David Bollier

Participatory Budgeting Gets Some Traction in the US

Last week, at the Edge Funders Alliance conference in Berkeley, California, I learned how participatory budgeting is starting to get some real traction here in the US. Participatory budgeting, or PB to aficionados, is a process by which ordinary people determine how to spend municipal funds. Ginny Browne of the Participatory Budgeting Project, which is based in Brooklyn, gave a terrific overview of the history and current state of this rare form of citizen engagement in government. The basic point is to let people have a direct say about the services that most affect them.

Participatory budgeting got its start in 1969 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a city of 1.5 million residents. Launched as an effort to bypass political corruption, PB is now used in that city to allocate 20 percent of the budget, or $200 million. The process engages some 50,000 citizens in Porto Alegre, and has resulted in a doubling of sanitation services and more school buses for underserved areas. (For more on PB in Porto Alegre, see the excellent book chapter by Hilary Wainwright in her 2009 book Reclaim the State.)

Participatory budgeting first came to the US in 2009 when a Chicago city councilman attending the U.S. Social Forum decided to try it out in that city’s 29th ward. In 2011 four New York City council members introduced PB in their districts. About 1.5 million people participated in deciding how to spend $14 million for infrastructure projects.

A year later, the city of Vallejo, California, introduced PB for $3.2 million in city programs and services. The idea had real appeal because the city had just gone through bankruptcy proceedings and citizen trust in government was low. A twenty-person steering committee for PB was created. After brainstorming ideas and developing project proposals, 4,000 citizens chose which of twelve different projects to fund.

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Ecuador’s Pathbreaking Plan for Commons-Based Peer Production: An Update

The nine-month effort in Ecuador to develop a new vision and policy architecture for commons-based peer production is coming into much sharper focus. To refresh your memory on this project, the Government of Ecuador last year commissioned the FLOK Society (FLOK = “Free, libre, open knowledge”) to come up with a thoughtful plan for enabling every sector of Ecuador to be organized into open knowledge commons, to the maximum degree possible. The project has now released a transition plan accompanied by more than a dozen policy frameworks for specific social and economic domains.

The main document can be read here – and here is a version that anyone can comment upon. Here is series of specific sectoral policy proposals.

What makes the FLOK Society report so significant is its informed analysis of global trends in the production of knowledge and culture -- and its bold attempt to reformulate state policies to assure maximum social benefits flow from them. The “advanced” industrial economies continue to cling to archaic intellectual property regimes that ignore network dynamics and prey upon the value created by nonmarket communities. But Ecuador’s path-breaking project seeks to go beyond neoliberal economics and policy. Many of us are excited because the FLOK Society report is a comprehensive, sophisticated and integrated synthesis for moving to the next stage of commoning and peer production on open networks.

A guiding idea in this effort is Buen Vivir (Sumak Kawsay) or “good living,” an indigenous peoples’ concept that refers to a life that balances material, social and spiritual needs and satisfactions (i.e., getting beyond compulsive material growth and consumerism). FLOK Society researchers realize that Buen Vivir is impossible without Buen Conocer (Sumak Yachay), which is the idea of “good knowledge.” Ecuadorian President Correa himself has urged young people to achieve and fight for this open knowledge societ

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The Psychology of Negotiations in Commons

education

Germany

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Celebrate the 82nd Anniversary of the Kinder Trespass!

It was 82 years ago last week that 400 men of the British Workers Sports Federation marched up to Kinder Scout, a bleak moorland plateau in Peak District of England. The march was an act of civil disobedience to protest the lack of legal access to “ramble” on open lands. As the trespassers scrambled up toward the Kinder plateau, they encountered the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers. What happened next is the stuff of grand lore in British rambling:

In the ensuing scuffle, one keeper was slightly hurt, and the ramblers pressed on to the plateau. Here they were greeted by a group of Sheffield-based trespassers who had set off that morning crossing Kinder from Edale. After exchanging congratulations, the two groups joyously retraced their steps, the Sheffield trespassers back to Edale and the Manchester contingent to Hayfield.

As they returned to the village, five ramblers were arrested by police accompanied by keepers, and taken to the Hayfield Lock-up. The day after the trespass, Rothman and four other ramblers were charged at New Mills Police Court with unlawful assembly and breach of the peace [and]….were found guilty and were jailed for between two and six months.

The arrest and subsequent imprisonment of the trespassers unleashed a huge wave of public sympathy, and ironically united the ramblers cause. A few weeks later in 1932 10,000 ramblers – the largest number in history – assembled for an access rally in the Winnats Pass, near Castleton, and the pressure for greater access continued to grow.

On the 75th anniversary of this act of civil disobedience, in 2007, Lord Roy Hattersley described the “Kinder Trespass” as “the most successful direct action in British history" (unless you want to count Gandhi's quite larger direct actions as part of British history!). (Here is The Guardian’s account of the Trespass in 1932.)

Why did this event have such an impact on British consciousness that it is still celebrated – and remains controversial in some quarters?

