The notion of a gift economy

[david_c]

Hi Nathan and others,

In light of the recent discussion " Gift Economies for the 21st
Century" on the open-manufacturing list* (
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/156dc88435995335 ),
I felt compelled to mention http://www.gifteconomy.org/ . I think it
looks promising. It seems somewhat more sophisticated, I dare say,
than justfortheloveofit.org for example (maybe not superficially, but
the backend software it plans to use seems to be potentially powerful.
It's more about the substance, and less about the flash).

As a brief aside, and at the risk of seeming pedantic, I don't even
like the word "economy". As far as I know, the word is derived from
the Greek "oikos nomos" (which translates as something like "house
rules"). Which leads me to say : I feel that - in the context of human
relationships and decisions - virtue is more important than rules.
Semantics are important sometimes.

david

* I enjoyed the hypothetical scenario BTW. I thought you were being a
bit hard on yourself though Nathan.

[Nathan Cravens]

Here's a revision of the village proposal.

• Property is public domain within the community, but private property to non-members.
  
• Gift cards (like credit cards) are issued to members.
  
• The card ensures a sustainable gift economy by limiting acquisition of scarce items as needed.
• Managers of a rationed item can take the form of software regulated by community members with interest in the production process.
• For exceptions or novel uses of rationed items, managers are consulted.
• Both producers and users know what demands to expect based on the amount of gifts distributed to produce accordingly.
  
• Free time granted by the gift economy dynamic is used to create or improve the productive processes from the web.
  
• With productive processes in the public domain, other communities may adopt the practices for themselves.

Large intentional communities like Findhorn, Auroville, and Damanhur can be the sort of communities to approach to fine-tune our gift model. When we see how from the web this works in practice, more communities will apply the methods.

Its safe to say the most materially autonomous towns using the monetary method, yet able to keep local currency in circulation, will have an easier time adjusting than towns dependent on global supply chains and the mazes of artificial scarcities and exchanges they involve.

The proposal creates a profound challenge, because this means all material resources going into a final product, from gift to gift, is made available without transactions. If transactions are involved, this renders the model volitile. An immediate switch may be impractical in some cases, let's propose a way to transition into the above model:

Non-profits form a pact with the athem, "free food, now." The conglomerate approaches organizers of CSAs with a deal: We pay for your financial expenses; in return our global team helps you track providers or creates them of the materials within your community you need to form a sustainable gift network to divert more funds to other CSAs in the same matter. With each success, a stronger CSA portfolio of providers and production processes are documented and public domain. Eventually the social network platform takes care of itself without funding any CSA. World hunger solved. Yes, in one paragraph. Next.

In concert, as we see the non-commercial CSA flourish, this will cause a chain reaction of gift pacts among material holders to make products without financial costs.   

For the collaberative design of productive processes I have in mind to ensure local material autonomy through a global collaberative platform, see:
http://www.appropedia.org/Open_Systems_Design_for_Peer_Producing_Anything

Paul and Bryan might want to pitch what they have in mind in this vital area. We need a user friendly resource development and management system if we want scalable gift economies. I call the approach Open Systems Design, a departure from the top-down approach of systems modeling as its known in practice to benefit a small number of stakeholders. In Open Systems Design, the users are the stakeholders. This means stakeholders could be anyone.

We known from the studies of Eric Hippel et al. that a large majority of innovation and invention comes from users themselves, therefore we can expect better infrastructures and products to come from users once web accessible systems are better imagined and folk come together to hack the code and design the elegant graphical user interfaces.

Hi David,

I look forward to getting to know the folk at gifteconomy.org better. At first glance, this group does not present approaches needed infrastructure, like in terms of collaberative design, resource management, and manufacturing. This is the issue with justfortheloveofit.org and Freecycle as well.

I think its important to separate community from the distribution of materials. I use the term 'economy' to refer to a distribution of materials. The term "gift economy" is one that enough people know about and can agree on. We might interpret the house analogy with the gift concept as a way to make the house, the economic system alone, with the gift prefix, a home. Communities may live in homes, but they are not the homes themselves. The process must not be mistaken for community itself. This is why I find "gift economy" as words attractive. If we were to call it a gift community, this perverts the word 'community' by describing it in terms of its economic practice. 

