Michel Bauwens reflects on the highly innovative qualities of Ecuador's FLOK Society project while offering ideas on how to transcend its local context.
The FLOK (Free/Libre Open Knowledge) Society project, where one of the authors served as the research director, ran in Ecuador from January to June 2014. It was a research and action project focused on a full integrative transition towards a “social knowledge economy”, i.e., an economy that would function around shared pools of knowledge in almost every domain. This research effort consisted of a general strategic paper for such a transition and specialised papers on various specific topics, such as distributed manufacturing, biodiversity, energy and others.
We never complained. We did never consider that Michel was an Stalinist, or that he had censored us. This is the commons, this is copyleft land: you are free to use, remix, copy, modify and distribute. No need to insult, no need to complain, no possibility for censorship. And we love that!
Michel explains what the FLOK Society is and how it can help Ecuador to become a p2p and commons-oriented society. At the end of May the proposed policies of FLOK will be presented amongst politicians from Ecuador and the whole of South America as well as civic society.
At this time last year, I had just arrived in Ecuador as a researcher for the FLOK Society Project at the National Institute for Advanced Studies (IAEN). I was part of an international research team that had been recruited to develop policies for a “social knowledge economy” that could transform Ecuador’s productive matrix away from neo-liberalism and the dependence on oil extraction, to an economy based on the free and open access to knowledge.
In 2013, the Government of Ecuador launched a major strategic research project to “fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador” based on the principles of open networks, peer production and commoning. Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation would be leading the research team for the next ten months, and seeking to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge.”
The nine-month effort in Ecuador to develop a new vision and policy architecture for commons-based peer production is coming into much sharper focus. To refresh your memory on this project, the Government of Ecuador last year commissioned the FLOK Society (FLOK = “Free, libre, open knowledge”) to come up with a thoughtful plan for enabling every sector of Ecuador to be organized into open knowledge commons, to the maximum degree possible. The project has now released a transition plan accompanied by more than a dozen policy frameworks for specific social and economic domains.
Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation and former advisor to the goverment of Ecuador for a project to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge.” With a team of researchers and through a partipatory process involving local civic actors and global commoners, the FLOK project produced a generic transition plan to a commons society with more than 15 specific policy and legislative plans.
Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, was invited to chair a research team exploring the possibilities for “fundamentally re-imagining” Ecuadorian socity on the basis of commoning, open networks and peer production. The Quito-based project sought ideas from people of all walks of life for 10 months, and released their Transition Plan (available in English here) in June. Bauwens offers his personal analysis of the process below.
Equally important, FLOK evolved a process for the development of these proposals, which was itself modelled upon the principles of the commons, of peer collaboration and free access to knowledge. In this respect, it has been an attempt to reinvent the policy process by organising its development from the bottom up. To achieve this, FLOK sought from the very beginning to engage a wide spectrum of actors in the development of its policy recommendations: not only academics, public servants and policy makers, but also hackers, activists, social movements and civil society at large. To this end, the project evolved a research process that was open, collaborative and distributed. It was open because the results of the research process – as crystallised in the FLOK policy documents – were released under free/open licenses, thus allowing anyone to use them, to modify them and to redistribute them. It was collaborative because FLOK made use of tools and technologies that enable distributed collaboration and promote transparency: for example, the project used wikis and pads for collaborative authorship, the co-ment platform for the process of peer review of the policy documents by the community, mailing lists and Mumble for communication among project contributors. Last, the process was distributed because anyone, regardless of their geographical whereabouts, could participate in the development of those policy proposals which, in order to encourage participation, were released ‘early and often’, thereby opening up their development process from a very early stage to the global community.
The Commons Transition Plan you are about to read is rooted in the particular experience of the FLOK project in Ecuador, which took place mainly in the first half of 2014. This was a research project commissioned by three governmental institutions in the state of Ecuador. Its intention was to help Ecuador transition to a 'social knowledge' economy and society, i.e. , a society and economy that functions as common pools of shared knowledge in every domain of social activity. However, the experience (especially the 'generic' transition plan that was proposed) largely transcends the specific situation in Ecuador.Here, we propose a version of the plan that has been changed by removing most, if not all, specific references to Ecuador.
Join us on a special podcast on this landmark book documenting how the FLOK Project (Free/Libre Open Knowledge) in Ecuador began a shift towards embracing "good living" through a commons. The policy that results has far reaching implications for societies around the world. We will be joined by Michel Bauwens, who is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, and John Restakis, who was the past Executive Director of the BC Co-operative Association in Vancouver.
This proposal is based on the policy document prepared by the author (Dafermos 2014) on behalf of the FLOK Society research project, with the aim of developing a set of public policy proposals for the transformation of the productive matrix in Ecuador towards a social knowledge economy. However, while the official FLOK version focuses on a specific country, the aim of the present version is to address the need – which is urgently felt in many countries around the world – to develop a radical alternative to the domination of cognitive capitalism. As such, this chapter could be considered a ‘non-country specific’ version of the original FLOK document.
(note: this version was originally written at the request of Jay Wallsjasper of On the Commons, slightly expanded and updated on July 13; it’s a little more elaborate than the first informal assessment shared here before)
This document examines the application of social knowledge economy principles to the secondary economic sector, with an emphasis on manufacturing. The first part of the Introduction dissects the concept of the knowledge economy, highlighting the role of access to knowledge as the fundamental criterion for determining the character of a knowledge economy: in contrast to capitalist knowledge economies which block access to knowledge through the use of patents and restrictive IP rights, social knowledge economies use inclusive IP rights to provide free access to knowledge. In the second part of the Introduction, we look at how the use of restrictive IP rights has been theoretically justified: in short, IP rights are supposed to promote innovation and increase productivity. However, the available empirical evidence on the effect of IP rights on innovation and productivity furnishes no such proof. On the contrary, looking at the way in which capitalist firms actually use IP rights reinforces the conclusion that they do not promote innovation but are in fact hindering it.
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