30th September 2009
Just over two minutes, done in Barcelona in April this year:
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Archive for September, 2009
Book of the Week (2): Case studies of networked politics
30th September 2009
Book: Transforming Power: From The Personal To The Political. by Judy Rebick. Penguin Canada, 2009
In this second and last installment on Judy Rebick’s book, we feature excerpts from chapter 13, entitled: “Is the Party Over?”
Do the new movements point to alternatives to traditional political party organizing?
Judy Rebick:
1. Spain
“One of the most interesting electoral experiences happened recently in Spain, where a right-wing government’s attempts to pin the Madrid subway bombings on ETA (a nationalist group in the Basque country) stimulated a massive response from a network of grassroots organizations that basically threw the government out of office. In a poll three days before the election in March 2004, the right-wing Popular Party had a majority. On March 11, thirteen bombs exploded on three suburban trains. Two hundred people were killed and fourteen hundred injured. Activists worried that if it were re-elected, the government would use the bombing as an excuse to repress all radical opposition—as they saw happen in the United States after September 11. The next day the government called a demonstration against terrorism that brought seven million people out into the streets. But instead of supporting the government, the protestors bore banners reading “Who did it? We want to know.” The ETA denied responsibility, but the government kept insisting.
That day, the networks that had mobilized against the war in Iraq issued a call for cacerolazos, or pot banging demonstrations, for Saturday, March 13, under the slogans “The dead are ours. The wars are yours!,” “PP [Popular Party] murders,” “Franco’s sons,” “No to government disinformation.” The cacerolazos were built almost entirely through cell-phone messaging. For every text message received, ten or twenty were sent out. These went beyond the usual activist communications to their families, workplaces, and places of study. One of the activists, Mayo Fuster Morell, reported in the online Mute Magazine: “Everywhere the bleep of SMS messages announced the latest news that spread from mouth to mouth through the crowd.… No flags, parties. Leaders, organizers, or orders. Participation is horizontal, spontaneous, and massive. A video is aired in which a group close to Al Qaeda claims responsibility for the attack, but none of the official media reports it.”
Realizing it was in trouble, the government tried to get the Electoral Council to delay the election, claiming that the demonstrations were illegally organized by the Socialist Party. The Electoral Council refused, and the result was a massive turnout in the election and the defeat of the Popular Party. “They now know,” wrote Mayo, “that, in forty-eight hours, a people can overturn any government.”
Young people with little interest in electing the Socialist Party just decided that it was critically important to defeat the PP and took advantage of a highly mobilized population and a terrible error on the part of the government to defeat them. A large number of youth also mobilized in France during the last election, although they did not manage to defeat the Right. And, of course, an even greater number of young people are mobilizing through the Obama campaign in the U.S. elections. In all these cases, the method of participation in the election campaign is quite different than we have seen before—a different way of doing politics.
2. Canada
At the beginning of the last election in Canada, Jack Layton and Stephen Harper refused to accept the participation of Green Party leader Elizabeth May in the televised leaders’ debate, even though her party was running about 10 percent in the polls and, through recruiting a sitting independent, had an MP. What followed was no less than a national cross-partisan uprising, demanding that she be included. Layton backed down after it became clear the issue was not going away, and then Harper backed down, and May was included. This kind of citizen activism, which is greatly facilitated by the Web, may in fact be a new way to force changes on political parties. In the Canadian election, climate change groups posted sophisticated websites suggesting strategic voting (for the progressive party most likely to win) in swing ridings. It is difficult to say if this had a major impact on the vote, but it was a major part of discussion during the elections. There was also a groundswell of support for some kind of coalition among centre-left and left-wing parties to stop a very right-wing Conservative government. If the New Politics Initiative had succeeded and the Greens and NDP had merged, there might have been an electoral breakthrough for the Left in an election in which the Liberals were particularly weak and the majority of electorate were opposed to the ruling Conservatives. In Canada’s undemocratic first past the post system, the Conservatives won a substantial minority even though more than two-thirds of the electorate voted against them.
3. Bolivia
IN BOLIVIA, the state is very weak because decades of opposition by social movements have succeeded in bringing down government after government. It was this dead end that convinced the indigenous movements that they needed their own political instrument. In some ways it is easier for the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism, led by Evo Morales) to make dramatic changes, but still those changes are being stymied, either by pre-existing laws or by the opposition of the Right.
Created as a political instrument of the social movements, the MAS is not a political party like the others. Candidates are selected in mass assemblies of all those involved in indigenous social organizations. Anyone who is active in one of these social organizations is automatically a member of the MAS. There is tremendous polarization, both in the Congress and the Constituent Assembly, because the changes being proposed involve nothing less than re-founding the country on a new—in Evo Morales’s words—“anti-neo-liberal, anti-colonial basis.” So the minority that benefits from the status quo is fighting like hell to keep their power, which makes consensus-building exceedingly hard outside the MAS itself. Nevertheless, Morales has been attempting to use these methods to find compromise and to solve some seemingly unmanageable problems.
While it is hard to imagine a political situation like the one in Bolivia developing in an advanced capitalist country, we can learn some lessons from this experience and from that of Venezuela. The first is that change will not happen only from taking state power. Power is something that has to be built. As Hilary Wainwright says in an article on rethinking political parties: “In general terms one can say that the goal must move from winning the power to govern for the people paternalistically to being a struggle in collaboration with organized citizens to change political institutions from sources of domination to resources for transformation.”
4. Others
One example of how this could happen is a citizen’s group called the Guelph Civic League in the small Ontario city of Guelph that tapped into just this approach before the last municipal election. Instead of taking the usual citizens’ watchdog role, they decided to ask their neighbours what they valued in their city. Starting with a survey of ten thousand citizens, they developed a list of five values that the people of Guelph supported. They then circulated those values in brochures, saying, “This is what your neighbours think.” In the summer leading up to the election, they hired a handful of students to go door-to-door discussing those values. They found people who were willing to run on these values, and let their neighbours know who they were. These candidates won nine out of ten seats on the city council, and they increased voter turnout from 30 percent to 50 percent. It was a simple switch. Instead of telling voters what the candidate thought, it asked voters what they thought and then found candidates who reflected that thinking. Today the Civic League continues its work by reporting back to voters about how their representatives have supported the values that were adopted. In addition, they are working with other municipal activists to share ideas and develop new strategies for engaging residents in civic government at the municipal level. There are no political parties in Ontario operating at the municipal level, which means citizen groups can relate more directly with politicians, thus avoiding the organizational structure of the party.
As we discussed in Chapter 8, Barack Obama is involving individuals in his campaign in an unprecedented, decentralized, networked manner, There is already discussion about how to to make sure that Obama is accountable to them. It will be up to the myriad of social movements in the United States to keep up the pressure on Obama, perhaps accessing this network, to construct the kind of inclusive, democratic, and compassionate society he is talking about in the campaign.
Using the extraordinarily democratic moment of the primary campaign to mobilize millions of people, Obama actually used the impact of these new voters to pressure the party brass to support him, defeating Hillary Clinton in one of the most dramatic examples of grassroots democracy we have seen in electoral politics. It is precisely this kind of dynamic that Lula’s foreign affairs adviser Marco Aurelio Garcia is talking about. For a party to stay true to its vision and resist the numerous pressures imposed on it by the electoral system and capital, it needs pressure from outside that system. For years, I thought that social movements could provide that pressure, and certainly, where they are strong enough—as with the landless movement (MST) in Brazil or the women’s movement at certain points in Canadian politics—that works, but can we structure a participatory system that keeps that pressure on all the time? Spontaneous online discussions throughout the Canadian election had an impact on the media and the politicians, and while it is hard to argue that these discussions shaped the campaign, they certainly influenced it. On the other hand, the focus on the leader has never been greater and the inability of electoral politics to solve anything has never been clearer. The Wall Street collapse fell in the middle of the Canadian and U.S. elections. If elections worked as the democratic moment they should be, there would have been a thoroughgoing and deep discussion of the alternative solutions to the crisis. Instead in Canada, the major discussion was about whether the government should react to the crisis at all, and in the United States, there was more focus on Joe the Plumber, a voter who was critical of Obama’s tax policy, than there was on alternative visions for solving the economic crisis.
The gap between horizontal networked politics and the North American elections campaigns of 2008 seems like a chasm. Yet the Obama campaign continued to use networking to mobilize new voters and there seemed to be more online citizen organizing in Canada than ever before. In a nationally televised speech before the US election, Barack Obama promised to involve Americans in their democracy again. Of course he has already done that not only through unprecedented voter turnout but through the masses of people engaged in the election itself. How he will do that once he is elected remains to be seen.
The philosophy behind networked politics suggests that the very idea of representation is problematic. Once again I turn to the discussions at the networked politics seminar in Berlin in 2007. At the end of the three-day seminar we tried to summarize what was discussed. Some of the key questions were how parties that aspire to use a horizontal logic can engage with institutions based on a representative one. We noted that representatives are almost always absorbed by the institution to which they are elected or appointed, and rarely continue to be accountable to those who elected them. Ideas that were floated included sharing the role of representative so that no one person accumulates personal power. One example of this is the role of the Zapatista’s Marcos. Because he is masked and therefore anonymous, different people can play the role of Marcos. It is hard to imagine how this tactic could work in the media-driven politics of the Global North, but the idea of rotating representatives or using people who are not professional politicians to represent their communities for a shorter period of time, as in the participatory budget, might work. The problem here is the need for expertise to deal with the institutions of power effectively. It is a difficult problem that requires a lot more practice and study.
Another tough question we discussed was how social movements interconnect with institutions of power without being absorbed or co-opted by them. One strategy, as discussed earlier, is to create alternative self-governing structures next to the hierarchical representative ones and, over time, the more effective, more democratic methods of governance will win out. Ideally, it should work, but in practice power reproduces itself, and it is rare for any institution or even organization to change its culture without a major battle or a collapse.
A more realistic approach was suggested in the final report to the Berlin group:
- Another way of thinking about it is related to a viral logic, to an idea of exploding this radical distinction between us and them. Then the question is how can this logic of horizontal networking migrate into the logic of state institutions themselves? This is a fundamental but unexplored question which points away from the either/or of the past: either protesting against the state or making demands on it; either taking over the state or creating an alternative. For example, what would a political party look like if it wasn’t based on a hierarchical list of candidates, or a hierarchical electoral mechanism?
We have more questions than answers when it comes to political parties, but certainly some of the new ways of organizing at the community and social-movement levels that are discussed in this book can give us some creative ideas about how this might happen. Who would have predicted the more than 100 percent increase in voter turnout in the 2008 U.S. primaries? Who would have thought that a campaign could raise more money in small donations online than from all the powerful political action committees that run U.S. politics? We make the road by walking, and the road to political power that will benefit the majority of people is, like every other journey, begun with the first steps.
All of the elements of the movements we have been looking at in these pages will be necessary to transform the current political system. Like every other progressive social change in history, it starts with ordinary people longing for change, and then coming together to imagine it and work for it. And in working for it , learning with honesty and courage from the experiences – including the defeats and difficulties – of those who have done the same. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but as you have read in these pages, I am far from the only one.”
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Distributed Manufacturing (1): the importance of modularity
30th September 2009
The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production. The “physical production sphere” itself has become far less capital-intensive. If the digital revolution has caused an implosion in the physical capital outlays required for the information industries, the revolution in desktop production tools promises an analogous effect almost as great on many kinds of manufacturing. The radical reduction in the cost of machinery required for many kinds of manufacturing has eroded Stallman’s distinction between “free speech” and “free beer.”
Clearly, the emergence of cheap desktop technology for custom machining parts in small batches will greatly lower the overall capital outlays needed for networked physical production of light and medium consumer goods.
The above comes from a great 38-page overview essay by Kevin Carson where he reviews current trends to more distributed manufacturing, often based on open source design, as well as a new type of machinery.
* Essay: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. Kevin Carson. C4SS, 2009
In this excerpt, go to the original for the excellently sourced citations, Kevin discusses the importance of modularity.
Kevin Carson:
“Modular design enables a peer network to break a physical manufacturing project down into discrete sub-projects, with many of the individual modules perhaps serving as components in more than one larger appliance.
According to Christian Siefkes,
- Products that are modular, that can be broken down into smaller modules or components which can be produced independently before being assembled into a whole, fit better into the peer mode of production than complex, convoluted products, since they make the tasks to be handled by a peer project more manageable. Projects can build upon modules produced by others and they can set as their own (initial) goal the production of a specific module, especially if components can be used stand-alone as well as in combination. The Unix philosophy of providing lots of small specialized tools that can be combined in versatile ways is probably the oldest expression in software of this modular style. The stronger emphasis on modularity is another phenomenon that follows from the differences between market production and peer production. Market producers have to prevent their competitors from copying or integrating their products and methods of production so as not to lose their competitive advantage. In the peer mode, re-use by others is good and should be encouraged, since it increases your reputation and the likelihood of others giving something back to you…. Modularity not only facilitates decentralized innovation, but should also help to increase the longevity of products and components. Capitalism has developed a throw-away culture where things are often discarded when they break (instead of being repaired), or when one aspect of them is no longer up-to-date or in fashion. In a peer economy, the tendency in such cases will be to replace just a single component instead of the whole product, since this will generally be the most labor-efficient option (compared to getting a new product, but also to manually repairing the old one).
Siefkes is wrong only in referring to producers under the existing corporate system as “market producers,” since absent “intellectual property” as a legal bulwark to proprietary design, the market incentive would be toward designing products that were interoperable with other platforms, and toward competition in the design of accessories and replacement parts tailored to other companies’ platforms. And given the absence of legal barriers to the production of such interoperable accessories, the market incentive would be to designing platforms as broadly interoperable as possible.
This process of modularization is already being promoted within corporate capitalism, although the present system is struggling mightily—and unsuccessfully—to keep itself from being torn apart by the resulting increase in productive forces.
As Eric Hunting argues, the high costs of technical innovation, the difficulty of capturing value from it, and the mass customization or long tail market, taken together, create pressures for common platforms that can be easily customized between products, and for modularization of components that can be used for a wide variety of products.
And Hunting points out, as we already saw in regard to flexible manufacturing networks in C4SS Paper No. 4, that the predominant “outsource everything” and “contract manufacturing” model increasingly renders corporate hubs obsolete, and makes it possible for contractees to circumvent the previous corporate principals and undertake independent production on their own account.
- Industrial ecologies are precipitated by situations where traditional industrial age product development models fail in the face of very high technology development overheads or very high demassification in design driven by desire for personalization/customization producing Long Tail market phenomenon [sic]. A solution to these dilemmas is modularization around common architectural platforms in order to compartmentalize and distribute development cost risks, the result being ‘ecologies’ of many small companies independently and competitively developing intercompatible parts for common product platforms —such as the IBM PC. The more vertical the market profile for a product the more this trend penetrates toward production on an individual level due [to] high product sophistication coupled to smaller volumes…. Competitive contracting regulations in the defense industry (when they’re actually respected…) tend to, ironically, turn many kinds of military hardware into open platforms by default, offering small businesses a potential to compete with larger companies where production volumes aren’t all that large to begin with. Consequently, today we have a situation where key components of some military vehicles and aircraft are produced on a garage-shop production level by companies with fewer than a dozen employees. All this represents an intermediate level of industrial demassification that is underway today and not necessarily dependent upon open source technology or peer-to-peer activity but which creates a fertile ground for that in the immediate future and drives the complementary trend in the miniaturization of machine tools.
In other words, the further production cost falls relative to the costs of design, the greater the economic incentive to modular design as a way of defraying design costs over as many products as possible.
Hunting added, in an email to the Open Manufacturing list, that this process—
- “the modularization of product design, which results in the replacement of designs by platforms and the competitive commoditization of their components”— is the reason why computers, based on platforms for modular commodity components, have evolved so rapidly compared to every other kind of industrial product and why the single-most advanced device the human race has ever produced is now something most anyone can afford and which a child can assemble in minutes from parts sourced around the world.
Michel Bauwens, in commenting on Hunting’s remarks, notes among the “underlying trends… supporting the emergence of peer production in the physical world,” the ‘distribution’ of production capacity, i.e. lower capital requirements and modularisation making possible more decentralized and localized production, which may eventually be realized through the free selfaggregation of producers.
Modular design is an example of stigmergic coordination. As defined in the Wikipedia entry, stigmergy is
- a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.
The development of the platform is a self-contained and entirely self-directed action by an individual or a peer design group. Subsequent modules are developed with reference to the platform, but the design of each module is likewise entirely independent and self-directed; no coordination with the platform developer or the developers of other modules takes place. The effect is to break design down into numerous manageable units.”
