“How about if the future of work does not get answered straight away with automation, but with cowork, with the creation of commons, with putting up productive energies, and the definition of work towards social and environmental ends.”

IN THIS EPISODE

Stacco Troncoso, Strategic direction steward of the P2P Foundation

Micky Metts, Worker/owner of Agaric

Ela Kagel, Cofounder and managing director of SUPERMARKT

TRANSCRIPT

Laura Flanders:

We’re relying more and more on free online platforms to mediate and inform our lives. But are they really free? As our digital selves are crunched, categorized, and traded, for-profit companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon make out exerting an alarming amount of control over our economy and us in the process. It could get much worse, but there are alternatives. This week on the show, I talk with coders, activists, and tech entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of the platform cooperativism movement. They’ll share their experience with cooperatively owned and operated digital platforms, which distribute rather than concentrate, power and wealth. If we take the cooperative route, they argue tomorrow’s digital economy could shrink inequality rather than exacerbate it and change our lives in the digital world and also on the dance floor. It’s all coming up on the Laura Flanders Show. The place where the people who say it can’t be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it. Welcome.

Laura Flanders:

Welcome all to the show. Glad to have you. Let’s start with platform cooperativism because I still don’t think people quite understand what we’re talking about. So what is a digital platform and why does it need to be cooperativised?

Micky Metts:

Yes, a digital platform is the type of tool we use every day, as you said, a Facebook is a digital platform, amazon is a digital platform for buying things. We believe in platform cooperativism that people need to own the platforms that we use daily and engage in. We need to be the keepers of our own information and to put forward the goals we want with our platforms. We are now being owned by platforms that we are on and we are so far engaged in them that they own all of our contacts, all of our information. If you were to be shut off of a platform, you would not have any connection with all the people, the thousands of friends that have given you likes and that you know. So for platform cooperativism, people need to build and own the platforms that we use.

Laura Flanders:

So is it as simple, Stacco, as to say maybe once upon a time the marketplace was where we did our business, now it’s some platform online and there’s a problem.

Stacco Troncoso:

Well, they increasingly mediate our daily lives, they mediate our elections, how we relate to each other, and we have no ownership of this. And they’re actually headquartered in the US but they have worldwide reach. So how about we lower the transactional cost of that collaboration and take ownership of the decision making of how they affect us.

Laura Flanders:

Well what’s the cost we’re paying now?

Stacco Troncoso:

The cost we’re paying now is that our digital facsimile of you is creating information for advertisers to exacerbate consumerism, to give data to further set political ends, which may not be in accord to you, the data generator.

Laura Flanders:

So that reminds me of what we’ve heard about recently. We saw some of the leaked memos from Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook corporation, literally bargaining with clients based on the currency they had, which is us.

Ela Kagel:

I mean there’s the saying that goes if it’s free, you are the product. And I think that’s true for all the digital platforms where your data is being sold and your privacy rights are just being used.

Laura Flanders:

And just to put a little bit more of a fine pin on it. How is that different from advertising? Because I always say the for-money media is all about delivering people to advertisers, unlike the independent media, which is about delivering people to each other. So is it really different?

Ela Kagel:

I think it’s entirely different because advertising is a way of sending out a message to the world and you can still decide for yourself whether you want to receive it or not. But what we are talking about here is media corporations owning the infrastructure of our society, not only our data but also looking at Airbnb for instance, owning streets, owning neighborhoods, and transforming the way we live and relate to each other. And I think that’s really, that’s a different story.

Laura Flanders:

So what do we do about this? Stacco, you have this extraordinary DisCO manifesto that you’re releasing and you’re on book tour with it now. It is sort of about disco, but not quite.

Stacco Troncoso:

So what is DisCO? DisCO stands for distributed cooperative organizations. They’re a way for people to get together and work, and create, and distribute value in commons oriented, feminist economics, and peer to peer ways. You don’t get to do this at work very much, to exercise these kind of relationships. And there are also critique of this monster called the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. They’re basically corporations or organizations that exist on the block chain that can execute contracts, they can levy penalties, they can employ people. So the computer organizations that wield their own economic power, and because technology is far from neutral and it always follows the ideals of those who are investing in it, we’re quite concerned about the deployment of these decentralized autonomous organizations. So we came up with the DisCO as an alternative, which is comparative on solidarity base.

Stacco Troncoso:

This came out of the lived experience of our comparative called the Guerrilla Media Collective, which started with a project based around translation and combining pro bono work and paid work. So we will do social and environmentally aware translations for someone like Ela for example, but then we would also do client work and the income that would come from our agency work would come back to compensate for the pro bono work. And we did this because volunteering, doing pro bono stuff is cool if you have the privilege to do it. But if you’re a mother and you have five kids and you need to get to the end of the month, maybe you want to look into compensatory mechanisms so you can do valuable work. So this was the guerrilla translation, guerrilla media collective story. But as we became, through our work in the P2P Foundation, aware of this world of the blockchain, et cetera, we said, “Well, we need a feminist reaction to this,” and why we need that is it’s a movement that talks a lot about decentralization, but it doesn’t really talk about decentralizing power and this trifecta of hierarchy, which is capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

Stacco Troncoso:

So how can we operate in the marketplace while articulating those values?

Laura Flanders:

Micky, you’ve worked closely with the Ujima Project in Boston where you’re based, that is also trying to address this problem of investing and where it comes from and where it doesn’t go.

Micky Metts:

Yes. Well, one of the problems with investing is the vetting, of course, and finding out all the underlying ties, et cetera. If you’re not really speaking, today’s language of technology, it is very hard to vet what technology you’re going to invest in. And without consulting the community, you can’t really build the technology they need. So right now we’ve ended up with a bunch of corporations that are tightly tied with corrupt governments doing their bidding and feeding the information directly to the government. So without disengaging from that, there really is nowhere for us to go.

Laura Flanders:

So if you’re making software differently-

Micky Metts:

Yes.

Laura Flanders:

How do you do it?

Micky Metts:

We use free software that allows the people that use it to modify it, change it, sell it, do anything they want with it. When you’re using a corporation’s software, like a Facebook or whatever they build their platforms with, you cannot see into that and you cannot see what they’re doing, which is as Shoshana Zuboff is talking about now, surveillance capitalism, which in a nugget leads right down to predictive analysis.

Micky Metts:

And now there is a bill that William Barr has put up to use predictive analysis to take our social media or a doctor’s records, combine them, and search for signs of mental illness. And then to put us-

Laura Flanders:

As defined by somebody.

Micky Metts:

Yes, who we don’t know who yet, and then to place us in observation against our will. How is this possible? And hardly anyone knows it, but these are platforms that are corrupt, that are all filtering info to the governments.