Because it was about the legitimate scope of private property rights. The Kinder Trespass was intended to point out how unfair and anti-social private land ownership laws were, and how they constrained the public's “right to ramble."

Great Britain

public trust doctrine

land

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Bauwens Invites Pope Francis to Help the Maker Economy

Following Pope Francis’ surprisingly blunt homily about capitalism in November 2013, my friend and colleague Michel Bauwens had the brilliant idea of proposing a practical way for the Pope and Catholic Church to help address economic inequality: let unused church facilities be used as hackerspaces, makerspaces and co-working spaces. This would help local communities reinvent the very idea of the economy with a different logic and ethic, while helping people meet real everyday needs and foster social solidarity. It’s an inspired idea that I hope the Pope and his advisors will consider.

Here is the backstory: In November, the Pope issued a remarkably direct statement about the failures of the global economic system. It included headings such as “No to an economy of exclusion,” “No to the new idolatry of money,” and “No to the financial system which rules rather than serves.” In words that had more than a few wealthy Catholic moguls quivering with rage, the Pope declared, “We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.”

Earlier this week, Bauwens – who has twice participated in deliberations by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences – released an open letter to the Pope thanking him for his statements of support for a more just economy and social solidarity. Bauwens proposed a helpful solution: find ways for the Catholic Church to let its old, unused church buildings and monasteries be used as hackerspaces, makerspaces and co-working spaces. The facilities would provide invaluable physical spaces for a local community to create new types of cooperative, mutualized forms of production and less money-driven, materialist livelihoods. The new uses of the facilities would not amount to charity or commercialism, but rather, a new species of nonmarket economics, commons-based peer production.

One interesting analog to this idea is the unMonastery in Matera, Italy, which Bauwens refers to. The unMonastery describes itself as "an ambitious and radical response to the challenge of bridging the gap [between work to earn money and work to make meaning]. The UnMonastery "draws inspiration from the 10th century monastic life to encourage radical forms of social innovation and collaboration. A sort of lay, off-grid mendicant order striving for a society that can better withstand present and future systemic crises."

hackers

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Spotlight on “Think Like a Commoner”

I’ve busy in recent weeks promoting my new book, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. I’ve been getting some great responses from a variety of media outlets, interview shows, public events and readers both in the US and abroad. (There are French and Polish editions, and other translations are currently being explored.)

Since the focus of the book and my public outreach is to introduce the commons paradigm, long-time readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the substance of my various efforts to publicize Think Like a Commoner. For the curious, here's some recent interviews, book excerpts, reviews and public talks:

Huffington Post, “The Commons as a Rising Alternative to State and Market” (April 14).
Shareable magazine, “New Book Inspires Us to Think Like a Commoner,” interview with Jessica Conrad (April 2).
Great Transition Initiative, Tellus Institute. Essay, “The Commons as a Template for Social Transformation” (April 2014), with comments from a selected readers -- and my responses to comments.
STIR magazine review (UK), by Danijela Dolonec (Spring 2014 issue).
Writer’s Voice radio interview, with Francesca Rheannon (April 23), 30 minutes.
C-Realm Podcast, interview with KMO, Episode #412 (April 30), 30 minutes.
Video of my talk at Sustainability Expo, Middlebury, Vermont (March 28, 2014), 45 minutes.
Observatoire des Multinationales (France). Interview with Olivier Petitjean, « Les communs nous aident à sortir du carcan de l’économie néolibérale, à travers des alternatives concrètes » (April 20, 2014). In French. In English.
Basta! (France). « Les biens communs nous offrent davantage de liberté et de pouvoir que ne le font l’État et le marché » (April 23).

If you know of media venues, reviewers, activists or commoners interested in giving some visibility to Think Like a Commoner, let me know!

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Finally: Open Source Broccoli and Kale

The past thirty years have seen a massive patent grab to control agricultural seeds and the crops that are grown, not just in the US but around the world. In the name of progress and greater yields, seed companies introduced proprietary GMO and hybrid seeds, slowly squeezing out seeds that are more common and shareable. This is exactly what Microsoft did in software, using Windows to marginalize competing software systems, and this is what bottling companies have done to water, trying to supplant tap water with heavily marketed branded water.

Some folks at the University of Wisconsin have launched a new effort to fight this trend in the seed market through what they call the Open Source Seed Initiative. The project last week released 29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains, all of them licensed under the equivalent of software’s General Public License (GPL), which is what has allowed GNU/Linux to remain in the commons.

Matt Watson, via Flicker, under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 2.0 license.

The license, known as the Open Source Seed Pledge, lets anyone use the open source seeds for whatever purpose they want – provided that any subsequent seeds produced are also made available on the same basis. The idea is to bypass the built-in bias of proprietary control in the patent system, and assure that the new seeds will be available for anyone to grow, breed and share in perpetuity, without the fear of someone imposing intellectual property restrictions on later uses of the seeds.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison news office quoted horticulture professor and plant breeder Irwin Goldman, one of the authors of the pledge, as saying: “These vegetables are part of our common cultural heritage, and our goal is to make sure these seeds remain in the public domain for people to use in the future.” Last week Goldman released two carrot varieties he developed, named Sovereign and Oranje, at a public ceremony outside of the university’s microbial sciences building.

