“I was in the forest today and I came out taller than the trees”

Karin Eyben, writing for Voluntary Art’s series on Cultural Commons, tells the story of Garvagh People’s Forest.

Karin Eyben: Garvagh (from Irish: Garbhach, meaning “rough place” or Garbhachadh meaning “rough field”) is a village in County Londonderry. It was developed in its current lay out by the Canning family in the 17^th Century following the 1640s rebellion with land confiscated by the Crown from the O’Cahans.

Garvagh once lay on the edges of the famous Glenconkeyne Forest which stretched from north-west from Lough Neagh, down the Bann valley, nearly to Coleraine, and across to the Sperrin mountains in the east. In 1607 this area was described by Sir John Davys, the Irish attorney-general, as “well-nigh as large as the New Forest in Hampshire and stored with the best timber in Ireland.” (Irish Woods Since Tudor Times, 1971). It formed in its day one of the biggest, and possibly the densest, oak forest in the country and became notorious for the hide out of the woodkernes; “a race of outlaws driven from their miserable dwellings by the Norman invaders, rarely emerging from their retreats in the impenetrable forests except in pursuit of plunder.”(http://www.clanmcshane.org/TheMacShanes.PDF) They became the most formidable enemies with which the first planters in Ulster had to contend with. By the end of the 17^th century the woods of south Derry had become mostly depleted with the woods exploited by the Crown with the timber used for casks, barrels, buildings and ships.

Garvagh Forest today is 600 acres and is a mix of broad leaf and conifer forest. From its more recent story as land ruled by different chieftains in Gaelic Ireland and managed through the Brehon laws, to private ownership through the Canning family who built the ‘big house’ in the forest to the state managed and owned from the 1950s as a commercial forest this small piece of land has evolved through different forms of ownership and management.

Understanding this history and the complexity of people’s relationship with the land and the forest is a key underpinning of the Garvagh People’s Forest project. The story of this project began with the closure of Garvagh High School (also sitting on the former Canning estate) in August 2013. There was significant level of community grief and anger at the time which was gradually shifted to exploring the potential of a community asset transfer of the land from the Department of Education to community management. The feasibility of this is still being explored. However, during this process, a new conversation began noticing the asset of the neighbouring forest and to what extent understanding the value of the forest could contribute to wider community well-being. A year was spent testing out different possibilities in the forest, led by Garvagh Development Trust (GDT), a local development trust, with the support of Corrymeela, such as creative community events and establishing a collaborative relationship with a number of local primary schools to explore the value of young people learning outside. This year established enough evidence to allow GDT to apply to the Big Lottery for five years funding to grow the project. We were successful in this bid with this new chapter of the story beginning in August 2017.

Garvagh People’s Forest (GPF) has as its mission to grow value in the forest with and for local people with a simple premise: time outside makes us feel better (if warmly dressed lol) and when we feel better we are in a better place to do interesting things for ourselves and with others. We have five strands to the project:

1. Developing a Forest School in collaboration with six local primary schools and three pre-schools with the ambition of increasing the time young people learn and create outside; this includes growing the skills and confidence of local educators in connecting young people to the outdoors;
2. An adult education programme, ‘classes in the forest’, where people with skills give time to share and teach those skills with others. For example, we have just completed a 5 week Unplugged in Garvagh Forest course teaching basic woodworking skills using reclaimed wood and making useful household items; this has led to the opening up of our Library of Tools & Forest Resources;
3. Growing community with imagination – this focuses on using the forest for community events that invite people to look at the world around them differently in the medium of the forest. We are currently planning a Time Travel Festival for the first weekend in August exploring the layered histories of the Garvagh area through an interactive adventure and challenge from Mesolithic Times to the Future through different sites in the forest;
4. Contributing to greater physical and mental well-being framing this work through 5 Indicators of Well Being: Notice; Learn; Give; Move; Connect.
5. Reflection, Learning, Evaluation, Community and Advocacy.

Garvagh Forest is already well loved by individual walkers, mountain bikers and families. Garvagh People’s Forest is building on these relationships with an invitation to shift from individual connections to exploring the potential of collaboration across individuals and local groups potentially sharing if not shifting the sense of ownership and responsibility with the Forest Service, local government and the State. Our dream is that by the end of five years there is a community-led integrated plan for Garvagh Forest informed by understanding of how the forest works, its biodiversity, social and commercial interests and most importantly that the forest is understood, shaped and used by local people through activity contributing to wider common good.

