Meanwhile . . An hour in a video meeting isn’t going to tap all the dimensions!! Do please get started below at any time, on the big issues underlying this month’s session
Pre-meeting notes by meet. coop Nextcloud pdf See also our ‘take-home’ points for this session, below, which refer to these notes.
Nathan Schneider’s slide presentation pdf
We in meet.coop would really like to see some discussion of our own take-home points from the session. They’re in the cloud too, as well as posted here:
commons.hour session#10 - Take-home points
Building a commons needs to be done in specific ways, for specific kinds of stuff-in-the-commons.
The ‘institutional stack’ is local to this commons. Thus for example, a commons that puts food in people’s kitchens is a different cultural-economic ‘stack’ than a commons that secures opportunities for marginalised people to participate in sport. And that is different from a commons that provisions digitally-mediated spaces for civil-society organising - which is meet. coop. See 1 A stack of spaces, a stack of commons in the meet.coop notes and below.
The points raised by Nathan, basically around undesirable limitations of conventional FLOSS/opensource commitments and protocols, need to be localised, in ‘this’ coop-commons, and ‘this other’ coop-commons . . the institutional stacks, the (parallel) economies and the (parallel) ethical frames will be specific. Thus, the meet.coop notes associated with this session attempt to start with a number of striking general points made by Nathan, and to follow these through into specific issues of protocols and principles in this coop: meet.coop. (FLOSS : free-libre open source software)
Six particulars
Starting from a specific quote in Nathan’s articles, in the meet.coop notes we can highlight six areas for developing principles and protocols for the coop, as below:
1 A stack of spaces, a stack of commons (an ‘institutional stack’) - not a stack of code entities, but a stack of spaces in which members of the commons - broadly seen as ‘organisers’ - perform actions of a collaborative kind.
2 Contribution economy, dual power - A parallel economy of contribution (not ownership, not exchange, not primarily money) is inescapably in contact with and in contradiction with the dominant economy. Thus dual power.
3 Practices of transformation, altered social relations - feminist economics, and stewarding in commons of plural kinds of users (including non-producer users), necessarily generate a ‘parallel ethics’ that differs from FLOSS. It involves protocols that determine privileges and obligations, and also legitimate participation. This is the analogue of the licensing issue in FLOSS, but not dealt with thro licenses as such. It is dealt with through membership rules and stewardship actions in the commons.
4 New infrastructures and institutions - As a digital platform provider, this leads us into matters of design justice. This framework of ‘parallel ethics’ is based on:
an understanding of the ongoing diversity of practices to be supported in the mutual sector, via the coop’s digital infrastructure ‘seven Rs of mutual sector commitment’
embodying altered social relations in cultural production, that have evolved in historical struggle with the dominant order, framed as ‘tools for conviviality’.
5 Stewarding - Privileges and obligations in a commons - Stewardship is an explicit collective practice, executed thro a General assembly, a Board and a Standing assembly of workers, rather than a tacit social hierarchy (a tyranny of nominally ‘open’ structurelessness) of wizards and benevolent dictators.
6 Contribution economy - Recognition and value(ing) - the platform service depends significantly on financial payments: by User members to the coop, and by the coop to operational members, as livelihood. This differs from a FLOSS regime that depends tacitly on privilege: a capacity for freely disposable, skilled, volunteer work hours (typically, white-male, global-North, graduate-level actors).
