Open E Land

It is always nice to find out that people are moving and are looking for alternatives. This project in Extremadura found the standard problems, that a fixed and old system would bring to any innovative project that tries to encourage people to get out of the system, out of the wheel.
Anyhow they overcame the adversities and organized a summer camp where the people not only learnt about open source, permaculture, self sufficiency, 3D printing… but also sowed the seeds of a network that will be priceless in the close future.
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Open E land is a six hectare site in rural, western Spain which the owner has made available for open source projects. It has suffered from the typical degradation of industrial agriculture – near complete loss of top soil and biodiversity with severe erosion and water management problems – and at the start of the year was just empty pasture with no infrastructure.
Their original idea was hold a two week summer camp during which they would construct the physical infrastructure, including a multipurpose strawbale building, to allow the site to be used as full time open source ecology project space. A few weeks into preparations it became apparent it would require a substantial battle to get planning permission to construct anything and take a minimum of six months to get approval – a depressing reminder of the obstructive inertia of governments attempting to preserve existing economic and agricultural models.
Because of this they decided the camp should focus less on construction and more on open source, skill sharing and permaculture. After ascertaining there was enough interest in the camp going ahead we circulated the following camp details:
With minimal effort in publicity and despite the site being fairly difficult to reach they were quickly overwhelmed with the response. At the point they were forced to close camp registration they had 50 people from across Spain and Europe registered – more than the site could comfortably support. A further 25 contacted them to get onto on a waiting list in case of cancellations.
With two weeks to go they issued a crowd sourced fund raising campaign to help buy items for camp infrastructure. At this point there was just two people on site doing all the site preparation and online work, so the ability to develop and promote the campaign was very limited. Even so, they raised around half of the the €2000 we asked for.
The prepare for the event they constructed a 6m geodesic dome, a humanure toilet, shade structures, a shower and a kitchen and hoped it all would be enough. Over the course of the two weeks around 40 people turned up. Despite some oppressive daytime temperatures they ran workshops on subject such as Arduino programming, 3D printing, water management, CEB fabrication, permaculture, hammock making and cooking with natural ingredients. They had forums discussing open source, talks about natural construction methods, ran a kitchen for up to 30 people using organic ingredients sourced from local farms, constructed water management basins and check dams, built a 5m diameter reciprocal roof roundhouse, a 2m 3G/wifi reflector dish plus countless items of furniture from recycled wooden palettes.
They wanted the camp to be as close to free as possible. People were welcome to cater for themselves or they could pay €5 a day for communal food from the kitchen. They originally aimed to run the kitchen at cost, but as it turned out they ended up making €450 from the takings. An honesty bar also contributed around €150. With donations the camp ended up paying for itself and left a legacy of infrastructure on the site.
In attempt to gain experience with CEB construction the person in charge had constructed a manual CEB press using the Open Source Resilient Living design. This was primarily made from recycled scrap metal using and very basic hand tools, with material costs less than €100. While he would not recommend this approach to the first time constructors, it is a worthwhile demonstration of what can be achieved with very little money and skill. After various alignment and precision problems were fixed it became apparent there were issues with the soil on site for CEB – although appearing to have a high clay and/or slit content it would require a lot of water to reach optimum water content and then would exhibit low compressibility and poor strength of the resultant brick. After attempting various experiments with adding course sand and lime more they less abandoned CEB construction for the time being.
They learned a huge amount from putting on the event and there is much still to document and share. Hopefully the foundations for future developments have been laid and discussion of events in the new year are in progress. For the moment the immediate legacy is the creation of a substantial network people and projects and the demonstration of considerable interest in this kind of event and the possibility of self funding models.

You can see some photos from the event here:

Oil & US Dollards or Oil & Yuan

There are several price benchmarks for oil in the world, the main ones are:
Brent oil (from the North Sea)
West Texas Intermediate (from USA)
OPEC Reference Bastket (from the OPEC countries)
Dubai Crude (from the Persian Gulf)
All of them were quoted in USD. 
The whole world oil market has been priced in that currency for over 40 years…a kind of monopoly over a key product, not only in the energy market, but in the food market, materials, textile, cargo …
Without notice, after half a century something has changed: China made a big announcement a month ago, an announcement that has got not coverage in the standard media.
China said «Our banking system is ready, all of our communication systems are ready, all of the transfer systems are ready, and from now onwards, any nation in the world that wishes to buy, sell, or trade crude oil, can do it, using the Chinese currency (yuan), not the American dollar.«
How can a country without huge reserves of oil make such a statement?
During the last years, China has sealed agreements with several countries to ensure their oil supply, not only for their internal consumption but to be able to control a market, the oil trading market, that will be the key of survival during the future years, the years where oil will be a scarce good with rising prices, rising demand and decreasing offer.
There is a new empire rising as the old one falls apart.