So how does Garvagh People’s Forest fit into the ‘cultural commoning’ movement? The initial decision that began the project was a small act of creative courage as it was driven by intuition as opposed to any evidence. The intuition was that the forest is a key aspect of shared cultural heritage and well-being and that so much more value could grow from people’s relationship with the forest and the local environment if we worked collectively. The forest offers a difference space and tangible focal point for all kinds of commoning work as well as giving value to the work that is happening across Garvagh. We also firmly believe that the sharing of responsibility and ownership of the forest will be better for people, the environment and the place of Garvagh.

We have recently crowd-funded for the purchase of nine Lost Words Books by Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris for Garvagh Forest schools. All over these islands, there are words disappearing from children’s lives. Words like Otter, Bramble, Acorn, Dandelion, Bluebell are gone from many dictionaries disconnecting young people from the heritage, history and landscape around them. The loss of words is the loss of a relationship and the loss of the art of noticing and learning from our natural world and understanding our place within it.

We hope that the next year we can shape our programme of work and activities in the Forest recovering the words that have been lost to the people around it.

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Photo by stevecadman

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Mairead McCormack: .Join us at the Imagine Festival of Ideas and Politics 2018 in Belfast for a series of conversational gatherings hosted and facilitated by Voluntary Arts Ireland in partnership with the International Futures Forum, Perspectivity and others.

Together we are exploring the prospects for cultural transformation related to economics, politics, and ways of living and making a living.

‘We live in an era when the consequences and effects of dominant economic, social and political paradigms are pressing upon people, damaging democracy and fomenting feelings of frustration, helplessness and despair. It is now when creating together, wisely and hopefully, matters most.’

Humanising the Economy – The role of cooperatives in making shift happen

Tuesday 13th March
8.30 to 10.30am (with buffet breakfast)
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

The role of cooperatives in making shift happen with John Restakis, Executive Director of Vancouver based Community Evolution Foundation and author of Humanizing the Economy. In this session, John will speak about the ways in which cooperatives are challenging the mainstream economy and are pointing towards a political economy that’s good for people and planet.  John will also examine challenges being faced by the cooperative movement in our turbulent times.  There will be opportunity for participants to engage in conversation about the issues and insights in John’s presentation.

Registration (Free)

Cultural Commoning – What it is and why it matters

Tuesday 13th March
1.30pm to 4pm (with light lunch)
Performance Room, Linen Hall Library, Belfast

Cultural commoning is of its time. In a world where it is becoming clear that the everyday creative things we do have a value to us, to the social fabric and wellbeing of our communities and to the health of our democracies it offers an alternative approach to sustaining our creative lives.

With Michel Bauwens, co-founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation – a cross-national, not-for-profit organization, Nat O’Connor, Lecturer in Public Policy & Administration at Ulster University, Peter Doran, School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast and Karin Eyben from of Garvagh People’s Forest. This seminar will focus on cultural commons/commoning – what it means and why it is important for personal and civic living – drawing from contributions made by cultural thinkers and doers from various parts of the world. There will be opportunity to meet and talk with some of these ‘citizen commoners’ as part of an open and informal civic conversation.

Hosted by Denis Stewart and Kevin Murphy of Voluntary Arts Ireland

Registration (Free)

Being SMart about Freelancing – The changing nature of ‘work’

Tuesday 13th March
5-7pm
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre

A shift is happening in our ways of thinking about and doing ‘work’. Increasingly people, especially young adults, are free-lancing, becoming self-employed, to ‘make a living’ – sometimes through choice, often by dint of circumstances. In the midst of their seeking and making good with opportunities, these increasingly numerous ‘working people’ face considerable challenges, for example, in maintaining sufficient monetarily valued work, in making provision for times of illness and unfitness for work, and in ‘laying up’ financial resource against their later, post-professional years.
This workshop will provide opportunity for participants to think together about ‘work’ in the round, and about the changing nature of remunerated work in particular. Colleagues from the Belgium-based SMart organisation will be playing leading roles in informing and inspiring the conversation.

The session will be hosted by Voluntary Arts Ireland and facilitated by Michael Donnelly of Perspectivity.

Registration (Free)

Commoning Our Democracy – A Civic Conversation on democratic revival

Wednesday 14th March
11am to 1pm
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

The nation-state and its democracy is in crisis and hardly able to contain the forces of disruption that are transnational in scale. But even before the re-emergence of an era of crises, democratic citizens hardly experienced autonomy and co-governance in the important spheres of production and education.

In recent years however, we have seen a re-emergence and fast growth of the commons, particularly in the fields of shared knowledge, but also in the mutualization of provisioning systems through urban commons. Can the new forms of co-governance and mutualized property that are characteristic of commoning also have an effect on the renewal of our democratic institutions?