Laura Flanders:

I highly recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, if you haven’t read it, people. Ela to you, you don’t only work with artists, but you have worked for a long time in the artistic community in Berlin. How does that fit into this discussion? How do artists engage with the same question?

Ela Kagel:

Well, I’ve seen quite a lot of my artistic friends moving away from contemporary art and rather diving into the world of activism, trying to apply artistic strategies to helping bring about social change. So I think that’s something that is happening because also, the artistic world is subject to a colonialization of people who have the money and the power to acquire arts. But that also brought about a really interesting movement of people applying all sorts of strategies.

Laura Flanders:

You work at the very prosaic level though of people’s daily needs as well, and I understand you’ve been working on a project having to do with food delivery systems.

Ela Kagel:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Flanders:

We’ve got lot of automated food delivery now coming from companies like Amazon, or explicitly Amazon in the US. Is that a similar problem in Berlin?

Ela Kagel:

Yeah, I think it’s starting to be a real problem everywhere. So a lot of these food delivery networks are owned by BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. So no matter are you trying to build locally? In a sense, you need to compete against this company. But what I think is super interesting when Deliveroo decided to pull out of some European markets, there have been a bunch of writers who decided, “Okay, so we are fed up anyways, we’re going to start our own thing. So we will apply a different ethics to what we do. We will create a platform co-op, something that is owned by us, something that allows us democratic control over what we do.” So there’s an interesting movement emerging now in Europe. It’s happening in Spain with Mensakas, it’s happening in Berlin as well.

Ela Kagel:

And it’s really interesting because this is not so much about taking a sole and entrepreneurial decision about, “Okay, I’m starting a co op or a company,” but this has more of a shared effort because clearly if a bunch of people is trying to build a sustainable food delivery network in a local sense, it’s super, it’s almost impossible to compete against the likes of, you know. So this really requires a shared effort of municipalities, of activists, people who know how to build co-ops, it’s super essential. The people who run the business, but also restaurants and potential partners, to really build something that is a real alternative to the food delivery as we know it. And I find it so interesting because these meetings, they feel different. This is not the startup situation, but this is really about creating multi-stakeholder models in cities and helping to bring about a real shared effort because all these organizations will only exist if you all want them to be, otherwise it won’t happen.

Laura Flanders:

They won’t be able to compete with the huge multinational. Well that gets to my next question for you, Stacco, the DisCO Manifesto is a lot about what happens online, but it’s also a lot about what happens offline in communities. And I want to just elaborate a little bit on what Ela just said, that co-ops are typically other privately owned organizations. They’re privately owned companies, they just happen to have a lot of private owners. Is there a possibility that you could have accumulation of wealth in cooperative hands that would still be concentrated, would still potentially be manipulated or abusive or surveilling, or are you trying to change the whole ethic of capitalism around accumulation?

Stacco Troncoso:

Despite the issue of private ownership, you can see that co-ops are like this fenced off area to experiment with other models, because co-ops actually overturn the three technologies of capitalism. So private ownership of the means of production becomes collective ownership. Wage labor? There’s no wage labor, you’re the worker and the owner, and an exclusive orientation to what’s profit is tempered by the cooperative principles. Now on the subject of comparative, as opposed to capital accumulation, as Ela has said, there’s multi-stakeholder models and you have precedents in Quebec and Emilia Romagna where for example, instead of privatizing healthcare, how about we give it to co-ops and we will have four kinds of votes. And one of them, it will be the state or the municipality that are putting up the funds, another vote will go to the doctors, another vote will go to the patients, and another vote will go to the family of the patients.

Stacco Troncoso:

So this is the more decision making side, but you can see that it’s emphasizing people who are part of the economic activity beyond the co-op. Co-ops have existed for 150 years, but they haven’t brought about the desired revolution that they could foreshadow, and part of it is because they do not talk to each other, they don’t know how to mutualize, and they don’t know how to mutualize economically for greater ends. You mentioned the big boys and they are boys, which is Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple, they have a market cap collectively of 3 trillion US dollars, but co-ops worldwide have also market cap of $3 trillion but they’re not talking to each other.

Laura Flanders:

You’re nodding and smiling, Micky.

Micky Metts:

Yeah. The most important thing that I see and hear from people we talk with is what the co-op movement needs most is a secure communications platform that is not owned by the Man or by governments. Because without that, our communications are kidnapped. We are not in real communicate, like the WhatsApp app that is just ubiquitous, that is a direct spy mechanism.

Laura Flanders:

You can say that it’s all the problem of capital orthodoxy and the tendencies of the economy. But isn’t it also our fault, Ela?

Ela Kagel:

I find this a super interesting question, to be honest, but anyway, I think we’ve had a really tiny time window where we actually had a choice. I wonder, if talking about today, if we still have that choice. Coming back to what you just said, you need to have the privilege to have the time to search for an alternative to opt out of these networks. But very often people are not in a position to opt out of Facebook and all these other platforms. WhatsApp, whatever. So that’s the real problem. And it’s not so much about us taking a choice. And I see this rather as a quite dangerous way of framing the situation. I think this is more about building an alternative to what’s there.

Laura Flanders:

Can we build one when Google has, I think, 96% of all the search business at this point? is it too late?

Stacco Troncoso:

I don’t think it’s too late. And if you look at the history of these monsters, they’ve only existed for some 20 odd years, and born out of public money. Here’s the thing, even though they may seem like behemoths, which are impossible to take down, take into account if the revolutionary drive of the 19th and 20th century was let’s take over the factories, let’s take over this massive economies of scale. What about if the means of production are actually in your laptop right now? And what about if we can network those laptops? It is much easier to create the alternatives. With that being said, what is really difficult is to have this network effect because what we need are alternatives, which are easy to use, which are inclusive, where your friends are, and this is where we’re lagging behind because of course we don’t have those massive investments, but the actual technology and to educate people into this technology is much simpler.

Micky Metts:

It’s there.

Stacco Troncoso:

Yeah. And it’s beautiful for people to actually know how to make the technology not just have it handed to you.

Laura Flanders:

How do we move forward to make the change that you’re talking about? It’s not going to be sporadic, you over here and you’re over here and maybe one TV show in a million once every 10 years. How do we do it? Do we embed these discussions in schooling and education? Do we fight for a better public media system? What?

Micky Metts:

Well, it’s difficult because the education system now, Microsoft and Apple got in there very early in the days of early computing and they armed all the schools with Apple’s and Macintosh systems, so now people have grown up with these systems and feel a loyalty to them that is beyond the convenience. So for new adopters, it’s the convenience, for the older generations that have grown up with these tools, it’s nearly impossible to get them out of their hands.

Laura Flanders:

Those are the screens that brought them up basically.

