Dear Michel,

pls find my responses in between your reply.

On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 9:49 PM, Michel Bauwens <michel@p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

dear Andreas,

nobody has made that critique, on the contrary, about every postmodern scholar has made it ..

When I said that this critique has not been made I was obviously referring to the thread of this list and not to post-modern literature. Of course this critique bas been made excessively by post-modern scholars. I am very far from post-modernist thinking, but I have never come across any literature that dismisses this argument as superficial, as you do here. Maybe you can elaborate?

it is in my opinion a quite superficial critique ..

the flok was not about a bunch of foreign experts advising people what to do at all

it was a process that combined input from local civic groups (70 at least, 24 seminars ect ..) and global commoners

hm, this is not how flok has been introduced originally on various platforms. All the hype was about the p2p foundation being asked by the Ecuadorian government to develop a plan for a transition of Ecuador's society and economy towards p2p structures. It is a bit pointless to change the story now. So my comments refer to the reading of these first announcements.

at the invitation of the local government, which sees itself as anti-colonialist

It doesn't matter much how the government sees itself, when it does not have the trust of the people. Isn't this an obvious point?

originally the project was meant to combine 7 foreigners and 7 local researchers ..

the foreigners in case were not experts dispatched by MNO's but activists

if calling a coworking between local and global commoners as 'colonialist' then the only other solution is pure localism

I have not used the term colonial but post-colonial. There is a huge difference between these two concepts.

Again, what is now presented as co-working and dialogical has earlier been presented in much more ambitious terms as helping to create a better Ecuadorian society.

there was ndio research from outsiders of indigenous society ... the indigenous scholars wrote their own paper

I have not suggested that this was research on indigenous people. I have pointed out that it is naive and arrogant for researchers in the west to fly in a country they don't know very well with a very high percentage of indigenous people to advice them on buen conocer. Isn't it rather ironic that westerners advice a country with a strong indigenous population on how to do the sharing economy?

that is not to say the flok can not be critiqued for colonialist or post-colonial elements, but this requires a bit more than just blanket condemnation because foreigners are involved,

Again you are misreading what I said. I was not talking about foreigners, but about western research in and advice for non-western spaces.

it's a kind of atavistic reaction, not a critique I would say, based on a very superficial understanding of the project

You are right that I don't have a detailed understanding of the flok project. For this reason I hesitated to comment in the first place. I would have kept my mouth shut had I not been worried about the evaluation of flok on this thread. It is less the failed project itself that makes me nervous than a certain refusal to question its political and moral integrity. I detect lots of enthusiasm to try this again, but better. And lots of blaming individuals involved with bad intentions. However I don't see much humble reflexivity and self-critique.

While I don't have any intimate knowledge of flok I do know a thing or two about ethnographic research, and I am convinced that these things can be applied to flok and its evaluation.

The first thing I know is that it is important to think about research in relation to power. Usually it is a bad idea if the invite to do research or consultancy comes from those who are in power (e.g. the government).

The second thing I know is that it is highly problematic to speak for others and to tell people in environments unfamiliar to the researcher how to improve things.

Michel, I don't doubt your good intentions for a minute. But good intentions cannot replace the more fundamental questions I am raising. As I said I find it quite worrying that nobody else on this list has raised them. You don't do the p2p-foundation a favour if you dismiss them as an atavistic reaction.

best,

andreas