David Bollier has made his Amherst College sociology course “The Commons Rising” available as a series of audio podcasts. Here’s one called “The Internet as a Super-Commons“.
Description:
The end-to-end principles of the Internet and its shared protocols constitute a vital infrastructure for creating countless online commons. This lecture gives a brief overview of this history, with readings by Lawrence Lessig, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, David Bollier, Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess.
This 16 minute audio interview is worth a listen. Click here for Action Foresight’s introductory description and to listen to it.
As articulated by Michel Bauwens, peer production / peer to peer is a counter-hegemonic discourse that rests on the ancient and re-emerging philosophy of the global / human commons. As such it is squarely aligned with the aims and aspirations of OWS.
And from the audio interview:
“when production is community based [as opposed to closed, hoarded, and centralized], sustainability is almost a given”
From the Story of Stuff Project, this video was made at the end of 2011. I love the line “keeping the dinosaur economy on life-support”. The basic premise of this message is that our social, cultural, economic problems are fundamentally about the allocation and coordination of existing resources – all influenced by our system of values and habits of behavior. Sounds like theatre to me.
This is author and commons scholar David Bollier’s report on last month’s OWS Forum on the Commons called “Making Worlds”. Here are some key excerpts:
through more than 18 hours of conference-talk, I think many people came to realize that the commons can help Occupy expand from its stance of resistance and protest to one of building positive, constructive alternatives.
Conventional politics and nonprofit advocacy remain on the cool, legalistic plane of policy. The Occupy world and commoners, by contrast, assert a larger, more integrated vision of human development. They seek to blend the personal, intersubjective, moral and cultural in ways that don’t divide neatly into the pigeonholes of “economics,” “politics” and “policy.” For us, identity, spirituality, aesthetics, moral and the quality of everyday life lie at the heart of an alternative worldview. The framework of so-called “democratic capitalism” (as corrupted) simply cannot accommodate the new world struggling to be born.
I feel certain that the spring will bring forth new shoots of Occupy activism and innovation, much of it commons-oriented. Here’s hoping for a glorious reawakening.
The core idea of peer-to-peer exchange is so simple, but you have to strip away decades of consumer behavior and culture to actually see its value as an incredibly exciting and efficient coordination of resources. The regional theater movement in the U.S. – for the most part – lives and dies by the values of mainstream culture, so peer-to-peer sharing or cooperation is as foreign a concept to our culture as it is to a “typical” American. That’s why there are only a small handful of initiatives like the Austin Scenic Coop in existence. That’s weird, right? You’d think we theatre people whose work is not-for-profit but for alternatives meanings and purposes would have a culture that reflects that. Not the case, but things are changing, and they’re changing rapidly.
Here’s a fun video from a new peer-to-peer car sharing startup. This is a model that could replace Zipcar and this kind of peer-to-peer model can encompass a huge spectrum services and material needs that we have — especially in the theatre:
This is a week long event organized by the Open Courseware Consortium. Here’s the idea and vision behind “Open Education” :
Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.
Open Education Week is taking place from 5-10 March 2012 online and in locally hosted events around the world. The purpose of Open Education Week is to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources is free an open to anyone.
This quote could be applied to any endeavor that’s about creating knowledge commons:
Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.
– Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
This report is from OntheCommons.org’s Alexa Bradley who was one of the presenters at the forum. Here are some key excerpts from her report:
As the Occupy movement considers how to expand the influence and energy of last fall’s uprising into the next wave of work, it is looking at strategies for social transformation that combine a commitment to deep democracy, equitable economics, life-sustaining interdependence with the natural world and a liberatory remaking of social relationships. It is not surprising then that the commons, as both a worldview and practical approach for sharing resources, would provide fertile ground for strategies and solutions.
And here’s a great theme that emerged from the forum:
Throughout the discussion speakers noted that commons of all kinds are defined by a type of social relationship in which the users of a given shared resource are also the co-creators, producers, protectors, stewards and decision makers. As Marcela Olivera, a Bolivian activist on the staff of Food & Water Watch, stated, “the commons is a social construction, not a thing. The commons will come from the doing and living of them.”
Here’s an article from the MIT Sloan Management Review about Nokia’s Life Tools program for farmers that piloted in India and is rolling out to China, Indonesia, and Nigeria. For a $1.20 per month subscription, farmers receive SMS information in their native languages about weather, farming tips, crop cycles, and market prices for crops, seeds, and fertilizers. Nokia partnered with a bunch of content providers, telecom service providers, and conducted “grass-roots” (a perversion of this term) market research to figure out what kind of information would be wanted for their potential consumer market. This R & D initiative from a multinational is trying to sound like and package itself as a social enterprise but is solely about developing the untapped “next billion” potential customer base for Nokia’s handsets.
So here’s the challenge: A global information, communication infrastructure is strengthening and growing because of this program – reaching places and people who have yet to have access. This is arguably a positive, empowering benefit for everyone (minus the ecological impact of manufacturing, distributing, operating a ‘billion’ handsets). Currently, that information infrastructure is serving the financial interests of Nokia and its partners. The impact on the lives of the farmers or the agricultural system is not yet known – but we can guess that it’s not making them any more prosperous since this program is not really designed to do that.
With a small pivot however, a small change in the local community behaviors around the use of this technology — the ability to communicate and share information peer-to-peer instead of with the corporations that sold them the technology could be greatly empowering and transformative. Having these handsets and the ability to send SMS to their peers in a coordinated way and for specific needs could be the infrastructure needed to remake and re-imagine their local food systems like the FoodHub project.
I have a feeling there’s already something like that happening via SMS – if you know of one, please let me know!
Definition and Purpose of “Co-Design”
This is an excerpt from the Design Council, a UK public benefit organization:
“Co-Design” is an abbreviation for:
What it can do:
And here’s the definition: