motivations. As a result, a wide spectrum of motivations and multiple forms of value operate in CBPP communities (Cheshire & Antin 2008), beyond monetary value, e.g. use value, reputational and ecosystemic value (Fuster Morell et al., 2016b).

The three aforementioned characteristics of peer production are in fact aligned with blockchain features. First, both CBPP and blockchain strongly rely on decentralised processes, thus, the possibility of using blockchain infrastructure to support CBPP processes arises. Secondly, the shared commons in CBPP corresponds to the shared ledger present in blockchain infrastructure, where data and rules are transparent, open, collectively owned, and in practice managed as a commons. This leads to the question if such blockchain commons could host or support commons resources, or “commonify” other features of CBPP communities, such as their rules of governance. Thirdly, CBPP relies on multi-dimensional forms of value and motivations, and blockchain enables the emergence of multiple types of non-monetary interactions (sharing, voting, reputation). This brings about the question of the new potentials for channelling CBPP community governance.

Overall, we strongly believe that the combination of CBPP and blockchain provides an exciting field for exploration, in which the use of blockchain technologies is used to support the coordination efforts of these communities. This leads us to the research question: what affordances are generated by blockchain technologies which could facilitate the governance of CBPP communities?

Read the full paper here.

Photo by mikerastiello

The post Essay of the day: When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Fabian Wallace-Stephens: Innovative initiatives are emerging to improve the quality of work across the globe. The recently launched Future Work Awards aims to recognise and champion them. What are we looking for? What do we expect to find? And how can you get involved?

A good starting point is the burgeoning WorkerTech scene in the UK. A partnership between The Resolution Trust and Bethnal Green Ventures has spawned initiatives such as Organise, the UK’s first workplace digital campaigning platform. Among their successes, Organise can count helping McDonald’s staff get their biggest pay rise in 10 years.

But traditional trade unions are innovating too. Through a partnership with IndyCube, a network of co-working spaces, Community Union are offering a range of services to self-employed people, including affordable invoice factoring. And the TUC has recently launched WorkSmart, an app to support younger workers who could benefit from union membership.

Even businesses such as Tesco are experimenting with technology to offer workers greater control and flexibility over shift scheduling. While Uber are piloting city-based engagement programs for their drivers.

Previous RSA research has highlighted how across Europe and North America, self-employed workers are banding together to address the challenges they face in the labour market. Based in San Francisco, Loconomics is a platform for booking local services (akin to TaskRabbit), which is cooperatively owned and governed by the service professionals that use it. And in Denver, Colorado, Green Taxi Co-operative has licensed an app which enables them to compete with other platforms.

In the Netherlands, self-employed people can join Breadfunds, a mutual sick pay fund, where members also offer each other practical support in times of ill health. While in France and Belgium, Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) such as Coopaname act as umbrella organisations for freelancers, enabling them to pool together business administration and other services such as training and workspace.

There is no one future of work

So far, we have only scratched the surface. Our search for the Future Work Awards is global. And our themes are diverse, spanning skills and training, worker voice and economic security (a full list can be found on our website).

However, we expect that in different countries, different innovations will be having the greatest impacts on workers because of the distinct challenges that they face. For example, many good work initiatives in the UK stem from trade union decline or growth in atypical forms of employment. But for parts of the world struggling with high levels of youth unemployment, the priority may be upskilling and/or job creation.

In our previous research we found that differences in economic and legal context can significantly affect the need for initiatives and their attractiveness to users. One of the reasons Breadfunds has over 12,000 members is because income protection insurance is excessively expensive in the Netherlands. But more reasonably priced services may be available in different markets. While BECs are essential in France because of differences in social security. Self-employed people don’t pay into the Government’s unemployment insurance fund but Coopaname enables them to become an ‘employee’ of the co-operative, meaning they are able to access these benefits.

Looking towards the future, trends can also appear more or less distressing in different places. Take the emergence of the gig economy. In the UK, this is often viewed as one whereby businesses are transferring additional risks onto workers. But in parts of the world such as South Asia, where so many are already independent workers, without employment protections to undermine, we should emphasise the opportunities. Economic activity will be better co-ordinated, with algorithms super efficiently matching supply and demand and creating more work in the process. And, as some commentators have pointed out, platforms can offer informal workers a degree of formalisation, by improving access to financial and digital services. Shifting from cash to e-payments, for instance, creates a transactional history that could help when applying for credit in the future.