Commons-based peer production


What the Internet and its descendants teach us is that there are now new models for doing things together, success stories that prove convincingly that you don’t need bureaucracies to facilitate public collaboration, and you don’t need the private sector to innovate.
“So was the Internet created by Big Government or Big Capital? The answer is: Neither. This is what’s most notable about the debate over the Net’s origins: it misses the most interesting part of the story. We live in a world that assumes that the most important and original products in society — bridges, cars, iPads, hospitals, 787s, houses — are created either by states or by corporations. And yet, against all odds, the Internet came from somewhere else entirely.
Like many of the bedrock technologies that have come to define the digital age, the Internet was created by — and continues to be shaped by — decentralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor with the entire world. Yes, government financing supported much of the early research, and private corporations enhanced and commercialized the platforms. But the institutions responsible for the technology itself were neither governments nor private start-ups. They were much closer to the loose, collaborative organizations of academic research. They were networks of peers.
Peer networks break from the conventions of states and corporations in several crucial respects. They lack the traditional economic incentives of the private sector: almost all of the key technology standards are not owned by any one individual or organization, and a vast majority of contributors to open-source projects do not receive direct compensation for their work. (The Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler has called this phenomenon “commons-based peer production.”) And yet because peer networks are decentralized, they don’t suffer from the sclerosis of government bureaucracies. Peer networks are great innovators, not because they’re driven by the promise of commercial reward but rather because their open architecture allows others to build more easily on top of existing ideas, just as Berners-Lee built the Web on top of the Internet, and a host of subsequent contributors improved on Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web.
it’s impossible to overstate the importance of peer production to the modern digital world. Peer networks created and maintain the Linux operating system on which Android smartphones are based; the UNIX kernel that Mac OS X and iOS devices use; and the Apache software that powers most Web servers in the world (not to mention the millions of entries that now populate Wikipedia). What sounds on the face of it like the most utopian of collectivist fantasies — millions of people sharing their ideas with no ownership claims — turns out to have made possible the communications infrastructure of our age.
It’s not enough to say that peer networks are an interesting alternative to states and markets. The state and the market are now fundamentally dependent on peer networks in ways that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago.
Why is this distinction worth making? Why should we avoid the easy explanations of a government-built Internet versus one animated by private-sector entrepreneurs?
One reason is that there is a growing number of individuals and organizations who believe the digital success of peer networks can be translated into the “real” world. Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age. New organizations are using peer-network approaches to attack low-tech problems. Consider the way Kickstarter has used networks of smaller funders to help solve the problem of supporting creative projects. Only three years old, Kickstarter is now on track to distribute more money this year than the National Endowment for the Arts.
But there is another, more subtle reason to stress the peer-network version of the Internet’s origins. We have an endless supply of folklore about heroic entrepreneurs who changed the world with their vision and their force of will. But as a society we lack master narratives of creative collaboration.
When we talk about change being driven by mass collaboration, it’s often in the form of protest movements: civil rights or marriage equality. That’s a tradition worth celebrating, but it’s only part of the story. The Internet (and all the other achievements of peer networks) is not a story about changing people’s attitudes or widening the range of human tolerance. It’s a story, instead, about a different kind of organization, neither state nor market, that actually builds things, creating new tools that in turn enhance the way states and markets work.
In the lines that followed his “you didn’t build that” comment, Obama managed to champion a collaborative ethos in much more eloquent terms: “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country: you know what, there are some things we do better together.”
Obama is right, of course; life is full of things we do better together. But what the Internet and its descendants teach us is that there are now new models for doing things together, success stories that prove convincingly that you don’t need bureaucracies to facilitate public collaboration, and you don’t need the private sector to innovate.
That should be the story we tell our kids when they ask who invented the Internet. Yes, we should tell them about the long-view government spending that paidcially viable. But we shouldn’t bury the lead. The Internet was built, first and foremost, by the initial salaries, and the entrepreneurs who figured out a way to make the new medium commer another network, this one made up not of servers but of human minds: open, decentralized, peer.”

Indie capitalism

Good article about the rising of an indie capitalism:

Indie capitalism is local, not global, and cares about the community and jobs and says so right up front. Good things come from and are made locally by people you can see and know. The local focus makes indie capitalism intrinsically sustainable–energy is saved as a result of a way of life, not in an effort to reach a distinct and difficult goal.
Indie capitalism is socially, not transactionally, based. It’s not just Internet social, involving 5,000 friends, but personally social. Take Kickstarter, for example, where people fund the music, books, and products that they can watch develop over time. In this model, consumer, investor, audience, fan, helper, and producer conflate. People find and prepare their food the same way they find and prepare their music. And then they share it all.MAKBut before they show and tell, people make. Indie capitalism is, above all, a maker system of economics based on creating new value, not trading old value. It embraces all the strains of maker culture–food, indie music, DIY, craft, 3-D digital fabrication, bio-hacking, app enabling, CAD modeling, robotics, tinkering. Making is not a rare act performed by a few but a routine happening in which just about everyone participates. Making and using tools are part of a meaningful existence. And tools shift from a ritual presence to a practical role in everyday life. Having great tools and making great things begin to replace consumption as an end in itself. 

