important appeal: social media and p2p tools against the meltdown
Michel Bauwens
Though commercial, it illustrates that social media and p2p tools can be one of the ways to help individuals and communities cope with the crisis, and even transform our society and economy.
Since this issue is eminently practical and affects human survival and well-being, I think we should cover these initiatives with more focus than usual.
So here is a first appeal:
- can you send me anything you have already found on the topic? The only requirement is that it represents some practical advance for those who would use it, making a real difference in their lives ...
I will start the following page to keep track of it: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Meltdown_Solutions
Michel
--
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net - http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN, http://www.shiftn.com/
Nathan Cravens
Thanks for making this call.
What I have to present addresses the three questions asked by the author of 'Social Media vs. the Economic Recession'. Housing may need to be manufactured out of Fab Labs at first until rent based vacancies are too rampant, lowering prices down to practicality. Our contact to solve the housing issue is Larry Sass. From http://otherexcuses.blogspot.com/2009/01/social-media-vs-recession.html:
- practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)
- emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don't have a job?)
- directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)
Here's an idea package to add to the TO DO NOW list:
The Open Cafe / Community Supported Agriculture / Fab Lab Alliance
Open Cafes:
The physical hub for activity. A place where meals are prepared by people for people to eat for zero money. Its hip and empowering to dine/work/have a chat here.
Community Supported Agriculture:
Enough participants work in DIY gardens or community farms and donate the produce to the Cafe and or from government issued food cards. (I play both sides for the same aim)
Open Source Fab Labs:
Cafes align with OS Fab Labs to fill out the resource necessity gap to further save financial cost.
Wikis provide only an example for the communications medium used until better mediums are made: easy to use and easier to organize. For now, let's work with the communications we have ready-made: e-mail and wikis.
Here are a few, but hardly all, hoops to jump through to make this Alliance a reality. This is just to prime the creative pump.
The Cafe is the focus:
- A space and resources are donated for this purpose by those that see the benefit. It can begin in your home and branch out. In urban settings, it can begin with what is already public domain, the local park.
- Food and beverage donation. Donations for the day/week can be viewed in advance on the Cafe's wiki. Most everyone will want to participate in production because everyone can go here for free. There are no consumers here, rather, this is where producers are born willingly. There is not much difference between consumption or production here.
- If money is needed, a wiki shows expenses that need to be met and what is generating them; those in the Fab Lab then have something to make to reduce or eliminate that cost.
- Event planning. This too is done in wikis and is a place for people to perform or have specific discussions at the Cafe or elsewhere (like at the CSA or Fab Lab) to benefit the Cafe and the people that go there. The Cafe is our focus, because its where all of our interests can unite: in putting food literally on the table.
- Elaborate and replicate the Cafe as needed from here: http://opencafe.wikispot.org/
The Sell Stuff to Get Stuff Business Model
I want to produce a Fab Lab to make 'almost' anything, but first need money to build one, but I'm not interested in profit so much as getting these labs up globally for abundant access so people can make what they want to have (rather than purchasing it / bashing me over the head for one). In prospect, once these labs are ubiquitous, I will ask "how can I make this?" rather than "where can I buy this?" Later it will only be "where can I make this" as desired. Knowing this foreseeable reality makes the presentation of Open Business plans like this one even more relevant and necessary.
I then go to the market and see what's selling for a high
return that's easiest to make with as few tools and resources as
possible. Once I've reverse engineered (open sourced) the thing and
simplified the production process (potentially ignorant of patent law)
I can now build it in our feeble lab and sell it for a return (like on
Ebay) in order to put more tools in the lab which are then reverse
engineered and resold to produce more fabrication tools and so on until
a fully replicable Open Source Fab Lab is in every town around the
world.
The Fab Lab is only an example presented in the story found in the preceding two paragraphs. The basis of this model can work for a CSA and Cafe as well, but I suspect OS Fab Labs will be the bread winner financially for these groups, even if the bread comes from the CSA and made at the Cafe by real people with real machines. I say OS Fabs will be the bread winners because the stuff made there are more difficult than replicating Cafes or Farms. Argument complete.
Conclusion
My presentation and prose may be a fault, but I believe the general ideas are sound. If you disagree, its only based on my presentation. With your help or without you even knowing it we will amplify and attenuate a version of this proposal into practicality before generating something better. This can begin by further refining the ideas described here to better assist: viable application.
Support Michel and P2P Foundation, Factor e Farm and Appropedia, your local OS Fab Lab, CSA, and start an Open Cafe. MIT, can you spare a dime? We'll be fine given our persistence toward the aims touched on here.