How you can get involved

Through the awards, we hope to recognise and reward social innovators who are helping to bring about a better world of work. And by showcasing best practice from around the globe we want to encourage others to consider kick starting similar initiatives in their own communities and sectors.

If you run a good work initiative or know of one that deserves attention, you can submit a nomination through a short online form or find out more from our Future Work Awards site.

Nominations are open until mid-September, after which a panel of global judges will review the entries and announce the winners in November.

The Awards are hosted by the RSA Future of Work Centre and sponsored by Barclays. The RSA’s partners in the venture include the Canadian impact investor Social Capital Partners and systems design agency Alt Now Projects.

The post Good work across the globe – introducing the future work awards appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Download the paper here: Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative, Policy and Practice

Photo by phedot

The post Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative, Policy and Practice appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Which knowledge, skills and learning environments can boost Open Design & Manufacturing at meaningful scale? How can OD&M  become the ground of collective experimentation and co-creation between Universities, Makerspaces and Enterprises?

OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and collaboration to create new value chains of innovation in design and manufacturing oriented to the social good.

Through inspiring international mobilities, dedicated events, project-based trainings and innovative systems of learning outcomes certification, the OD&M community is committed to create a valuable environment of capacity-building for students, university staff, enterprises and highly creative and passionate people.

The P2P Foundation and its sister organization, the P2P Lab, are part of Open Design and Manufacturing platform, which has recently released an report. The report can be downloaded in it’s integral and reduced versions. Below you will find the report’s introduction, (written by Laura Martelloni, from LAMA agency) followed by its Executive Summary.

Introduction

Often, new professions and jobs emerge from transformations in the market.

They tend to remain in a grey zone where they mostly take shape through progressive adaptation and training on-the-job, until institutional education and training systems are able to recognize, codify, embed and scale them up into coherent learning journeys and learning outcomes, understandable by the labour market and the wider society.

Manufacturing in Europe is going through a major, almost unprecedented transformation. While it is suffering heavily from the effects of the global crisis and ongoing globalization, we are witnessing the emergence of a social technology-based movement, the Maker movement, spreading fast across the globe. Supported by ICT networks and by the establishment of physical spaces such as Fablabs, this movement is expanding its outreach across the globe, involving people with different backgrounds and mindsets that converge around common values such as ‘sharing’ and ‘openness’, generating a multi-faceted and complex knowledge.

The maker movement has opened the way for a new paradigm of production, called from time to time open manufacturing, p2p production, social manufacturing, maker manufacturing; although the plurality of definitions hints at the lack of maturity of the sector, its keywords – open hardware, open software, distributed networks, collaboration, transparency, among others – all point to the movement’s vocabulary and narrative.

These new forms of production are enabled by open source ICT and rooted in social innovation principles, they adopt open-ended business models and act at the level of ecosystem, they harness distributed networks and ubiquitous communities to unlock the inventive of peer to peer collaboration, and are able to imprint production processes, products and organizational forms with social purposes and outcomes. Considered in its potential to infuse production processes with social innovation principles and values, open manufacturing opens room to cultivate radical changes in the economy and society, able to preserve and grow the public good while steering disruptive paths of innovation (Johar et al., 2015). Open manufacturing has already reached a stage that offers the prospect of new jobs and businesses, but education and training systems across Europe are still stuck in the grey zone of unaware and fragmented intervention.

Within this framework, the OD&M project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe)[1] works to create a trust-based and collaborative Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, traditional manufacturers, and innovation communities of digital-savvy makers and open manufacturing businesses across Europe and beyond. The Alliance’s ultimate goal is to build a European enabling ecosystem that fully embeds the key approaches, values and principles underlying the open manufacturing paradigm, and turns them into drivers for a more competitive, sustainable and socially innovative manufacturing in Europe.

Focussing on the co-creation of new teaching and learning processes, as well as on new methods and models of knowledge exchange and capacity-building between the nodes of the Alliance, OD&M works to unleash a new generation of highly skilled and entrepreneurship-oriented designers and manufacturers, able to boost open design and manufacturing towards meaningful impacts.

