About Double Edge Theatre

Double Edge Theatre, an artist-run organization, was founded in Boston in 1982 by Stacy Klein as a feminist ensemble and laboratory of actors’ creative process. The Double Edge Ensemble, led by Artistic Director Klein, along with Co-Artistic Directors Carlos Uriona, Matthew Glassman, Jennifer Johnson, and Producing Executive Director Adam Bright, creates original theatrical performances that are imaginative, imagistic, and visceral. These include indoor performances and site-specific indoor/outdoor traveling spectacles both of which are developed with collaborating visual and music artists through a long-term process and presented on the Farm and on national and international tours. In 1994, Double Edge moved from Boston to a 105-acre former dairy farm in rural Ashfield, MA, to create a sustainable artistic home. Today, the Farm is an International Center of Living Culture and Art Justice, a base for the Ensemble’s extensive international touring and community spectacles, with year-round theatre training, performance exchange, conversations and convenings, greening and sustainable farming initiatives. DE facilities include two performance and training spaces, production facilities, offices, archives, music room, and 5 outdoor performance areas, as well as an animal barn, vegetable gardens, and two additional properties: housing in the center of town for resident artists and DE’s Artist Studio, giving primacy to African American and Latinx artists; and a design house, with design offices, studios, costume shop, and storage for sets, costumes, and props.

The post Double Edge Theatre: Art & Commoning appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens believes that because societies are complex adaptive systems, the only way to move towards a new, stable system is through a chaotic transition. The current pandemic shock will serve as a wake-up call, exposing the fallacies of our current systems. What we need forward are strong commons-based institutions that can provide a complimentary, counter-balance to powerful nation-states and existing multilateral organisations.

Podcast notes

In this with Michel Bauwens, we explore both the epistemological and political/regulatory layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new” ways of organising society. We dig into concepts like “trans-national institutions” and explore the changes we could expect in both regional and international governance of the economy and society.

Michel Bauwens is founder and director of the P2P Foundation, research director of CommonsTransition.org (a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons) and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group.

Michel is a real lighthouse when it comes to collaborative, commons-based production models and works tirelessly since more than a decade in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Michel Bauwens, Corona and the Commons http://liminal.news.greenhostpreview.nl/2020/03/23/corona-and-the-commons/

> Michel Bauwens and Jose Raomos, “The pulsation of the commons: The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition” (Draft), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sHhuecKxfB8HRH8o9aOfdlKNqaPQ8lc91502FXXv8e4/edit#heading=h.99i7fcsrn7tf

> Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Bologna_Regulation_for_the_Care_and_Regeneration_of_Urban_Commons

> P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival — Commons Transition, https://commonstransition.org/p2p-accounting-for-planetary-survival/

> REPORTING 3.0, https://reporting3.org/

> Robert I. Moore (2000), The First European Revolution: 970–1215, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/712195.The_First_European_Revolution

> Bernard A. Lietaer, The Mystery of Money, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8198838-the-mystery-of-money

> Material flow accounting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_flow_accounting

> Resources, events, agents (accounting model), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resources,_events,_agents_(accounting_model)

> David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf

> Jamie Wheal in Rebel Wisdom: War on Sensemaking 3, the Infinite Game, https://youtu.be/mQstRd7opv4

> French land trust “Terre des Liens”, https://terredeliens.org/

> Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40203892-the-neganthropocene

Key insights

1. There are two main layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new”: Epistemological and Political/Regulatory:

– The epistemological layer needs a new educational approach, since the current one is largely reductionist and rooted in the “old” system.

– The political and regulatory space need stronger commons-based institutions and governance protocols, where the nation state becomes a “partner state” and you have a public commons protocol, like for example in the Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons in Italy.

– We will also see the emergence of trans-national institutions that connect local constituencies globally and virtually and which are able to protect planetary boundaries.

2. We’re moving towards a mutation of consciousness where Western countries are increasingly questioning modernity/progress paradigm, while many Asian countries still think they can get capitalism right (modernity-nature). Nonetheless, the fact that we’re currently consuming five times our planetary resources to maintain the capitalist economic model might indicate that we’re moving towards a next “pulsation”, or regenerative reaction, to a period of unsustainable extraction.

3. There’s a need of coherence driving decision-making mainly based on accounting using energy flows, which go beyond double-entry accounting — creating winners and losers — making transparent the three-dimensional, real impact of activities.

 Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.

This podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Stitcher, CastBox, RadioPublic, and other major podcasting platforms.

Transcript

This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Michel, is such a pleasure to have you on this podcast! We know each other I think from, you know, the early 2010s, probably something like that. So it’s almost 10 years, maybe more. And, you know, when we started this podcast, we really wanted to have the conversation on the on the commons and P2P commons based production into this conversation into this podcast. And, you know, as you know, I am also personally very much passionate about this idea of open source, for example, and open collaboration, based on the commons. So my question for you as a starting point, say to explore the world of P2P commons based production is is much more related to try to understand with you why this is not as big a deal as it should be, you know. And so, what are the structural issues that, as for your understanding, are harnessing the further development of these paradigms in the world?

Michel Bauwens:
Right. Well, I guess to start with, I’d like to basically maybe even challenge what you just said. Because, you know, you have to remember where it came from right, where basically we just had open source movements in the early 2000s. Now we have urban commons — and I did a study in Ghent which show the tenfold increase in urban commons from 50 to 500 in just one city — that’s one thing. Then we have the makerspaces, the fab labs and something that’s called a multi factory. There’s about 120 of them in Europe right now already and this is like real production, where craftspeople mutualise their you know, production in a common space using open source principles. And also, I would like to say that there’s already a lot more political expression of this, right, there is the regulation in Italy in 250 different cities, there is a whole plank of activity in France around the municipal elections, and you know, with a real commons political program at the local level. So, of course, we’re not where we want to be, but I just want to stress that we also have been growing at the same time. So I just want to make sure that that is said.

Simone Cicero:
For sure.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, yeah. But so I, you know, I think of course one of the issues and that’s one of the statements we wanted to discuss is, is about the value regime, right? So my analysis is that we live in a world that only recognizes extracted value. So in other words, in order to create value, you either work with people or with natural resources and you extract a surplus. And that surplus is translated in financial wealth. And then we are going to do philanthropy or we’re going to do taxation. And so we’re doing redistribution. And this, this has a number of paradoxical effects. And one of the profound effects is that if you do generative work, if you do care work, you don’t get funded unless you get this redistributive money. So a typical example would be, you have in France a community land trust called Terre des Liens. They have 775 million Euro in capital and you know, they buy land from the markets and put it in a trust and then they give cheap rent and ecological contracts with organic farmers. They have already in 2016 published a report showing that the fact that they don’t use toxic pesticides in their form of agriculture means that they’re saving the French state 300 million euros per year. So that’s, you know, amount of money in water pollution, depollution that is not spent, because they do this generative activity. And I hope you can see the problem there. Right. So if you’re a farmer, and you’re destroying your soil year after year, and some studies say there’s like 60 harvests left in Western Europe, you know, if we continue with this, de-substantiation of minerals in our soils. You’re going to be basically getting, you know, billions in European funding from the agriculture program, but if you’re an organic farmer you’re not going to get this. So I want to say this is important because the common in some ways and an alternative to capital, but you still need capital. So capital privatizes the commons, that’s how capitalism emerged. And so what people are doing right now, I would say is using the commons as an alternative to capital because they don’t have capital. Right? So if you don’t have capital, then you’re going to use mutualization as an alternative. This combined idle sourcing, combined many, many, many small contributions to try to, to get at a substantial amount of infrastructure. And so, why is this important because as long as the current system works, as long as the extractive system works even if it is destructive, it kind of creates a structural situation where generative activity is marginalized. And this is just, you know, a fact of life. Right? And now, if you agree with me — or maybe don’t agree with me — that we are reaching a point of no return in the current system. In other words, continued extraction at this scale, an overuse of the planetary resources at this scale, creates resource issues, creates future problems with food and water, creates climate change and — as we see nowadays — creates a huge issue around pandemic distribution. So, I would say that it might be that the time you know before these alternatives, you know, become more important is not so far away as we think. Now, so the first argument would be around structural weaknesses for me is the value regime, right? In which value regime are we operating? And what is it favoring? And what is it de-favoring?The second issue, though, I think, is that we live in a hybrid economy, in a hybrid society. So we have different ways of exchanging value. We have the pricing system, which you know, only is dominant for the last two centuries. It wasn’t before; it was a it was itself marginal until two centuries ago. You know, we have maybe 10% people in the cities and 90% people in the countryside were almost not affected by the pricing system. We have the gift economy, which is, I think, quite marginal. Then we have commoning, which is working on a shared resource, and then we have redistribution. So those are four different ways of exchanging value. And I think one of the critiques you know, like self-critique we could make of the commons movement is the idea that it’s a, it’s a totalistic alternative, right? So what I would argue differently is that the commons on its own is not sufficient, just as the market on its own is not efficient, sufficient. And the states on its own is not efficient. Even more so, I would argue that believing this is a form of totalitarianism, so you’d have fascism and communism as an absolutism of the state. We have a bit of right wing libertarianism and neoliberalism as a absolutism of the market. We also could have commonism as some kind of absolutism of you know, of horizontality. And so I think it’s much more fruitful to think of combinations. In other words, if you’re a market player, you could start thinking, you know, how can we use the commons. And actually, of course, we see that capitalists actually doing that, right. I mean, all the new — the things you do with your platforms and, you know, normally most of the platforms are capitalistic, what I call net article platforms — that’s exactly what they do. And they have become commons extracting economic systems. They directly,you know, get value from cooperating humans, right? So if you look at Uber, Airbnb, they no longer just hire people to produce, they actually let us exchange and then they get taxed from our exchanges, broadly speaking. So capitalism is certainly doing that. And so what I’ve been suggesting for the last 10 years is that commoners should do the same. One of the historical theories about capitalism is that it emerged in Europe because we had, you know, medieval cities, free medieval cities where the merchant guilds had autonomy, which didn’t happen in any other region in the world, because always the market forces were subsumed and dominated by the Empires and the Royal, the monarchic forces. But in Europe, we had a distributed system, fragmented system, of power in the Middle Ages and that allowed the merchant classes to slowly create a world that worked for them. And so basically, what I’ve been suggesting is that commoners should do the same; that we should be thinking not about, you know, doing on our own 100% pure way, but we should be thinking: what kind of markets work for commoners? What kind of state form works for the commons?