Here's a marketing slogan to bank on:
GET OUTTA DEBT FAST BY SWITCHING TO GIFT ECONOMY!!!

--
Nathan Cravens
Effortless Economy

OPEN SOURCE >> AGGREGATE >> INTEREST >> DISCUSSION >> DESIGN OUTLINE >> DESIGN >> MATERIALS REQUEST >> FABRICATE PROTOTYPE >> OPTIMIZE

[david_c]

Nathan, a quick question : what does CSA stand for?

[Nathan Cravens]

Community-supported agriculture. ;)

[david_c]

As regards the idea of "gift cards" : GnuPG private keys - as far as I
know - can now be stored on smartcards. See
http://www.gnupg.org/howtos/card-howto/en/smartcard-howto-single.html
for info. The idea of using these OpenPGP cards (or something similar)
would seem to make sense to me. It utilizes a technology which is more-
or-less understood and utilized by lots of people already. Also,
people who don't have the means to acquire such a card wouldn't
necessarily be left out of the picture, as - after all - they are
primarily a convenient means of storing a private key.

[Douglas Rushkoff]

Hey Group,

I never followed up on getting involved, or in getting the people
currently reading my book and following my work to become involved
directly in the postscarcity group.

How best to synergize?

I've got my film, as well as a series of followups, all hosted at http://lifeincorporated.net
The "dispatches" I'm releasing sound like a list of postscarcity
principles. Perhaps I should have called my book post-scarcity....

Who is around? Does anyone want to be on my WFMU radio show about
these issues?

Do we intend a conference or event of any kind?

All best
Douglas



On Jun 30, 2009, at 6:18 PM, Nathan Cravens wrote:

> Community-supported agriculture. ;)
>
>
> >

[Joseph Jackson]

While I'm currently working on the Open Science Summit for 2010, I
don't know of any events specifically on post scarcity. Perhaps Paul
Fernhout could do the interview. An abundance barcamp at least would
be a good start.

Currently we're hosting the open journal system at
abundancestudies.org to produce the first issue of Abundnace: the
Journal of Post Scarcity Studies.

I'll send out an announcement for solicitations end of this week. The
time table is roughly 8wks, for labor day it would be nice to have a
first issue with 8-10 feature length articles of 3K-10K words. At
this time I'd also like to have compiled the past years' worth of
posts and content into a version 1.0 Post Scarcity FAQ.

Sounds like the dispatches could fit with this principles of post
scarcity summary.

On Jul 1, 8:11 am, Douglas Rushkoff <rushk...@rushkoff.com> wrote:
> Hey Group,
>
> I never followed up on getting involved, or in getting the people  
> currently reading my book and following my work to become involved  
> directly in the postscarcity group.
>
> How best to synergize?
>

> I've got my film, as well as a series of followups, all hosted athttp://lifeincorporated.net

[Douglas Rushkoff]

This would be great.
I want to link to any resources or to post-scarcity itself as a
resource from my radio show site and book site.

[Chris Watkins]

Hi Douglas

What we're doing at Appropedia is very much about creating an abundant world - even if we don't emphasize the term post-scarcity. E.g. One of us could join you on the radio show.

Projects such as Transition Towns (and The Transition Handbook) are also working on a future where we create abundance in a completely sustainable way. I don't know how close this is to your idea of post-scarcity - do these seem like relevant resources to you?

Chris

--
Chris Watkins

Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

identi.ca/appropedia / twitter.com/appropedia
blogs.appropedia.org

I like this: five.sentenc.es

[Nathan Cravens]

Doug,

Here's a few links that come to mind...

Advanced Civilization
http://www.adciv.org/Main_Page
 
Anyone working in abundance with any virtual presence is in some way affiliated with the p2p foundation. Michel's diligence has assured this.
http://p2pfoundation.net/

Most related?
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Movements
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing

An elegant and well written site
http://onthecommons.org/

Lots of grassroots activity facilitated here.
hackerspaces.org

openMaterials
http://openmaterials.org/

Open Source Ecology
openfarmtech.org

Wikichains
wikichains.com

Robotic Nation
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm


Some folk to contact in terms of post-scarcity for the radio show...