The present report contains the results of an action-research carried out by OD&M between March and August 2017. The core objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole. The overall goal of the action-research was ultimately to identify gaps and opportunities for strengthening connections and collaborations within the OD&M Knowledge Triangle, enabling in particular Higher Education Institutions with new capacities and assets to play a valuable role in this field.

The action-research has been coordinated by LAMA Agency and has actively involved teams of researchers from: University of Florence – DIDA (Italy), University of the Arts London (UK), University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering (Spain), University of Dabrowa-Gornicza (Poland), University of Tongji (China), P2P Foundation (Netherlands), Furniture and Furnishing Centre (Italy). The other partners of the project (i.e. Fablab London, Fablab Lodz and Tecnalia) have contributed as key informants and hubs of connection with relevant stakeholders in the targeted countries.

As the report will highlight, the action-research confirmed that the maker movement is a complex phenomenon that is nurtured by a continuous serendipitous melting-pot among cultures, skills, knowledge, learning styles, languages and attitudes. If this richness represents a fertile ground for innovations across manufacturing sectors – and probably beyond them -, it also represents a challenge for the codes through which Higher Education Institutions embed new topics and shape new mindsets on the one hand, and through which companies demand and search for new, innovation-oriented skills and competences on the other hand.

More research is needed to further encompass and systematize the wide geography of knowledge, competences and skills underlying the maker movement, as well as to better understand how and to what extent they can be encoded in a framework that is portable across life’s domains, and recognizable by different actors. However, the OD&M research represents an important step in this direction, providing insights and identifying a possible scenario of education, training and business innovation built upon an unedited Alliance between Higher Education, manufacturing businesses and maker communities, able not only to prepare the next generation of designers and manufacturers, but to spur innovation – and, in particular, social innovation – across the whole open design and manufacturing value chain.

[1] The OD&M project is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand. The project started in 2017 and will run over three years. It actively involves the following organizations: University of Florence – DIDA, University of Dabrowa-Gornicza, University of the Arts London, University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering, University of Tongji, Furniture and Furnishing Centre, Tecnalia, Fablab Lodz, Fablab London, P2P Foundation, LAMA Agency. The project also involves a number of Universities, SMEs, Foundations, local innovation communities and networks across Europe as associate partners.

Executive Summary

The present Report contains the results of an action-research developed in the context of the OD&M Project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe), funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand.

The main objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole.

Indeed, the different levels of maturity of the maker movement – and, more generally, of the open design and manufacturing paradigm – in the different countries, poses clear challenges in the implementation of this type of research; on the other hand, it reflects the reality of an emerging phenomenon and points to both the challenges of a common path, and the opportunities of building common experimentations at European level.

Read the full version of the report here

Read the reduced version

The post Universities, Enterprises and Maker Communities in Open Design & Manufacturing across Europe: an exploratory study appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post, written by Dirk Holemans, is part of our series on articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

Two real-world stories

One: a medieval city called Ghent. The remnants of the age-old St-Baafs abbey are a public museum. Sounds logical; it is where the history of the city started. But the municipal government had to cut its budget and, as there are not many visitors, the site is closed. For a few years, nothing happens. Who cares? Then the people of the neighbourhood decide it is a great shame, a beautiful medieval refectory and garden hidden from public life. They take action because such a thing of beauty should be shared by everyone. They start a citizens’ initiative and organise lectures and concerts in the abbey. It evolves into a very successful organisation. Twenty years later, around 150 volunteers organise more than 200 public events, reaching out to thousands of people. A vibrant new urban common is created.

Two: a big country called Germany. In the 1990s, the state produces electricity mostly from nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Even in light of climate change, the four big German electricity companies think that business as usual is the only way forward. Investing in renewables is laughed at. So citizens come together and start their own energy initiatives, mostly renewable energy cooperatives (REScoops). In cities and villages, the idea turns out to be contagious, and together they start to change the energy system. Nowadays, half of the new renewable energy systems in Germany are owned by citizens and their organisations. Call it a state-wide network of local commons.

You’ll never walk alone

These examples are true, but they only tell half the story.