Micky Metts:

Yes. So even when you’re pointing out the inequities and how this tool you’re using is your jailer, people don’t really get it or they have to divide their mind and say, “I need this tool to do my work. I can’t work without it, therefore I must use it.” But I caution us all to while you’re using it, think of how inequitable it is. Think of the things that it’s doing to the system.

Laura Flanders:

But that feels like me feeling guilty when I drink out of a plastic water bottle.

Micky Metts:

It starts like that. But then with these movements and platforms, there are actual places to join and make change.

Laura Flanders:

Ela-

Micky Metts:

And to not be alone.

Laura Flanders:

You have one of those places.

Ela Kagel:

I guess we find ourselves in a place where we are constantly competing with others about likes and about visibility, attention, and so forth. So what if we would really work on strengthening our local communities, our municipalities in order to create a sense of where we are, what our communities are, having more opportunities of actually getting together and helping each other with all these questions. Because one of the big problems of the neoliberal past 10, 50 years, 15 I mean, was the fact that people got isolated in a way. So that’s really, that’s proof to be a side effect. So for me a counter strategy is to radically create those opportunities in places where people can come together. That’s the first thing, because that is missing.

Laura Flanders:

So what do you do in Berlin?

Ela Kagel:

Well, there is Supermarkt but also other spaces because Berlin, this is in recent years turned into a hub of people that want to make the world a better place, which is great.

Ela Kagel:

And since space is still sort of available, there are enough people took advantage of that and got a space, rented it, and opening up that space for community events. So that’s what we also do at Supermarkt. So in doing so, just being there, that’s helped a community to emerge and that wasn’t curated by myself or anything, it was just about being there, opening the doors, running regular events, and then things happen automatically. They just emerge by people being in the same spot. And I really think that’s a healthy way to try to counter the current situation, but of course it’s not just the communities there. They also need backing from local politics and they need solid financing structures, and that finance cannot just come from the classic world of finance, but also that needs a collaborative effort to raise funds from sources that are acceptable and sustainable. I really think these are big tasks we need to tackle and there is no easy solution for that. But at the same time, what I really see, for instance at the Platform Co-op Conference here, I see a lot of people starting initiatives and I see them thriving. So there is hope, but we just need to bring these people together, as Stacco said, we need to build an ecosystem of platform co-ops.

Laura Flanders:

We caught up with one such group at the Platform Cooperative Conference titled Who Owns the World held at the New School in New York in November, 2019. For over 20 years, Smart Co-Op has provided work security for tens of thousands of freelances in over 40 cities in nine European countries. Here’s what they had to say.

Sandrino Graceffa:[in French, translation follows 00:22:00].

Our organization, Smart, has understood that there was an intermediate position, between the classical salaried worker and the individual forms of entrepreneurship, we call it the grey zone of the working world. This grey zone consists of creatives, freelancers, people that work with a lot of discontinuity. We call it the new form of employment. The atypical jobs. The institutions, whichever they are, don’t really take into account this category of workers who still need to be protected. Therefore, our organization intends to bring new solutions to these problems of work and employment.

Tyon Jadoul:

We are pursuing a social model for social transformation. We have a really political dimension to our project that strive to offer the best social protection for the most freelancer as possible.

Sandrino Graceffa:[in French, translation follows 00:23:01].

The core activity of Smart is to provide the administrative, accountability and financial frameworks that allow autonomous workers, freelancers, to charge for their performances. In exchange, Smart gives them a working contract, a salaried working contract. Smart converts the revenue into a salaried working contract and therefore brings the best level of protections for these workers.

Tyon Jadoul:

You can have a real living democracy participation of the members, even with a big structure like us because we are now about 25,000 cooperators or associates in Belgium. How we do that, we invented or created different possibility for a member to participate into the evolution, the decision making of our cooperative. You could do it by participating to small meetings at night, you can do it by giving your opinions online on a blog, by writing something that you might find interesting, by coming to the general assembly each year, you can watch it online, you can vote online, you can express your voice.

Laura Flanders:

Sharing successful models and innovative ideas is essential if we’re ever going to create a more democratic digital world, cooperatives owned and controlled by their workers look set to play an important part in that evolution.

Laura Flanders:

So we often end this program by asking people what they think the story will be that the future tells of this moment. So Stacco, I’m going to ask you, what do you think is the story the future will tell of us now?

Stacco Troncoso:

Just off hand, it may be the moment where people were doing things that were criticized as folly or useless, but really what we’re doing is to build capacity, and we’re building capacity because there’s people that talk of collapse and you always imagine like the Mad Max sexy collapse, but we’re in an ongoing process of collapse. But we’re doing these things that may not make sense, according to the predominant economic logic, but man, they will make sense in the next economic crisis where incidentally, co-ops over all economic crises have actually thrived, kept to their principles, and being more successful. But it’s not just that, there’s also overcoming the alienation that Ela talks about. How about if the future of work does not get answered straight away with automation, but with care work, with the creation of commons, with putting up productive energies, that being that the definition of work towards social and environmental ends.

Stacco Troncoso:

And I think that we’re in this hinge moment where everything may seem hopeless, but a lot of things are crumbling and those solutions which are being posited, your green growth, your neoliberal strategies now to tackle climate, they’re not going to work. And again, process of collapse we raise the ground with alternatives.

Laura Flanders:

All right, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you all. Micky, Stacco, Ela, great conversation. You can find out more about the Platform Cooperativist conference or the Conference on Platform Cooperativism at our website and we’ve been happy to be part of it these last few years.

Ela Kagel:

Thank you.

Micky Metts:

Thank you.

Laura Flanders:

Thanks.

The post Take back the App! A dialogue on Platform Cooperativism, Free Software and DisCOs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Who we’ve been, who we are becoming

If you’re not familiar with Guerrilla Translation (GT), here is what you should know. Founded in Madrid in 2013 and inspired by the 15M and Occupy movements, GT is a P2P and commons-oriented translation collective. It was conceived as a new kind of livelihood vehicle for activist translators that combines two compatible functions: a voluntary translation collective working for activist causes (eg. social, environmental, etc.) and an agency providing translation and general communication services on a paid contract basis. The proceeds from this paid commissioned work go, in part,  toward financing the social mission by retroactively paying translators for their voluntary (aka ‘pro-bono’) work. Sounds simple, right? But, as we soon found out, when trying to do something from scratch that’s radically new and commons-oriented, the devil is in the details.

The first thing we realized back in 2014 was that we needed a better system to organize the paid and pro-bono work.  We decided to adapt an abandoned open-source governance model and orient it towards our ideology and needs (the original had a strongly traditional “startup” flavor). We discussed it for more than a year but, due to lack of engagement, we never arrived at a final version. Meanwhile, GT was thriving: we were well regarded in our community, our translations were reaching more people than ever and we had an increasing stream of work offers. At the same time there was an imbalance between readily recognized productive labour, and all the invisible, reproductive work required to keep the project healthy.