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Another indie capitalism characteristic is a heightened meaning embedded in materials and products. Making fewer things of higher quality and utility is important. Reusing and sharing really good stuff is valued. The touch and feel of things, from Apple products to vintage Levi’s jeans to beautifully made (but unlabeled) dresses, are important. The entire notion of brand is upended in indie capitalism, superseded by the community surrounding the creation of a product or service. Authenticity is the “brand” in many cases.
 

Utopia stakes for sale (@honduras)

Have you ever dreamt of creating your very own society from scratch?, with your own laws, taxes, social services, education system, police forces, courts? Have you ever thought how would your living place be if everything could be defined from zero? What kind of community will you end up having? What would be your system of governance?
Platon thought about it when he wrote The Republic, Moro did it in the island of Utopia and Euhemerus through his island of Pancaya… and in in the next years, in a less theorical way, MKG Group, will be doing it in three different ‘charter cities’ in Puerto Castilla and the Valley of Sula, in Honduras.
Last year Honduras modified its constitution to allow the creation of ‘charter cities’ (following Paul Romer‘s ideas) in its territory (Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo). After a year the Coalianza has signed the first agreement with an American company to develop three pilot cities. Cities that will have their own laws with the only limitation of complying with international human rights. Cities that would have full autonomy in all areas other than foreign and defence policy, national elections and issuing identity documents. Cities created from scratch, where the law with be set by a company, the one that bought a stake of Utopia, MKG Group.
Who is behind this company? After a thoroughly search the only company that appears under that name is a French one that does not fit with the investment, size or even the country of origin.
The only thing that has been published, is that MKG is an American company that will invest 14 million USD in the first phase of the construction of the first city, close to Puerto Castilla.
In one of the most dangerous countries of the world, controlled by ‘las maras’ MKG is going to develop autonomous cities out of the Hondura’s law, out of any known law.
Would the rules be improved? Would they be set after Singapore or Hong Kong to develop a growing economy? Would they be a replica of  Las Vegas or Nevada? or would their project try to build a sustainable and selfsufficient community?
I doubt it’s the last, but dreams sometimes come true.

Aleph

«Decidir. Cambiar. Estar. Ser. Reinventarse. Caminar. Hacer. Levantarse. Experimentar. Conseguir. Desafiar. Soñar. Vencer. Descubrir. Reivindicar. Comprometerse. Pensar. Creer. Potenciar. Preguntar. Crecer. Pertenecer. Despertar.
Porque llega un momento en el que sentimos la necesidad de plantearnos cómo vivimos nuestra vida, si estamos donde queremos estar y hacemos lo que queremos hacer.»
Así reza la contraportada de este libro. Hay veces, casi todas, que no somos nosotros los que elegimos el libro que leemos, sino que son los libros los que nos eligen a nosotros.
Después de tenerlo en la mesilla durante más de tres meses, llegó el momento que este libro estaba esperando; me llamó, lo abrí, me sumergí y disfrute de un viaje lleno de belleza y misticismo.
Si queréis ver como empieza el primer capítulo está disponible aquí.
Autor: Paulo Coelho
Título: Aleph
Nº pags 272
 
 

Elinor Ostrom – Governing the commons

Elinor Ostrom (Agosto 1933 – Junio 2012) fue la primera mujer en recibir el premio Nobel en economía gracias a su trabajo sobre el procomún. La profesora Ostrom dedicó su vida a estudiar la relación de las sociedades con los ecosistemas en los que viven, con cómo desarrollar prácticas sostenibles que aseguren el equilibrio y la continuación de los recursos que nutren nuestras vidas. 
No existe una solución única, cada comunidad, cada entorno, cada área, debe evaluar sus recursos naturales  y analizar la mejor forma de gestionarlos para que su riqueza llegue a las siguientes generaciones. Estudió distintos modelos de gestión del procomún en los que no interviene el gobierno, como la gestión de pastos comunales en distintos lugares de África, sistemas de irrigación como el de la huerta valenciana o la gestión comunal de bosques en Suiza y en algunos pueblos de Japón. 
En su libro ‘Governing the commons‘ se recoge gran parte de sus ideas sobre la gestión del procomún.
Si en el año 2009 el estudio de la gestión del procomún fue merecedor del Nobel de economía, quizás podamos pensar que el procomún sea un tema de interés económico internacional y se empiece a valorar y a dar la importancia que tiene en nuestras sociedades y en el impacto que tendrá en la vida de las generaciones futuras.