[P2P-F] [Commoning] Flok Society 's book (tuesday, 16 th)

[Michel Bauwens]

just so people know,

This is a censored version that leaves out the main strategic document on
the FLOK transition, written by myself. People here are already aware of
threats (and offers of corruption) that were expressed by the people behind
this censored version, to avoid any indepedendent evaluation of the FLOK
process.

If my name has also disappeared from this publication, it would be in the
proud tradition of stalinism and changing history post-humously.

A selection of the more strategic version on the FLOK transition was edtied
by Stacco Troncoso at commonstransition.org ;

Here is the evaluation of the FLOK transition process that could not see
the light of the day, if I had not resisted the intimidation, it's not that
special or harsh, but differs from the gungho story being spread. It is not
meant at all to be antagonistic, just focusing on lessons learned for next
time,

It is really gross that I have expunged even my name from the list of
authors,

Michel

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-new-evaluation-of-the-flok-experience-in-ecuador-whats-next/2015/04/07

At the end of 2013, three governmental institutions asked a team of
researchers to draw up a participatory process in order to craft a
transition strategy for a society based on ‘free, libre and open knowledge.
The project was of course rooted in particular local i.e. ‘national’
concerns, but also transcended this local situation.

The local context was the following: Ecuador is still essentially in a
dependent situation vis a vis the western-dominated global economy, which
means that it needs to export raw material at low added value, and import
consumer goods at high added value. Moreover, a large part of this
extraction is based on non-renewable finite resources such as oil. It’s a
scenario for permanent dependency that the progressive government wanted to
change. Following the lead of Minister Rene Ramirez of the SENESCYT
innovation agency, the project aimed to envisage an economy that would not
longer be dependent on limited material resources, but on infinite
immaterial resources. The proposals of the research team consisted of a
generic Commons Transition Plan, and 18+ legislative proposals including a
dozen pilot projects, which were validated in the Buen Conocer Summit at
the end of May 2014. The synthetic proposals based on a participatory
process which involved both local and foreign input, were then presented by
the research team at the end of June 2014, and are still being finessed for
scientific publication. The proposals are now being processed in the
Ecuadorian administration, and subject to local politics and balance of
forces. Some projects, such as a open agricultural machining project in the
Sigchos district, are pushed forward by committed local leaders and
populations.

Several aspects of the Ecuadorian process where highly innovative, such as
the intense participatory process, and the openness to both local and
foreign input, which is quite unusual.

But the Flok project and the Commons Transition Plan also significantly
transcend the local context and have a global significance.

The first important aspect of the process is of course its very existence.
This is the first time that a transition plan to a commons-based society
and economy was crafted. There are ‘new economy’, climate change centric,
green, and other transition plans, but none of them focused on
re-organizing society and the economy are the central concept of the
Commons as the core value creation and distribution system.

The second important aspect are the conceptual innovations and analysis on
which the transition proposals are based.

The Commons Transition Plan is based on an analysis and observation of the
already existing commons processes and economies, and the value crisis that
they provoke within the current political economy.

There is indeed a increasing contradiction between new relations of
production emerging around the digital commons and the economies they are
creating, and how this emerging prototype of a new mode of production is
embedded within the political economy capitalism. In short, while more and
more use value is created in and through the commons, only a fraction of
this is being monetized, and it is being monetized through proprietary
platforms that very seldom share any of this exchange value with the
creators of value. Hence we see an evolution from a cognitive capitalism
whose income and capital accumulation is based on the rent extraction
through intellectual property as well as the domination and control of the
supply networks, to a new form of ‘netarchical capitalism’ in which
proprietary platforms both enable human cooperation but also extract value
from it. In other words, netarchical capitalism directly extracts value
from human cooperation itself. But its failure to return that value creates
both increased precarity, but also a crisis of accumulation of capital. If
there is no consumer or labor class with income to buy the goods that are
produced by the industrial system, then indeed capital itself, fails to
accumulate on a systemic base, even as an elite 1% of capital can continue
its domination. Hence, any transition must also solve and restore the
feedback loop between value creation and distribution, and create an
ethical and civic economy around the commons, moving from extractive forms
of capital, to generative forms of capital. Capital that returns value to
those that contribute to the commons.