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, that’s, sorry I’m interrupting you, but I want to bring you some first reflection that reconnects with some older interviews that we’ve been recording the last few days. So, for example, when you say that the commons doesn’t need to be totalistic, you know, not approach that somehow like we need to do it alone outside of the society of markets, but more something that can appear on top of existing markets. It reminds me about David Ronfeld’s tribes, institutions, markets and networks. So this idea that essentially they evolve on top of each other and this is something that we also had the chance to discuss quickly with John Robb a few few days ago. And if I connect with your remarks at the start, that it’s a value issue and also you say, you know, as long as we have extracted value, it’s hard to imagine that, you know, something different comes up as long as society somehow praises this kind of extractive approach. And this is really interesting, I think. I mean, when you say for example, care work is not funded, it makes me think about Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene idea, that care needs to become central. And, and so somehow this brings us this reflection that if we don’t see more commons based production, you may also be an epistemological problem. We may also be dealing with to this idea of, you know, as Heidegger’s said we face the world as standing reserve that we just want to consume or basically we just can think about consuming. So it’s these big, these huge epistemological issues related to science and rationalism. And so this is one of the big issues. And on the other hand, that is a political issue. Because when you say, you know, basically, if this information needs to come on top of existing institutions and markets, it means that we need to take it politically, we need to have a political discussion on how we run our markets and what kind of production we, I would say we encourage with our policies. So there are these two topics. And you also mentioned the point of no return so at some point, we were going to figure it out that if it doesn’t change, we’re gonna have very hard times and we are already living through hard times. You mentioned the pandemic. It’s crazy, today we are all three of us at some level of lockdown, you know, you’re locked down in a room because you’re finishing your quarantine, and me and Stina we’re locked in our houses in Paris and Rome. So I feel like the point of no returning somehow is already here, for some reasons, but so the question is: how do you see that happening? Is the epistemological transformation really key? And is this aspect of cosmology and integrating the technology and the cosmological vision as we are seeing for example in China somehow, something needed? Is it something that you see happening? How do you see that unlocking? Is it a political procedure? Epistemological? That sort of thing.

Michel Bauwens:
Let me give you some examples. So I just finished writing an essay, which I really happy about is called “The pulsation of the commons”. And so I’ve been looking at different schools of thought like biophysical economics and cliodynamics, which is a historical school, and the cognitive cycles and the movement of Karl Polanyi. And they all come to a very similar conclusion, which is basically saying that history moves In waves, in pulsating pulsation, so you have extractive moments in history and then you have regenerative reactions, and typically for regenerative reaction is the revival of the components. So in, you know, 10th century 11th century Europe in 12th century Japan in 15th century China, what you see is that the extractive regime has done so much damage that there is a huge popular revolt that in that time takes on a religious and spiritual language. And so, basically, you know, we can take Japan also in the 16th century and happen again. So, you have like a completely deforested country, which will be subject to civil war and then, you know, so many people have died and then the Shogun takes power. And for three centuries, Japan has succeeded in creating it’s called the Tokugawa period, a nation that lives within its regional planetary boundaries. And it has a stable population. So it can be done right, it’s actually possible to have a civilizational form that lives within natural boundaries with a stable population. It’s been done in the past. And so that’s that’s like something that you see happening all the time. So for example, I was reading a book is called the first European revolution, it’s in 975, after the period of capitalization and you know, all these feudal lords are fighting and killing each other and raping their the women in their population and everything and stealing the gold from the churches. You have the monks and the people organizing demonstrations and within 70 years, the whole of European Society has changed. And so this kind of pulsation between extraction and regeneration is not unusual. It’s actually I would say the rule now with capitalism because of technology, because of oil, you know, we kind of thought we were out of it, right? We thought we escaped this, but this is no longer the case. We can’t escape it. We, you know, we use four or five planets, use five times more resources than the earth can regenerate. We have climate change. So basically, I believe we have now reached that point on a global scale. Now there is a difference between Asia and Europe, in Asia, in Europe, we already have at least one third of the population in Europe that questions all the ideals of modernity. So there’s already kind of a mutation in consciousness, I would say. In Asia, they are still much more believing in the system, and they think finally they can get there. So they, so that I would say that the the majority of the people in Asia believe in capitalism, and that a majority of the people in Europe are losing their faith in capitalism. And so you see all these people changing how they do health, how they do, you know, think about young people in work today. I mean, this is a real issue, where most young people cannot find meaning in a traditional job, or they they want something else, they want to live other values. So I would say in general, that we actually see mutation of consciousness. And let me end with one example because I think it’s important. So mutation in consciousness is not just a continuation of the old. So when we have the Christians coming after the Roman Empire, in the Roman Empire workers or slave work is something bad, is something that a free person doesn’t have to do. But in the Christian world, in a feudal world, Ora Labora, so you have to pray and work at the same time. So actually working is transforming the world, is making the world a better and more divine place. So that’s a complete complete shift in consciousness. And I think today, a lot of people want to care for the earth, want to be at the surface of the planet. And the system hasn’t yet changed to make that possible. But I think the desire is already there.

Simone Cicero:
So we can say maybe that, for your understanding, we are witnessing this epistemological change. So maybe it’s the time to see how it plays out to the political level?

Michel Bauwens:
Well, it plays out I think at the moment, first of all, with a total lack of trust in the institutions, right. 20 years ago, 70% of people were saying, I trust politicians, I trust doctors, I trust hospitals. Today’s more like 17%. So they, I think the majority of the people do not see it, have not a clear vision of the alternative. But they already have a clear vision of what they reject. And you probably remember this quote from Gramsci where it says the old system is dying but is not dead yet and a new system is being born but it’s not born yet, so it’s a time of monsters. You know, citation like that and he was living in the same moment we are living now because at the moment he was living is you had in the 19th century had Smithsonian capitalism, which was a total domination of capital over labor and why workers in the 1850s were dying at 30. And, you know, World War I and World War II were a transitional periods where two new regimes — fascism and communism — were competing to offer something new because the old system wasn’t working. And then we got a huge change which was the welfare system, right. So after 1945 we have a compact between capital and labor, and it creates — at least in the western states — it creates a welfare state. Well, then the way I formulate this is that the change now is, we need a compact with nature, because the compact between capital and labor was done at the expense of nature by not recognizing externalities. And then so politically — and this is one of the terms that we wanted to discuss — is we don’t have a nation state system that’s territorial. So people live in a territory they, they like their locality. So at least some people do, they feel attached to the region, a lot of people feel attached to their nation. And then we’ve built a multilateral system that is on top of that. And that is, so we have political and economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, that were mediating institutions, and they’re not working anymore. They’re not working well anymore. Then we have another world, which is the word that I think you and I work with, which is a transnational trans-local world, which is where people live in virtual territories. So let’s say you do permaculture so you at some level you’re local. You’re you know, you’re doing your garden. But then when you communicate about permaculture you’re communicating with the global permaculture community. And in that world, the nation state doesn’t even exist. It’s just invisible. It’s not part of your view. Right. And so that second world for me is the word that we’re building with the commons with Knowledge Commons. And so we talk about Cosmo local, global order, which is everything that’s global is everything that’s light is global and shared and everything that’s heavy is local, which is an alternative to both neoliberal globalization which is a globalization of matter and people moving around the world all the time. We spend three times as many on transportation, I’m making things now. And then we have a world of national protectionism of “okay, let’s keep the foreigners out. Let’s do everything locally”. And so what we try to present is a third view, right, is a view of “Yes, we need to re-localize a lot of our production”. Because if you look at corona, the reason we are such a mess is that we have neoliberal just-in-time systems that are totally dependent on the weakest link and then when China you know, got in crisis, we didn’t get our medications. And there’s no supply line to create the making of ventilators and masks and so we lost every resilience that we had in terms of combating disruption anyway. So, yes, so what I’m saying is that the open source germ form shows how we can do it. We have a global cooperation of experts globally about ventilators. And then we need to find local places where we can make it. What we don’t want is to isolate ourselves, you know, from the knowledge that’s available in all of humanity.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. I will jump in with a question. I thought it was — you already answered to some of the questions that I had — but I was reading the other day your a piece that you wrote in Liminal on the corona and the commons. And there were some interesting remarks that you made about, you know, that for sure the systems that we have are sort of failing, like the nation state and, and the multilateral system. There’s a lack of trust that is growing but still, that things might have been even worse if we didn’t have these systems in place, because somehow they are doing their role. So I’m curious to hear about that coexistence and how you see that will pan out. What will be the frictions between the old and the new?

Michel Bauwens:
Right, so I think we have a two fold-problem: one is that we have, you know, weak, commons institutions. We don’t have strong commons institutions yet. And the other problem is that we have state forms which cannot cooperate with these commons, right? And I think Italy has given some examples of how this could be done, because after the Bologna regulation, the regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, you have 250 cities which took it over and according to the calculation between 800,000 and 1 million people who are involved in these projects. So you have there already what I call a “partner state protocol”, a public commons protocol. So you have in Italian cities, a way in which citizens can do a project that can be recognized by the state and can be supported in what they call the five, the quintuple governance multi-stakeholder model. So this is a typical thing that exists in Italy but doesn’t exist in other countries yet. And I think it’s a good example of, you know, how you can smooth the cooperation between those two worlds. Because what we have now is we have all these open source communities now with all the expertise that is needed to this ventilators and valves, but we also see that the government are not ready or able to work with them. So there are several issues. And of course, one of the issues is certification regulations, which should probably be relaxed in an emergency time because even if an alternative is not 100% effective, it can still save a lot of lives that you can’t if you don’t have anything. But you know, beyond just emergency measures, what it shows us is that what is lacking today is the interface between the state and the civil society, the state and the commons. There is no interface and I think that’s a huge weakness on both sides, because right now the state would — and also maybe say that in some more theoretical ways I think the state can see territory, it cannot see flows — and so we need a partner state with which is not just the issue of, you know, being a partner with civil society and allowing civil society to be autonomous, but it’s also related to the ability of the state to see things and accept the fact that flows enrich the nation. I am not sure that beyond the neoliberal market flows, commodity flows, that people in the states and traditional politicians are actually able to see how open source and international global maker spaces can enrich a territory can enrich, you know, the wealth of a nation state. I don’t think they see that work well.