In Ghent, the neighbours had to ask for the key to the abbey. The civil servant responsible, probably a visionary, not only gave it to them but added: “Nobody can inspire such an abbey as a neighbourhood”. Several departments of the municipal government actively supported the citizens’ initiative by, for example, announcing the activities in the newsletter of the official neighbourhood centre. The responsible alderman had to back their civil servants who, in a gesture of trust, just handed over the keys; after a while, on a permanent basis.

In Germany, the REScoops could only establish themselves in such numbers because of a stimulating legal framework, with stable feed-in tariffs for the renewable energy delivered to the energy network. First introduced in 1990, this law was consolidated with the ambitious Law on Renewable Energy, (and other far-reaching government policies), ten years later. When the financial crisis arrived later, putting your money in renewable energy systems was not only a civil gesture, but also a financially smart move.

These two examples are in line with research done in the Netherlands on citizens’ initiatives. In one way or another, they all have to rely on support from the government, be it for a space they need for their activities, a piece of land for urban agriculture, or some money. As we will argue, this support is not a problem, but rather a vital part of democracy.

There is still a dimension missing in these stories: the economic one. People in Germany who produce their own renewable electricity still sell it on a market, albeit a highly regulated one. And, luckily, when there is no wind or sun they can buy energy that comes from other sources or other countries. Even if the ‘Neighbours of the Abbey’ is run by volunteers, they also have to pay their bills. So they run a café during their activities, which, from a Belgian perspective, is the most obvious thing to do financially.

Together with the Liberals and the Socialists, ecologists acknowledge that a combination of market, state and autonomy components is optimal.

Complex thinking

Let’s move from the examples to the general societal debate. If, for instance, we look at opinions about how we should organise housing, they tend to lie on a spectrum between two opposing views. On the Left, there is the view that the government is the best option to organise it in a fair way. On the other side, the Right argues that only the market can allocate houses in an optimal manner. On a higher level, a lot of commentators interpreted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the victory of the Right side of the spectrum. Concretely, in countries such as the UK, this led to the dismantling of public social housing, and the transferral of care homes from the public to the private sector.

What matters is that discussions on this, as well as other areas of society, are trapped in a Left-Right framework, within which the radical Left, without any critical analysis, invariably pushes the government forward as a solution and the Right, equally unquestioningly, only sees merit in the market approach by private companies. It is as if the citizen – the bearer of democracy – may only watch from the side-lines and is unable to propose solutions to societal needs. Remaining on the question of housing for elderly people, arguments for citizens’ initiatives, the Abbeyfield Houses for example, are rarely heard in the mainstream debate. This initiative was born in 1956 in Britain in response to a growing social problem: an increasing number of elderly people in the poor neighbourhoods of London were no longer able to live independently in a dignified manner. Today, the British Abbeyfield Society manages 700 homes with 7,000 seniors, aided by 10,000 volunteers1. Abbeyfield is a concept of collective living and a volunteer movement which has already taken root in many countries.

This is not to imply that citizens’ initiatives are the panacea for all challenges; but they can be an important part of the future if we are willing to widen our gaze. These examples clearly demonstrate that we have three basic options to address these challenges and to organise society. This broadened view of society can be visualised in the following triangle. The spectrum discussed above is actually only the line at the base of the triangle.

Each corner indicates an extreme society: a fully market-oriented society; a 100 per cent state-run society; or one exclusively managed by autonomous citizens. How a given society formulates a response to a social need – such as the nursing homes – can be situated within this triangle.

With this broadened view we come to the core of political ecology, as has been pointed out by the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs. For this presentation shows the narrowness of the dominant discourse in our society (oscillating between more state or more market), as it only takes place on the horizontal side of the triangle. Once one conceptualises the three corner points, with autonomy above as the vertical dimension, it becomes immediately clear that when the liberal and socialist logics praise the importance of the market or of the state, they not only advocate less state or less market, respectively, but plead also for a smaller autonomous sphere. But there exists a third perspective that emphasises autonomous activities and, thus, less of both state and market involvement. The horizontal ‘Left-Right’ axis is typical of modern industrial society; transitioning from this line up to the top of the triangle is a feature of the current post-industrial society that promotes other forms of participation in social life from the perspective of autonomy, rather than that of money and work. This is exactly the field of the commons.