Posted in P2P Manufacturing | 1 Comment »
From pioneering Australia: E-participatory budgetting
29th September 2009
Via Tiago Peixoto at TechPresident:
“The government of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the economic downturn and stimulate local economies, has allocated the equivalent of US$30 million to the Community Building Partnership program. Aiming to support local jobs, stimulate growth and improve community facilities, the program allocates between US$260,000 and US$ 350,000 to each of the 93 NSW electoral districts. Under the program, community groups are eligible to electronically submit applications for funding to support local infrastructure and jobs in the district. Once applicants meet the requirements, MPs prioritize which projects are to receive funding.
However, the real novelty comes from the electoral district of Heathcote, where MP Paul McLeay is inviting the district’s citizens to decide through the Internet on the allocation of the funds that the government has made available. On the rather 2.0 MP’s website, the legislator uses video to explain the context of the initiative and invite citizens to prioritize the eligible proposals formulated by local community organizations.
From October 6th, citizens will be able to cast five votes each – with a maximum of 3 votes per project – in order to decide which causes are the most deserving of existing funds. According to a local article on the initiative, a system has been deployed to ensure that only residents of the district vote and to keep the initiative from being defrauded (e.g. multiple voting). In this respect, voting is auditable and, apparently in the same way as Belo Horizonte’s e-participatory budgeting system, votes are only considered valid by the system if the information provided is accurate and compatible with that contained in the electoral roll.
In order to alleviate the effects of the digital divide, the initiative counts on the support of local libraries that have made some of their computers available for citizens to access the initiative’s website. Last, but not least, the website will provide tools for organizations and supporters to lead their online canvassing, such as newsletters and website widgets.”
Posted in P2P Business Models, P2P Commons, P2P Governance, P2P Politics, P2P Public Policy, Peer Production | No Comments »
Social networking as a p2p endeavor
29th September 2009
Social networking is at a crossroads. The choice is between the ease of use and ubiquity of commercial services such as myspace, facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter, and the desire to use a tool for social interactions that is not subject to the decisions of an anonymous board of directors of some for-profit company, to being sold to the highest bidder or to just simply ceasing to operate.
While the commercial providers of networking space are doing everything to make life easy and to make interaction fun and interesting, there are drawbacks that we need to consider.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, in his article
Is a Perfect Storm Forming for Distributed Social Networking?
brings some of those issues to our attention.
Twitter went down again today, possibly for the second time in two weeks because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A swarm of zombified computers, distributed all around the world, is hitting Twitter’s centralized infrastructure over and over again until it can’t stay up.
If we all had a little piece of our microblogging network on our own servers and they spoke to each other, that couldn’t happen.
- – -
Social activity stream discussion network FriendFeed announced that it was selling itself to Facebook yesterday and many of its users were very upset. The acquisition is likely to change Facebook in interesting ways (FriendFeed’s creators were the inventors of GMail and Google Maps) but FriendFeed itself was important to its users.
The feeling of betrayal that comes from a transaction like this makes it hard to trust a hosted social networking company again.
- – -
The alternative would be, according to Kirkpatrick, “a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools”. Something that can run on our own computers, giving us the same functionality that today’s best hosted services provide, except it should be open source and not subject to anyone’s whim or control.
This would appear to be a perfect time for building a block-buster open source p2p social networking tool and I am sure efforts are underway.
Please share any insights on what is happening along these lines out there.
Posted in P2P Development, P2P Technology | No Comments »
The cooptation of user participation
29th September 2009
Article: Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. By José Van Dijck and David Nieborg.
We mentioned this essay before, which is a critique of a number of business authors, such as Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics, Charles Leadbeater and others, for failing to see the cooptation strategies of business and the antagonistic interests between proprietary platforms and user communities.
Here are some excerpted paragraphs outlining some of the arguments of the essay.
José Van Dijck and David Nieborg:
1.
“In their respective books Wikinomics and We-Think, Tapscott, Williams and Leadbeater usher their readers into a brave new world of web-based economics, where cultural values such as participation, collectivism, and creativity are the mantras. These mantras not only inform the new business models of the digital economy, but their declared cultural roots suggest an ideological paradigm shift that is about to restructure post-industrial societies and post-service economies. As the cover of Wikinomics illustrates, initiatives like YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Second Life, Linux, InnoCentive and even the Human Genome Project are all grounded in the same basic principle: they are created by crowds of (mostly) anonymous users who define their own informational, expressive and communicational needs, a process touted as “mass creativity” or “peer production.” As a result, the conventional hierarchical business model of producer-consumer is rapidly replaced by the so-called “co-creation” model, a term frequently surfacing in business literature (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b). Mass creativity, peer-production and co-creation apparently warrant the erasure of the distinction between collective (non-market, public) and commercial (market, private) modes of production, as well as between producers and consumers; the terms also cleverly combine capital intensive profit-oriented industrial production with labour intensive, non-profit-oriented peer production. In this article, we will take Wikinomics and We-Think as exemplifying a currently popular wave of business and management books that favour terms like collectivism, participation and creativity to argue its benefits for Web 2.0 business and production models. A decade of experimenting with e-business models appears to have resulted in a smooth integration of communal modes of production into the largely commoditized infrastructure of the Internet.
Academics commonly look upon these kind of manifestoes as pamphlets written by business gurus trumpeting the victory of “dot.communism” over late capitalism. Indeed, Tapscott and Williams, like many of their colleagues, are first and foremost consultants who are in the business of selling their high-priced advice to (internet) companies. And yet, what is interesting in their manifestoes is the undeniable urge to prophesy an ideology of cultural collectivism as the gateway to economic cornucopia. Underneath the rhetoric of these manifestoes lies an intriguing complex of thought that has combined roots in hardcore business economics and in the socio-political idealism of the 1960s counterculture—a hybrid discourse that, as of late, has become increasingly popular in theories of the Web 2.0. (O’Reilly, 2005).
But how does the integration of grassroots collectivism into mainstream business take place?
By analyzing a sample of Web 2.0 business manifestoes, we want to uncover the assumptions underpinning these popular discourses—implied conjectures about creativity and consumption, producers and users, commerce and commons. As we will argue, these conjectures not only buttress the logic of economic and business discourse beyond these manifestoes, but they can also be found in academic cultural theory books promoting convergence and participatory culture.”
2.
“Manifestoes like We Think and Wikinomics show a distinctive tendency to push hybrid concepts that merge consumer interests with producer interests. Notions such as “prosumer” have permeated management-speak ever since “experience” became the magic word to tout customer engagement (Toffler, 1980; Pine and Gilmore, 1999). Yet the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, translating networked information into mass creativity, spurs the full integration of “produsage” into common parlance (Bruns, 2007; 2008). Tapscott and Williams (2006: 150) call attention to how industries stand to profit from the new consumer activism: “You can participate in the economy as an equal, co-creating value with your peers and favourite companies to meet your very personal needs, to engage in fulfilling communities, to change the world, or just to have fun! Prosumption comes full circle!” Produsage and prosumption are presented as manifestations of creative emancipation. As Leadbeater (2007: 6) argues: “Consumers turn out to be producers. Demand breeds its own supply. Leisure becomes a form of work. A huge amount of creative work is done in spite, or perhaps because, of people not being paid.” The active involvement of the people-formerly-known-as-customers and the formation of communities are both celebrated as the best thing since the establishment of worker’s comp and a woman’s right to vote—the long awaited emancipation of the digital citizen who wants to create her own products and be in charge of her own distribution.
Wikinomics and We-Think-authors proclaim the marriage of former foes production and consumption and, consequently, of for-profit and non-profit platforms; the result of this marriage’s consummation is the birth of a new business model called “co-creation”. However, the baby turns out to be conjoined twins. In defining the term, management gurus carefully avoid the language of labour economics and consumer markets. They describe co-creating communities as groups of self-selecting individuals who choose to be working on communal projects, whether or not mediated by companies (Kozinets, 1999; McWilliam, 2000). Neo-Marxists have countered the myth of co-creation arguing that customers in the Web 2.0 economy often provide free labour; user-generated content simply means that consumers are taking a lot of work out of the hands of producers (Terranova, 2000; de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2005). As Terranova (2000: 35) observes, the Internet “does not automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject.” Co-creation, she contends, does not yield any power and control over the means of production. On the contrary, user control and power are troubled concepts in the culturally spiced lingo of business experts (see also Pr?gl and Schreier, 2006). Indeed, a bit of uneasiness with self-organizing users surfaces in Wikinomics when the authors warn companies that the crowds cannot be “controlled easily,” but they can be “steered” (Tapscott and Williams, 2006: 45).