Simone Cicero:
That’s a very important point, as for my understanding because so far I think what we have been seeing in the last — you know, basically from forever — is that, you know, gradual (something that you also mentioned), this gradual integration of institutions up until we reach this supranational let’s say multinational transnational state, you know, with the UN, for example, as a way to somehow take over this role of controlling and regulating and at the same time. What you mention is that this trend basically disconnected the citizen from the policymakers and from the regulation, regulatory process itself. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good idea to borrow Daniel Schmactenberger’s considerations on on the fact that when you have this huge power growing at the edge of the system, so where basically every nation state -but within time I would say every individual — has technological potential to create such a big harm and often coupled with Guerilla like, you know, basically biological warfare or like we said, you know, we’ve witnessed that with the drone attacks to the Saudi plants, you know.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that was amazing, yes.

Simone Cicero:
So the question is, when these two trends, let’s say generate friction between each other so that they need to to scale our need for a coherent regulation for example, at a multinational transnational level, and at the other hand, we have this need to probably go back into a more indigenous and local context of of creating wealth and managing the commons. Are we left with some kind of, you know, conundrum that we cannot solve?

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, okay. I you know, I won’t imply that it’s easy, but so let’s take the example with corona. So we can criticize the state and there were many failures and everything. But imagine that there is no state, then, you know, in the US, you would have every state out of the 50 states will be competing with each other. They wouldn’t take into account each other. One city would do social isolation and the other wouldn’t. I mean, that’s not acceptable either, right? There are some challenges that do require transnational frameworks. And in some way, you could say that the nation state system already works that way. And that’s not so bad. So the fact of the WHO, you know, was able to advise, and it’s an international organization. And it is followed by a lot of states. But it’s an international expression, right. And I want to say something else, which is that the regime that we are living with is, you know, it’s weak multilateralism, and it’s only economic and political. So the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and they are mediating institutions to keep the peace because before World War II, they didn’t have them. And so they thought “We want to keep the peace we need these mediating institutions”. Now, one mediating institution that I know we need right now is actually some institution that could protect planetary boundaries. And I’ve done a report last summer called p2p accounting for planetary, was again, “p2p accounting for planetary survival”. And the theme is that we need accounting tools — share the accounting tools — that enable us to see the world differently. And that allows us to see externalities. And of course, they are not externalities, but the economy — our current economy — sees these things as externalities. So the thing is the economy is the center and then these marginal things on the outside, but actually the planet is primary. And we know we are guests. So we are actually at the edges in a certain way. And so that kind of reversal of perspective, I think needs to be institutionally validated. And so one project that I really like and I think is totally on the mark is called Reporting 3.0. And one of their proposals is called the Global thresholds and allocations Council. This is a form of, they call it multi capital accounting. So you don’t financialized but we have to see the metron energy flows in our systems. And so what they propose is basically that this group of scientists and experts, the global thresholds and locations Council, would be in charge of setting the limits in which states and individuals and companies and coops can operate right, because your freedom stops where you endanger the life of another. I think international is not good enough because if let’s take the human rights issue, right, we you have the UN Human Rights Council, but then there’s China and Saudi Arabia are members. And now human rights are very important, but it only affects some people, but the planetary survival affects everyone. And so this is sort of a vision I have is to have this to have globally shared accounting platforms, and shared supply chains where we can actually do Stigmergy, right. And that’s that I would say it’s an institution of the open source movement that works very well in free software. And once we have accounting, we can also apply it to production. That’s a huge, huge shift in perspective.

Simone Cicero:
Can you add a little Michel, on how would you see Stigmergy playing out in progress?

Michel Bauwens:
Yes, so if we move to open collaborative systems — and I think the blockchain systems are already that right — so that means like open source, everybody can come in and can leave at any time. So there is no single company that integrates the whole system that dominates our system. It’s an ecosystem. And it’s an open ecosystem. So what we see in these ecosystems is sort of all contributive accounting, which is practiced by different open source systems, which is where you can recognize non market generated activity as having its own value. So if you look at human history, and Bernard Lietaer talks about this in his book, The mystery of money: it talks about Yin and Yang money, male and female, warm and cold currencies. So now we only have cold currencies, extractive currency, he says we need to go back to the double system, which we had until the Middle Ages in the 14th century, which is we need warm currencies, which recognize non market generative care activities. So for example, in Indonesia you have money systems which regulates the watershed: people are paid to care for the watershed, and they can use that currency. So in the system that Reporting 3.0 proposes — this is more like a thermodynamic accounting systems — but again, it’s an open system everybody can see. So the theory is the following: in order to be in a steady state economy, so an economy that keeps the level of resources for the next generations, we cannot grow more than 1% a year otherwise it’s exponential. So basically, you calculate, you know, like the all the chemical elements of the table of Mendeleev. And that already exists. You can find it online. The American Chemical Association follows the flows of matter in these different elements. And so you’d have a commission of experts that would follow this, you know, how much copper is there, how much copper do we expect to find every year? What is the bio-circularity of copper? 70%. Every time you use copper, you re-use it, you can only use 70% of the copper. And that gives you boundaries, right? And within these boundaries, you’re free, but you cannot cross those boundaries. And stigmergy is that if I, let’s say I make shoes and I need leather. I can see all the other leather producers as well. So I can adapt in real time my behavior to the behavior of the ecosystem. And so there is another kind of accounting it’s called flow accounting. REA (resources, events agents), which no longer has double entry, and this is an important point. So if you use double entry accounting, you only see what is coming in and out of your own entity. And it’s a narcissistic accounting because the ecosystem doesn’t exist for you. Once you have flow accounting or REA accounting, you see the whole 3D ecosystem. You see every transaction, how it fits in the 3D ecosystem. Now, I want to go one step further, if you don’t mind. Because what we want to avoid is eco-fascism, right, a kind of planned economy where everybody is rationed. So here’s a potential solution to this. Let’s say you want to decarbonize and what we do now in the neoliberal economy is to do everything with competitive bidding. Competitive Bidding is anti-holistic because you win the competition by externalizing as much as you can. So you solve one problem, but you create anothers. In order to win, you have to be really reductionist. If you do a circular finance, let me explain what that means. You create a public ledger, that public ledger allows every citizens every collective to have its decarbonisation efforts to be verified. So you have it verified, you have been tokenized. And it either through taxation, or through contributions, those who profit from that positive externality, you fund these tokens and you create a circle. It can be very easy. I’ll give you an example Belgium, a small city — 20% of the kids used a bicycle. So it creates pollution because, you know, 80% cars. You create traffic accidents, noise, everything. SO “okay let’s pay these kids mileage mileage based currency” — I forgot the name but, you know, it exists in Bonheiden — they let them then use that currency in the circular economy, the local circular economy, so recycle makerspaces, Fab Labs. So, now they went to 60%. So considering cycling generative as compared to the extractive effects of cars and you recognize it creates value, so you have a priority but you leave people free to choose how they’re going to do it. You know, to use their creativity in answering those societal challenges. I hope that makes sense.

Simone Cicero:
No, it makes a lot of sense. And I think maybe my last question for this conversation today, or my last reflection that I want to offer — and maybe Stina wants to add more — but, you know, every time that we talk about for example, this moving out of competitive bidding into circular finance, and we speak about, you know, the need for institutional enforcement, you know, multinational institutions to enforce these regulations, which is of course, very meaningful — I find it very meaningful — but, you know, for example you will have witnessed that in the last few weeks, there were lots of people talking about how corrupt is the World Health Organization. So, there is this issue — I’m not saying that — but I’m saying that a lot of people are saying, you know, these are corrupt institutions not telling us for example, that masks are useful, you know, because they don’t want to make us, you know, freak out or something like that. So, in general, I think the question on potentially dealing with the corruption of the institutions, and in general the scarce capability to work, because of the complexity of the matter that they regulate. It is something that should make us think about, you know, what is the other route? And when I was talking with John Robb — we were talking with John Robb a few days ago — he made a reflection with us, basically saying “I want to be able to connect with the global system on my own terms”. If I am, you know, creating a local system — for example, caring about my resilience — I can connect with me on my own terms. And this is quite different as an approach or an epistemological political approach, you know, either we end up with these multinational institutions that everybody trusts, which is I believe a very difficult, you know, a very improbable outcome, or we may end up with these local institutions that connect with, connect between each other on their local own terms. So, maybe these connections that we are going to create, these multinational inter-networks and connections are more like you know, gonna be produced as tools.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, yeah, I think this is the thing that, you know, fundamentally libertarian people like John Robbs don’t get. This is actually the core of what I’m trying to tell you, that you have the two: we are living through physical bodies, and we live in a territory. And that territory is not just a local, it’s no, it’s a historically evolved situation where the communities that were destroyed by capitalism became the imagined community of the nation states. And we shouldn’t underestimate the attachment of most people to this identity, right? And we see, actually today that forces that represent the revival of the nation state are winning. They’re not losing, they’re winning. And the people who, you know, usually on the left who don’t feel this identity with a nation state, they’re losing. And then on the other hand, you have the libertarian view, right? And it’s all about networks iner-connecting networks. And I think what is missing is that the nation state is a very contradictory institution, but it also represents a “common good” institution. It’s a social contract between different parts of the population. Because what you have in the virtual world is just the same. You know, it’s not an ideal place. It’s a place with hackers — you know, I mean bad hackers now — the kind of people who steal your credit cards and stuff. So, it’s the interaction between the two, right? So we need strong, commons institution. I’m trying to give you a few examples of what I see as potential new commons institutions. And then we need to work on the interrelationship between both. Because for example, you talk about WHO, you say they’re corrupt. Why are they corrupt? They are corrupt because they are international. So Western countries don’t have enough masks. So they want to preserve the masks for the doctors and the hospital systems. So they have an interest in not pushing masks. In Asia where everybody has masks, the information we get is that masks work. In Belgium, I’m getting information that masks don’t work. I checked it: masks actually work. But the corruption of the WHO is because the nation states are the only agents that have power there. So they’re gonna negotiate. And there’s a nice term, it’s called “super competent democracy”. And so I think we need more independence for the trans-national expertise as a way of counter balancing the, you know, the corrupt selfish power of nation states. But we can’t have a completely new system that ignores nation state when the nation state is still dominant and powerful. Does that make sense?