Charles Collis
Eric Hunting
Lewis Hyde
Marcin Jakubowski
Smári McCarthy
Catarina Mota


Cheers,
Nathan

[david_c]

I thought it might be worthwhile to bring this back to the original
topic (if people want to change the subject, they should start a new
discussion).

On a whim, I just thought I'd posit this for possible discussion.

Let's imagine taking a model similar to justfortheloveofit.org, but
with the following differences :
- FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software)
- probably a web-app I suppose (at least to begin with)
- de-centralised (and thus, without single point of failure)
- chapters which collaborate with each other, but which are
otherwise autonomous
- maybe these chapters could correspond to the "villages" or
"communities" you mentioned Nathan, or maybe they could be larger
- perhaps subdomains could be used for different chapters
(similarly to how different indymedia collectives use different sub-
domains of the indymedia.org domain)
- make a few other technical changes (once it's open-source, and not
just in the hands of one or two people, the details could be thrashed
out then)

[david_c]

I initiated a brief discussion on this at the RBE forums :
http://rbefoundation.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=293 - and tried to
portray my lack of enthusiasm for exchange paradigms in general.

me :
> I think that perhaps not just money is the problem. The associated mindset of debt, and exchange, and payment, is an impediment to a life of abundance, no? Natural systems - some orders of magnitude more intricate and beautiful than what humans have accomplished - don't utilize these contrived mechanisms of exchange and payment. And, furthermore, I suspect that they *couldn't*.

> I can not muster enthusiasm for LETS, alternative currencies, or barter. Perhaps something like a modern "gift economy" is what I aspire to. I'm not sure. Something where - although there may be (and probably is) some form of reciprocity - there isn't this effort wasted on "accounting" and so on.

_dm :
> Could you please clarify your vision?

me :
> ... one of the thoughts I'd like to bring across in this discussion is : if people's willingness to help each other is contingent on an explicit "quid pro quo", and tenuous notions of "value" and "credit", I think we are placing unnecessary restrictions and impediments on the scope and nature of our endeavours.

> What would happen if the antibody-producing cells of our immune systems said to tissue-cells in the event of an infection : "Just to clarify : we charge x tokens per unit time for our labour", or "We will only do this for you if you do 4 hours for us tomorrow". What would happen? Our bodies would disintegrate, no? The mechanisms that sustain our bodies, and other natural systems, are so much more subtle than these notions of exchange and barter. They use feedback systems; they keep variables within certain limits; they maintain internal balances. In my understanding, what they *don't* utilize are mechanisms of exchange.

[Douglas Rushkoff]

I suppose some systems of credit and debit do exist in nature. Or at
least some set of protocols that identify one member's request as valid.

If cancer cells keep asking for resources to do destruction to other
members of the community, then how and when do other cells justify
refusal?

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Douglas Rushkoff wrote:
> I suppose some systems of credit and debit do exist in nature. Or at
> least some set of protocols that identify one member's request as valid.
>
> If cancer cells keep asking for resources to do destruction to other
> members of the community, then how and when do other cells justify
> refusal?

Ah, this is interesting. Because, now we see a paradigm shift, from thinking
those who get much more than others should be emulated by millionaire
wannabees, to considering that those who get a lot more than others are ill
somehow (as in "financially obese", a phrase James P. Hogan made up). :-)

And then, the question is, what sort of social systems should be in place to
help people who are mentally ill or diseased? Are ration units (fiat
dollars) really the best way to deal with mental illness?

--Paul Fernhout

[Nathan Cravens]

Hi David,

Thanks for returning to this discussion. 

Okay, so back to discussing how we might shift from negative reciprocity to positive reciprocity and beyond. ;) We can attenuate the complexity by describing these in terms of use value vs. exchange value; its variations and hybridizations. 

A talk regarding a p2p shop surfaced.

In it, Smári gave an update on the map project, tangible bit. 

Mapping materials, processes, and rendering them common are vital for scaling gift to more consistent global economies. 

Smári McCarthy wrote:

(From: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-July/003797.html)

Franz Nahrada wrote:

> The meeting was quite extensive the next day and we tried to link various

> perspectives to find a sústainable pattern that might go far beyond the

> opportunity of the moment. Of course its "up in the air" to create a

> dealership for Open Source products, but what if such a dealership was

> embedded in an operating system which facilitated communication between

> all involved groups, users, developers, producers, workers, retailers and

> so on?