The hybrid term “co-creation” also rhetorically pre-empts the meaning of “consumer markets.” The discourse of business applauds users who provide content for their favourite sites or games not only because they take care of the process of selection and evaluation, but, on top of that, because they help advertising companies by forming groups of like-minded customers with similar tastes and lifestyles who engage in dialogue and exchange responses. Most e-communities are actually thinly disguised entertainment platforms (YouTube, Hyves, The Sims, Last.fm) or product-exchange markets (eBay, Amazon) where people come together to find someone, something or something to do. In doing so, they inadvertently form attractive profiling communities for advertisers who used to spend a lot of money finding out what demographic group covets similar tastes and products. Life has never been easier for marketers. Now that advertising agencies and marketing departments no longer have to look for grassroots groups affiliated with (commercial) products or services, they take the guess-work out of marketing by letting customers create online brand communities which then serve as marketing niches or free service support.
The term co-creation has yet another side to it that is conspicuously absent in business pamphlets, even if most Web 2.0 platforms derive their profits from this added value. Every user who contributes content, and, for that matter, every passive spectator who clicks on UGC sites (such as YouTube) or SNS sites (such as Facebook), provides valuable information about herself and her preferred interests, yet she has no control whatsoever over what information is extracted from her clicking behaviour and how this information is processed and disseminated. For instance, even if we assume that YouTube users have full power over content creation and distribution (which they have not), they have no say over the data and metadata generated and aggregated by platform providers such as YouTube’s owner Google. And these (meta)data are more valuable than the content itself. To put it bluntly: rather than being in the business of content, Google is in the business of deriving commercially significant data from users and connecting these data to companies who need them for targeted advertising, marketing and sales management. Google is less interested in co-creation or content than they are in people making connections—connections that yield valuable information about who they are and what they are interested in.
When the authors of Wikinomics applaud Google and similar search-media companies for their effort to provide “new public squares, vibrant meeting places where your customers come back for the rich and engaging experiences,” they significantly add the phrase: “Relationships, after all, are the one thing you can’t commoditize” (Tapscott and Williams, 2006: 44)—a phrase poignantly echoing the advertisement slogans of credit card companies. And yet, commoditizing connections is exactly what facilitators of user-generated content do: they capitalize on the relationships and social behaviour of people clicking away on their sites. Google is not interested in collectivity but in connectivity; MySpace is not about creativity, it’s about detecting related activity; Facebook does not want to link friends to friends, but is in the business of linking people to advertisers and products. Not content, but connections and profiled actions are the new commodities. And yet, the discourse of commoditization is entirely subjugated to the rhetoric of connectivity.”
3.
“A fundamental assumption on which the ideological treatises of Wikinomics and We-Think thrive is the unproblematic equation of non-profit and commercial platforms in the Web 2.0 universe. Commercial UGC-enablers such as Google and Amazon and non-profit projects such as Wikipedia are equally applauded for providing software platforms where users can creatively express themselves and share cultural content. In fact, these business guides to the digital galaxy make a point of explaining how the innate benevolence of co-creation and prosumership transforms the “old” capitalist enterprise model into a “new” standard of shared public-private system of value creation. The new values of sharing, peering and openness bring society a more sustainable model of entrepreneurship in which companies are socially responsible by being open and transparent, and in which users are socially responsible by dedicating part of their energy to “common causes” such as open source software (Linux) and knowledge infrastructures (Wikipedia). As Tapscott and Williams (2006: 44) profess: “Web companies are realizing that openness fosters trust, and that trust and community bring people back to the site.”
There are several disputable tenets implied in this glorification of private-public entrepreneurship and in the uncritical alignment of producer interests with consumer benefits. Most profoundly, Wikinomics and We-Think suggest the distinction between non-profit and for-profit platforms is made irrelevant by the model of peer-production, as if peer-production were some overarching humanist principle of society’s organization.”
4. Conclusion
“In this article, we have argued how Web 2.0 manifestoes promote the combined cultural and economic significance of business models both in terms of their rhetorical influence as well as in terms of their impact on social and cultural theory. Cluetrain, Wikinomics and We-Think extend a line of thinking, historically analyzed by Fred Turner (2005), that is markedly rooted in a capitalist individualist model while eloquently tapping into the spirit of communalization—a hybrid line of reasoning that has dominated grass roots virtual communities from the very beginning. Behind the abrasive lingo of these manifestoes lie some important basic assumptions about how a new digital infrastructure has come to govern our mediascape as well as our social lives. We particularly questioned these authors’ undifferentiated concept of users and platforms; we have also interrogated the introduction of new concepts such as produsage and co-creation into mainstream economic discourse.
In addition, we have shown how some of the basic manifestoes’ persuasive claims and rhetoric have been uncritically adopted by cultural theory; books like Convergence Culture tend to efface concerns of political economy in their unilateral acclaim of participatory culture. Convergence Culture hinges on the same ideals and deploys similar celebratory rhetoric than Wikinomics and We Think. Whereas Jenkins derives its evidence mostly from virtual grass roots communities subverting mainstream media, and Tapscott, Williams and Leadbeater indiscriminately juxtapose online brand communities to nonprofit virtual collectives, both argue the mutual benefits of producers and consumers operating in the same electronic realm. The hidden “magic” of Web 2.0 technologies remains conspicuously unquestioned by all promoters, whether business gurus or cultural experts. They all claim a brave new world where the spirits of commonality are finally merged with the interests of capitalism.
We think that new models of convergence culture demand new modes of divergent criticism, unravelling the strategies of cooptation. Rather than defending or attacking the cult(ure) of participation, mass creativity or co-creation, we urge a more critical awareness of socioeconomic implications of these emerging trends. Despite the convergence of companies, business interests, technological platforms, cultural actors and other agents, it remains essential to untangle the succinct positions and interests of various players. Technological systems, like labour relations and consumer positions, are increasingly implied rather than manifest (Schaefer and Durham, 2007). This is the power of technologies and regulatory systems governing our everyday lives and defining individual identities vis-à-vis collective identities. We need to carefully dismantle the claims of Wikinomics, We-think and Convergence Culture in order to better understand what kind of brave new worlds we are welcomed to.”
Posted in Crowdsourcing, P2P Business Models | 1 Comment »
Governance, labour and property modalities for outcome-based enterprise
29th September 2009
I have not often seen detailed treatments of what kind of structural options exist for outcome-based enterprises.
I often state that the key issue for peer production and shared design communities, who deal with abundantly shareable immaterial value, is how that they interact with allied enterprises that create scarce and rival but marketable added value for which cost-recovert mechanisms are needed, and presently have to do that in a capitalist context.
The following report deals with how community-centered food enterprises have solved their problems. What kind of property and decision-making modes have they chosen. It turns out there is a variety of choices, but all dependent on prior value choice.
Report: Thinking and Practising Values: Community Enterprises in the Food Sector. By Jenny Cameron et al. Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. The University of Newcastle, 2008
Excerpted from the Conclusion:
“What is clear from the workshop is that community enterprises are addressing contemporary social, economic and environmental issues with considerable creativity and innovation. To do this, the enterprises have developed an array of economic practices, and these practices reflect their values. For example, the two Community Supported Agriculture initiatives—The Beanstalk Organic Food and Food Connect—share a commitment to food affordability and to strong farmer-consumer relationships.
Yet, they have distinctive commitments—Beanstalk values participation as a form of community development, and Food Connect values social and economic equity and justice. As a result they use very different economic practices— Beanstalk is predominantly based on volunteer labour, and Food Connect is based on paid labour. As discussed in Section 3.2 neither of these approaches is better than the other or more true to the ideal of Community Supported Agriculture. Rather, these differences are indicative of the ethical economic decision making that characterises community enterprises. Divergent economic approaches reflect each enterprise’s distinctive values.
The values of the enterprises shape not just economic practices. All aspects of the enterprises are shaped by their values and commitments. As discussed in Section 3, this ranges from the organisational structure and governance arrangements through to how the enterprises manage issues like growth and planning. What clearly emerges is that there is no one pathway for community enterprises to follow. Each enterprise has its own way of approaching these matters, and the approach reflects its values. So ethical decision making occurs not just in the economic arena, but in all areas of operation. If any one thing characterises these community enterprises it is that they are engaged in an ongoing process of thinking through and practicing their values.