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Will Bitcoin and Other Insurgent Currencies Reinvent Commerce?

This and other questions are addressed in “The Weightless Marketplace: Coming to Terms with Innovative Payment Systems, Digital Currencies and Online Labor Markets,” a just-released report that I wrote for the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. The report distills the more salient points raised at a three-day conference last August that brought together leading players in banking, financial services and online labor platforms.

Most of the conference participants are in the business of inventing or adapting to new types of digital payment systems or data-based services. They include major players like JP Morgan Chase, Intuit and VISA as well as upstarts such as Bitcoin, ID3 and the identity-management service Personal.

The basic story in digital markets is the ongoing elimination of “friction” in making transactions – reducing the barriers of geography, time and transaction costs. Hence the title “the weightless marketplace.” “Reducing economic friction” has been the story of the World Wide Web from its beginnings, of course, but the trend is now reaching new levels of intensity and disruption. My role, as rapporteur, was to represent the diverse points of view while providing my own interpretive synthesis.

Perhaps the most fascinating points of discussion revolved around Bitcoin. Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding it, Bitcoin’s basic functionality and soaring popularity have some serious implications for banks, credit card companies, PayPal and other payment systems. Peter Vessenes of the Bitcoin Foundation noted that digital technology can move value to anywhere in the world, at any time, using just 100 bytes of data. And it can do it at very little cost – much less than the per-transaction charges levied by credit cards, for example.

Critics charge that Bitcoin facilitates illicit transactions, money laundering and terrorist activity, not to mention tax evasion. Vessenes replied that Bitcoin is “way less anonymous than cash” – because the permanent global ledger of transactions for each Bitcoin is accessible and can be used to help identify buyers and sellers. Another reason that Bitcoin is controversial is that it represents a potential threat to the sovereignty of nation-states, because it could undermine their monetary and fiscal policies. That’s why regulation of Bitcoin is inevitable, many agreed.

But apart from Bitcoin’s fate, the larger question may be how existing banks and financial companies will respond to the coming “democratization of money.” Several factors are fueling this trend, according to Gartner, the consulting firm: individual access to massive, high-speed flows of information, the proliferation of mobile computing (smartphones, tablets, etc.), the rise of the cloud, and the social commons of highly specialized communities of interest.

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Derek Wall’s “The Commons in History”

For many people, the commons exists as some sort of Platonic ideal -- a fixed, universal archetype. That’s silly, of course, because commons are so embedded in a given place and moment of history and culture, and therefore highly variable. Derek Wall takes this as a point of departure in his new book, The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict and Ecology (MIT Press). At 136 pages of text, it is a short and highly readable book, but one that conveys much of the texture of commons and enclosures as paradigms -- and the implications for ecosystems.

Wall is an economist at Goldsmith College, University of London, so he knows a few things about the biases of conventional economics. He is also a member of the Green party of England and Wales, and therefore knows a few things about corporate power and oppositional politics.

As the author of a recent intellectual biography, The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge), Wall has a subtle mastery of Ostrom’s approach to the commons, but he is not afraid to wade into the political aspects of commons. He notes, for example, “most commons have not been found to succeed or fail on the basis of their own merits. Instead, they have been enclosed, and access has been restricted and often turned over to purely private ownership or state control.” He adds that “commons is a concept that is both contests and innately political in nature. Power and access to resources remain essential areas for debate.”

It is entirely appropriate, then, that Wall goes beyond the familiar Hardin-Ostrom debate on the rationality and economic value of commons, to explore what he calls “the radical case for the commons,” as outlined by E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, among others. While Marxist criticisms of the environmental effects of capitalism so often hit the mark, Wall points out that “the commons is not utopia. A common-pool property rights do not guarantee a free and equal society.”

That’s partly because a commons is not a unitary model, but only a template with highly variable outcomes. People may have common rights to use “usufruct rights” on privately owned land, for example, authorizing them to gather fallen wood. This can be considered a type of commons, albeit not one as self-sovereign and robust as those with communally owned and controlled land. Commons may also coexist with hierarchical power relationships – a reality that also militates against a radical equality.

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Walking Paths as Commons

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh of STIR magazine shared with me an arresting little snippet of history that speaks eloquently about the quiet role of social reciprocity in a civilized life. Consider walking paths as commons, as described by Robert Macfalance in his book, The Old Ways: A Walking Journey:

“Paths are consensual, too, because without common care and common practice they disappear....In nineteenth-century Suffolk [UK] small sickles called 'hooks' were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for instance, or byways to parish churches. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the opposite direction. In this manner the path was collectively maintained for general use.”

It seems to be that we need more modern-day “hooks” that invite people to participate in anonymous acts of self-directed enterprise and reciprocal generosity. Sounds like a great alternative, when feasible, to the connivances of large markets and remote, centralized bureaucracies.