Simone Cicero:
Totally, totally. I think one insight that I’m driving from this conversation is that we probably need to care about the local and indigenous regional, you know, many, many terms we are using to describe these systems where we as citizens, we can be more actively engaged in producing on top of the commons. But we also need to care about these interrelationships, inter-relational institutions that need to connect these nodes. That’s the part that I’m more concerned about, you know.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that’s what we’re missing and, you know, we had it in the Middle Ages and was called the Catholic Church. Right? This was an institution that existed in parallel with the regional powers that was organized on a European scale. And so it could identify with, let’s say the interests of Western civilization, not just, you know, not just a local perspective of the regional Lord

Simone Cicero:
Good point

Stina Heikkila:
This links well into the question that I had also because earlier you spoke about this mutation of consciousness that we can start to somehow see emerging, where people are tired of this endless capitalism that is destroying the planet. So I see the link between what you mentioned in terms of this kind of radical transparency, where you would be able to basically see the impact in real time of a decision, right? So what is the cultural shift in that mutation of consciousness? Like how could we nurture citizens who could, you know, look for the right kind of choices?

Michel Bauwens:
Well, I think it should start probably in school because right now, the modern school is an agent of alienation. You know, so we decided in the 16th century in Europe, that the body was separate from the mind that the human was separate from nature. And all our institutions reinforce this. So that’s what you learn in school. You know, you learn all the abstract knowledge. But you don’t know anything about cleaning your room and about growing stuff. And for example, if you live in a country like Thailand, you’d see that all the children of the farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore. Right? So there’s a complete break between tradition and the relationship to the land, local, and then when they go to the school, it’s all about the nation state and science and engineering and you know, all good stuff. But you know what I’m trying to say, right? So I saw this documentary — I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of the city, but it’s in Finland, I believe, in northern Finland — and it’s the first carbon positive city in the world. And what you see there is that the children are involved in this. So the children think about heating, they think about eco, they think about organizing the school in a way that, you know, it doesn’t use so much energy. So they started building like, how to say, a warming system that works on the floor. And so the kids are inventing all kinds of things. And so they are really growing up with a different kind of consciousness. So I think that, you know, that a large part of the answer is generational. At some point, we’re going to have to educate our children in entirely different ways than ways we were educated. You know, we’re largely lost already, in a way, because we’re so used to consumption and to all these separations. So even if we are ideologically sympathetic to these innovations, to be honest, in our daily lives, very few of us are actually living differently. And so, you know, changing our mind is the first step but to actually change the whole body-mind has to be mobilized. And I think this is something — you have to do some kind of programming of a worldview — and that has to be done very early.

Simone Cicero:
Well, Michel, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation. So I’m happy to offer a little bit of a reflection to wrap it up. I think we’re witnessing again and again, the fact that it’s a generational issue, it’s an educational one. And it looks — I don’t want to say that it looks like we understand what needs to be done — but somehow, more and more we understand that aspects of the current system need to change. We need to re-embed most of our economy to our region on a local scale. We need to, you know, develop these regulations and we need to change the educational system, but sometimes it looks like — or at least it was — you know, a trajectory where it was very hard to stop for a moment and to rethink, you know, the new systems. And, you know, sometimes — I was afraid to say that — but sometimes when I see that the systems are recovering, rebounding after the corona first hit, first wave, I’m thinking, you know, maybe in the future we’ll miss the corona times, where we had to stay at home.

Michel Bauwens:
So we can reset our thinking, right?

Simone Cicero:
Exactly and like, my question is, are we doing it or not?

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, I think we’re doing it. So here’s the way for me to see it: you have a stable system and the only way to go to a new stable system is through a chaotic transition because societies are complex adaptive systems. So we are ready since 2008 in the chaotic transition. And then what we need is you know, pedagogical catastrophes. We are going to learn because we are going to be shocked. And corona is the first shock, the first true shock — maybe the second if you count 2008 — but corona is a wake up call, and I think that it will have long term effects. I think it is, you know, we’ll try to go back to normal in some way. But I think in many ways people have woken up, for example, to the fact that our state systems no longer work. That you know, we don’t have ventilators, we don’t have masks. How is that possible? The most advanced Western countries are not coping with this pandemic as they should. And they lost tens of thousands of people because they were not organized in the proper way. And a lot of people will lose their income, you know, they will have to rethink their place in the world. So I think this will be a multi year shock and it will have effects but it’s not enough to have one shock. We’ll have more, but maybe this is the first one.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, I mean, just as a closure, I think, you know, I was listening to Jamie Wheal a few days ago on a podcast and I think he said something interesting: that sometimes, you know, that there’s this conversation now around this idea of “Game B” — also this idea that we need to make transition towards a new civilization. And it’s interesting to say that, you know, parts of this new civilization are already here. And sometimes we iconise, let’s say we imagine this transition as something very different, while the reality is it’s gonna start by steps, you know, through maybe this new disruption that we are living through these days is going to push us in this direction. A little step, and then another one, and then another one. And we end up maybe in a few years with a system that is completely different. So hopefully.

Michel Bauwens:
I think that’s how it works, yes, there is no, you know, there is, okay…. So you know, I was quite unhappy as a youth and I went to therapy. And you know, I did it for about seven years, and there is not a single therapy where I felt “this is it”. And yet after seven years, I was different. You know what I mean? So, I suddenly realized that I had changed. But there was no there was no like, revolutionary moment. And I think in the West, we’re too focused on this idea of, you know, the revolution that comes from the French and the Russian revolutions. But actually, even those industrial revolutions were different in every country. And it was a religious civil war in England. It was, you know, the military class which took power in Germany. The Tsar then liberated the serfs in Russia. So it took so many different forms, right? And I think this is going to be the same. We, you know, we shouldn’t wait for this magic moment. You have all these little changes and at some time, it will feel “Wow. Now the logic is already different”.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, maybe maybe Michel we just need to give up our tendency to try to model everything because this transition is not gonna be modelled very easily. So Michel, thanks very much. That was an amazing conversation. And really, we thank you for this and I’m sure that our listeners will have lots of food for thought. And for sure we had it, so thanks again.

Michel Bauwens:
Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Stina, as well.

The post Commons-based peer production at the edge of a chaotic transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Can we create big, ambitious projects without corporations, governments, and bosses?

Nathalia Scherer wants to try. Her organization, DAOstack, is using Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to make tools for self-organizing. Last year DAOstack raised $30 million in a 60-second token offering, but genuinely participatory governance may be easier to raise money for than to actually achieve.

MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech.

Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Originally published on KGNU.org

The post Looks Like New: How Can We Self-Organize at Scale? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

His specialties are program development, research, data analysis, agent based modeling, computer simulation, monitoring and evaluation, complementary currencies, informal settlements, environmental programs, cooperatives.

In this episode, Will talks to us about his work over the past eleven years, organizing micro-entrepreneurs in poor areas of Kenya. Central to his work has been the creation of community currencies that have enabled a greater amount of trading and utilization of capacity in those communities. Recently, Will and his associates have been implementing digital forms of those currencies, and networking communities together in a wide area exchange system.

Grassroots Economics, https://www.grassrootseconomics.org
“Through community currencies people have a way to exchange goods and services and incubate new businesses, without relying on scarce national currency and volatile markets.”

Documentary on Will Ruddick and Kenyan Community Currencies, https://youtu.be/ojFPrVvpraU

How to Give People the Same Power As Banks, https://youtu.be/PfEW2atiB4s

Unblock HongKong – Interview with Will Ruddick – Director at BANCOR, https://youtu.be/OagQNEecZhA

M-Pesa, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

This interview with Will Ruddick was conducted 2019 April 30.

Reposted from the Beyond Money Podcast

The post Will Rudrick on Community Currencies and Grassroots Economics appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Fanatical belief in cryptocurrencies lead to the perfect becoming the enemy of the good. Michel Bauwens takes us on a tour of what’s good.

The future of tech: the next billion seconds are the most important in human history as technology transforms the way we live and work. The rate of change we will experience will be the fastest humanity has ever seen. Award winning podcast creator and journalist, Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster whose work and global connections in all things internet and tech extend back to the early days of the web. He speaks to the brightest minds shaping this new world and creating the future via smartphones, connected devices, artificial intelligence and beyond.

Here’s a P2P Foundation post about “10 blockchain projects to keep an eye on“, including: The Possible Project and ShareRing. (ShareRing is Australian, so we do our best to have them on CRYPTONOMICS in our next series!)

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Level One Project promises to bring cryptocurrency and smartphone-based trading to the developing world.

Finally, the Regen Network, which sees in itself a complete rewriting of how we account for value in civilisation.

Photo by markchadwickart

Republished from Cryptonomics.show

The post Podcast: CRYPTOPIA – Mark Pesce interviews Michel Bauwens appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This week we are talking about deepening democracy in our communities through participatory budgeting and participatory decision making more broadly. We’re joined by three great guests: Shari Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project, Lorian Ngarambe of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, and Yale University Ph.D. student Alexander Kolokotronis.

Adam Simpson: Welcome to The Next System podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson. Today we’re talking about participatory budgeting and, more broadly, broadening the scope of democracy in our communities and movements. We have a great group of guests lined up, starting with Shari Davis, co-executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project. Shari, welcome to the program.

Shari Davis: Thank you so much.

Adam Simpson: We also have Alexander Kolokotronis, a Ph.D. student at Yale University, and founder and board chair of the Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives. Alex, thanks for joining.

Alexander Kolokotronis: Thanks for having me.

Adam Simpson: And we also have Loriane Ngarambe, a community engagement specialist with the United Way. Loriane, it’s great to have you with us.