Another key theme to emerge from the workshop is the importance of telling stories about the diversity of approaches. Telling stories is certainly a means for individual community enterprises to learn about what others are up to and to reflect on their own values and practices (and through reflection, enterprises might clarify and affirm some values and practices, and re-evaluate and reconsider others). It is also important to tell stories collectively as a means of building up a shared knowledge of community enterprises (or perhaps something we might want to start calling “the community enterprise sector”). This collective story telling is important for amplifying what community enterprises are doing, particularly so they might be replicated. It is also important to tell collective stories to better understand the characteristics of community enterprises, the challenges faced and the ways that challenges are being handled (or might be handled). This is particularly important in the current context in Australia, where some governments and community-based organisations are developing programs to support the start-up and ongoing operations of community enterprises. What might be learnt from the community enterprises that already exist? How might the values and practices of existing enterprises be incorporated into the programs that are being developed? If what characterises the community enterprises at this workshop is their diversity, how might the different approaches to economic practices, legal structures, governance arrangements, planning and growth be incorporated into programs, so that no one single development pathway becomes the accepted route for community enterprises, but so community enterprises are able to make the choices and decisions that best reflect their values and commitments?
Excerpts on Governnance and Property Modalities:
* Typology of Transactions
There are a variety of alternative and non-market transactions.
For example, Beanstalk and Food Connect are Community Supported Agriculture initiatives, which means they develop direct relationships with farmers, rather than indirect relationships that are mediated through the wholesale fruit and vegetable markets (see Row 2). As will be discussed in other parts of this document, this direct connection means that the enterprises recognise their interdependence with the farmers and actively seek to build relationships that reflect this interdependence. Imago Forest is based on a Community Supporting Agriculture model, which again is based on building a direct relationship between farm producer and consumers.
There are also a range of non-market transactions. Fig Tree is characterised by various forms of gift-giving. For example, neighbours and local restaurants gift their waste to the chickens and the worm farm, a local mowing service gifts their grass clippings to the compost piles. The garden itself is a gift for people to use—people drop by to pick the evening’s salad, a home school group uses the site for educational activities, the beekeeper who monitors the port keeps his hives on the site, people turn up every second Friday evening or the last Sunday in the month for pizza cooked in the pizza oven (and for the pizza, people bring gifts of food and the garden itself contributes its produce). There is also self-provisioning with participants in the Sustaining our Suburbs project growing fruit and vegetables for their own consumption.
* Typology of Labour Arrangements
In terms of labour arrangements, people are “paid” for their labour in a variety of ways. For example, City Cousins who are the distribution centres for Food Connect are remunerated through discounted produce. At Beanstalk people who volunteer (on tasks such as cleaning up, setting up, working on the newsletter) receive free produce (usually 1 free box for each month of volunteering). At Fig Tree people who are on the weekly roster looking after the chooks (chickens) are remunerated in the eggs they collect. At Sustaining our Suburbs volunteers receive a cash payment of either $30 a day or $15 for ½ day, not enough to constitute a wage but a sum of money that recognises the contribution of volunteers. Most of the enterprises also use volunteer labour, ranging from the actual labour of running the enterprise (e.g. Organic Buyers Group and Food for the Future) through to behind the scenes organisational work on committees of management (e.g. Fig Tree and Beanstalk).
In terms of the structures of the enterprises, Imago Forest and Food Connect can be characterised as alternative capitalist enterprises. Food Connect has a company structure, but with not for profit articles. So unlike other capitalist enterprises it is not driven by profit-maximisation (and as will be discussed throughout this document, there are other concerns that drive Food Connect).
Similarly Imago Forest operates as a social business guided by a social ethic: Julian Lee (Imago Forest):
- For me a social business would only charge the True Price for goods and services. This is calculated by working out the actual costs of production, including labour and any overheads to keep the business running now and in the future. Not more. Not less. On books, the company may show a small profit but this is just to ensure its future stability. Its purpose is not to make money but to have demonstrable social outcomes.”
As an incorporated association with a strong emphasis on communal and selfdirected work, Fig Tree is a non-capitalist enterprise. And Beanstalk and the Organic Buyers Group are also non-capitalist forms of enterprise with a focus on communal and cooperative principles.
* Diverse Economic Practices Shaped by Values
The diverse economic practices that characterise these community enterprises are shaped by the enterprises’ values, particularly their social and environmental values. Indeed, this is a defining characteristic of community enterprises— economic practices serve social and environmental goals.
To take one example, The Beanstalk Organic Food uses volunteering as its primary form of labour, and has only one paid worker. For Beanstalk, the economic practice of volunteering serves a number of social goals.
As one member of Beanstalk explains, organic food is only one element of the enterprise:
- Rhyall Gordon (Beanstalk): [I]t’s not just about individual health reasons, it’s about healthy communities and people participating.
For Beanstalk volunteering is a way of building healthy communities and encouraging people to participate:
Rhyall Gordon (Beanstalk): [W]e’re mostly volunteer based and that in itself is an ethic and something we want to promote from a kind of community development point of view.
But volunteering also enables Beanstalk to achieve another goal—providing affordable organic food:
- Rhyall Gordon (Beanstalk). The idea of participation, in terms of Beanstalk, it’s a big issue for us, and the purpose of participation, because essentially the fact that we have volunteering is the reason why we have affordable organic food.
So in Beanstalk volunteering is an economic practice that serves multiple goals— participation, community building and affordability.
Like Beanstalk, the other Community Supported Agriculture initiative, Food Connect, also has affordability as one of its goals, but it uses a very different economic mechanism to achieve this. In Food Connect consumers have to purchase a minimum of four weeks boxes in advance, as this guarantees markets and an income for farmers, even if crops fail. So unlike Beanstalk where consumers can pay on the day (or a week in advance), Food Connect has to find a different strategy to incorporate low income households. Through a scheme developed in conjunction with Foresters ANA Friendly Society, low income earners can pay weekly but over four months they pay an extra $2 a week. By the end of the four months they have accumulated enough to start buying a month’s subscription in advance. So this Food for All scheme gives low income households a chance to catch up with other households and buy advance subscriptions.
For Food Connect the advance purchase of produce is a way of enacting the Community Supported Agriculture goal of building strong relationships between consumers and producers.
Because Beanstalk has a pay on the day (or a week in advance) system, it uses different economic practices to build relationships with farmers, for example:
- Rhyall Gordon (Beanstalk): We’re very keen on the idea of Community Supported Agriculture … and for us it’s just that idea of building better relationships with the farmers. We’ve done quite few things already, quite small, but I guess they’re first steps for us. Just this winter there was one of our farmers who suffered quite a bit with the rains and we on average were paying him about $400 a week. What he could supply to us dropped and what we did was just to continue to pay the $400 so it was our way of trying to support him through difficult times. And he returns that favour, or whatever you want to call it, in many ways. So there’s a very good relationship there and we want to try and develop that across the board. And there’s different things we do as well in terms of working bees for farmers. We go out and plant garlic and work in the farms and stuff like that. And one time we went to a struggling farmer where there was a bit of a crisis after floods and weeds and stuff like that. So as another form of Community Supported Agriculture there’s an opportunity for a group of labourers who can go out and support farmers, and that’s something we want to expand.
So Beanstalk has helped farmers who are in difficulty by gifting money and organising volunteer labour.
In these two examples, very different economic practices are being used to achieve the same outcomes of affordability and fostering strong relationships between consumers and producers. The one key difference is that Beanstalk has a community development emphasis and encourages civic participation via volunteerism. Whereas Food Connect has a social and economic justice emphasis and provides work opportunities for marginalised groups. As part of this social and economic justice focus, equity is a key value and this is reflected in the practice of having only two pay scales for all workers ($15 or $17 per hour) irrespective of people’s background and ability.
What is important here is not that one approach to Community Supported Agriculture is better than the other; rather, the two approaches are equally valid with each being shaped by the distinctive values of the enterprise (participation and volunteerism in the case of Beanstalk, and social and economic justice and equity in the case of Food Connect). These two enterprises therefore demonstrate ethical economic decision making. In other words, they demonstrate how choices, or decisions, about economic practices are shaped by the overriding values, or ethics, of the enterprise.