Frustrated with this imbalance, some of us decided to take an extended sabbatical from the project. An exception to this pause was our very successful crowdfund campaign to translate and publish David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner, a Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. The campaign was important in several aspects, including the use of the Peer Production License and an innovative, distributed publishing model dubbed “Think Global, Print Local”. The lead-up to the campaign saw renewed activity on the pro-bono side, and the crowdfund succeeded in its objectives, leading to a book launch in the fall of 2016.

But after the crowdfund, GT still suffered from the same mixed condition: solid social capital, continued offers of paid work, but no clear governance structures to ensure a fair distribution of work and rewards whilst maintaining its social mission.

By 2017, the remaining team had achieved a very high level of interpersonal trust. It seemed like the right time to clarify our goals and values, revisit the unfinished governance model, and review nearly 5 years of lessons learned. To “reload” GT in an organised and sustainable way, we clearly needed an in-person meeting. We began to shape our ideal meeting, determining our goals and target invitees. Next, we got in touch with friendly experts in fields including tech, decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, and governance, inviting them to help us develop the governance model and a long-term survival strategy for GT.

For the financial support we needed to host the meeting, we turned to Fundaction, a Europe-wide participatory grantmaking platform focused on social transformation. Fundaction offers several types of grants, among them Rethink, directed at exchange — and capacity building — activities and networking. We applied for the Renew grant in November of 2017. In late December 2017, the first round of voting for Rethink proposals was closed, and in January 2018, there was an official announcement of the Rethink grant awardees, with Guerrilla Translation as one of the 8 winning applications. We felt humble and grateful to have received this support and validation (highest number of votes received!), and remain thankful to Fundaction.

Rethinking among mountains and rivers

Hervás is a small mountain village in Extremadura, western Spain, where Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso (Guerrilla Translation’s cofounders) reside. Declared as an anarchist canton in the 1st Spanish Revolution and surrounded by beautiful nature, it seemed like the perfect (and cheapest!) place to host an fruitful encounter among the Guerrilla Translators and friends.

Prior to the encounter, we drafted a first version ⁰ of  “The Open Cooperative Cooperative Governance model”, inspired by the original, but tailored to fit the ideals of Open Cooperativism — a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the rich social tradition of the Cooperative movement. We wanted to provide a “graspable object for the workshop participants to engage with, critique and develop.

We created a project budget and an ideal guest list, and after many conversations and calendar reviews, we invited seven people external to the collective, including:

• Sarah de Heusch (SMart)
• Emaline Friedman (Holo)
• Bronagh Gallagher (Connecting Scotland)
• Richard Bartlett (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum)
• Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum)
• Virginia Díez (Wikimedia Spain)
• Carmen Lozano Bright (Nodocomun, ex-GT)

These invited mentors were selected not only for their professional affiliation and relevant knowledge, but also for some of their personal qualities. We imagined how these people could interact as a group, and also serve as allies to the collective ongoing. The final composition of the workshop had a female-male ratio of 10 to 3, which reflects Guerrilla Translation’s own gender ratio.

Five of the six currently active members (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel) represented GT in the meeting. Finally, Lucas Tello from Zemos98 was hired for workshop methodology and facilitation.

Clockwise from the top left: Carmen Lozano Bright, Stacco Troncoso, Natalia Lombardo, Bronagh Gallagher, Lucas Tello, Susa Oñate, Virginia Díez, Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Richard D. Bartlett, Ann Marie Utratel, Lara San Mamés, Sarah De Heusch, Emaline Friedman.

A most convivial workshop

From May 22nd to 24th, 2018, we worked together on Guerrilla Translation’s goals, values and future directions, while also building connections, mutual support and a convivial atmosphere.

Zemos 98 designed a methodology, in collaboration with GT, supporting inclusive collaborative processes, trusting peer to peer knowledge and accepting diversity as an intellectual basis for collective work.

On day one, participants split into two groups and began to define GT’s values and goals. Values included peer to peer learning, clarity, diversity, resilience connected to systemic self-reflection, fairness, adaptability, commoning, equity, intimacy, high quality crafted work, and being prefigurative while aspiring to political transformation through relationships within and beyond the collective.

Some fun portmanteaus and ideas emerged out of this exercise, including “Trustparency” (blend of trust and transparency) and “Simplexity” (acknowledging the need for a balance of complexity and simplicity). Another idea which struck a chord with everyone was the idea of “Punk Elegance”. It reflects that GT comes from a non-conformist, DIY/DIWO culture but still seeks high quality, aesthetic style and communicational mastery.

“My main reflection from the event is that we went to work on one collective but in the process, it felt like we were all working on all of our collectives all at once. ” – Richard D. Bartlett

Turning to the Goals, the teams saw GT as a space to concentrate on mentorship and peer to peer learning. Obviously this applies to mentorship in creating high quality, handcrafted translations and other communication strategies, but also to fostering collaborative culture. As a project, GT demonstrates that an alternative, post-capitalist economy is possible and can thrive on several levels. A first step is to offer translators (and other media workers) a way to do paid work apart from capitalist structures, and simultaneously create a translingual knowledge commons. GT also has the potential to encourage personal transformation towards commons-oriented futures based on concrete, daily practices (not theoretical frameworks), especially with its focus on the recognition of carework and power. As such, it could be an exemplary project for Open Cooperativism, and a transnationally oriented, multi-constituent space to do socially and ecologically valuable work while also creating commons.

How could we achieve these ambitious goals and hold true to the values? Over the following two and a half days, each group developed distinct prototypes and timelines for GT’s near- and mid-term future. This would help us plan a functioning model and lived practice.

On the third day, the teams presented a summary of their discussions, and their timelines for possible futures. Each team treated the same targets (community, governance, platform and financial), and presented cohesive yet contrasting visions of suggested near-term GT actions. The differences in each team’s results indicate a fundamental balance in all commons: the dialectic between culture (that which defines the group’s shared motivations and visions for the future) and structure (that which formalizes the group culture into recognizable legal/procedural forms). Culture and structure are codependent in a commons: you can’t have one without the other, and their artful balance can create resilient, self-organized communities.

You can read our in-depth workshop report for details of each team’s prototype, but here are some of the main takeaways:

During their presentation, Group 2 (comprised of Richard D. Bartlett, Virginia Díez, Carmen Lozano Bright, Lara San Mamés, Sarah de Heusch and Ann Marie Utratel) focused on group culture, human relationships and trust. The group suggested many strategies based around designing for commitment and valuing reproductive work as equal to productive work. The group argued that a resilient, matured culture needs to be in place to design structures to augment existing, practised values, instead of enforcing them technically.