Loriane Ngarambe: So excited to be here.

Adam Simpson: Shari, can you start us off with just a brief intro into participatory budgeting. What is it? How does it work? What are some of the benefits and limitations?

Shari Davis: Sure. Participatory budgeting is something that gets me really excited. I’m a person who worked in local government in the City of Boston, Massachusetts for just about 15 years overseeing youth services. While I had seen a lot of really interesting and innovative approaches to community engagement, participatory budgeting was an opportunity to explore that in a way that I hadn’t seen before. My first introduction to this was in my role overseeing youth initiatives. The mayor coming to me saying, “I really want young people to play a leadership role, not just a figurehead role, in how I govern and in how I make the City of Boston better.” When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern, and a change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or broader community.

From that initial introduction, I learned that participatory budgeting is relatively new in the United States, but, globally, it’s been around for several decades. That said, the way that we practice it in the US is also a bit different. The first thing that happens, and my favorite part to ensure transparency, is that community members come together to write the rules that will govern a participatory budgeting process. Then we enter the idea-collection phase, where we collect hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas on how to spend a pot of money to make a community better. We’re not talking about the entire public budget; we’re talking about identifying a space, a line item in the budget, where we can make some decisions together.

After we collect those ideas, we go into the next phase, maybe my most favorite. This is proposal development. This is where community members come together and form a couple of committees to review all of the ideas that have come in based on need, feasibility, and impact. This is an important piece around ensuring equity, not only for the projects that come in but the projects that make it onto the ballot. They work alongside agency or institutional staff to distill and vet those projects so that we have final projects for the ballot. Nothing makes it on a participatory budgeting ballot unless it can really happen if it gets enough votes.

We enter the almost final phase then, the voting phase. Unlike traditional local or national elections, the voting phase is usually a bit longer. It can last a week. And the vote goes out to where people are. That steering committee, and the folks that have been involved in the process, really think about who is typically left out, and how do we really center their engagement in this process, so that their voice is heard. After the vote phase, the projects with the most votes are implemented, truly enacted in the community, until that pot of funds runs out. Then the process begins again the following year, after an evaluation.

When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern and a change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or broader community. That’s the quick-and-dirty overview.

Adam Simpson: Wow, so much to dig into there. Thank you for that, Shari. In particular, you mentioned that participatory budgeting isn’t a new idea. I’ve actually read in some of your work, Alex, that the tradition of participatory democracy having both international indigenous roots. Can you say a bit more about this and how you view participatory budgeting fitting into that historical tradition?

Alexander Kolokotronis: Sure. Traditionally, I think we connect these things to direct democracy, and we think of ancient Athens. But I think a lot of recent work, in the last few decades, has been connecting up this notion around participatory democracy to the Iroquois Confederacy here in the United States. Most recently, in explicit work on participatory democracy, Michael Menser really foregrounds this in his beginning chapters of his book, We Decide. But on through that, into history, we see a lot of other instances of participatory democratic praxis on a wide scale. So, of course, there are the traditions I’ve just mentioned, but then we see larger cases in the 20th century, such as the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. Then, of course, the coining of the term, participatory democracy, in the ’60s by Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Statement, which itself has a lot of international renown.

Often, if I mention that some of the things I’m looking into with my own research include SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, I’ll hear people from various parts of the world say, “The Port Huron Statement and participatory democracy.” But its practical roots really, really lie in different areas of the world, including right here with the Iroquois Confederacy.

Adam Simpson: Now, there are a variety of ways that participatory budgeting can be deployed. In Loriane in Monroe County, New York, this was part of the antipoverty initiative that you were involved in, which incorporated a participatory budgeting process. What do you think was different about the outcomes, and the initiatives, of that process, as opposed to the outcomes that would have been advanced from a more top-down process, either from city leaders alone, or social impact investors, nonprofits, et cetera? What do you think was different about the fact that this process to alleviate poverty in the Rochester, Monroe County area because of the participatory nature of it? For so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or it’s what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s literally their lives.

Loriane Ngarambe: This is the thing I always use whenever I’m talking about communities, or other community engagement efforts over at RMAPI: It’s always that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. And for so long, any time people are talking about poverty, and strategies, and solutions you always have this top-down approach. I look at this through a context of content experts, and context experts. And for so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or, maybe, it’s what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s literally their lives. They understand it through, and through, because it’s not just a nine-to-five thing for them, right?

Adam Simpson: Right.

Loriane Ngarambe: When they go home, they still have to deal with the poverty. At night, they deal with it when things are good. When things are bad, they understand it at a deeper level. A PB process really allowed an opportunity to see just what happens when you give these context experts an opportunity to really tell you what makes sense for them, right?

Adam Simpson: Right.

Loriane Ngarambe: The PB process allowed for ideas to come up that could be sitting at tables for decades and an idea like 24-hour daycare, that was one idea that came out a couple of times when we’re doing idea collection. It’s just like, “Wait, why isn’t that something that happens more often?” You have A, B, and C-shift jobs, but when you think of daycare, it’s usually for people who are working A-shift. But then there’s all these jobs that are available, and people, especially single mothers, aren’t able to take advantage of them, because they don’t have something like 24-hour daycare, where they can be secure on where they’re leaving their child. It’s things like that, that make the PB process make sense because they’re able to bring ideas and propose solutions that a content expert may not think about, because their understanding to the problem is limited to their experience.

Loriane Ngarambe: So PB just allowed us to really highlight what happens when you co-create solutions with community, rather than come up with an idea, a creative solution, and then present it to the community that has to live with the consequences of whatever decisions are made. So PB just allowed us to highlight that, and it’s really given us a lot of momentum, and energy, and buy-in from the community, as well, too. Now, you have people who then, as part of this process, that say, “We want more. How can we be more involved? What are more opportunities where we can really let our voices shine through?” And it’s just been an incredible experience for us.

Adam Simpson: That’s something I want to ask about directly. I think Shari mentioned a little bit what the process of participatory budgeting looked like, but I’m interested, particularly, in how you get people involved and engaged. I know that a lot of people, they have work, they have, as you mentioned, childcare, they have so many duties going on. Did you find it difficult to get people engaged? What were the strategies you employed there? In your experience, were people really eager to get involved?

Loriane Ngarambe: The main strategy that we used, that was really important, was meeting people where they were at, and not making this be an additional thing that they have to do. For instance, in idea collection, just getting out there and getting people more informed and engaged with what was going on. We would go to places like our Department of Human Services, where people are going to be sitting there for hours anyway to get their benefits or go to their appointments. So, instead of making a meeting, later on in the evening, where they have to find their way there, meet people where they’re at, go to schools, go to libraries, go to rec centers, go to churches, meet people where they’re at. Identify your key communities’ members, people who already have those relationships, people who will be advocates for what’s going on.

It’s a ripple effect, essentially, right? We’ve identified our 20 key people who really understand what PB is and are really for it. So they start going onto their networks and that’s, really, how the engagement bloomed, how the engagement grew. Then you’d have people hitting up our Facebook page, people reaching out to us because their cousin, who goes to their church, told them about this thing that they’ve been taking a part of. That’s really how we were able to get that engagement going. It wasn’t because of what me and my colleague, Graham, are doing. It was more about the people who understood this for what it was and were passionate about it, and so they were looping in their neighbors, their friends, their family. That’s really how the engagement happened.

Then just meeting people where they’re at, mitigating barriers. If we knew that childcare was an issue, then we made sure we had childcare available at a meeting that we had. We made sure we had food. We had giveaways, if people needed it, just to incentivize people to be able to get there, so it’s worth their time, essentially. I don’t want you to have to leave your kids to come participate and be engaged; bring them with you. We’ll have things for them to do, as well, too. Just meeting people where they’re at and being cognizant of the barriers they need to be facing and how you can help mitigate that. That was really important for us.

Adam Simpson: Wow. That sounds like a really amazing process. Shari, could you say a little bit about this and your experience? What do you see as the most successful strategies for getting the community engaged in these participatory processes?

Shari Davis: Well, one thing I want to just underscore is this principle that was mentioned before, and that’s around content and context expertise. I often say, “If I were to build a building, I would get an expert.” I would go get an architect because I don’t want the building to fall down. So, if I’m going to build a healthy community, I need experts to do that. I need people that live, walk, breath, and exist in that space on a regular basis. When we’re infusing their ideas, impact, and, really, voice, we’re able to build communities that are responsive to generations to come. I think that’s a really important piece here.

In terms of what we’ve seen work, and how this really works is, is centering those folks—who now we’re turning to as experts, and have always been experts and leaders in their own right. But if we’re going to center their engagement, we have to design the process with them, and not for them, and that’s why this steering committee component is so important. If we want single parents, or parents period, to participate, then we have to really think through childcare, times that we’re meeting. If we want young people to be in the room, then we probably can’t meet at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. These considerations and the design process are essential. And that’s not me, Shari, or other members of PBP, that make those decisions. It’s the important folks that are on the ground, the folks that work in government, but especially those that are of the community that we’re trying to engage in a participatory budgeting process, really need to be at the helm of that design.

That’s what we’ve seen work in Oakland, where there’s no minimum voting age, anyone of any age, as long as they can interact with the materials, can participate. That’s what we’ve seen work in the City of Boston, where young people reported being more likely to engage in their community or being more likely to vote in a local or national election, as a result of participation. That’s what we saw in Phoenix, Arizona, where the entire school district engaged in a participatory budgeting process. And, last year, nearly a thousand of those young people that engaged in the PB process also registered to vote in local and national elections.

That’s what we’ve seen be a big piece of success is making sure that community, and those that are representative of their community, are really involved in the design process early, and in a way that they can make some decisions.

Loriane Ngarambe: Just to add to that, real quick. Here, in Rochester, we have a community advisory council. This is made up of community members who have decided to take on that extra time to really be involved with what’s going on, and provide input and guidance to the solutions and programs, and conversation, that are being had around what’s going to be happening with our communities. They played a really important role in the education part of introducing PB to the community. We brought it to them. We explained what it was to them, and they helped with the creation of our steering committee, and getting the word out there. Just to back up that statement, that was a huge, huge component of this, as well, too for us.