Each of the community enterprises represented at the workshop engages in ethical economic decision making. For example, in Imago Forest, the practice of True Pricing—of charging enough to cover all necessary costs plus a small amount of “profit” to sustain the enterprise into the future—is an ethical economic decision to foster a mutually beneficial and supporting relationship between farmer and consumer. In Sustaining our Suburbs, the practice of paying volunteers a small sum of money for a full or half day’s work is an ethical economic decision that reflects the values of social and economic justice.
Ethical economic decision making is not something that occurs only once in the life of a community enterprise; ethical economic decision making is an ongoing process. For example, Fig Tree Community Garden started with the intention of developing a place for people, where values could be nurtured and developed:
- Craig Manhood (Fig Tree): We actually started [Fig Tree] with no thoughts about money, it was more about the community involvement and what it gave to people in terms of values and what people learnt. An example of just a really basic outcome would be all the kids that just come and look at the chickens and go “Wow!” and that’s it.
The emphasis on fostering community, means that the enterprise is based on economic practices like gift giving, with garden plots being shared and people encouraged to take what they need (even neighbours and passer-bys who don’t contribute to the gardening). At times, however, Fig Tree has contemplated taking a more commercial and market oriented approach, such as selling more produce to raise revenue for materials and equipment. But the concern is that this will compromise the values and character of the garden:
Bill Robertson (Fig Tree): As soon as we start charging … does that kill the magic?
So far, the decision has been to steer away from a commercial focus. In so doing, the ethical economic decision has been to prioritise the social values associated with gifting even if it compromises other aspects of the enterprise’s operations (such as holding off on purchasing materials and equipment, or finding other ways to secure needed inputs). Nevertheless, Fig Tree may well return to this ethical economic decision and reconsider whether to develop more commercial activities, and if so, how such activities might be developed so they match the values of enterprise, or indeed, whether the values of the enterprise might need to be modified to accommodate a more commercial orientation. These types of considerations are the ethical economic decisions that community enterprises are always engaged in.
These ethical economic decisions mean that enterprises can end up with an array of economic practices—and not just practices like paid work, volunteering and gifting, that sit comfortably with ideas of community.
Ethical economic decision making can sometimes mean accommodating what might be described as economic misbehaviour, like theft:
Ann Hill (The Australian National University): What sort of values, like equity, and trust, how important are those for Fig Tree?
- Craig Manhood (Fig Tree): Oh, paramount. But then if people breach that, so what?
- Bill Robertson (Fig Tree): We deliberately haven’t had a problem if someone comes along and takes some vegetables then that’s good, isn’t it? That’s what it’s about. We had one instance where we found one person taking lots of pumpkins and selling them. But you know, so what. Robert Pekin (Food Connect): Yeah we have the same attitude. If someone’s broken in and stolen a lot of money well obviously they need the money. That’s a social problem not their problem.
Ethical economic decision making can also mean taking a more hard line stance and saying “No” to potential clients or negotiating relationships so they match the values of the community enterprise:
- Robert Pekin (Food Connect): Yeah, if you’re dealing with politicians or corporates, we won’t have anything to do with a corporate that doesn’t want to be judged at those higher levels. So you can go to the mission statement and look at the mission statement and point it out to them and say … “Unless you’re willing to deal with us at that level then we’ll go and talk to someone else”. So you’re always, all the time, being hard-nosed about those higher values. And then lots of discussion comes out of that, lots of learnings—even if nothing comes out of it in terms of a material contract or partnership or alliance, it’s always pushing. [For example,] we’re in a partnership with Connell Wager, a big engineering firm that deals with lots of mines. And they want us to supply fruit because we give them a tick in the Buying Local box, and also taking all their food scraps back, and it’s a great resource. It completes the cycle for us. It’s a fantastic win for us. But I’m not going anywhere with them until we can actually have an impact with all of their CEOs, all their management staff, about what real sustainability is, and a chance to speak. So they said “Righto, we want you to come in at these various times”. We want also to cater for them at the highest level. So we sort of look at that top line … we want to filter our values up … [and] through that catering event they experience something different. That experience, whether it’s through osmosis or through verbal, is something – we won’t do anything with them until they’re open to saying “Yes you can do this and yes you can do that”.
This ethical economic decision making is by no means easy, particularly when an enterprise is reliant on external relationships, as one participant describes:
- Pablo Gimenez (The Brotherhood of St Laurence): [Y]ou have to have really good strong ethics and systems in place to be able to say “No, we’re not going to take your money because of x, y and z”.
Most agencies will take the money and not even think about who they are dealing with. And a lot of that is because of the pressure that they just want to continue or there’s a lot of paid staff involved.
This dilemma is particularly evident in the UK with the move away from community enterprises that are relatively autonomous to an emphasis on social enterprises as a means of delivering funded services for government:
- John Pearce: I think in the UK but perhaps not unique to the UK, when governments start seeing social enterprises as a useful tool to deliver services then it puts people into quite a difficult situation because it compromises the independence that they seek, or have sought in the past.
With community and social enterprises attracting more government attention in Australia ethical economic decisions about funding sources may well become more of a concern in the future (see also Barraket, 2008).1 What emerges from the discussion is an understanding of how the diverse economic practices that characterise the enterprises have been developed to reflect the enterprises’ values. Through this ongoing process of ethical economic decision making the enterprises are redefining what we usually imagine the economy as being.
They are innovating with this economic diversity in order to foster interconnections between people, sustain communities, address issues of social and economic inequity, and develop environmental practices.
* Diverse Legal Structures Shaped by Values
As well as innovating with economic practices, community enterprises innovate with legal structures and governance arrangements as a means of reflecting values.
For example, Food Connect is a Proprietary Limited Company (Pty Ltd), but with not for profit articles:
- Robert Pekin: We’re a Proprietary Limited Company. And I’m the only shareholder or I was [as employees are in the process of becoming shareholders]. We wrote into the constitution that this business is not for sale and this business is not to benefit anyone individually from a profit point of view … And what we’ve created is a really unique little model. We don’t have to have a board. Not for profits have to have a board. So we have a Board of Concerned Elders who are then freed up to not think about legal and fiscal responsibility to the rest of the community; us as the employees all do that. So now we’ve got five people who are about to become shareholders and then the rest of Food Connect will become shareholders in that Pty Ltd with not for profit articles.
Some community enterprises like Fig Tree Community Garden operate as an incorporated association (which again means that the enterprise is not for profit). Like Food Connect with its Board of Concerned Elders, Fig Tree also innovates with the requirements for incorporated associations in order to reflect the values of the garden:
- Bill Robertson (Fig Tree): [W]e have the Annual General Eating rather than the Annual General Meeting, and Fun Raising Committees rather than Fund Raising Committees. That sort of language is really important.
The other community enterprises have no legal structure.
For example:
- Julian Lee (Organic Buyers Group): They’re just bunches of people who get together each fortnight.
This approach of informal governance is even supported by advisory groups:
- Rhyall Gordon (Beanstalk): And I spoke to the Association of Cooperatives and we had a great conversation and at the end they advised me that we probably don’t need to incorporate. There’s not any advantages and in many ways there’s more risks. We’re going to have to spend more money on insurance and so on.
So in each of these examples, the community enterprises are using their legal structure or governance arrangements to match their values.”
Full report is at www.communityeconomies.org/papers/comecon/jcameron01.pdf
Posted in Food and Agriculture, P2P Governance, Peer Property (IP) | No Comments »
Estimating the Development Cost of Open Source Software
28th September 2009
Via CMS Wire:
“Black Duck Software (news, site) recently released a report stating that, by their calculations, the development cost of open source software is US$ 387 Billion. That’s roughly half of the US stimulus bill.
Contributing to this value are over 200,000 open source projects with over 4.9 billion lines of code. Not only is all of this work worth a staggering amount in terms of dollars, it’s also worth around two million developer years.
That’s a lot of code. That’s a lot of code that, since it’s open source, you can incorporate into your own projects. In fact, Black Duck estimates that 10% of IT application development spending goes toward duplicating open source efforts.
Companies who instead turn to the open source code base could save US$ 22 Billion a year.”
Posted in Free Software, P2P Business Models | No Comments »
Book of the Week: Judy Rebick’s Transforming Power
28th September 2009
Given the failure of the Left, the labour movement, and the social movements to creatively resist neo-liberalism, it makes sense that when a new generation emerged to fight corporate globalization, they created horizontal structures and demonstrated an abhorrence of any kind of top-down leadership.