In discussing business structures and priorities, Group 2 emphasized structural flexibility according to the collective’s needs. Concurrency was introduced, a computational principle describing work that happens not only in parallel (people doing different things), but also in different order (not a chain of dependencies). This concept would prove essential in combining both models. ¹

While Group 2 focused on culture, Group 1 (comprised of Emaline Friedman, Bronagh Gallagher, Natalia Lombardo, Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate and Stacco Troncoso) co-designed a possible structure to make GT’s community culture thrive.

The group imagined a free software digital platform to handle all accounting and transactional aspects and to clarify the governance agreements forged at the cultural layer. Similar to how a Community Land Trust perpetuates specific social values in a shared ownership structure, the platform represents the collective’s consent to a set of voluntary self-organised rules, while being responsible for overseeing and carrying them out. It transcends the role of a digital “bad cop” often seen in DAOs by functioning as an on-chain core to facilitate continual care-oriented discussions about the collective’s off-chain values. Using easily visualized value streams, Guerrilla Translators would be able to discuss and reprogram the platform to ensure that everyone is heard, and maintain fairness within the collective.

The group also envisioned GT as an educational opportunity for those interested in translation, open cooperativism and non hierarchical organising in digital spaces. The group also worked on the recognition of reproductive work and onboarding strategies for new members. ²

Each group identified qualities already present in the collective: multi-skilled team, peer recognition, established network, good reputation, offers of work, investment potential, attractive branding and an innovative economic/governance model. Historically, the collective has also had a high proportion of female members (75-85%), and has been committed to keeping real-life needs and realities in focus, creating better conditions for digital work.

The needs included a new legal structure and invoicing/payment systems compatible with the model; seed funding for two years to develop both the cultural (community/governance) and structural (platform and legal/financial) aspects of the collective (and open source them to a wider community); the need to incorporate and train new, committed members (to a total between 10 and 15); and adapting the structure to support new spin off collectives of illustrators, coders, designers, etc. Everyone agreed that the GT core team needed a follow up meeting to process the outputs of this workshop and make decisions.

“What a great personal and professional experience GT was. It really made it tangible how strong, efficient, and fun it is to collaborate with people who are professional in what they do, and have different points of view and experiences. That makes collective intelligence really work. It also made clear for me what a woman’s way of dealing with things is; that is, letting emotions and personal aspects come into consideration, in listening and not being an “authority” kind of organization. It was great.” – Sarah de Heusch

The two groups then presented their proposed timelines, and offered mutual feedback. These details aren’t described here ³, but (spoiler alert!) we will recount how the proposed timelines would eventually be merged during the follow-up meeting.

On the final day we met to hold a closing circle. Two questions were asked:

1. What are you taking home from this encounter?
2. Would you like to engage with GT ongoing (and how)?

Everyone expressed gratitude about the workshop and towards the production team, especially Lucas Tello, whose unobtrusive yet deeply effective moderation created a solid support and also allowed for plenty of space for a convivial atmosphere. Everyone felt that they had learned a lot — not just about GT or the project, but about themselves and their own groups and collectives. Some people expressed that it was the best workshop event they had ever attended. Everyone was enthusiastic about the social occasions, the sharing of food, being out and about in Hervás, as a part of the bonding and motivating experience.

Vulnerability, transparency and the willingness to explore apparent contradictions and tensions were qualities also appreciated by the group, as well as the cultivation of intimacy as a precondition for creating alternatives to more typically hierarchical or patriarchal relations. Finally, the female to male ratio was also highlighted as a unique feature of the gathering, with the three men present expressing deep gratitude for being in such a space — something they don’t often find available.

The participants agreed to help GT become a flagship project for Open Cooperativism, and the members of GT committed to a follow up meeting to treat the results of the workshop “while the iron was hot”. (This meeting would take place in Hervás in late June, exactly one month after the initial workshop).

Cultivating Culture, Building Structure

The Guerrilla Translation Reloaded workshop was acknowledged by all attendees as a success. GT members and invitees created a spectrum of possibilities, colourful yet tempered by reality and experience. But how could GT make a coherent framework of the suggestions?

To answer this, Guerrilla Translation’s core team (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel), met once more in Hervás for a three-day follow-up meeting.

After a review of the prototypes, the team decided to hold a series of thematic conversations to reach agreements in key areas. These included how to bring in new members; our community; communication rhythms and tools; our availability and chosen areas of work; how to track and value carework; ways of mentoring and mutually supporting each other; and how to publicly relaunch the project during September 2018.

The core team also agreed to adopt and develop the patterns described in Richard Bartlett’s Patterns for Decentralised Organising. Richard passionately defended the need for more intimacy and group culture during the workshop, and the patterns provide an excellent starting point ⁴. They are:

• Intentionally Produce (Counter) Culture
• Systematically Distribute Care Labour
• Make Explicit Norms and Boundaries
• Keep Talking About Power
• Navigating the Communication Landscape
• Introduce New Tools With Care
• Make Decisions Asynchronously
• A Toolbox For Decision-Making
• Use Rhythms to Address Information Overload
• Generate New Patterns Together
• Get Unstuck With An External Peer

Concurrency: A Shared Timeline

Having reached an agreement in most issues, the core group proceeded to create a timeline reflecting the best elements of each prototype. This was no easy task but an overall narrative framework was proposed to help us make sense of what was on the table.

“Concurrency”, seen above, was one of the main features of this framework. As a reminder, this was a concept brought up by Richard Bartlett describing “a computational term that’s a useful management principle: not just that your work can happen in parallel (people doing different things), but in different order (not a chain of dependencies).”

The team was eager to work through the apparent contradictions and form resilient systems, so the timeline was divided into two main sections:

• STAGE ONE: Minimum Viable Model (assumed to end between 6 and 12 months)
• STAGE TWO: Lucas 9000 (assumed to begin between 6 and 18 months)

The flexibility in how these relative stages begin and end is due to the unpredictable nature of concurrent events. Stage One has many of the Culture fostering ideas expressed by Group 2. Most of the Structural ideas proposed by Group 1 start concurrently in this first Stage but more slowly, maturing further in Stage 2. Each stage has its characteristic features:

Stage One

Stage One is characterized by the use of a Minimum Viable (MVM) Economic/ Governance model. This is based on immediate implementation (if not full execution) of the Open Coop Governance Model, including changes agreed on post-meeting. Stage One would prioritize three lines of work:

• Research and implementation of MVM legal structure: Including options such as: an association in Spain, the “group hub” equivalent of SMart, Open Collective, or an Estonian e-company, as possible ways for the collective to invoice and receive funding.
• Community Building: Applies to the existing community (and its tools and processes), and additional community members via a handbook, selected outreach, etc. This includes prospective work circles.
• Project Funding: Seeds funds are required to support the first two main goals and other specifics for GT to mature into Commons-oriented Open Coop. This targeted work involves detailed project proposals, budgeting and alliances.

