Dear colleagues, I just wanted to bring up 2 potential community governance opportunity in South Africa where we can trial some of these ideas we are talking about. 1. KOKSTAD SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT I am involved in eco-community planning in South Africa and I must tell you that there is an astonishing number of groups within South Africa who have approached me wanting to create sustainable ( in both senses of the word) eco-communities. These are not just wealthy white communities but many integrated communities, communities of tribal peoples and black township communities as well. There is actually a large potential for big change here because much of the land is held by traditional tribal councils and they are looking for ethical, alternative development projects. If one approaches them with such projects, they are prepared to offer land. They have done this with some of the projects I am involved in.There is growing awareness that the national and global socio-economic systems are not working and that these communities are looking for different solutions. Hence my interest in open-source and truly democratic ways of governance, specifically at the community level. The Kokstad/Franklin plan is one such project and the finished development plan is very detailed and is unique not just for South Africa but for Africa in that it is the first design based upon the principles of Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Centre's Planetary Boundary model as well as Oxfam's donut model for social development within the planetary boundaries. Many of the consortium members of the spatial planning committee feel that Kokstad is a unique development project in South Africa and if we succeed in implementing the strategy outlined in the plan, it could serve as a new community model for the rest of the country. My colleague Piet (who is a local resident in Kokstad and whose family has strong roots there) is being asked by the municipality to drive and manage the entire development project. Piet, myself and Dr. Tiaan Osthuizen of the University of Johannesburg are planning to implement as many open-source and cooperative models as possible to create a template for the other potential eco-communities springing up. Tiaan is busy assigning projects to his PHD students to do with open-source manufacturing and is meeting with 4 other European universities to develop modular, community-level microfactories. Our whole strategy is to create local, sustainable circular economies based upon effective application of open-source, cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, local economic theory and local governance. In the South African context, there are usually 2 existing levels of governance at this level: 1. national government municipal governance structure 2. tribal governance structure The national governance structure is quite well known in this country for generally being a combination of incompetence and corruption and political influence from the ANC. Usually, party cadre's find appointment in these positions and they don't have the training to manage properly. This is the root of the ongoing service delivery issues which often erupt in violent protests and death. We could say that there is effectively no service delivery in general for these poor, rural communities throughout South Africa. Of course there are exceptions to the rule; some communities have more effective governance than others. Piet has very good contacts with both these forms of governance. He is the only white African person to be asked to be on the local tribal council. He speaks the native languages and is able to communicate effectively within the local cultures. That is why he is being asked to head the project. 2. COMMUNITGROW This is a project driven by architect Giva Goven and sustainable developer David Pearson of Pact Developers to create sustainable cities for Africa. By their estimates, a very large number of cities are going to naturally develop between now and 2050. If this process is not guided and designed with sustainability in mind and allowed to take it's own course, we will have hundreds of millions more slum dwellers in the world. They launched their book at the Sustain Our Africa conference last year. You can download the book on the link on the CommuniTgrow website: http://communitgrow.com/category/connect/ They realize the urgent need to develop healthy communities for the African continent and they have launched an initiative to create a framework for this. They are inviting collaborators to come work with them to build the future sustainable cities for Africa.
From their free book 2 Billion Strong:
In a UN Habitat Report concerning the State of African Cities, the Editor states that; By 2030 the majority of Africans will be urban residents, and the majority of them are predicted to live in slums and informal settlements unless radical corrective measures are taken. Echoing a similar sentiment, the World Urban Forum in Vancouver in June 2006 had called for a major shift in global thinking anticipating that by 2008, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population will live in cities, and in future years most of all new population growth will be in cities in the global South. The report goes on to point out that the rate and scale of this growth would be coupled with impending issues such as climate change, extreme weather events and resource depletion. Together these factors pose serious problems not only in these new towns but also in older settlements that have long reached their infrastructure peak and lifespan. These large-scale problems pose huge urban disaster risks. In particular, governance is one of their 6 pillars and they have a need for innovative governance models: http://communitgrow.com/governance/ SUMMARY So in short, I am bringing everyone here a couple of potential opportunity for application of open-source based models of better governance at community and city level. Would this group be interested in trying something and seeing if abstract theory holds up in reality? Kindest Gien On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>wrote:
Dear Apostolis,
I don't believe you can simpliy wish politics away, and look for technocratic solutions based on mathematics, and I also think it has been shown that the Power Law operates in every distiributed network.
In my opinion, what is needed are 'counter-measures' that balance power law tendencies with their opposite, which is exactly what the greek democracy did, but also the free cities in medieval Europe. But all of these were also a direct result of politics. The greek democracy was based on the revolt of the people against debt slavery, and because the sailors-proletarians were armed; the medieval councils were based on the power of the guilds and the city militias which could act against the nobility ...
It's less mathematics that will help us, than 'group threshold' anthropology and other in-group vs out group findings of evolutionary psychology, which show more precisely when democratic ingroup processes start to break down.
The Norwegian Terje Bongard, in his book Biological Man, has recently published a whole book outlining such an approach.
Peer production has shown us that the global scaling of small group dynamics is now possible; can we apply this to politics as well? Some ideal combination of permanent individual expression of choices (such as the liquid feedback system of proxy voting), small-group deliberation, could augment any system of representation that is still needed where down-scaling is not possible ..
All of this is however, dependent on popular mobilization, as much as on real-life experimentation of real peer production communities that have successfully defended their autonomy, or in other words: messy politics
Michel
XXX
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:14:07 +0200 From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is
there a lesson for us? To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Message-ID: < CAOX4E5F+744hzv4fX8pfC9Ly4G84tJA5n29F4Nmv8CFqOjeQpg@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Letting people literally become the state is the best way to protect Democracy. But how efficient is this?
The good thing is that today we have the internet and thus it is much easier to have a decentralized state by the people, thus solutions like these could for some things scale without costing a lot.
I wonder if there has been any mathematical research for the amount of decentralization that is required so that a hegemonic class doesnt emerge.
I'd prefer it to be mathematical because I know a lot of opinions on this matter which are always interrelated with one's political agenda.(reformist,anarchist,revolutionary marxist,capitalist) -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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