*The Commons transition plan is based on a simultaneous transition of civil
society, the market and the state forms.*

For most of the history of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, the
political conflict has been one between state and market, to either use
reinforce the state mechanisms for redistribution and regulation of the
excesses of the market players. Or on the other side, to re-privatise
activities towards market players. This has been called by some the lib
(for liberal) vs lab (for labour and its derivative social movements)
pendulum. In our current political economy, except for researchers who
operated outside of the mainstream, such as Elinor Ostrom and her research
on the commons, the latter has been discarded as a historical legacy
without future, and indeed, the remaining physical commons that exist
globally, mostly in the South, are everywhere under threat.

But the re-emergence of digital commons of knowledge, software and design,
do not only recreate commons-oriented modes of production and market
activities around it, it also shows that value is now created through
contributions, not labor per se, and creates commons, not commodities.
Through its contributions, it can be said that civil society has now become
productive in its own right, and we can make a leap from contributor
communities to a vision of civil society that consists of commons
contributed to by citizens; the entrepreneurial coalitions that are created
around the commons, and necessarily should be in alignment with the
commons, induce the vision of an ethical economy, a non-capitalist
marketplace that integrates externalities, and re-introduces reciprocity in
the market’s functioning, while co-creating commons and creating
livelihoods for the commoners; finally the emergence of FLOSS Foundations
in the commons economy, organizations that maintain the flow of cooperation
through the maintenance of its infrastructures, point the way to a new
state form, which we have called the Partner State.

Thus, the commons not only introduces a third term next to the state and
the market, i.e. the productive commons-producing civil society, but also a
new market and a new state. The changes must happen concurrently in all
three aspects of our social and economic life.

Let us repeat:

* in the old vision of value creation in industrial capitalism, value is
created by private actors, labor and capital; it is captured by enterprise,
which pays the workers; but, since private market players do not take into
account the negative social and environmental externalities of their mutual
exchange, an external institution is needed as an external regulator, i.e.
the state. Civil society has no clear and recognized role in such societes,
as even the vocabulary of ‘non-profits’ or ‘non-governmental’ indicates.
Civil society is at most a rest category, which can mediate some political
processes.

* In the new vision, value is created by contributors, paid or unpaid, to
the common good as expressed in shareable commons; in this scenario, civil
society has become productive, it is the core of value creation; around the
abundant commons, which are not market goods, added value can be created
for the market place; and, if we do not want the value of the commons to be
exclusively captured by non-inclusive extractive forms of capital, it needs
an ethical economy, i.e. enterpreneurial coalitions that are aligned to the
commons through which they create economies and livelyhoods.

*What then,is specific about our notion of the ‘ethical economy’?*

We call the existing economy an extractive economy, because it extracts
capital from the commons, but does not directly create livelihoods for the
commoners; what is needed is generative capital, that generates capital and
livelihoods for the further production of the commons. Thus we imagine a
connected binary of the commons sphere, in which contributors jointly
create commons, AND a cooperative sphere, in which commoners act as
cooperators, generating their own livelihood and ‘cooperative accumulation’
of capital, which funds the continued production of commons, without
extracting its value to maximise the profit of shareholders. One of the
techniques we propose to do this is a new type of license, the ‘copyfair’
license or license for reinforced reciprocity. Classic free licenses, such
as the copyleft licenses, allow for generalized sharing and use, including
by huge multinational corporations which end up dominating the commons
economy.

The Commons-Based Reciprocity license, a hypothetical to be created license
that is prefigured in the Peer Production License developed by Dmytri
Kleiner, introduces the following rules:

* all common good institutions, which are structurally aligned through the
common good or a social goal through their internal statutes, can use the
particular commons covered by the license

* all non-commercial entities and activities, can use that commons

* all for-profit companies who contribute to the commons can use that
commons

The license introduces one major new restriction, i.e. for-profit entities
which want to use that commons without contributing to it, are required to
pay a moderate license fee.

The main aim however, is not to capture this new flow of income or capital
for the commons, but most of all it is to re-introduce the concept of
reciprocity in the marketplace. Hence, we see this as an essentially
non-capitalist market, since instead of enclosing the commons, or
exclusively capturing its value for profit maximisation, it is a market
which actually generates capital for the commons. Hence we move from a
condition of ‘communism of capital’, in which capital uses the commons, to
a condition of ‘capital for the commons’, in which the new form of capital
strengthens the commons and the commoners.