During Stage One, the team would use their existing communication and workflow tools as a sandbox for Stage Two.

Stage Two

Stage Two is characterized by the implementation of Lucas 9000, the “One Stop Shop”, all-in-one tool for Guerrilla Translation’s needs.

Conceived as being built “with, and on” Holo, following Emaline Friedman’s suggestions in Group 1, Stage Two sees GT as a DCO or “Distributed, Cooperative Organization”, a spin/critique of Ethereum-based “Decentralized, Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). The latter are code-based entities capable of executing payments, levying penalties, and enforcing terms and contracts without human interaction. Lucas 9000 will be agent-centric, serving the ideas and core values of the human Guerrilla Translators.

With Lucas 9000 implemented as an Open Cooperative DCO, Guerrilla Translation will use this Holo-based platform to process financial transactions (external invoicing, pro-bono work, hours-based carework metrics). The legal structure would be built around this distributed cooperative framework, based on Holo’s emergent network and with HoloFuel (Holo’s recently created non volatile and asset backed cryptocurrency) as a medium of exchange. Lucas 9000 would also provide clear, visual, information about the health of the collective, facilitating community conversations, and a suite of open source tools (dApps) to manage workflow and collaborations.

All community work during Stage One is further developed in Stage Two, where the collective foresees a multi-lingual, globally distributed team working through the platform, informing its community-centered development as well as fluid working circles attending to the collective’s needs.

“The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values. And I can’t leave out something about prototyping alongside sheeps playfully chasing each other and goats bleating…” – Emaline Friedman

The Lucas Plan: A Synthesized Timeline

The synthesized timeline was named “The Lucas Plan” ⁵. The team scheduled all agreed tasks from each timeline over a two year period, following the general framework described above.

The synthesized timeline can also be consulted ongoing as a spreadsheet here.

What now for Guerrilla Translation?

At the time of writing (late August 2018), the Guerrilla Translation gang is feeling energized and inspired to carry out our tasks.

• As a Community, we are mapping our capacities, setting our community rhythms, reclaiming GT’s social capital, stating our commitments, and mentoring and supporting each other. We are drafting a first version of the Guerrilla Translation handbook and contacting specific translators.
• In Governance, we are researching legal structures in Stage 1 of the timeline. We are also updating the governance model with all the knowledge and decisions made after GT Reloaded. We are also beginning to gradually implement it.
• Financial tasks include creating both project budgets according to our timeline and detailed funding proposals, and sharing these with prospective partners. We are also exploring new income streams.
• In Tech, we are clarifying and training in our workflow/ communication tools, updating the websites, and collaborating closely with Holo for future implementation of Lucas 9000.

If you want to know more, the full workshop report detailing our conversations and decisions is accessible. If you’re interested in collaborating with us as an individual or organization, we recommend you read the full report.

Left to Right: Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Lara San Mamés, Georgina Reparado (in spirit), Ann Marie Utratel, Susa Oñate, Stacco Troncoso

We are excited and ready for this journey. Guerrilla Translation has gone through many iterations, changes, disappointments and successes since its founding in 2013. We are all older, wiser, and hopefully also humbler and kinder. As we write these words, Guerrilla Translation feels reloaded and ready to dance. Please join us!

This post was written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel based on the collectively written Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Report. All images (except the “Rethink” screenshot) are by the Guerrilla Translation team and licensed under a Peer Production, P2P Attribution-ConditionalNonCommercial-ShareAlikeLicense. The Fundaction “Rethink” image was created by Sylvain Mazas and licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Footnotes

<sup>0. [The updated version of the Open Coop Governance Model (V 2.0) has been drafted. It is a dramatic overhaul from version 1.0 and can be read here. Complimentary, the version history is listed here]
1. [For a full account of Group 2’s findings, read the relevant section of the Guerrilla Translation Full Report in our wiki.]
2. [As with Group 2, a full account of Group 1’s presentations can be found here.]
3. [Once again, for full details on each group’s procedures and proposals, read our full workshop report.]
4. [If you’re interested in Richard D. Barttlet’s and Natalia Lombardo’s excellent work on decentralized, non-hierarchical organizing check out their website: The Hum. We highly recommend their workshops.]
5. [This is also a reference to the inspiring British design/technological sovereignty movement in the late seventies]</sup>

The post Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

These are the questions from Laura Flanders’ opening statements at the Transnational Institute’s convening on Transformative Cities in Amsterdam during July 2018.

The post Transformative Cities: Crisis and Opportunity in Amsterdam appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Join Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel to play Commonspoly- the resource-access game where we win by working as a community. The event will take place at 18:30 on Monday September 17th, at SUPERMARKT Berlin – (Mehringplatz 9, 10969 Berlin). Sign up though the comment section here or through this Facebook event (yes, we hate Facebook too, but we had to do this short notice)

About Commonspoly

Hi there, we hope you had a safe journey, welcome to Commonspoly’s utopia!

Commonspoly is a free licensed board game that was created to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the commons as a critical discourse towards relevant changes in society, but to do it playfully. This game is an ideal device to introduce commons theories to groups in a pedagogical and enjoyable way. But it’s also great for boring, rainy afternoons!

And another thing, Commonspoly is an attempt to repair a misunderstanding that has lasted for more than a century. Back in 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a board game to warn about, and hopefully prevent, the dangerous effects of monopolism. Years later she sold the patent to Parker Brothers, who turned the game into the Monopoly we know today: a game that celebrates huge economic accumulation and the bankruptcy of anyone but you.

Commonspoly turns the basic features of the traditional game upside down in an effort to imagine a possible world based on cooperation instead of competition. But is it possible to play a board game where the players have to find ways to work together, not beat each other? Well, the cycles between financial crises are shortening, global unemployment rates are skyrocketing, ice caps are melting, and we all have that hard-to-explain, creepy feeling… In this game, it’s a race against time and every player’s help is more than welcome! It’s not all bad news – we have some powerful, community-based tools to use in this struggle against the apocalypse. Let’s get down to business: we have urban, environmental, health and knowledge-based common goods to preserve!

We are working on a new version, which is going to be available this summer. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions: [email protected]

The post Play Commonspoly at SUPERMARKT Berlin – Sept 17th appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Stacco has worked alongside Michel Bauwens for many years and has an excellent grasp on the concepts of the commons, whilst Monica is currently developing Teixidora.net and also contributes to several commons-oriented initiatives in Catalonia such as La Comunificadora, and cooperative FemProcomuns. Tiberius is focused on open hardware development, production and distribution.

