The text below is a second installment from my essay, "Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing Governance through Emergent Networking," published by Friends of the Earth UK. The third and final part of the essay will appear next.
Digital Commons as a New Species of Production and Governance
To return to our original question: How can we develop new ways to preserve and extend the democratic capacities of ordinary people and rein in unaccountable market/state power? There is enormous practical potential in developing a Commons Sector as a quasi-independent source of production and governance. Simply by withdrawing from the dominant market system and establishing stable, productive alternatives – in the style of Linux, local food systems and the blogosphere – the regnant system can be jolted.
While many digital commons may initially seem marginal, they can often “out-cooperate” conventional capital and markets with their innovative approaches, trustworthiness and moral authority. The output of digital commons is mostly for use value, not exchange value. It is considered inalienable and inappropriable, and must be shared and copied in common, not reflexively privatized and sold. By enacting a very different, post-capitalist logic and ethos, many “digital republics” are decisively breaking with the logic of the dominant market system; they are not simply replicating it in new forms (as, for example, the “sharing economy” often is).
Let us conspicuously note that not all open source systems are transformative. We see how existing capitalist enterprises have successfully embraced and partially coopted the transformative potential of open source software. That said, there are new governance innovations that hold lessons for moving beyond strict market and state control. For example, the foundations associated with various open source software development communities,[17] and the wide variety of “Government 2.0” models that are using networked participation to improve government decision-making and services (e.g., the Intellipedia wiki used by US intelligence agencies; Peer to Patent crowdsourcing of “prior art” for patent applications).
Any serious transformational change must therefore empower ordinary people and help build new sorts of collaborative structures. Ultimately, this means we must recognize the practical limits of external coercion and try to develop new systems that can enable greater democratic participation, personal agency, and open spaces for local self-determination and bottom-up innovation.[18] The examples described below are embryonic precursors of a different, better future.
Let’s make these assumptions:
Now let’s envision that the biased views mentioned in #2 (above) go away. Wealthy, straight, white men develop genuinely respectful, appreciative, egalitarian views toward all others. Meanwhile, the other groups come to believe that they have equal potential and rights, rather than internalizing bias against themselves. What happens?
Most women and most gay men are children of straight men. Therefore, if advantaged moms and dads simply form the opinion that their own daughters and gay children have fully equal potential and worth, then they will demand spaces for those kids at the top of the social scale. Social outcomes should change quickly as a result of attitudinal changes. The only obstacles are: (1) persistent bias, which may become implicit and subtle, (2) leftover policies and structures that discriminate, such as policies regarding parental leave, and (3) the reluctance of incumbents to yield their own places. To the last point: you wouldn’t expect tenured Ivy League professors or US Senators to resign to make room for women, but you would expect the gender ratio to improve with generational turnover, as long as attitudes truly change.
In contrast, most people have the same race/ethnicity as their parents. Therefore, even if all the white parents who dominate the preferred slots in a society come to believe that people of color are fully equal and entirely welcome, if they also succeed in obtaining slots for their own kids, then racial demographics will shift slowly, if at all. Attitudinal change will have little impact on outcomes. Absent major pressure from outside the system, all you’ll see is slow, incremental change as each family of color that makes it to the top holds a spot for its own kids.
As for class advantage, it presumably consists of having a better-than-average chance of attaining a desirable social role for yourself or your kids. In the list above, I assume that a society provides highly some desirable social slots (such as places in the student body of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), and that parents confer advantage in obtaining those slots. For instance, US parents who have attended college have an 82% chance of sending their own kids to college, versus a 36% chance for parents who didn’t complete high school.