Based on his experiences in projects for the government in Ecuador and the crafting of a Commons Transition Plan for the city of Ghent, Michel Bauwens will offer answers to this question. And all those participating in the seminar will be invited to engage in co-creative, civic conversation about the prospects for ‘commoning our democracy’ as part of the ecological and social transformations that are needed for humanity to survive.

Registration (Free)

This event is part of Democracy Day organised by the Building Change Trust. To find out more about Democracy Day and register for other events please click here.

Universal Basic Income – What currency could it have?

Friday 16th March
1pm to 3pm
The Studio, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

Interest in the idea of an unconditional ‘basic income’ for everyone has been growing in recent years, with considerable deliberation and some experimentation. This session will offer opportunity to engage in civic conversation about universal basic income – what it means, in principle and practice, and its potential benefits and challenges. During the session, Anne Ryan, from Basic Income Ireland, and Nat O’Connor, from Ulster University, will share their perspectives on basic income to help inform and inspire the conversation.

The seminar will be co-hosted by the International Futures Forum and Slugger O’Toole, and facilitated by Karin Eyben, of Garvagh People’s Forest, and Denis Stewart, from the IFF.

Registration (Free)

Download The Common Interchange of Ordinary Intelligence poster

Photo by Eskling

The post Common Interchange of Ordinary Intelligence: Join the Imagine Festival of Ideas and Politics appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Liam Murphy: This piece is part of a weekly series of articles curated by Voluntary Arts and authored by cultural thinkers and doers. The series will be published between November 2017 and March 2018. It is being shaped in response to the emerging practice of cultural commoning and as a way of articulating ideas that have arisen in conversations about Our Cultural Commons over the past two years across the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Our intention is that the series will help make visible the cultural commons in action and will encourage new approaches to sustaining creative cultural activity in local places. And we hope that the articles and the conversation they stimulate will contribute to the forming of ever more enabling cultural policy.

In a cultural sector which diverges massively around ownership – or simply ignores it – it is interesting that ‘the commons’ is increasingly in the vanguard of conversation. Before you can share though, you have to understand what’s yours and what’s not. My focus in this article is on Digital Cultural Commons. For simplicity, I’m referring here only to artistic production made, stored, distributed or represented digitally.

The objective of (digital) commoning is that content should to be available to all equally – exploitable, but non-exclusive. Starting from a position of giving it all away is not going to lead to a common stock of anything and neither is centralising ownership. Thinking about cultural products as common resources to build from – extensions of the knowledge-based commons – sends some hard-working artists into a miasmic fit of income loss induced panic. So first a few observations about how much we do and don’t own in terms of intellectual property (IP) and what the opportunities are for our digital commons in particular.

The IP system often claims to respect the ‘rights of authors’ but in fact, little protection or monetisation is possible until the rights we have as authors have been offered up to, usually, a publisher. Twitter, Facebook, Unsplash, etc., like most content management sites, have absolute waivers when it comes to remuneration for, or control of original work. Basically, they assume all rights and insist that authors relinquish them. Even where Creative Commons licenses are used for sharing (e.g., Flickr), commercial sales are not permitted – though links to websites are. Currently, open licences invite capitalistic exploitation without protection. Copyright is arguably a charter for the protection of publishers and owners of rights – rather than for the protection of content creators. But, as creators, we do have power – if we choose to exercise it.

The perception of copyright as a corporate or publishers’ tool for profit also creates a resistance among artists who do not view their original works as appropriate for reproduction, sharing or ‘trade’ worthiness. This reasonable antipathy also bolsters the ‘anti-copyright’ movement, which has found expression in alternative licenses. Not being ‘defined’ by market value alone is important for the arts. At the same time, it’s clear that cultural creativity cannot be separated from the market. At the nub of it, who can afford NOT to profit? At some level, the arts are always reliant on the market for their existence. And yet they fail collectively to retain much of the value they create, resulting in centralisation – and globalisation – of resources. The arts have human value, aesthetically, morally and spiritually. They also create monetary value. Re-connecting the two functions is a goal for digital commoning.

‘ CultureBanking’ in the UK, is a response to this need for a re-connection of the moral, spiritual and material imperatives for art and culture. It is also a movement to retain IP and re-connect the market with the commons, ‘banking’ our communal digital rights to re-fund cultural activity in localities and grow capital for future cultural investment. There are parallel initiatives bearing the same name around the world, all of which acknowledge that the way we fund local growth in arts and culture is flawed. In the USA Culturebank aims to create “a new paradigm in financing the arts by re-defining returns on investment”. At Culturebank in Sydney the model is equally re-distributive but uses crowdfunding methods, more akin to the SOUP model, like a modern potlatch system. , channelling investment and income back to a real place with real benefits: Essentially, a Commons Collecting Society. Currently there are few media or market platforms performing this function. By taking control of the assets you create, you’re saying: “We’re here – these are our terms, take them or leave them”. It’s an important message – especially for young people whose ‘digital footprints have farthest to go.