Shari Davis: I think you were touching on something that’s super important, and I know Alex can attest to this too. Often times we see councils and engagement strategies, and the councils may work, sometimes they’re a bit defunct, so participatory budgeting can be a way to really build robust advisory council level support. And, to your point, really allow them to infuse the beginning stages of planning that lead to the steering committee creation. And, in the City of Boston, we saw that with the Mayor’s Youth Council. They became huge ambassadors and key to the success of participatory budgeting, and really ran this process, and continue to now. I know that’s true, in terms of what Alex has seen, on the university scale, as well. Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of.

Alexander Kolokotronis: Yeah, to add to that. At the university scale what we’ve seen is—and you’ll find this again; this is another product of the ’60s—so many schools have a series of advisory committees in every aspect of the school structure, in terms of making school policy, or making recommendations for school policy. What we found, when we were doing our participatory budgeting process at Queens College, was that there were all these committees for different things, related to finance, related to buildings and grounds, related to all these things. As we looked through the lists, nearly all the students’ seats were vacant. It really astonished us, because it was clear that in a school with 20,000 students, there was an opportunity there and that no one, nearly no one, was taking up this opportunity to push things forward.

At the same time, we were recognizing that these are advisory structures and, after all, we, ourselves, are pushing for a process where we actually had decision-making power and weren’t simply being shuffled off into advisory seats that we were afraid might not affect change. But the result in having a participatory budgeting process is that people felt anchored, and felt able to try out, maybe, also sitting on some of these advisory seats, and, maybe, also having that feedback into the participatory budgeting process itself at Queens College.

The effect has been, over the last few years, that students have consistently found certain committees are really great to work within and are able to push things that sometimes may spill out of the PB process. For example, we have, at Queens College, a lot of technology projects have been pushed, rather simply having those projects having funds allocated through PB itself, they’ll be brought into the technology feed committee and will be pushed that way. We’ve seen, in that case, a lot of spillover effects in terms of the preexisting advisory structures and how PB not only provides people with the confidence to step up into positions in those councils or committees but also brings in the information and all the different perspectives that are accumulated through PB into those advisory structures themselves, affecting change in a lot of different ways.

And that’s what we’ve seen, where projects have been, ultimately, taken up and have been funded well beyond the PB process itself at Queens College.

Adam Simpson: I’m really interested in what your views are, all of you really, on participatory processes at different layers beyond different governments, including universities, as you mentioned, Alex, or neighborhoods, and workplaces, et cetera. But maybe, in an effort to begin gesturing toward that, I think one of the really resonating things to me about participatory budgeting is that the community—and this is what I’ve heard from Shari and Loriane—is being treated explicitly as the actor rather than something that’s acted upon. Alex, I wanted to ask, in your research, have you seen what effect this level of gesturing toward direct democracy has on broader social participation and building a sense of community and community wellbeing?

Alexander Kolokotronis: Absolutely. I think, actually, this indirectly gets back into one of the earlier questions you asked, in terms of traditions that this all derives from or is related to. A big push in the first half of the 20th century, and is now, of course, creeping back in and is something that is often addressed by The Next System Project is a push towards workers’ control, towards cooperatives, and towards, really, trying to reshape the workplace from something that is seemingly separate, or it feels separate, from us to something that actually can constitute a community in its own right.

Things like participatory budgeting, I think, do the same thing for neighborhoods, and for any institution that’s using participatory, or has a participatory, budgeting process where people might feel quite apart and distinct from their neighborhood. That’s something you’ll experience, for example, in New York City, where I’m from, where people often get caught up in their daily commute, caught up in a lot of the different transformations of New York City, where, maybe, a lot of locally owned businesses have now terminated. A lot of the community and civic life has slowly been drained. And, of course, New York City has been a big battleground for things like this, when we think of, for example, Jane Jacobs in the ’60s and ’70s, and the fights around neighborhoods and maintaining a neighborhood vitality.

Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of. This is something I’ve seen time and again. But, in terms of my own research, I really look at participatory democracy within public schools. There are a few reasons for that. One, actually, connects to what Shari and Loriane were talking about. I view the adult-child relationship as the first iteration of the expert-layperson relationship. For me, when I think about these issues in terms of expertise, when it comes to architecture, when it comes to medicine, or when it comes to physical infrastructure, and we talk about the very particular distinctions between expertise in all those realms, I try to get at that thinking about, “Well, how is this expert-layperson relationship constructed from the very beginning and, particularly, within schools?”

Alexander Kolokotronis: I think one thing that we see in schools is that kids, and children, and teachers themselves, often experience the school as theirs, like “This is my school,” or “At my school, we’re doing this.” But, at the same time in their daily life, their daily experiences, they don’t necessarily feel the school is really theirs. Something like participatory democratic processes, including PB, really allow for people to not just take ownership of the school, and take ownership in the sense that what is theirs is actually really theirs, but that they are an agent, as you push forward, within that setting and can constitute themselves as a collective agent in the process.

I’ve seen that in my own research in the way in which students and teachers at more traditionally and, dare I say, authoritarian-structured schools have a far different sense of, and range of emotions, when it comes to their setting, than those, even if there are problems and difficulties at participatory democratic schools and trying to build a community around that, as well. I mean, that might be a long-winded way of getting at that, but I think we see that daily in the daily distinctions between different types of schools and how well incorporated people are, in terms of acting within them.

Shari Davis: Alex, you bring up something that’s so important to me and, as you were talking, I was just thinking about one thing. That is, a lot of what we talk about when it comes to democracy—and we haven’t talked about it or defined the problem—there is no secret that a lot of folks are not happy, or feel that government is not designed for the benefit of all. There’s been reasonable research on this, and I think that one part of the long-game strategy to addressing this bigger problem is to change government, and to change who’s in government, so that government looks like the people that we see in communities, so that they’re familiar with the issues, and so that there is more of a conversation, and there’s not this big divide between those individuals.

How do we prepare folks for roles? Not everyone necessarily wants to be, or is interested in being, an elected official. There are so many roles in government that serve community and I ask myself this question: What does lifelong civic engagement look like? What does onboarding look like? I was a young person who started working in government as a teenager and had nearly a 15-year career in local government, and that was unique. How do we not make that a unique story and make that an opportunity that folks can really attain, and lean into, and explore, especially as a young person? I think, to Alex’s point, introducing that in a school context is so important, and then can become foundational. And organizationally, at the Participatory Budget Project, that’s why we’re not only focusing our efforts on the county level, and citywide level, and regional, and larger scale PB, but we’re also really focusing on school, and school-district level PB, because it’s so important to empower our young leaders that are not future leaders but are leaders today, and need tools and support. [Participatory budgeting] is a way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open, want to be more involved.

Loriane Ngarambe: For us, we also had our Mayor’s Youth Advisory group that was heavily involved in this whole entire process. And the energy that they brought, and just the innovation that they brought to this process, it wouldn’t have been what it was without them. To just piggy-back off of when you’re trying to say, “How can we get communities that are more centrally engaged?” You’re right, it is foundational. It needs to start early on.

I know when we would go out into the community and tell people about what this PB process is, you have community members who almost feel siloed from the democratic process that’s going on. You have these people in position of power making decisions, but, to them, it’s like, “I got to figure things out for me. I don’t have time to worry about what they’re doing or how they’re doing it.” Because, in their minds, decisions that are being made are not being made with them in mind because, if that was the case, then these decisionmakers would be way more informed about what really matters for people living in poverty. They’d be more aware of what is it that community members are doing that works, that we can build from, what is it that community members are missing that we’re missing on our end, as well.

This process, a lot of it, was just relationship building and education, as well, too, really informing community members of the power that their voices have. The power that they have, as a collective, when they really stand up and say, “Hey, enough is enough,” or “This is what we need. This is what should be happening.” In RMAPI community engagement, it’s a huge cornerstone, a huge part of the work that we’re doing, because we understand poverty is not going to be reduced, eradicated, or any other word, if community is not a part of what’s going on.

Again, I keep saying this, PB is a way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open, want to be more involved; they want to know, “How can I, in my sphere of influence, do something that can make a difference? How can I be more involved? How can I be part of this greater democratic process? What does that look like? There just needs to be more education and strategies around making sure people get the information that they need. So, whatever they decide to do with that, at least, they have that information.

Adam Simpson: I want to turn from how we’re thinking about community engagement and broadening this scope of democracy, and think about how racial equity fits into that. Shari, I know I’ve seen you highlight, and you, as well, Loriane, in the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, a participatory budgeting process as a pathway to creating racial equity, and bring that, really, out of frame and into focus. Shari, could I start with you? Can you tell me about the impacts you’ve seen and how participatory budgeting, and participatory processes, in general, can really begin building pathways toward racial equity?

Shari Davis: Absolutely. Since 2009, the first instance of participatory budgeting in the US, we’ve seen over 400,000 people be empowered to decide how to invest over $300 million on community projects in over 30 cities across the United States and Canada. The participatory budgeting projects have played a lead role in most of these processes in US and Canada at some point. For us, ensuring equity, and racial equity, in particular, is a little bit different in every space. No two PB processes are the same, but, honestly, I can’t find two communities that are the same.

With that said, layering in the important elements of racial equity, it really goes back to design. That means, who is designing the process? What are the considerations that they’re making? And how are we ensuring that this process is really centered around people? People that are, you could say, often left out, but these end up being the folks that are easiest to ignore. With that said, I think a lot of our strategy around racial equity is having honest, open, and transparent conversations, and allowing folks to be on the same side of the table. A key element to that is excellent facilitation and training folks to be able to hold space, so that they can have some group agreements, and really be able to dig into some things.

I’m really interested to hear how this rolled out in Rochester, in practice, and I can give a few other examples.

Loriane Ngarambe: I know, when we were designing the process, there was a lot of time and emphasis around making sure that this made sense for our community. What does that look like? We wanted to be very intentional about reaching to, but also reaching past, the usual suspects, as I like to refer to them. Anytime there’s anything new that comes into Rochester, those engaged community members are always there. But we wanted to make sure that we were making an effort to reach behind them, to the people who are not engaged for whatever reason. When our steering committee first came together, there were a lot of honest, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations that needed to be had to say, “All right, so why is it that anytime something new comes to Rochester, the people who are going to benefit from it the most, are always the last to hear about it.” And when they hear about it, it’s usually when decisions are already made. There’s a plan already being rolled out, and they didn’t know anything about it, but what can we do, this time, that’s different?