We further propose a second innovation for the ethical entrepreneurial
coalition surrounding the commons, i.e. a new corporate format, that of
‘open cooperatives’. A classic cooperative consists of members, producers
or consumers, which co-own and co-govern the cooperative under the
principle one member, one vote. In order to survive in the capitalist
marketplace, cooperatives tend over time to use the same strategies as
corporations, work for their own members exclusively, and increasingly use
internal structures that resemble capitalist enterprise. Generally, they do
not produce commons. Hence we believe that we need a new type of
cooperative structures, which we call ‘open cooperatives’.

The characteristics of the open coops are the following:

* the cooperative internal statutes are oriented towards the common good

* the cooperative has a multistakeholder governance and ownership model

(cooperatives with these two characteristics already exist, and are called
‘solidarity cooperatives'; they are a general model for social care
provision in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna, and in Quebec)

But the following two characteristics do not generally exist yet, except in
prefigurative and insufficient forms:

* the cooperative must actively co-produce commons

* the cooperative must be organized around its global commons on a global
organizational level

Currently, cooperatives produce revenues and benefits for their members,
but do not produce commons. An open cooperative uses open and free
licenses, and as we suggest , the copyfair type of licenses, to insure an
ongoing production of immaterial commons, that can be used for all. Open
cooperatives can also produce physical commons. For example, the Allianza
Solidaria housing coop in South Quito, Ecuador, asks it member to
contribute one hundred hours of community work, which is used to clean the
ravines around the housing estate, and which are then given back as
publicly accessible parks to all citizens, hence functioning as a commons.
We of course also need to rethink the expansion of commons formats to
physical and financial capital. An ethical economy is not a liberal economy
which assumes that the universal selfishness at the basis of market
transactions, automatically create wealth; instead, it structurally
integrates the creation of positive externalities for the commons, as an
integral part of its productive activity.

Why must a open cooperative also be organized on a global level ?

The current organizational model of peer production communities, i.e.
communities that share knowledge, code or design, consists of three levels:

* the open design communities themselves, consisting of contributors, paid
of unpaid that allocate their resources to the particular commons ; these
communities are naturally global, open to all who can access the networks

* a for-benefit association or foundation, which manages or enables the
infrastructure of cooperation; for example the FLOSS Foundations insure
that open source communities can continue to do their work over time,
through the protection of the commons through licences, certification
programs, the organisation of conferences, and the like. Though these
foundations may be legally anchored in a single country, they are also
mostly global organizations

* finally, there are the entrepreneurial coalitions who create value on top
of the commons, for the marketplace.

Most of these entrepreneurs are for-profit and may may be organized as
‘multinationals’ at the global level, such as IBM within Linux.

However, the distinct mode of production that such networks enable follow
the rule: “if it is light, it’s global, if it is heavy it is local’.

If we believe in the creation of an open and free economy based on
distributed local production, i.e. through microfactories, it would be very
natural to create local producer cooperatives in charge of making and
selling that particular production. It is here that the imbalance would be
created: while the for-profit economy and its accumulation of capital and
power is able to project itself globally and threatens and diminishes the
power of nation-states for private gain, the alternative cooperative
economy on the other hand, would remain local, and would be unable to
project such counter-power.

Hence the proposal for ‘global open cooperatives’, either as single
organisational entities or as federations of local producers. Las Indias, a
cooperative active in various parts of Spain and the hispanic world, argues
for the creation of “phyles’. A phyle is a global business eco-system that
creates livelihoods for communities and their commons. It is this form of
organization that we advocate as well. One of the projects that goes in
that direction is the fair.coop initiative of the Catalan Integral
Cooperative. Fair.coop is starting as a network of fair trade cooperatives,
most especially active in the Global South, which would start using the
faircoin crypto currency, a fork of Bitcoin that would use the rent
extracting mechanisms of Bitcoin, which favours the enrichment of early
adopters, but would gift them as a capital good to these cooperatives.

The report also specifically innovates the concept of the state, and
through the partner state concept, proposes the creation and use of
public-commons partnerships, and the commonification of public services,
and other innovative concepts and practices that could fundamentally renew
our political economy.

The concept of the state is derived from the emergence of the for-benefit
FLOSS Foundations in the micro-economy, as key new institutions created by
the peer production communities. Just as these foundations enable and
empower the cooperation to take place, so would a partner state, at the
macro level, enable and empower the individual and collective economy of
citizens, as producers of value and contributors to the common good. A
partner state is not a market state which favours market forces, but a
democratic and participatory collective institution, or set of
institutions, that enables social production and an autonomous civil
society with a thriving ethical economy. The commonification of public
services means that the state insures equal and equitable access to key
public services, but that these public services themselves are a
co-production and co-governance of the citizenry and related user
communities. A model of this are the solidarity cooperatives for social
care, already active in Quebec and northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna).
Public-commons partnerships would be the result of this process and would
be an alternative to public-private partnerships, which often socialize the
losses and privatize the gains, while being detrimental to the universal
access to the provisioning of what should be public services.