This fits into what I've been doing. I've been working on a system

called "tangible bit" (www.tangiblebit.com) that's essentially a

networked resource map. It ostensibly maps resources (think: plywood,

transistors, bicycles, milk.. ) and manufacturing processes/capabilities

(think: CNC mill, pick'n'place, welding rig, butter churner) in a

geodata setting with both resources and capabilities tied into "sites".

The idea is that if you have enough resources mapped and enough

processes mapped you can start to do some fancy sparse matrix inversion

in order to find the shortest path to any given product constrained on a

number of variables such as cost, distance materials must travel,

environmental impact, etc.

I'm not very far along the line with this and desperately need somebody

to be hacking on this with me so that design decisions become more

rational and that the right development path is followed - I can do it

alone, but it'll take a very long time and it might come out weird. If

you want to take a look, clone the GIT archive from

http://www.tangiblebit.com/tangiblebit.git

What I'm thinking though is that given this database+interface it should

be relatively easy to add a "shop" to it (perhaps Satchmo based?) that

allows sites to take and process arbitrary orders, either from other  

sites or from individuals. In fact, this would be highly valuable. 

I forwarded the above discussion to the hackerspaces.org community to incite some collaberation. Smári, you may want to pitch your project to this community personally.

If property rights for materials used by various people were converted into commons this would reduce most of the financial costs in exchange trade. From here, the existing material costs are reduced by having accessible and revisable designs, like 'tangible bit', to better optimize productive processes. So let's assume materials and distribution are free. We still require a person to perform tasks hardware and software alone cannot--for now and the foreseeable few decades. I do not see any consistent way to create new products that require human hands for export without extrinsic reward greater than recognition within this window of labor capitalization, because few would care if some distant islanders thought poorly of you or your community for not pulling a crank. When the recognition economy fails, Logos must enter the room to make a trade. I can easily imagine the other party not having anything adequate in exchange to trade (including that basic income dollar!) and therefore she or a friend must learn to perform the tasks or do without. It is here you can see why I'm interested in pursuing small scaled village settings that practice positive reciprocity or gift transfer until we have the technological leverage to become more self sufficient using advanced desktop fabrication. 

That's a condensed version.  

Nathan

[david_c]

Hi Nathan, and others.

Yes, I'm aware of Smari's project. I was in touch with him about it a
while ago. Unfortunately I haven't had time to look at in depth or get
involved yet (you on this list Smari? Sorry I haven't got back to
you!). I'll try to do so shortly. In the meantime, I was just
wondering ....

Do you think it would be worth setting up a group on Ning.com to
facilitate this sort of initiative? Google groups are useful, but a
Ning group would quite likely facilitate a stronger sense of
community.

As well as providing people with a forum for "discussion", we could
also endeavour to provide people with a forum to *help each other* -
e.g. to share resources, skilled labour, etc.. The latter would only
be useful if it was used by people from the same community of course,
which wouldn't happen straight away. An unpretentious forum where
people can figure out ways to help each other is basically what I have
in mind.

I would be interested in a non-hierarchical project of this sort. We
would have to be clear about the purpose of the group though. For
example, some people might consider alternative currencies or some
credit or accounting schemes as a desirable alternative to the market.
Personally, I don't. And - while I don't really care that much about
what other people do - I don't intend to invest my time or effort in
furthering these initiatives. Also, while I think that the free and
open-source movement and ideology is very valuable - in the context of
trying to foster an environment of "abundance", rather than scarcity,
that is - my own perception is that there are other factors which are
considerably more significant.

I don't know if anyone here would be interested in that sort of thing,
but if you are, feel free to let me know. I don't think Ning.com is
ideal (it has advertising and stuff), but it could be a valuable tool
to get us going. There are also interesting CMSs like
"crabgrass" ( https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/about ), but that would
involve significantly more effort.

Just a thought.

[Nathan Cravens]

Things are really coming alive, David. 