But both of those circumstances are variables, not constants. A society can offer a steeper or gentler gradient of social advantage, and the correlation between parents’ and children’s advantage can be larger or smaller. In Continental Europe and Canada, colleges do not differ nearly as much in reputation and resources as they do in the US and Britain, which means that it matters less where you enroll. However, it is worth noting that even in Sweden, with a century of social democracy behind it, today’s upper class is substantially descended from the 17th century aristocracy. But Swedish women now earn 95% as much as Swedish men and fill 43% of the seats in the legislature. In Sweden, new attitudes toward gender (and sexual orientation) led to deep changes in individual choices and social policies. But new attitudes toward class didn’t dislodge Sweden’s most advantaged families.
I am often asked what the commons has to contribute to solving our climate change problems. Since most commons are rather small scale and local, there is a presumption that such commons cannot possibly deal with a problem as massive and literally global as climate change. I think this view is mistaken.
The nation-state as now constituted, in its close alliance with capital and markets, is largely incapable of transcending its core commitments to economic growth, consumerism, and the rights of capital and corporations -- arguably the core structural drivers of climate change. But these allegiances artificially limit our options, if not dismiss the kinds of interventions we must entertain. The market/state simply command and coerce its way to success in arresting with climate change; it will require the active, enthusiastic contributions of everyone, and it must command social respect and political legitimacy.
A new vision and popular energy from the outside must arise. But how? And how could it possibly expand to a meaningful size rapidly enough? I think that the Internet and other digital networks offer a fertile vector in which to develop new answers. I explore the speculative possibilities in this essay written for Friends of the Earth UK, published as part of its "Big Think" essay series. Because the piece -- "Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing Governance Through Emergent Networking" -- is nearly 14,000 words long, I am separating it into three parts. You can download the full essay as a pdf file here.
Four days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the pilot on United Airlines Flight 564, going from Denver to Washington, D.C., came on the intercom:
The doors are now closed and we have no help from the outside for any problems that might occur inside this plane. As you could tell when you checked in, the government has made some changes to increase security in the airports. They have not, however, made any rules about what happens after those doors close. Until they do, we have made our own rules and I want to share them with you …
Here is our plan and our rules. If someone or several people stand up and say they are hijacking this plane, I want you all to stand up together. Then take whatever you have available to you and throw it at them … There are usually only a few of them, and we are two-hundred-plus strong. We will not allow them to take over this plane. I find it interesting that the U.S. Constitution begins with the words, “We the people.” That’s who we are, the people, and we will not be defeated.
As recounted by journalist David Remnick, passengers “were asked to turn to their neighbors on either side and introduce themselves, and to tell one another something about themselves and their families. ‘For today, we consider you family,’ they were told. ‘We will treat you as such and ask that you do the same with us.’”[1]
As civics educators, we are always looking for ways in which we can encourage civic engagement on the part of our students. One of the most effective ways, based on surveys of teachers here in Florida , is to bring in members of the community, including government officials, to the classroom.
This data, from our own surveys of Florida civics classrooms, reflects the findings from at CIRCLE , Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, and others, which emphasize the Six Proven Practices in civic learning.
In an effort to help civic teachers here in Florida, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship is piloting a new effort to connect Florida social studies and civics teachers with local public officials. Currently, the program is available for teachers in Seminole and Orange Counties, but we want to eventually expand it further!
If you are a teacher from Seminole or Orange Counties, and would like a local government official to come talk to your class, no matter the grade level, simply follow the screenshots and directions below. Please keep in mind that you DO need to be a registered user on the free FJCC site to access the list of volunteers and we are still working on expanding the the communities in each of these counties. NOT ALL COMMUNITIES ARE ON THE LIST YET! If you don’t see yours here, send them a note to tell them you would like them to be on our list!
How Do I Bring in a Public Official? A Walk Through
The first step is to log in to your FJCC account.
Once you have logged in, scroll up to ‘Resources’ and click on ‘Invite a Public Official’.
You should notice that it has provided you with a prepopulated email that includes your own name and email address. It has also signed it for you! This draws from your registration information, so please be sure both your name and email are correct!