*What now ? What comes after the experience in Ecuador?*

First of all, through a new website and wiki at commonstransition.net, the
P2P Foundation and its partners are making an effort to create an open
public forum for further commons-driven and commons-oriented policy-making,
that is distinct from its first iteration in Ecuador (floksociety.org), and
is open to all contributions from commoners globally.

With the Commons Transition Plan as a comparative document, a ‘force de
proposition’ as they say in French, we intend to organize workshops and
dialogues to see how other commons locales, countries, language-communities
but also cities and regions, can translate their experiences, needs and
demands into policy proposals. The Plan is not an imposition, but something
that is intended as a stimulus for discussion and independent crafting of
more specific commons-oriented policy proposals in various specialized
contexts. As part of this process, we have already concluded a workshop
with the Reseau Francophone des Communs in Paris in September, and
workshops with Syriza officials in Greece. The idea is not to support or
choose any political or social movement, but to enable all progressive and
emancipatory forces to look for commonalities around their approaches, and
renew their political visions with the commons in mind.

This project therefore, is itself a commons, open to all contributions, and
which should benefit all who need it.

In the Commons Transition Plan, we are making also very specific
organizational proposals, to advance the cause of a commons-oriented
politics and a ‘peer production of politics and policy’.

At the local level, we propose the creation of Assemblies of the Commons,
institutions that bring together all those that are creating or maintaining
commons, immaterial or material, but we propose to restrict membership to
civic organizations and not-for-profit oriented projects.

At the same time, we propose the creation of local Chamber of the Commons,
the equivalent for the ethical economy and ‘generative’ capital, the what
the Chamber of Commerce is for the for-profit economy. Our aim is to
reconstruct commons-oriented social forces at the local level, and to give
them voice. These assemblies and chambers could produce a social charter,
that would be open for political and social forces to support, which in
turn would guarantee some forms of support from these new institutions.

At the larger regional but especially national levels, but also perhaps at
the global level, we propose to re-organize politics around the joint value
of the commons. Such a (global) ‘coalition of the commons’ would create
alliances of those movements that express the digital commons and digital
cultures (such as Pirate Parties and internet platform parties), the
ecological forces who are naturally inclined to environmental commons, the
new transformative parties of the left such as Podemos and Syriza, who may
be called the forces of the industrial commons, and the expressions of
progressive entrepreneurs, i.e. the ethical coalitions that emerge around
the commons, of which Alternativet in Denmark may perhaps be an early
expression. Such coalitions would support politics and policies which are
no longer a prisoner of the lib/lab dilemma, i.e. nationalisation vs
privatisation, but can rethink social organization as a triarchy based on
the commons.

It is important to keep in mind the limitations of the first Commons
Transition Plan. Indeed, the remit of the FLOK project in Ecuador, was the
implementation of a ‘social knowledge economy’, i.e. an economy that is
centered around knowledge commons. Therefore, this plan did not include a
transformation strategy for other commons, such as the Polanyi triangle of
land and nature, labour, and money. We partly went beyond this limitation
by putting a lot of attention to the material and immaterial conditions,
and feeding mechanisms, which would guarantee the successful existence of
the immaterial commons of knowledge, however, that is not sufficient.

*Thus, the Commons Transition Plan is waiting for its next iteration, in
which the knowledge commons are not the only commons to be considered a
priority, but would be rather seen as a more general, fully physical,
transformation towards a commons economy based on the commonification of
land, money and labor as well.*