The P2P Foundation Ning is a community pursuing this topic. There's nearly 500 folk there to network with. http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/

>
> As well as providing people with a forum for "discussion", we could
> also endeavour to provide people with a forum to *help each other* -
> e.g. to share resources, skilled labour, etc.. The latter would only
> be useful if it was used by people from the same community of course,
> which wouldn't happen straight away. An unpretentious forum where
> people can figure out ways to help each other is basically what I have
> in mind.

justfortheloveofit.org does this already to some extent, but the platform is its own island, not apart of the web itself. OpenKollab just launched after a p2p conference to better address keeping ties and activities in development after events like conferences; to keep that spirit alive to the greatest degree without the conference atmosphere.

OK looks poised to better match skills and resources to meet needs in a forum-like setting at first with bells and whistles to come as we bring more developers onboard and it becomes a useful organizational tool. At the moment we're discussing how to launch something simple to build on. Its a small group for now, but we all want to develop the same types of things and put it into one package, so that helps. Planned weekly irc chats also help in having real time engagement that sparks motivation and creativity; even if it is text chat; I've seen it make a big difference in terms of increased activity. I hope Smári might get involved in some way with this project as well. ;) http://wiki.openkollab.com/Home

>
> I would be interested in a non-hierarchical project of this sort. We
> would have to be clear about the purpose of the group though. For
> example, some people might consider alternative currencies or some
> credit or accounting schemes as a desirable alternative to the market.
> Personally, I don't. And - while I don't really care that much about
> what other people do - I don't intend to invest my time or effort in
> furthering these initiatives. Also, while I think that the free and
> open-source movement and ideology is very valuable - in the context of
> trying to foster an environment of "abundance", rather than scarcity,
> that is - my own perception is that there are other factors which are
> considerably more significant.

I'll see to it that the OK platform can help negotiate exchange trade if needed.
I highly suggest you become familier with the discussion at the OK list. http://groups.google.com/group/openkollab/?pli=1

I summarized OK's monetary platform in one sentence:
"An exchange trade currency can be introduced when demand for materials exceed supply or necessary work cannot be motivated by other means. "
http://wiki.openkollab.com/wagn/Exchange_Trade

There's a workshop in the works presently set for Nov 3rd in Manchester on Media Ecologies addressing these issues more directly:

""
The intention is to invite a series of speakers who are passionate aboutusing/holding/developing projects in public spaces that actively work toward the sustainable future of our post industrial world. The series will include both practitioners and academics who are committed to Media Ecology, a contemporary term that refers to the relationships and interactions between people online and media environments, and their relationships to the political and social contexts where poverty and climate change are our biggest concerns. These spaces include fab labs, crowdsourced democracy systems, mutualist monetary systems, Open Manufacturing and other concrete ideas for community building through the use of technology. The radical ideas of theMedia Ecologies community have already begun to impact ideas for sustainable development and new practical platforms for production.

Suggested speakers will include for example Matthew Fuller of Goldsmiths University (author of Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture, MIT 2005), and Michel Bauwens of Bangkok University (Founder of the P2P Foundation), who are very influential scholars in the research area ofMedia Ecology. These two researchers will discuss the emergence and proliferation of a new form of production and value creation: peer production, where communities of volunteers as well as waged producers work to create (free) software and/or (open) content, which is accessible to everyone. Within peer production, producers create products within a ‘commons’ or shared space, which can be used and modified by others who then return the product, thus improved, to the common pool. Producers can be volunteers or paid programmers or authors, often both operating as a cooperative ecology between communities as well as the companies that create market-based spin-offs from that same commons. Linux is a good example of peer to peer production, a software operating system that led to an economy of USD36 billion.

""

Nathan

[david_c]

Hi.

On Aug 16, 12:46 am, Nathan Cravens <knu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I summarized OK's monetary platform in one sentence:
> "An exchange trade currency can be introduced when demand for materials

> exceed supply ...

But even if resources are scarce, so some form of rationing is useful,
is the price mechanism still the only way to do this? Might this not
harbour the same risk as the system we're already in - where
"accounting" is more important than friendship? Can't we explore other
ways of coping with scarcity?

> ... or necessary work cannot be motivated by other means.

But if you need to resort to providing "incentives" for people to
work, this seems to imply that people don't consider the work to be
intrinsically valuable - which would appear to me as potentially
symptomatic of a deeper problem.

[Nathan Cravens]

David,

I see exchange trade as a last resort when all else fails and not an end in itself. 

I'm on your side here. 

Nathan