Whilst Creative Commons, CopyLeft, General Public Licenses, CopyFarLeft, Human Commons Licenses and user generated ‘culturebanked®’ commercial peer production licenses all represent attempts to revise the licensing of IP assets in order to create some kind of commons of digital ownership, what we need alongside these is enabling technology in order to put it to use. The development of smart contracts based on distributed digital ledgers such as Blockchain and distributed peer-to-peer initiatives such as Holochain are the beginnings of a decentralised approach that can support a more equitable system – offering artists, arts organisations, creative citizens and corporate rights-holders the possibility of ‘holding common ground’.

As Arthur Brock of Holochain puts it: “An equitable economy requires a composable grammar of the commons”. In addition, by developing processes and creating easily adoptable solutions for artists and arts organisations to take a commons-based approach to their IP, we can regenerate commons-based access to markets.

As we make these changes, there is undoubtedly an ecosystem to protect. The everyday creative things that people do together, the publicly funded arts and the creative industries are what make up the ‘cultural sector’. Upsetting one may upset the whole ecology. But just because we shouldn’t upset something doesn’t mean it is working well. Indeed the ecosystem of cultural creativity is already upset in a few ways. For example, the Creative Industries Federation (CIF) recently quoted a value on the UK cultural sector of £92 Billion (for scale, the amount by which Facebook has grown in a year!). If we compare this to Arts Council England’s planned annual budget for 2018-22 of £622 million and imagined a tax relationship between the two, it would show that the private arts and cultural sector is re-financing its public-sector counterpart at a rate of little more than half a percent (excluding gifts, trusts and endowments)! This leaves over 18% of that £92 billion to find to match the contribution expected of all of UK companies in tax (19%). Something in the region of £17 billion annually, therefore, is ‘missing’. Arguably, this is the current size of an annually accruing debt of the cultural ‘sector’ to its cultural ‘commons’.

Some handling of IP by the BBC also illustrates the extent to which there is, as yet, any substantial move towards supporting cultural commons for creators. Consider, for example, ‘The Voice’, which has broadly followed precisely the same format as purely commercial channels and sold out its right to ITV in 2015. A good indication of a ‘commons-led approach’ is whether or not ‘contestants’ create, own and disseminate their own intellectual property. Universally, in these shows, they do not. The IP remains with the show – not the acts – despite the ‘public broadcasting’ remit. A commons-led challenge for the BBC (and other cultural producers) is to commission programmes and platforms featuring new artists who compete to make new IP (the BBC would still own the format) using peer production licences. In this way, the BBC would be helping to create a genuinely diverse cultural economy of new, accessible work and empowering creative markets and communities with real diversity and growth potential.

Empowering culturally creative people to control their assets and re-financing the infrastructure that helped produce them is the cultural commons which many are looking for. What digital cultural commons have too little of are payment gateways to enable this two way relationship between civic roles and voluntary action (production) to happen. By hypothecating the financing of local creative economies using smart contracts and peer-to-peer micropayments to create a commons of digital assets, we can encourage fairer ‘ownership’ and participation in cultural life.

The problems of ‘grass roots’ funding, co-production, local collaboration and inter-sectoral working begin to look more like opportunities too:

At Olympia’s Brand Licensing Fair last year, a stand simply titled; ‘Spain’ was busy promoting its cultural wares. There’s no reason any village, town or city in the UK couldn’t perform the same function – for private gain and for civic benefit. The beauty of digital though, is that this can be done with just a time-stamp, a hash and a license.

Liam Murphy,
CultureBanked®

Liam Murphy is a Civic Entrepreneur and Writer who has worked as a gardener, picture framer, artist, book seller – and run an art gallery in Great Yarmouth! He’s currently transferring his LTD company into a shared art and framing workshop using common stock and facilities and writing a book about the cultural industries. He’s also involved in various local and national cultural initiatives, including What Next? Cultural Education Partnerships and the Gulbenkian Enquiry Into The Civic Role Of Arts Organisations.

CultureBanking provides ‘plug-in’ help for user-led Collective Rights Management to creative communities.
To learn more about or get involved with the project go to the CultureBanking Meetup group.

Photo by snakegirl productions

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