Having those intentional conversations was really important. They did so much work in creating the guidebook and making sure that they were taking into consideration things that normally wouldn’t be taken into consideration. So having single mothers at the table, having young people at the table, was really important as well. Then having predominantly context experts and then having people, who I call the hybrids, context experts who also are content experts, so they can live in both of those worlds. They’re almost like culture brokers, so they know how to navigate both of those worlds, and being able to think practically like, “Okay, this is something that’s going to make sense,” or “This is something that’s not going to make sense,” and just encouraging those conversations. As staff persons who are helping facilitate this process, we wanted to make sure this was as community-led as possible.

We wanted to do everything on our end to mitigate barriers, to mitigate influencing what these guidelines or rules that they laid out look like, and just really making sure this was community-led, and community-owned. I think it made a huge difference for this process to be what it was.

Shari Davis: Loriane, I have a question for you. First, let me just commend you, because I think often folks get nervous when we talk about opening up transparent processes that center race and, really, that center tension. I think that there’s a way that tension can be healthy and tension can be toxic. But I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about your experience in moving this through government and getting to a “yes” and dealing with some of the strong hesitation around being so transparent. I think folks are often afraid that it’s going to be counterproductive and not productive. You’re telling a different story. I know a different story. How do we get there?

Loriane Ngarambe: Yeah. At RMAPI, we were lucky enough to be able to roll out this pilot PB process without having to do it through government. Our process wasn’t through a city government. We secured the funding, and we helped roll out the process. So, as a result, we didn’t necessarily have to deal with the red tape of government and the bureaucracy that lies everywhere. We were able to really make the process whatever is the community members who were helping design it be what it was. Then, also, at RMAPI we have our three guiding principles of addressing structural racism, being trauma informed, and community building. This is something that we infuse in everything that we’re doing.

Any project, any solution, any process, conversation that’s being had, these guiding principles are meant to be utilized as lenses in which we’re doing all of this, so that we’re not just sitting around sugarcoating what the real problem is. We’re trying to deal with the root causes of why we’re here, and what we’re going to do, and what’s going to make the most sense. Having these tense conversations goes with the territory of doing RMAPI work. So having the right people in the room, and being able to sit in those moments, was interesting, because it was almost the community members themselves guiding that process. When you were in moments of tension, moments of people not sure of how to receive what was being said, just sitting in that moment and facilitating: Where are people’s heads at? How do we move past? What about this do you not understand? Just allowing the space to really get through that, I think, is and was really important.

Shari Davis: Adam, the reason why I very much tagged Loriane in on this is because I mentioned no two PB processes are the same. But a big piece in addressing racial equity is grassroots leadership, and that usually looks like a strong community-based partner that is very much involved in this, because they have the connections, they’ve done a lot of this work, and they have a really good sense of the landscape. Oftentimes we’re talking about bringing these folks together, making these connections, getting them on the same side of the table. I can’t think of one PB process where this wasn’t the case, where there weren’t really strong relationships with community-based organizations that were centered on things like racial equity, housing inequality, gentrification, and really inviting those folks to be at the forefront who are doing some of this deep engagement.

Shari Davis: We need those community ambassadors, whether it is a youth council, an advisory board, or, really, those groups that have the deep relationships in communities with those folks that are often hard to reach, is a key element to centering this process and really using a lens of equity, racial equity, gender equity, and these other pieces. We have to be clear on the goals at the beginning of the process, otherwise they will not show up in the design.

Adam Simpson: Before moving on, I wanted to follow-up, Shari, on something you mentioned earlier about the first PB project in the United States, or in North America, maybe, you said, beginning in 2009, now, over 400,000 participants across the country. I get a sense that PB is spreading, and I wanted to ask, why do you think that is? Why do you think? Maybe, it’s something to do with this particular moment or maybe it’s something that the idea is just compelling to a lot of people. But why do you think PB is growing in this popularity, in this particular moment?

Shari Davis: Well, I think, to be honest and completely transparent, we’ve seen some slower growth of participatory budgeting in the United States compared to what we’ve seen in some other places. I think there are a few things to think about here. In Paris, France, for example, they do a PB process with over 100 million euros, a school-based process, a district-based process, and a city-wide process. The mayor has committed 5 percent of the budget to be decided on by folks that live in the City of Paris. So it can be that big. We’ve seen countrywide PB in Portugal. We’ve seen really big large scale PB processes in other places across the world. And, I think, we’re starting to see some real growth of participatory budgeting in the US since 2009. And, as I mentioned, the practice of participatory budgeting is different in every process, but it’s also a bit different in the United States, and it should be, because the context in the US is a bit different.

I do think that we are seeing a continued growth, and there is a moment here for us to think about what participatory democracy looks like overall, and really, for us, to think about what civic engagement looks like beyond just voting, and what building pathways to lifelong civic engagement are. And, I think, participatory budgeting is not the silver bullet or the only solution, but is one of some innovative solution that should definitely be considered in addressing this. And I think we’re in a moment where we’re seeing an uptick, and a real desire for things like PB.

Adam Simpson: Absolutely. I just want to follow-up on that. As a tool for building community power, and a sense of community cohesion, I’m hoping to hear from folks about how far they think these processes can go beyond budgeting, really, to local issues like zoning or economic development plans. The recent fiasco with Amazon HQ II in New York City comes to mind immediately. But being conscious that one of the criticisms I’ve heard about PB is sometimes that of the decisions that are put on the table by various local governments, et cetera, the amounts of money involved are relatively small, or the decisions involved are not as consequential as they could be.

Maybe we could start with Alex. Do you think that participatory budgeting, or participatory processes more generally, could be applied to bigger economic decisions whether we’re talking about the state level, or the regional level, or even the federal level, or is there really, truly a scale dilemma and this is much more appropriate for municipal processes? I’m just wanting to get a sense of the scale and what are the limitations or the potentialities.

Alexander Kolokotronis: This is a question I thought about for years. Recently, I started to think about the criticism of PB, and what that criticism says in the more underlying way. I think what the criticism of PB does is that it actually says something about the way we understand money. The way we understand money is really this very orthodox neoclassical economics-based outlook of seeing money as something really separate from us. If you take an Econ 101 class, the way it starts, and the thing that animates it all the way through, is the supply and demand curve, and that’s that.

Somewhere the consumer and the producer are supposed to meet at this optimal space. The whole point there is the service or good being exchanged. Money is external to that. Money is not seen as really a part of that. Money is just this separate thing that, at best, maybe helps facilitate that private meeting or exchange. This is the private money story, where we really start our barter. Now, and I think in recent years, what’s really taken off, especially with modern monetary theory, is another story that is more historically based, that it’s not that we were born as these isolated individuals who come to market and then separate; we’re really born into a community, and when we think of things that way, we understand provisioning far differently.

Let’s say I’m looking for a shoe and someone else is looking for a bottle of water. Instead of understanding it as, “Well, we so happen to have this double coincidence of loss, so I’ll give you want I need, and you’ll give me what I need.” It’s rather more like, “You have this, I owe you one.” Then that person, who I’m exchanging with, owes someone else one. Then we come to the question of, well, what is one? One of what? This is something covered really well in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. We see that this story is not really barter comes first, then money, and then credit. It’s really credit comes first and then money.

The reason why I’m taking this story and bringing it here is that when you think of it this way, money is really a part of, and really emblematic of, the community that we’re building. And money is not really the super-private isolated thing. Actually, money is public. And if we think of it that way, things like participatory budgeting are not simply this add-on thing. Think about participatory processes, like participatory budgeting, as actually really necessary to community control. They’re not simply a tool for someone to maybe pat themselves and look better. And they’re certainly not necessarily this thing that some on the left will criticize as things that are just about crumbs and don’t really get at bigger things.

In fact, I think a really big power of participatory budgeting is it gets at the very question of how we experience money. In our day-to-day lives, we experience money as something completely alien to us, whether it’s our boss who pays us, whether it’s a government that bureaucratically allocates funds, or whether it’s money in terms of the sense in which we don’t have it. What I think you experience with PB is actually really unique and almost a rupture in how we relate to each other through money. We start to see money as not this necessarily disgusting alien thing that’s above us and controls us, or that we lack control in relation to. I mean, you can think of when someone might feel quite ashamed of spending money. I mean, all these dynamics. All of these are reversed or upended, when we do something like PB, where people start to relate to each other through, “Well, how are we going to allocate funds?” Participatory budgeting is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale.

I think PB is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale. As Shari was referring to, there are some national initiatives, such as in Portugal, with national PB process there, and there have been statewide PB processes, such as in Ontario, Canada, or in Rio de Consul, Brazil. So there have been some initiatives to try and get at this, and it’s really about, I think, getting at the mechanics. But PB is, I think, connecting very much with modern monetary theory, and I don’t think it’s absolutely coincidental that we’re seeing these things dovetail, in terms of their rise in the current political moment, that we’re fundamentally re-understanding what money means, or can mean, to us, and that it neither has to be this thing that is a fetish, as Marxists, might frame it, as the only way money can exist, nor does it have to be a thing where it’s something that we just have to, as a result of being a fetish, feel ashamed of even touching. Rather, it’s something we have to embrace and redesign to have an experience of something far more shared and something that will facilitate the provisioning of community-building, of individual fulfillment, such as you see in the project development phase, where people are individually really cultivating their own projects. These are all things that PB points the way to and, I think, it’s something we have to add more to.

Adam Simpson: We’re getting really close to time, so probably this is my final question. Given what Alex just said, I want to ask you, Loriane, the outcomes of the antipoverty initiative that you were involved in, in the Rochester, Monroe area. The outcomes touched housing, they touch food scarcity, so many different things. And the way Alex was talking about, they do have to do with money, but also these are also very much policy issues. I wanted to know, specifically, what’s your thinking on this? What are the limits of participatory budgeting from just your recent experience of participatory processes? Do you think that it’s possible to engage in the way that you’ve been engaging, in the Rochester community, to make these broader decisions about the local area, and the different bigger economic decisions more broadly?