Book: Transforming Power: From The Personal To The Political. by Judy Rebick. Penguin Canada, 2009
Judy Rebick’s book on the rise of networked politics has been very well received so far.
For example, here is a review Hilary Wainright, Editor of Red Pepper:
“In Transforming Power, Judy Rebick tells the story of how, in the wake of decades of destructive politics, many new pathways of social change are being made around the world: from small grassroots groups, to new online mobilizations, to experiments in democratic, pluralist states; from urban USA to the Indigenous Americas.
As humanity confronts the greatest economic crisis in 80 years, and the ecological crisis that is he greatest challenge in history, politics as usual seem barren and irrelevant: part of the problem to overcome, not part of the solution.
Judy’s book is a timely intervention and will inspire new thinking and dialogue on how to build the movements and communities that will bring about the radical changes we need in our world.”
In this first excerpt, from Chapter 8, “A New Grammar of Democracy”, Judy looks at what the new online-enabled movements have learned from the successes and failures of past generations of activists.
Judy Rebick:
“WHILE THE NEW LEFT OF THE 1960S, feminism, and various New Age projects challenged authoritarianism, the political Left never managed to change its authoritarian and patriarchal mode of functioning. The Left believed that to be effective and take on a centralized and authoritarian power, they, too, had to concentrate power. For the social democratic Left, the pressure of the media to conform to highly managed political interventions and, eventually, to highly managed political conventions was deadly to internal party democracy. As early as 1979, British socialist feminists were making the argument that the political Left needed to transform itself, following the example of the new social movements, most importantly the feminist movement.
But the problem goes beyond patriarchal modes of functioning to our very notions of power. The Left has always seen power as being located in the state and in the corporations. The way to change the world was to get state power and make changes to state and economic structures. The women’s movement, anti-racist groups, and the environmental movement introduced the idea that we must also change our personal behaviour if we want to change the world. All these movements broadened the idea of politics into the realm of the personal relationships between people and the relationship between humans and the environment. Power was understood as something each of us exercises in our lives as part of a dominant group, including our human dominance over nature and its creatures. These ideas of power were influential in organizations and in community, but somehow didn’t change our ideas of political change. Today we are seeing the beginnings of that kind of change in the notions of transformative power.
Hilary Wainwright writes in her saucy U.K. magazine Red Pepper:
- Closely associated with an understanding of transformative power are the distinctive understandings of knowledge influenced by movement-based politics. In good part as a result of this politics and—not unrelated—developments in the philosophy of science, we are increasingly aware of the plural sources of knowledge: as tacit, practical and experiential as well as scientific. We are working increasingly with complexity, ambivalence and uncertainty.… A recognition of the many perspectives from which a single phenomenon can be understood must be reclaimed as tools for analyzing and changing a complex real world.
These new understandings of knowledge point towards an emphasis on the horizontal sharing and exchange of knowledge and collaborative attempts to build connected alternatives and shared memories. They stress the gaining of knowledge as a process of discovery and therefore see political action, the exercise of transformative power, as itself a source of knowledge, revealing unpredicted problems or opportunities.
This recognition of the importance of experiential and practical knowledge deepens the nature of debate. It implies debate driven not so much by the struggle for positions of power as by a search for truth about the complexity of social change, a production of collaborative knowledge that itself becomes a source of power.
An early example of this kind of collaborative knowledge emerged from a decimated labour movement in the United States in the 1980s. Then president Ronald Reagan had waged a relentless attack against trade union rights that had seriously weakened not only the labour movement but the rights of workers. The mainstream labour movement was stuck in business unionism, and unable to change its tactics to meet the new challenge coming from neo-liberalism.
Some progressive unionists decided to take another route, going around the power of the leadership of the labour movement rather than confronting it head on. These union activists understood that organizing the workers in the new economy—including those in precarious work, part-time and contract workers who are rarely organized—would be central to rebuilding the union movement. They also understood that making allies within the community would be the key to success. They created an organization called Jobs with Justice.
I first learned about Jobs with Justice at the World Social Forum in 2002. I noticed them because there were so few U.S. groups at that Social Forum and because they were working with some Canadian groups I knew. A few years later, at a leadership training session I attended at the Rockwood Institute, I met Sarita Gupta, who is now the executive director of Jobs with Justice. I asked her how Jobs with Justice organizes. She said,
Even though we are a national network, each of our local groups is locally autonomous. Because of our commitment to local autonomy, our national office doesn’t say “Here is the campaign that everyone is going to work on.”
Our leadership has resisted the normal model of national organizations. We felt that in order to build a strong grassroots worker movement in this country, we have to make sure the organization is accountable to local struggles. We’ve built a network that’s collaborative and not competitive because we understand that we are part of a broader movement, learning from one another. There is a big culture of peer-to-peer learning. Instead of the experts in the national office swooping in to help the national campaigns, we look to one another to help, so our coalition in Boston will help our coalition in New York City.
Our structure is hybrid. We have national stakeholders, but also each of our local coalitions have institutions around the table as a steering committee or whatever governing body works best for them. We also have activists who sign a pledge card, saying,
“We are committing to be there for someone else’s struggle as well as our own at least five times in the next year.”
We have a hundred thousand people who have signed these cards and are the base of mobilization. Those activists are playing a very big role in helping to organize and ensuring we are actually speaking to people.
Early on we structured it that way and resisted the notion of paid staff. Larry Cohen, who is one of our founders from the Communications Workers, said,
“If we are going to do this right, then I will commit as a union that our organizers will give 10 percent of their time to helping get the coalition up and running.”
This helped us resist hiring full-time staff. Now it’s twenty-one years since we were founded, and we are slowly moving toward hiring. But everything we do considers staff and volunteers. For example, we never just do training for the staff, we always include activists and community leaders, so that collective learning is happening in a cross-section, not just for the staff.
People who work with Jobs with Justice come together around an issue or set of issues and make decisions for that particular struggle. It starts at the local level, where the ongoing work takes place. Volunteers can participate at multiple levels of commitment, and decisions are made by consensus.
Like Clayton Thomas Mueller from the IEN, Gupta calls this action base-building.
She explained,
“People take the pledge to support others very seriously. Part of our ideology is around this movement work. We believe that through taking collective action, people are transformed, and their vision of the world or what is right or wrong changes, and their commitment changes.”..
Gupta points out that the organization is rooted in local struggles. It is at those local tables, as she calls them, that relationships are built.
These relationships permit differences to be worked out. Then the national organization can help to mobilize across cities to support a particular local struggle or organize a national campaign that is supported across the board. At the moment, Jobs with Justice’s national campaigns include a push to strengthen labour laws to regain rights lost under Reagan and a demand for public health care insurance.
It makes sense that Jobs with Justice was founded by some of the organizing departments of local unions, since this locally based, relationship-building, networked approach has always been that of organizers trying to get new people involved in the union. The organizing departments of unions have always been closest to the ground and to grassroots workers. It’s not surprising, then, that Jobs with Justice, a new kind of labour organization that works with the unions, is at the same time outside of them, working with the community.
Given the failure of the Left, the labour movement, and the social movements to creatively resist neo-liberalism, it makes sense that when a new generation emerged to fight corporate globalization, they created horizontal structures and demonstrated an abhorrence of any kind of top-down leadership.
In the demonstrations against the various summits of the WTO, FTAA, G8, and the rest of the alphabet soup of global-governance institutions, young demonstrators set up affinity groups and spoke circles that made decision by consensus.
These affinity groups have morphed into a new kind of movement politics that is most advanced in Europe. It is called networked politics, and it is tremendously effective in a number of ways. Many of the most visible protests in Europe, such as the Spanish response to the 2004 Madrid subway bombings, the rebellion of immigrant youth in the suburbs of Paris in 2005, and the mass upsurge in France in 2006 against a new employment bill that discriminated against young workers, were all organized through informal networks. When formally organized political forces wanted to set up a coordinating body in Spain to institutionalize these semi-spontaneous uprisings, none of the young people involved were interested. Not only do these groups resist any kind of formal structure, they also opt out of the corporate global media system by refusing to have identifiable leaders or spokespeople.