On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 5:56 AM, Bernardo Gutiérrez <
bernardobrasil at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello again
>
> Here you have the free download of the book in SPanish
> http://book.floksociety.org
>
> At the moment, in English you have the summary of the contents
>
> http://book.floksociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/intro_JoPP_15_6_2.pdf
>
> Best
> Bernardo
>
> 2015-06-14 16:19 GMT-03:00 Bernardo Gutiérrez <bernardobrasil at gmail.com>:
>
>>
>> Mover a Recibidos
>>
>> Más
>>
>> *2* de *23.230*
>>
>> Flok Society 's book (Tueday 16th): a new path for the global commons
>> Bernardo Gutiérrez <bernardobrasil at gmail.com>
>> 16:15 (hace 2 minutos)
>>
>>
>> para liberationtech
>> Hello
>>
>> We are in the final stretch of the publication of the results of FLOK
>> Society ' s collaborative research.
>>
>> The official day of release of the book will be on Tuesday 16 th , in
>> Quito. The book will also be available for free download in various
>> digital formats. Besides that, on 16 th there will be a hang out with
>> some of the authors and contributors.
>>
>> Here a text that explain more
>>
>>
>> http://floksociety.org/en/2015/06/12/buen-conocer-flok-society-public-policy-and-sustainable-models-for-a-social-knowledge-economy-in-ecuador/
>>
>> This is the final figure of the book:
>>
>>
>> FLOK Society / Buen Conocer. Sustainable and public policy models
>> for a social economy of the common and open knowledge in Ecuador
>> David Vila-Vinas and Xabier Barandiaran E. (Eds.)
>>
>> Thanks p.i.
>>
>> Prologue
>> Daniel Vazquez p.vii
>>
>> FLOKeando in Ecuador
>> Milton Cerda p.xi
>>
>> Introduction
>> David Vila-Vinas & Xabier Barandiaran E. p.1
>>
>> The  FLOK Society process
>> E. Xabier Barandiaran, David Vila-Vinas & Daniel Vazquez p.7
>>
>> PART 1. Strengthening collective intelligence
>> 1.1 Education: Open Educational Resources
>> David Vila-Vinas, Daniel Araya & Paul Bouchard p.61
>>
>> Science 1.2: Collaborative research, participatory and open
>> E. Xabier Barandiaran, Daniel Araya & David Vila-Vinas p.143
>>
>> 1.3 Culture: access and sustainability in the era of free culture
>> David Vila-Vinas, Carolina Botero, Sylvie Duran, Jorge Gemetto, Bernardo
>> Gutierrez Pilar Saenz & Pedro Soler p.223
>>
>> PART 2. commons oriented  productive capacities
>> 2.1 Agri-Food: open and sustainable food system in
>> Ecuador
>> George Dafermos & José Luis Vivero Pol p.293
>>
>> 2.2 Biodiversity: citizen science, ancestral knowledge and
>> biodiversity applied in social knowledge economy
>>
>>   Stefano Golinelli, Karina Vega-Villa & Juan Fernando VillaRomero
>>         p.345
>>
>> 2.3 Manufacturing: Open design and distributed manufacturing
>> George Dafermos p.397
>>
>> 2.4 Energy: Free Knowledge, distributed power and empowerment
>> social for a change in the energy matrix
>> George Dafermos, Panos Kotsampopoulos, Kostas Latoufis, Ioannis
>> Margaris,
>>
>> Beatriz Rivela, Fausto Paulino Washima, Pere Ariza-Montobbio & Jesus
>> López
>>
>> PART 3. Institutions, society and communities
>>
>> 3.1 Institutions: Knowledge society, social economy and
>> partner State
>>
>> John Restakis p.479
>>
>> 3.2 Communities: Knowledge and expertise originating, traditional and
>> Popular
>>
>> Juan Manuel Crespo & David Vila-Vinas p.551
>>
>> PART 4. open and free technical infrastructure
>> 4.1 Hardware: Ecosystem-based innovation and production hardware
>> free
>> Alan Lazalde, Jenny Torres & David Vila-Vinas P.619
>>
>> 4.2 Software: Free and open source software in government
>> Public
>> Jenny Torres & Mariangela Petrizzo p.653
>>
>> 4.3 Connectivity: Accessibility, sovereignty and self-management
>> communications infrastructure
>> Jenny Torres & David Vila-Vinas p.703
>>
>> Quito Declaration p.739
>> Authors / s p.749
>>
>> Best regards
>>
>> Bernardo
>>
>> --
>> www.futuramedia.net
>> www.codigo-abierto.cc
>> @bernardosampa (twitter) / @futura_media
>> São Paulo +55 11 43044380 (fixo) +55 11 84881620 (celular)
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> www.futuramedia.net
> www.codigo-abierto.cc
> @bernardosampa (twitter) / @futura_media
> São Paulo +55 11 43044380 (fixo) +55 11 84881620 (celular)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commoning mailing list
> Commoning at lists.wissensallmende.de
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>
>


-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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