The strength of social innovation

The autonomy perspective is a key element of political ecology (ecologism). As for the other two ways of thinking, it is not desirable, from a Green perspective, to drive society into any single corner of the triangle. Together with the Liberals and the Socialists, ecologists acknowledge that a combination of market, state and autonomy components is optimal. At the same time, their point of view distinguishes itself clearly from the liberal and socialist approach. For ecologists, autonomy represents the joyful potential to shape the world together. Autonomy is at odds with a unilateral individualisation: the joyful shaping is always done in cooperation with others. Therefore, ecologists speak about connected autonomy: I can only find fulfilment and build a world to live in through a fruitful connection with others, which also entails the dimension of care, for each other, for the world we live in, and for our living planet. This perspective is related to the notion of stewardship: our freedom to act and change the world implies, at the same time, feeling responsible for it.

With more and more citizens taking initiatives of their own, the challenge for governments is to turn themselves into a partner state, as is already happening in Bologna and Ghent.

As a source of social innovation, the importance of the autonomous sphere cannot be underestimated; a lot of solutions to societal challenges did not come from the government or from business, but from creative citizens. The aforementioned Abbeyfield Housing is a good example, as are social innovations such as car sharing, organic farming initiatives, and food teams2. And who built the first windmills to produce electricity? It was citizens developing a positive alternative to nuclear plants in countries like Denmark and Ireland.

The triangle shows that political ecology cannot be reduced to environmental protection. Ecologists want not only to respect the boundaries of the earth’s ecosystem; they strive at the same time for a larger independent social sphere where people can deploy their capabilities without the interference of market or state. The final goal is a good life for all.

From public-private to public-civil partnerships

As these examples show, most citizens’ initiatives rely in one way or another on cooperation with the state. This is not a problem: it is the future. The neoliberal regime of the last thirty years dictated that the best approach to organising anything in society was one based on markets and competition. This has led to a wide array of public-private partnerships, which, most of the time, leads to a government losing its grip on policy areas and citizens paying too much tax for the services delivered. Again, the triangle clearly shows the alternative, future way to develop: public-civil partnership. With more and more citizens taking initiatives of their own, the challenge for governments is to turn themselves into a partner state, as is already happening in Bologna and Ghent. Here, politicians don’t see their political constituency as a region to manage from above, but as a community of citizens with a lot of experience and creativity. Leaving top-down politics behind, they develop forms of co-creation and co-production. In Ghent, citizens developed, within the frame of a participatory climate policy, the concept of ‘living streets’: they decided by themselves to reclaim their streets, getting rid of all cars for one or two months. And the municipal government took care of all the necessary measures to make it happen in a legal and safe way. With public-civil partnerships, an underestimated area of the triangle of societal possibilities is explored in a positive way.

Stimulating and sustaining the commons requires an active state which develops new institutions that allows citizens to engage in transition projects.

Institutional diversity for resilient societies

With the revival of the commons, it has become clear that there exists a third fundamental way to develop and organise society. Centred on the basic principle of autonomy, it has its own logic, consisting of specific forms of social relations based on reciprocity and cooperation. It is more than probable that new commons initiatives will form a crucial part of the transformation towards a social-ecological society. At the same time, it would be very unwise to strive for a pure ‘commonism’. Just as with communism or neoliberalism, a society based on only one of the three approaches to organisation is unable to cope with the broad array of severe challenges we face nowadays. Having said that, stimulating and sustaining the commons requires an active state which develops new institutions that allows citizens to engage in transition projects in a secure way, so their autonomy and creativity can flourish. In combination with other innovations, a universal basic income could be part of this new socio-ecological security framework for the 21th century.

This is probably the most important argument at the political level in favour of the commons. At the level of who we are and how we relate, it stimulates the basic human ability to cooperate and take care of ourselves and each other. What more can we dream of, than citizens using their freedom to take their future in their own hands?

Their passion is unbeatable.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 2nd article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by pni

The post Finding Common Ground 2: Institutional Diversity for Resilient Societies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Rural natives of course have a culture in place. As they interact with urban newcomers social innovation can occur.  Rural Hub is a project aiming to formalize this innovation process.

