[P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is there a lesson for us?

Sat Jan 12 11:08:06 CET 2013

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 <michel at p2pfoundation.net>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 <xekoukou at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is
>
>         there a lesson for us?
> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAOX4E5F+744hzv4fX8pfC9Ly4G84tJA5n29F4Nmv8CFqOjeQpg at 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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>

-- 
We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails
*Birtha Calloway*

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