Nathan Cravens
Effortless Economy
BTW, everything I have to say past, present, and prospective is public domain. I'm only saying this once here. Just don't blame or hurt me (based on my undisclosed definition of pain) if it causes a problem for you. Rework it to your advantage, the advantage that works for the benefit itself works the best, that is, that which works best in the longest run for the most people.
Michel Bauwens
I'm publishing this on the 8th: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-answers-the-meltdown-nathan-cravens/2009/03/08
keep it coming!!
Michel
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Nathan Cravens
Helen Titchen Beeth
Kevin Carson
#
It’s an excellent model for community resilience–simultaneously a
cushion that could enable the unemployed to subsist outside the wage
system and form the nucleus of a future post-mass production economy
centered on production outside the wage system.
A few points:
The Fab lab concept should be expanded to include all forms of
small-scale production tools affordable by individuals. This would
include well-equipped home workshops with conventional machine tools,
as well as intermediate-sized tools like the multimachine. This
broader conception would coincide with the community workshops
advocated by Colin Ward, Karl Hess, etc.
Local agriculture should place a premium on alternative water sources
(esp. rainwater conservation with cisterns), edible permaculture
landscaping, etc., for resilience against drought and other forms of
climate change associated with global warming.
And adding housing as a fourth and separate category, rather than only
related tangentially to the other functions of the Cafe, would fill a
big gap in the overall resiliency strategy. It might be some kind of
cheap, bare bones cohousing project associated with the Cafe (water
taps, cots, hotplates, etc) that would house people at minimal cost on
the YMCA model. Squats in abandoned/public buildings, and building
with scavenged materials on vacant lots, etc. (a la Colin Ward), might
tie in with this as wel
Vinay Gupta’s work on emergency life-support technology for refugees
is also relevant to the housing problem: offering cheap LED lighting,
solar cookers, water purifiers, etc., to those living in tent cities
and Hoovervilles.
--
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Nathan Cravens
Thanks for your feedback. This proposal fits well with Open Source Market Economy we've discussed, in that, it anticipates the decrease in monetary necessity.
It’s an excellent model for community resilience–simultaneously a
cushion that could enable the unemployed to subsist outside the wage
system and form the nucleus of a future post-mass production economy
centered on production outside the wage system.
My hopes are that these environments help people thrive and support independent living through community organizing. It would be a place to network and learn skills that help to revise, add, or replicate various parts most personally attractive based on the resource dynamic, like available applicable knowledge and material resources. The intention is to make the organizational approach transparent and self organizing.
I recently read Wallerstein's introduction to world systems analysis. I find the approach very attractive. This view provides the empirical backing for the effort.
First comes developing this proposal further into something adoptable.
A few points:
The Fab lab concept should be expanded to include all forms of
small-scale production tools affordable by individuals. This would
include well-equipped home workshops with conventional machine tools,
as well as intermediate-sized tools like the multimachine. This
broader conception would coincide with the community workshops
advocated by Colin Ward, Karl Hess, etc.
I will look into Ward and Hess for more background. My influences presently are that of Factor e Farm and NYC Resistor. Factor e for more rural settings and NYC for an urban model.
Local agriculture should place a premium on alternative water sources
(esp. rainwater conservation with cisterns), edible permaculture
landscaping, etc., for resilience against drought and other forms of
climate change associated with global warming.
The Vigyan Ashram has developed affordable methods of ground water detection. For dry areas there are ways of condensing moisture in the air. Desalinization can be used for communities near the sea.
Appropedia is a good hub for the various ways of water.
http://www.appropedia.org/Portal:Water
And adding housing as a fourth and separate category, rather than only
related tangentially to the other functions of the Cafe, would fill a
big gap in the overall resiliency strategy. It might be some kind of
cheap, bare bones cohousing project associated with the Cafe (water
taps, cots, hotplates, etc) that would house people at minimal cost on
the YMCA model. Squats in abandoned/public buildings, and building
with scavenged materials on vacant lots, etc. (a la Colin Ward), might
tie in with this as wel
In an urban area, one large multi-level building could provide all basic needs. A floor for hydroponicly grown food, the fab, and cafe. The remaining space can be used for housing. The more sophisticated the fabs and availibility of materials, the better conditions may rival or exceed present middle class standards.
Vinay Gupta’s work on emergency life-support technology for refugees
is also relevant to the housing problem: offering cheap LED lighting,
solar cookers, water purifiers, etc., to those living in tent cities
and Hoovervilles.
Nathan