You will then want to do a number of things. First, select your location and then the official you would like to bring in. Remember that this is at this point only for Seminole and Orange Counties, and we are still expanding communities in those counties! Then, adjust the email to specify your school, the topic, and how much time you would like them for, as indicated in the image below.
Finally, click ‘Send Email’ and your request will be sent to the person you would like to come! We are working to expand options among officials in these two counties, as well as bringing other counties into the system. We are very excited about this! We hope you find it useful! Engaged students become engaged citizens!
The 2016 NCDD national conference on Bridging Our Divides is getting closer and closer, and we couldn’t be more excited! But there’s still a lot of work to do in the lead-up to this amazing event, and
we need to ask for our NCDD community’s help with one important task!
As we recently announced, NCDD is offering scholarships to help make sure that young people, students, and others who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend the NCDD 2016 conference can join us. Before our 2014 conference, we received an incredible $10,000 anonymous donation to help ensure we had plenty of resources to offer scholarships to young people and low-income folks – but we can’t count on that kind of support this year.
That’s why we are calling on our amazing NCDD community to donate to our NCDD 2016 Scholarship Fund to make sure that this year’s conference is brimming with the next generation of emerging D&D leaders. We are hoping to raise at least $10,000 for scholarships, if not more, by October 7th and we can’t do it without you! Whether you can give $5 or $500, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Scholarship Fund today.
Your tax-deductible donation will go directly to helping us provide travel reimbursements, shared hotel rooms, and registration for scholarship hopefuls. Plus, anyone who donates $50 or more will have their contribution acknowledged in the printed conference guidebook!
Our last NCDD conference in Reston, VA had more young people than any before it — a dynamic that was universally seen by the attendees as making the conference experience much more engaging and exciting. Ensuring that young people are involved in our conferences adds a great deal of fresh energy and perspectives to our field’s work, and it helps us diversify our field, spark new partnerships, bring in new volunteers and researchers, and foster mentoring relationships between emerging leaders and seasoned practitioners.
Additionally, NCDD recognizes that one of the important divides in our society that needs to be bridged is the divide between the younger generations and their elders whose are still in charge of the nation’s direction. That recognition is part of what animated our 2014 conference theme, Democracy for the Next Generation, and we continue to be committed to helping foster positive, collaborative relationships between older and younger people as a way to continue to strengthen our democracy. Being sure that younger folks are at the table for our conversation about about Bridging Our Divides is part of that ongoing commitment.
But maybe most importantly, engaging young people and students in our work helps us foster long-term resilience for the field of dialogue & deliberation. In coming years, we will continue to see many of the pillars and pioneers of the field exiting the work, and so it is critical for us to be making a conscious decision today to begin developing the D&D leaders and practitioners of tomorrow. Today’s younger generations will be charged with utilizing our methods to address some of society’s most pernicious issues and to bridge our most persistent divides, which is why it is so vital to ensure that we are intentionally investing in engaging and cultivating their leadership. They already have valuable insights and experiences that can help us forge new paths for our field, but we can’t tap into them if they aren’t with us!
That is why we feel it’s so important that we are successful in reaching our goal of $10,000 for the NCDD 2016 Scholarship Fund, and why we urge you to make a contribution now.
We at NCDD are putting our money where our mouth is with incentives for students and young people to attend NCDD 2016: we have reduced the registration rate to just $250 for students (a $200 discount!), and we are offering even lower group rates for teachers and other practitioners who are bringing groups of students from their youth-oriented programs! So we’re counting on our NCDD community to join us in helping make sure every young leader in our field is able to join us at the conference.
There are several other ways that you can support youth and student engagement during NCDD 2016:
Your tax-deductible donation will help us continue to cultivate the next generation of D&D leaders, and ensure the long term sustainability of our field. Won’t you contribute today?
Thank you for supporting NCDD’s efforts to engage our emerging leaders!
Please complete the short form below to send in your donation. Be sure to put “Scholarship Fund” in the box where we ask if your donation is earmarked for a particular program!