Extracted from: http://www.ruralhub.it/project/

Rural Hub is the rhizome of a network of researchers, activists, scholars, and managers interested in identifying new models of economic development. All those people are motivated to find new solutions to the needs (both social and market-related) of the new rural enterprises.

It was founded as a research union, in order to facilitate the connection between new and innovative enterprises, investors and trade associations. This “response” to the lack of business incubators and service providers could really entail a renewal of the business, for a sustainable development of the agri-food industry.

Rural Hub is the first Italian hacker space allowing connection and sharing among people, ideas, technologies and projects concerning social innovation projects applied to the rural world.

Rural Hub is:

• A co-living and co-working space;
• A study center leading a permanent research on social innovation applied to rural;
• Local and global venue of events;
• An incubator carrying on Mentoring e Project Financing for Rural Start-ups:
• Connector between innovators and rural change-makers;
• A laboratory, concerned with new business and communitarian realities, both formal and informal, involving agri-food;
• A task force for projects of activation of rural communities;

Extracted from: http://www.ruralhub.it/rural-social-innovation-manifest/

In the current economic model, the creation of value has shifted from the physical product to the immaterial dimension. In the Conventional Value Chain, the product has become a ploy for the enhancement of other dimensions, such as logistics, branding and finance.

The new rural economy demands to regain possession of these processes and reorganize them on a Community-basis, in order to return the value to the material product itself. The challenge is to combine People – Planet – Profit, in order to create economically sustainable businesses, finally able to assume social responsibilities and – at the same time – respect the environmental balance of a region.

Rural economy oriented to Societing: a Rural Social Innovation

This new economic model borrows from the past those values which seem to be useful to the present (frugality, solidarity, respect for the ecosystem and biodiversity protection) and aims to transfer them in the contemporary space and time – thanks to the current technologies.

Many young innovators are taking into the rural areas, in the agricultural context, the high job skills they have acquired through their urban life or stays abroad; they express a global culture and share the network ethics, thus enhancing powerful new semantics of the categories of the contemporaneity.

So, the life choices of these young people, projected in the ionosphere, and narrated through social networks, are no longer a private matter but something that becomes strongly public and political. This operation reduces the space-time distances between a metropolitan modernity, where the facts of the future seem to happen, and a rural backwardness that we assume anchored to the past.

That’s how we introduce the concept of #smartrurality, a rurality which becomes fundamental to re-read the contemporaneity through a dialectic of sustainable lifestyles and new possibilities

The Rural Social Innovation System is a new model: the concept of disintermediation takes the place of logistics, storytelling replaces marketing and redistribution supplants finance, subverting the conventional value chain and finally projecting the focus on the product, in a ratio of osmosis with the community.

Disintermediation works in a community dynamics, bringing together manufacturers, producers and local communities. Branding is replaced by an authentic storytelling – able to convey the evocative and real value of traditional products. Redistribution triggers mechanisms of return of the value (both tangible and intangible) within the very same community.

The measurement of the impacts of the Rural Social Innovation System could provide evidence on the generated value. The point is: we need to build tools able to measure the results produced by the rural activities in order to project a more sustainable world.

Extracted from: http://www.ruralhub.it/2016/07/06/summer-school-foodhacker-dal-foodporn-al-foodlove/

The FoodHacker Summer School 2016 aims to create an experience that involves the Digital storytelling withing the principals of real food made in Italy.

The Summer School  will, therefore, train operators ready to respond to the sustainability era interactive, collaborative, participatory, hybrid of ‘ infosphere. Rebuilding a relationship of love with the food quality and its story fitting into a new dimension: the #foodlove .

The technologies and the new media are also valuable tools to describe the rural area: the universe in which we live can be digitized now represented as a domain of complex narratives, in which the storytelling techniques become powerful tools that can be used to give new light to the elements that characterize the history and culture of the rural places. Through the narrative quality authentic food on  digital storytelling  communicates and promotes the identity, traditions and landscape.

Telling these elements means to redefine and redesign the structures of local communities , using methods and tools offered by technology.

The food made in Italy acquires a new meaning, far from that of #foodporn  metropolitan and offers important clues to rethink critically and social dynamics, economic mechanisms, the digital, political and cultural.

Participants will be given handouts, teaching materials and tools of very high quality and can be used immediately in the field.