Loriane Ngarambe: Right. At the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, our goal here is to bring system change. So, there’s a lot of information gathering that is required. There’s a lot of understanding of what is a problem; what’s been done that wasn’t working, that’s working; What are some new strategies; what are some new solutions. I think, more than anything, what the PB process does, as I keep saying, is brings community into this conversation and, now, we have to figure out a way to keep community as part of these conversations and part of this solution-creation. But then, also, it sheds light on what the real problems are. It sheds light on not just the problems, but what some of the assets are within our communities that are so often overlooked. Because, when you’re talking about poverty, you come at it from such a deficit point of view and often overlook just how people are making ends meet, how people are living day-to-day with the dire circumstances that they’re living in.

When you’re talking about systems-level change, when you’re talking about policy-level change, all those conversations require evidence, and PB, for us at least, I would say has been a great tool, a great process to bring to light what evidence exists. Because it’s really hard to look at over 2,600 people who voted on the projects that won, because these are things that they feel are important and should be highlighted, and should be regarded as conversation builders around how to really support individuals living in poverty. I think it just provides the evidence to be able to change policies and change systems in a way that, if this was just a closed-door process, when just policy makers stand on policy gains, it wouldn’t be as effective, and it wouldn’t be able to get to the core of what it is that people really actually need to live self-sufficient, full, and complete lives.

Adam Simpson: I know I said that was probably my final question, but I’m going to kick this to Shari, if you don’t mind. I just wanted to get your perspective, just a closing comment given what was just said by Alex and Loriane, on your view of participatory budgeting in the context of system change.

Shari Davis: I think Alex and Loriane raised some really wonderful points. One of them that’s sticking with me is, when we’re talking about participatory budgeting, we’re not talking about blowing up or highlighting only problems. We’re talking about thinking through solutions. That includes really doubling down on the assets that exist in place, building them out, understanding what to duplicate and invest in. Participatory budgeting is about understanding community spending priorities, government spending priorities, and having an opportunity to reconcile them. This is about an opportunity to lift up the lid, invite folks in, and do things better. Ultimately, we’re talking about building more sustainable, effective, and responsible communities. This truly is an opportunity for us to maximize the finite resources that we have to serve folks the best way that we can. This is one strategy of many to do exactly that.

In terms of broader systems change, participatory budgeting, when adopted, marks a real change in the way that folks do business, a real change in the way that government operates. For me, and for many folks, this is a beginning of a larger participatory democratic wave that, I hope, really is fueled and ignited, so that we can see things like participatory budgeting really take hold and become the way that we do business.

Adam Simpson: I can’t thank you all enough for joining me today to talk about participatory budgeting, and all of your work around it. Just a final thank you to Shari Davis, Alexander Kolokotronis, and Loriane Ngarambe. Thank you all for joining me today on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure.

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In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published a revolutionary white paper that described a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would later become Bitcoin. In the decade since the launch of the digital currency, the nascent blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has been heralded as having the same radical potential as the printing press or the Internet, in particular presenting extraordinary challenges to traditional banking. Yet the paper contains no reference to existing political ideas, monetary or economic knowledge. Why?

THE WHITE PAPER, with an introduction by James Bridle, situates Bitcoin within an obscure historical movement of decentralisation, powered by the ideologies of encryption, showing how blockchain is part of a wider project to redraw the maps of political possibility. Crypto-economist Jaya Klara Brekke’s guide analyses Nakamoto’s canonical text as the Rosetta Stone that reveals the far-reaching implications of decentralisation.

In this discussion held at Foyles on 4 February 2019, Jaya sits down with Ben Vickers and Paul Mason to discuss how Nakamoto’s White Paper can serve as a compass for the rapidly shifting terrain of contemporary techno-politics.

Visit Ignota Books for more information about THE WHITE PAPER.

The post Podcast of the Day: The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto – Jaya Klara Brekke, Ben Vickers and Paul Mason in conversation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ela and Peter started off the conversation by introducing two showcases, RChain Europe cooperative and Resonate Music streaming collective, two technology enterprises that are organized as cooperatives. In their introduction, they especially highlighted the challenges of collectively governing these projects and then asked for more people to join. Among the people that responded were Kei Kreutler of Gnosis, Felix Weth, co-founder of Fairmondo, Sven Laepple and Gleb Dudka from Astratum, Stacco Troncoso from Guerilla Translation and P2P Foundation, and
Anton Wundrak from DNAmerch.

Republished from Revision.io

The post Revision 18 – Ela Kagel: Blockchain, Cooperatives and Alt-Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About This Episode

In 2010, The American Bar Association named Janelle Orsi a Legal Rebel, for being an attorney who is remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation. We agree- Janelle is a rebel with a cause, transforming the way we think about leadership in this shifting economy. From participatory leadership to salary transparency, Janelle is leading by example to expand our definition of leadership. In this episode, Janelle shares examples of how her organization’s leadership practices create opportunities for every level of staff to be engaged in contributing to the organization.

About Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Janelle has also worked in private law practice at the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, focusing on sharing economy law since 2008. Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.

Janelle’s cartoons include Awkward Conversations with Babies, The Next Sharing Economy, Economy Sandwich, Share Spray, The Beatles Economy, The Legal Roots of Resilience, Housing for an Economically Sustainable Future, Transactional Law Practice for a Sharing Economy, Governance is Life, and Citylicious.

Janelle is an advocate for a more open, inclusive, and accessible legal profession, and you can see her 10-minute presentation on transforming the legal profession here. Janelle supervises two legal apprentices — co-workers who are becoming lawyers without going to law school. Janelle and her apprentices are blogging about the process at LikeLincoln.org. 

In 2014, Janelle was selected to be an Ashoka Fellow, joining a robust cohort of social entrepreneurs who are recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society.  In 2010, Janelle was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, Janelle was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals “whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.”

In her words…

“I’ve come to realize, if we cultivate the right conditions, we can end up with communities and organizations where, a lot of people, or even all the people, feel that they have power and agency to just shape the world around them.” “I have a lot of hope and optimism for what I think we can do in this world. I think a lot of my role as a leader has just been to help impart that same enthusiasm. I do that. I really hone my skills as a communicator and I do a lot of speaking, I draw a lot of cartoons, I do a lot of writing in ways that I hope inspire other people. What ends up happening is that when other people are inspired, they’re highly intrinsically motivated to get involved. That’s my form of leadership, it’s spurring a lot of voluntary and intrinsically motivated participation in this work as opposed to coercive. I almost never want somebody to do something if they don’t feel intrinsically motivated to do it. For me, my style is to create the vision and communicate it in a way that people are going to want to and feel really driven to get involved in.” “I think we need to start young and just get everybody used to having more power in agency. I think most people walk around their cities or their neighborhoods and they watch things happen. They see, ‘Oh, that building got bought up by a big developer,’ or, ‘That building’s being torn down.’ They watch things happen and it just sort of washes over us, but we don’t always necessarily feel like we have the power or opportunity to change things or shape the world around us. To the extent that we can start practicing that in small ways and creating opportunities for people everywhere to practicing that in small ways, it’ll, I think, ultimately lead to people doing it in bigger ways and having a bigger impact.” “Sometimes I hear people say, ‘there are too many nonprofits,’ or ‘there’s too much redundancy.’ You know, we don’t need more nonprofits, but in a way, I think that we do, because every organization or every program within an organization is a space in which people are able to have a lot of agency and power and to take things on and to achieve a lot. And the degree of social change that we need, if we really are gonna make it through this next 10 years, we have the UN predicting that 2030 is the year in which basically climate change is gonna be irreversible. These are huge problems to take on and of course, the inequality’s been getting worse. Racism’s been getting worse. We’re on a trajectory where things are getting worse, and so to really turn things around, it’s gonna take a lot. A lot of people really focusing on making that change.” “I think the nonprofit sector will grow and that it should grow and that there should be a diversity of organizations working in the same sector. A lot of people say, ‘don’t just duplicate efforts’. But I think we should duplicate efforts. We need a lot of people doing the same kind of work, but doing it in their unique communities, in their unique ways, trying innovative things. And so I think a plurality and diversity and multiplicity of nonprofits emerging in coming years I think will be important. And I think the highly participatory leadership structure is gonna be really critical to that in order to create that leaderful society.” “I just think the passion and the dedication and the intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers is perhaps the most valuable resource that we have for social change. That it’s the workers themselves and the drive and the motivation that we bring. That’s what’s really going to make change. And then in order to tap into that drive and into that motivation, we have to be thinking about our organizational structures and our organizational culture. So it could really come down to that. Maybe this is my way of saying that nonprofits that aren’t really thinking deeply about their structure and their culture right now are missing an opportunity to tap into that incredibly valuable resource.” 

Questions Answered on this Episode

• What is shareable leadership?
• Why do you think it is beneficial in the nonprofit sector?
• What issues or opportunities do you see in traditional structures of leadership?
• Cooperatives and shared economy models are seeing a surge in popularity. In many ways, cooperatives, in particular, are creating new economic opportunities for people who may have been previously counted out. How do we invest in those leaders and groups to prepare them as their organizations grow?
• How would you describe your leadership style?
• What has been the overall response to the concept of shareable leadership?
• Are there specific conditions under which the model will thrive or fail?
• What response does “shareable leadership” get from funders? Have they embraced the concept?
• Our current political climate has birthed leaders that haven’t followed the typical trajectory but felt the need to lead in order to create something better. Do you have any predictions about leadership structures and what we may see in the next 5 or 10 years?

The post Janelle Orsi on transforming the way we think about leadership appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What is the definition of capitalism? What is the history of the word “capitalism”? Who were the Boston Anarchists? What is “vulgar libertarianism”? Are there alternative social structures that we do not acknowledge because we are stubborn and stuck in our ways? Is post-capitalism occurring?

Further Reading:

Center for a Stateless Society website

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, by Kevin Carson

Reposted from Libertarianism.org. Click here to see the original post (includes a transcript)

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