Jeff Juris, an American activist and academic from this new generation, explains
“that none of these practices or ideas are necessarily new; these discussions go back to the debate in the early part of the twentieth century about different kinds of organization [between anarchists and socialists]. But technology facilitates more decentralized practices, and allows for scalability. In the debate between vertical and horizontal forms, the horizontal forms perhaps have more of an advantage than they used to, so they are diffusing relatively widely.”
The World Social Forum is probably the largest and most complex political network in the world. Its Charter of Principles contains three principles of horizontality. One is respect for diversity that not only values and celebrates political, social, and cultural diversity but sees the need to constantly extend the network to new actors. The second principle is that no individual or organization can speak in the name of the network. People may speak for themselves or for their own organizations, but no one speaks for the WSF. The third has to do with the inevitable decision-making process that comes from this form of organization, and it insists on consensus. Before you roll your eyes and say that this could never work on a large scale considering the complexity of modern society, we should look at a very similar network that has taken on mighty Microsoft and produced an amazingly successful computer operating system, as well as numerous programs that many believe are of much higher quality than the corporate product. Open source software functions like a network, in many ways similar to the World Social Forum.
The open source system, also called Linux, was created by Linus Torvalds, whose approach has been characterized as “release [program codes] early and release often; delegate everything you can; be open to the point of promiscuity.” In theory, this could result in products and projects that were chaotic and contradictory. However, Linux competes successfully with Microsoft, which is based on the old proprietary methods, and continues to grow.
Contributors to open source projects are motivated by the challenge of writing new code, building on the creativity of others, and the chance to act as partners in the project, rather than by personal financial gain. Challenge and the opportunity to collaborate must be available before a person can start an open source project, or a project founded on the open source model. While people pursue their individual interests, they are doing so while promoting the good of all. Thus, while each person is actually following his or her own agenda, the end result also benefits everyone else involved. In a way, open source turns the neo-liberal ideal of self-interest as a motivating force for the market on its head, liberating the creativity of each individual but in the context of a collective project, in which sharing knowledge and building on the knowledge of others becomes the goal—rather than profit and competition. This is a particularly exciting idea, because one of the acknowledged strengths of capitalism is its capacity for innovation, and we are always told that money must be the motivating force for that innovation. Open source proves that challenge—rather than money—can be the motivating force for innovation.
The metaphor of “open source” is also becoming a key element in the new ideas about democracy. The code is legible, transparent, and open. It can be modified by anyone and favours individual autonomy, participation, and control over giving power to a representative or a particular group. Openness, as an ethical principle, also refers to reciprocal listening, communication, connectivity, and inclusion.
Jai Sen, a veteran activist from India who is theorizing this idea of open space, says,
The central idea here is that an open space, rather than a party or movement, allows for more and different forms of relations among political actors, while remaining open-ended with respect to outcomes. It is open in that encounters among multiple subjects with diverse objectives can have transformative political effects that traditional forms of movements, coalitions, and campaigns, with uniform themes and goals, exclude. By the name itself, it also seems to offer scope for a much wider range of actors to take part and contribute, including those not necessarily involved with politics or movement; so it is more inclusive.
Of course, neither the software movement nor the anti-globalization movement lives up to these ideals, but both demonstrate that individuals and groups working together as equals, without power being distributed in a hierarchical way, can be very effective at producing the results that the group desires… Lawrence Cox, an Irish activist and sociologist, said that we must redefine the way we see power itself. Instead of seeing it as located in the state or in the corporation, we have to see power as something in all of our relationships. “Then every single movement we do is a laboratory in which we are experimenting with the grammar of democracy. If we get together in a circle and balance the presence of women and men, we are somehow thinking about how the future grammar of democracy will be.”
This is an exciting idea, because it means each of us can change the theory and practice of democracy through how we interact in our organizations.
Thomas Paine, a father of the American Revolution and an important democratic theorist, pointed out in his 1792 essay The Rights of Man:
It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There exists in man [sic], a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be able as such to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.
Perhaps the young activists across Europe and North America are practicing a form of democracy, which, while short of revolution, does manage to liberate the genius and talents in ordinary people by using open space, horizontal structures, and self-organization. The question is how does this liberation of human potential interact with existing power structures to transform them?…
The Obama campaign used the principles of networked politics both to fundraise and to organize. The most sophisticated online fundraising operation in the world, www.moveon.org, was assisting him, and obviously he has brilliant online strategists from the generation that grew up with networking online. While the campaign machine itself was probably organized in a fairly traditional, professional, top-down manner, they were organizing a grassroots campaign. If you signed up as a volunteer, you could get a list of phone numbers of people to call and a script of what to say. No one monitored what you were doing; you didn’t have to join the Democratic Party to do it or go to a meeting to be trained. They just assumed that if you supported Barack Obama and wanted to volunteer time, then they wanted you involved.
That’s it. Anyone who got that email could host a meeting for Barack Obama. Just like the Sud étudiants in France, the IEN, or Jobs with Justice, the Obama campaign provided the tools and resources and left it up to the individual to handle the meeting. That kind of confidence in supporters is rarely seen in a traditional campaign, in which control over the message and the campaign is of paramount importance.
It wasn’t just online that this open friendly approach governed the campaign.
According to an October 8 article in his blog on Huffington Post, electoral campaign expert Zack Exley explains the genius of the Obama campaign was in combining the openness of networked politics with the a sophisticated electoral machine. “The Obama campaign is the first in the Internet era to realize the dream of a disciplined, volunteer-driven, bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scaleable organizing campaign, “ writes Exley. Instead of staff recruiting volunteers to knock on doors, they spent their time identifying volunteer team leaders and training them to organize others thus vastly increasing the volunteer operation on the ground. The slogan of the organizing campaign was “Respect Empower Include,”
Jeremy Bird, the Ohio general election director and one of the driving forces behind making teams a national strategy, said, “We decided in terms of timeline that [our organizers] would not be measured by the amount of voter contacts they made in the summer—but instead by the number of volunteers that they were recruiting, training and testing. ..
Regional Field Director for Southwest Ohio, Christen Linke Young said,
“I feel like people are committing more time this election because there’s a community thing going on, and they’re part of something that’s local and social. But we’re also more effective at harnessing volunteers because the teams do a lot of the training and debriefing themselves—it scales well. Everyone who goes out canvassing comes back with at least one story of someone they impacted. The team leaders are trained to give people time to tell those stories, and so everyone gets a sense of progress and they learn from each other how to be more effective next time.”
But when the openness of the Obama campaign met the vicious attacks of the McCain campaign, they were forced to a certain degree back into the old model of the battle of titans. Nevertheless, they kept the positive message and the friendly open approach to their supporters right up until election day…
Internet expert Jesse Hirsch says the Obama campaign will transform electoral politics in the same way as the Kennedy-Nixon debate, which marked the moment that television took over electoral campaigns. The challenge is to figure out how the networked politics approach can impact on the hierarchical institutions that have most of the power in our society. Open source shows that on the economic and creative level, networks have as good or better outcomes than hierarchy. Obama shows that introducing even an element of networked politics into a highly structured political system can vastly increase people’s participation and the campaign’s creativity.
Recognizing the weaknesses of networked politics does not in any way take away from its considerable strengths. It is the network with roots in the ground, on which any lasting transformation of power will take place.“
Posted in P2P Books, P2P Movements, P2P Politics | No Comments »
Centralized Grids as a condition for Distributed Energy
28th September 2009
An interstate transmission corridor solves wind’s intermittency. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Simultaneous lulls in wind across the country hardly ever happen. So if we connect the sites, if Texas has a sudden lull, then North Dakota can fill in. Long distance interconnection lets unsynchronized peaks and troughs to cancel each other out; stabilizing wind’s contribution to the general grid.
The CleanTechnica blog makes a good case that a national grid solves intermittency.
“Successfully transitioning the United States to low?carbon electricity will require an improved
transmission infrastructure. Cities don’t grow where there’s too much wind. The best solar is far from us in our deserts.
We need to build a supergrid like the national highway system we built in the 1930’s. But a new study finds that this might be almost impossible to do in this country. A historical legacy of Balkanized ownership of multiple tiny grids and ineffective regulatory structure has hindered upgrades to and expansion of the U.S. transmission network.
In these political times of political hysteria against any kind of national common good, it will be hard to overcome a legacy that grew out of our rugged individualism.
By contrast, China and Europe have easily added more renewable power, by socializing the grid.”
Posted in P2P Energy, P2P Hierarchy Theory | No Comments »