 Photo by bygdb – Gianni Del Bufalo (CC BY-NC-SA)

The post Project Of The Day: Rural Hub appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cases such as Airbnb, Uber, and eBay have popularised the concept of the sharing economy. Digital platforms allow for the exchange of products and services, defying the business model of traditional companies. As it turns out, however, the expansion of these platforms often goes against the rights of their workforces. This is the dilemma that Trebor Scholz analyses in his book Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016). As an alternative, he proposes platform cooperativism that complements the technological foundations of digital platforms with a cooperative organisational model.

The conference on Platform cooperativism organised by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider in 2015 helped to broaden the debate around the sharing economy, which is summed up in Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. In this book, Scholz explains how the phenomenon of the corporate sharing economy took advantage of the situation that developed after the 2008 crisis as an opportunity to dismantle labour conditions, not as a means to rethink the economic system and make it fairer. The solution now is to go back to the cooperativist tradition as an alternative to the corporate sharing economy. As Scholz says, “The cooperative movement needs to come to terms with 21st century technologies.”

The Corporate Sharing Economy

One of the distinctive characteristics of collaborative production is versatility: cases of peer-to-peer production and consumption based on collaborative initiatives supported by digital platforms have emerged in a huge variety of sectors and areas of business. The map of collaborative production initiatives created by the P2Pvalue project includes at least thirty-three types of activities and more than 1,300 cases in Catalonia. Another characteristic of collaborative production is its ambivalence: it can take the form of social economy, scaling up cooperatives, or it can arise from the most ferocious capitalist corporate spirit.

In Platform Cooperativism, Scholz begins by analysing the corporate side through the examples of Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk (a micro job marketplace), emphasising an aspect in which they both strongly coincide: the awful working conditions. These are companies which have an enormous supply of possible “employees” to absorb their demand, but do not consider them as such. Rather, they see them as “non-employees”, freelancers or independent workers, so they can externalise the means of work (asking workers to use their own cars, for example), as well as welfare and risks. This means they do not have to contribute to healthcare, unemployment insurance, accident cover, or social security. Scholz describes the corporate sharing economy as a situation in which workers are “losing minimum wage and overtime, as well as the protection of anti-discrimination labour laws.”

He also mentions the lack of equality in class terms, noting that “in the shadow of our convenience linger hefty social costs for workers”, particularly for blue-collar workers. Quoting Juliet Schor, he also notes that the sharing economy increasingly allows educated middle-class workers to access low-level jobs. The fact that the middle classes can now drive taxis to make ends meet also means that they are displacing low-income workers from these jobs – and from a steady source of income.

The impact of the corporate sharing economy on the regulatory framework is just as bad. The illegality of the “sharing economy” is a method, not a bug. We should not see it as an error or something that will eventually be fixed, but as a strategy for the creation and consolidation of markets. Moreover, these corporations spend millions to lobby public institutions to make regulatory changes in their favour. Scholz believes that the corporate sharing economy “isn’t merely a continuation of pre-digital capitalism as we know it, there are notable discontinuities – new levels of exploitation and concentration of wealth.”

Women pushing car, 1944. University of Oregon. CC-BY-NC-ND

Platform Cooperativism

“Silicon Valley loves a good disruption, so let’s give them one,” says Scholz, who believes that platform cooperativism is the solution, the way to stop relying “solely on digital infrastructures that are designed to extract profit for a very small number of platform owners and shareholders.” He adds “A People’s Internet is possible!”

Scholz’s approach to platform cooperativism is based on three key elements: the technological design of initiatives such as Uber, Task Rabbit, Airbnb, and UpWork; a more democratic ownership model – platforms can be owned and operated by trade unions, cities, and various kinds of cooperatives; and economic activities that can benefit many, reduce inequality, and favour the social distribution of profits. Scholz categorises the following types of platform cooperatives that already operate:

1.   Cooperatively owned labour brokerages (such as the freelancer-owned cooperative Loconomics)
2.  Cooperatively owned online marketplaces (like Fairmondo)
3.  City-owned platform cooperatives (like MinuBnB and AllBnb, alternatives to AirBnB for specific niche markets)
4.  Produser-owned platforms that generate and access content on shared platforms (like Stocksy, an artist-owned cooperative for stock-photography)
5.  Union-backed labour platforms (of which he mentions several examples linked to the taxi sector)

And two modalities that are still in their infancy:

6.  “Co-operatives from within”, forms of organisation and solidarity among users of corporate sharing platforms
7. The platform as protocol, decentralised models based on peer-to-peer interactions, for example.