Focussing on the present and future possibilities, in this panel and live Q&A session the speakers discuss how we can develop sustainable, self-organising ecosystems based on open innovation, highlighting business models that are based on p2p economics principles and rely on p2p technologies to develop shared infrastructure and methodologies of mutual aid and peer to peer support.

The post OPEN 2018: Growing the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the inescapable artifacts of human communication. Paraphrasing some of the salient points:

• Knowledge problems: language is a lossy codec for communicating our internal experiences to other agents, leaving an immense gap between words and meanings.
• Computation problems: tools like wikis and markets are subject to the massive efficiency gains of concurrency as they decentralize communication both in time and space. But most radical organizations prefer consensus meetings, which are severely constrained by the extremely low bandwidth channel of sequential one-at-a-time utterances.
• Tribalism: in organizations, the cognitive biases and psychological needs of most humans act as a constant pressure to prioritise the self-preservation of our collective identities ahead of measurable progress towards shared aims.

However, while the critique is illuminating, I found myself unsatisfied, wishing that they had offered more light at the end of the tunnel. Frankly, I don’t care for critique without reconstruction.

Through my work at Loomio I’m connected with social movements around the world, as they use our collective decision-making software. These international connections give me great optimism, as I see new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology overcoming the limitations outlined in Gillis’ talk. Optimism is more fun when you share it, so I wanted to document two cases that I think are worth emulating.

The movements I’m most inspired by are inspiring precisely because of their combined competencies in organizational and technological development. Namely, they’re:

1. The international municipalists informally headquartered in Spain.
2. The conservative anarchists building new democratic forms in Taiwan.

Organized citizens in Spain have made an extraordinary demonstration of the necessity of making uncomfortable coalitions (they talk about “complicated majorities”). You see this when distinct organisations temporarily coordinate in service of one shared issue, disbanding after victory. Radical leftists are working shoulder-to-shoulder with organised labour, with immigrant groups, with progressive politicians and social entrepreneurs. Stacco Troncoso credits this practice of coalition-building as the primary factor in keeping the far right mostly out of action in Spain. It’s hard to fuel the hate-fires between tribes when they are being continuously reminded of their shared interests, and continuously invited into acts of mutual aid (e.g. the old unemployed factory worker loses some of his xenophobia when the immigrants show up to prevent his home eviction).

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus as a means of redirecting civil unrest it into channels that support the status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals, an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extituion: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy.

Similarly, you see elements of the same “organizational + technological innovation” recipe at play in Taiwan. In 2014 their occupy movement won. Since then they’ve been dramatically reformatting the government, moving beyond political parties, and deploying technology for mass citizen participation in law-making. This 4-minute video from queer open source hacker turned movement spokesperson turned digital minister Audrey Tang is a great introduction.

In Taiwan as in Spain, the credibility of the new political actors is rooted in the streets. Second, those actors have deployed a rigorous political strategy, systematically making allies throughout the public & private sectors, and civil society. The folks from vTaiwan told me how they interviewed every state official they could find and used the results to map out which government departments were most ready to concede decision-making power to citizens. Then they used those early engagements as leverage, playing departments off each other in a competition for who could be the most participatory. That is the kind of strategic genius that could be repeated the world over.

On the tech front, you see a dual strategy: comprehensive research of existing tools, plus regular hackathons for developing new tools. Perhaps the best-documented example of this approach is the vTaiwan Uber case, where Uber drivers, taxi drivers, citizens, and officials efficiently found the region of their agreement using a combination of face-to-face deliberation and digital sentiment mapping using .

Perhaps most importantly, these processes are being hosted by people who appreciate the immense skill required to facilitate multi-stakeholder deliberation, who are up-to-speed with the palette of tools available, and who are pre-emptively mitigating the risks of “open-washing”.

In 4 years of hobby-horsing, I’ve met exactly 2 other westerners who were familiar with the Taiwan story before I told them about it. I realise I sound like a stuck record. I feel like I’m in a little bubble where nobody seems to care much about these stories. I don’t know who else is capturing the lessons, building the transnational networks, and remixing strategies into their local context. So I’m confused, like, am I an early adopter way ahead of the curve, or am I making a mountain of a molehill, or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Photo by speedbug

The post Organizing Beyond Organizations: Good News Stories from Spain and Taiwan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The new site features four types of materials suited different levels of interest: short Q&A-style articles with illustrations; longer, in-depth articles for the more serious reader; a library of downloaded PDF versions of research publications by the P2P Foundation; and a collection of videos, audio interviews and links to other content.

The website does a great service in introducing topics that are sometimes elusive or abstract, giving them a solid explanation and lots of working examples. Go check it out!

Start with a series of Short Articles that addresses such questions as “What is a commons transition?” and “What is distributed manufacturing?” Then browse the Longer Articles section and read “10 ways to accelerate the Peer to Peer and Commons Economy,” a visionary piece on the movement to design global and manufacture locally.

The Library contains a number of major reports on how to embark upon a commons transition. The organizational study of Catalan Integral Cooperative as a post-capitalist model is fascinating. Check out the new conceptualizations of value in a commons economy, and the two-part report on the impact of peer production on energy use, thermodynamics, and the natural world.

There is also a wonderful overview of some leading commons, especially tech-oriented ones, in a collection of fifteen case studies. These explore such projects as Wikihouse, Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysan, Mutual Aid Networks, Spain’s Municipalist Coalitions, and the Ghent’s urban commons (in Belgium).

Elena Martinez Vicente has produced a number of fantastic infographics that really help demystify some abstract ideas (the new ecosystem of value creation, patterns of open coops, cosmo-local production). Mercè Moreno Tarrés did the dazzling original art for the site, which helps make the material so engaging.

The Commons Transition Primer was produced by the Peer to Peer Foundation and P2P Labs with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Kudos to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for conceptualizing the project and preparing much of the material, and to Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis for their contributions to the text.

The post The Commons Transition Primer Demystifies and Delights appeared first on P2P Foundation.

You may not know it by its admittedly awkward name, but a process known as commons-based peer production (CBPP) supports much of our online life. CBPP describes internet-enabled, peer-to-peer infrastructures that allow people to communicate, self-organize and produce together. The value of what is produced is not extracted for private profit, but fed back into a knowledge, design and software commons — resources which are managed by a community, according to the terms set by that community. Wikipedia, WordPress, the Firefox browser and the Apache HTTP web server are some of the best-known examples.

If the first wave of commons-based peer production was mainly created digitally and shared online, we now see a second wave spreading back into physical space. Commoning, as a longstanding human practice that precedes commons-based peer production, naturally began in the material world. It eventually expanded into virtual space and now returns to the physical sphere, where the digital realm becomes a partner in new forms of resource stewardship, production and distribution. In other words, the commons has come full circle, from the natural commons described by Elinor Ostrom, through commons-based peer production in digital communities, to distributed physical manufacturing.