Scholz suggests that platform cooperativism is not just limited to cooperativism as a kind of business, but can also go further. He defines 10 Principles for Platform Cooperativism: collective ownership of the platform; decent pay and income security; transparency and data portability; appreciation and acknowledgement of the value generated; co-determined work, with collective decision-making; a protective legal framework; portable worker protection and benefits; protection against arbitrary behaviour in rating systems; rejection of excessive workplace surveillance, and, lastly, the right of workers to log off. Scholz also points out that cooperative platforms are not islands, and that it is important to generate a cooperative ecosystem around them.

Is class the only inequality?

Scholz talks about inequality in terms of class, income, and education, but he does not mention other sources of discrimination and inequality in his critique of the corporate sharing economy or in his proposed alternative. One of the weak points of the book may be its limited gender perspective – although, unfortunately, that tends to be the rule in discussions around the sharing economy and critiques of the hegemonic economic approach. There is little emphasis on the links or dependence between the sharing economy and the domestic and care economies, or on the feminist reading of the phenomenon. Similarly, references to male authors prevail, with a notable absence of key female thinkers on the subject such as Elinor Ostrom on the commons, and Tiziana Terranova in relation to “free labour”. Aspects that receive a surprising lack of attention include other sources of discrimination and inequality such as origins, the lack of environmental awareness, and the connections between the corporate sharing economy and the circular economy.

The Sharing Economy: Cooperativist vs. Commons

The commons tradition is not a response to the corporate sharing economy: it pre-dates and inspired it. The digital commons, in the sense of projects based on collaborative production among peers, supported by collectively owned and managed platforms that generate free and/or public resources has been around for a long time. Examples include open source software communities, Wikipedia, Guifi.net and Goteo.org. The digital commons has also seen various waves of capitalist innovation: from the “Web 2.0” to the emergence of YouTube and Facebook in response to the dot-com crisis in 2000, and the sharing economy including Uber and AirBnb in response to the 2008 crisis. These forms adpot the collaborative discourse and mode of production of digital platforms, but at the same time turn their backs on the use of free, transparent technology, on the role of the community of creators in the governance of the process, on the collective ownership of knowledge, and on the distribution of the value generated among those who contribute to create it.

The tradition of the digital commons poses the challenge of the sustainability of the individuals who contribute to the common good. Some of the models that are being designed and implemented in response to this challenge were described by Philip Agrain in his 2011 book Sharing. In the commons, there is tension between the desire to maintain the predominantly non-commercial nature of projects and to emphasise other, non-monetary sources of value on one hand, and the need to secure income for those who contribute on the other.

The option of setting up cooperatives has also been an alternative in the digital commons – particularly in the world of free software – although foundations have been a more common model of institutional organisation. Another issue is the need to create legal figures that can allow for the fact that online collaborative production generates patterns of very different levels of participation (in which 1% usually generate the majority of the content, 9% contribute occasionally, and 90% participate passively as “audience”). Another challenge of the digital commons is to move towards decentralisation, which does not seem to adapt very well to the “traditional” cooperative membership model.

Scholz’s approach puts the spotlight on the labour conditions of the people who contribute to digital platforms, and on the creation of cooperatives as a means to guarantee ownership. These are certainly key issues, but they push important aspects of the digital commons into the background. On one hand, open knowledge, knowledge as a common good, and the public dimension of collaborative production through the use of licences (like Creative Commons) that guarantee access to the resources; on the other, free technology – platforms based on free software – as a means of communal control of the means of production in a digital environment.

In this sense, the best perspective from which to read Scholz is to focus on the integration of the aspects that he draws attention to – cooperativism as a means to ensure democratic governance of economic activity and the conditions of collaborative production that respect basic rights – while keeping in mind the strengths of other processes, including the digital commons – which emphasises the importance of the public and the commons, as well as free infrastructure –, the feminist economy, and the circular economy. And from there, to develop a new social, feminist, environmental commons economy.

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