This recent process of bringing peer production to the physical world is called Design Global, Manufacture Local (DGML). Here’s how it works: A design is created using the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, and then produced using local manufacturing and automation technologies. These can include three-dimensional printers, computer numerical control (CNC) machines or even low-tech crafts tools and appropriate technology — often in combination. The formula is: What is “light” (knowledge) is global, and what is “heavy” (physical manufacture) is local. DGML and its unique characteristics help open new, sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption.

Imagine a process where designs are co-created, reviewed and refined as part of a global digital commons (i.e. a universally available shared resource). Meanwhile, the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind. The process of making something together as a community creates new ideas and innovations which can feed back into their originating design commons. This cycle describes a radically democratized way to make objects with an increased capacity for innovation and resilience.

Current examples of the DGML approach include WikiHouse, a nonprofit foundation sharing templates for modular housing; OpenBionics, creating three-dimensional printed medical prosthetics which cost a fraction (0.1 to 1 percent) of the price of standard prosthetics; L’Atelier Paysan, an open source cooperative fostering technological sovereignty for small- and medium-scale ecological agriculture; Farm Hack, a farmer-driven community network sharing open source know-how amongst do-it-yourself agricultural tech innovators; and Habibi.Works, an intercultural makerspace in northern Greece where Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees develop DGML projects in a communal atmosphere.

This ecologically viable mode of production has three key patterns:

1) Nonprofit: Objects are designed for optimum usability, not to create tension between supply and demand. This eliminates planned obsolescence or induced consumerism while promoting modular, durable and practical applications.

2) Local: Physical manufacturing is done in community workshops, with bespoke production adapted to local needs. These are economies of scope, not of scale. On-demand local production bypasses the need for huge capital outlays and the subsequent necessity to “keep the machines running” night and day to satisfy the expectations of investors with over-capacity and over-production. Transportation costs — whether financial or ecological — are eradicated, while maintenance, fabrication of spare parts and waste treatment are handled locally.

3) Shared: Idle resources are identified and shared by the community. These can be immaterial and shared globally (blueprints, collaboration protocols, software, documentation, legal forms), or material and managed locally (community spaces, tools and machinery, hackathons). There are no costly patents and no intellectual property regimes to enforce false scarcity. Power is distributed and shared autonomously, creating a “sharing economy” worthy of the name.

To preserve and restore a livable planet, it’s not enough to seize the existing means of production; in fact, it may even not be necessary or recommendable. Rather, we need to reinvent the means of production; to radically  reimagine the way we produce. We must also decide together what not to produce, and when to direct our productive capacities toward ecologically restorative work and the stewardship of natural systems. This includes necessary endeavors like permaculture, landscape restoration, regenerative design and rewilding.

These empowering efforts will remain marginal to the larger economy, however, in the absence of sustainable, sufficient ways of obtaining funding to liberate time for the contributors. Equally problematic is the possibility of the capture and enclosure of the open design commons, to be converted into profit-driven, peer-to-peer hybrids that perpetuate the scarcity mindset of capital. Don’t assume that global corporations or financial institutions are not hip to this revolution; in fact, many companies seem to be more interested in controlling the right to produce through intellectual property and patents, than on taking any of the costs of the production themselves. (Silicon Valley-led “sharing” economy, anyone?)

To avoid this, productive communities must position themselves ahead of the curve by creating cooperative-based livelihood vehicles and solidarity mechanisms to sustain themselves and the invaluable work they perform. Livelihood strategies like Platform and Open Cooperativism lead the way in emancipating this movement of globally conversant yet locally grounded producers and ecosystem restorers. At the same time, locally based yet globally federated political movements — such as the recent surge of international, multi-constituent municipalist political platforms — can spur the conditions for highly participative and democratic “design global, manufacture local” programs.

We can either produce with communities and as part of nature or not. Let’s make the right choice.

• Originally published in Truthout
• Art by Jared Rodríguez

The post Reimagine, don’t seize, the means of production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Today’s show features music interludes composed, recorded, and performed by our guest, Stacco Troncoso. Overlaid are excerpts from a talk Stacco gave at Prix Ars in 2016. The page header illustration is from the Commons Transition Primer website, by Mercè Moreno Tarrés. Our opening song is Foreman’s Dog by Fugazi.

Opening today’s episode, Rushkoff looks at the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. In his “by any means necessary” moment, why does Trump even bother to deny collusion with Russians? And is media’s obsession with the Russia story distracting us from Trump’s dangerous policies and appointments?

If you enjoyed this episode, dig deeper:

• How can I take part in the Commons Transition
• Commons in the Time Of Monsters: How P2P politics can change the world, one city at a time.
• ​​Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
• ​​Long: In-depth, longer articles
• ​​Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
• ​​More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links
• http://www.guerrillatranslation.org/

This and all Team Human shows are made possible by listeners like you. You can help support the show by subscribing via Patreon.

Please review Team Human on iTunes. Your review helps us reach more listeners.

The post Team Human: Stacco Troncoso “The Commons is the Glue” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our intention with this site is to make the ideas of the Commons and P2P accessible and attractive to commoners and communities worldwide. The site is organized into several sections:

1. Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
2. Long: In-depth, longer articles
3. Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
4. More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links

We’ve built some other useful features into this site, too. In the Short articles, Key Concept pop-ups offer definitions of specialized terminology. Case Studies outline the practices of existing commons communities, often adapted from our own research publications. Infographics and illustrations have sections of their own, for easy sharing. To keep things light, we’ve added a tab with a “TLDR” summary (internet slang for “too long/didn’t read”, if you didn’t already know), plus a tab for Resources which links to source and reference materials for the specific article.

This website was produced with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and is an outgrowth of our previous Commons Transition and P2P Primer in print form, which was co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis and produced in cooperation with the Transnational Institute (TNI). It will be followed in 2018 by a publication from Westminster Press titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto and written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis. We’d like to thank Heike Loeschmann, Joanna Barelkowska and Joerg Haas of the Böll Foundation for their consistent support and feedback during the process.

The Commons Transition Primer website project was coordinated, edited and/or co-written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel (except where other authorship is noted). Elena Martínez Vicente led the design and UX, Mercè Moreno Tarrés provided the illustrations while Javier Arturo Rodriguez took care of the technical details and backend. Thanks are due to David Bollier, Vasilis Kostakis and Rajesh Makwana for reviewing the texts in the “Shorts” section. Special thanks are also due for the technical expertise and last-minute interventions of our colleague, Lisha Sterling.

We offer thanks to the growing, worldwide P2P Foundation community for continuing to enthusiastically share, research, promote and experiment with the ideas and tools of the Commons and P2P. We hope you enjoy this site (and your feedback is welcome!)

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