Bill Tucker: Mankosi is a remote rural community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. It is home to almost 6,000 people. The nearest city is Mthatha, about 60 kilometres away, as a bird flies.

Most homes are not connected to the electricity grid; residents charge their cellphones at a local shop or shebeen, for which they must pay. Both data and airtime for those phones also cost a lot: a survey shows that people spend up to 22% of their income on telecommunications. This is money that could be spent on food, education, transport and other needs.

They’re not alone. South Africa has some of the highest mobile voice and data costs in the world.

Yet, things are changing in Mankosi. A research team at the University of the Western Cape has worked with residents to develop a solar powered wireless community network.

The Zenzeleni Networks project – Zenzeleni means “do it yourself” in isiXhosa, the Eastern Cape’s most prevalent language – is, as far as we’re aware, South Africa’s first and only Internet Service Provider (ISP) that’s owned and run by a rural cooperative. Just like any ISP, Zenzeleni installs and maintains telecommunications infrastructure and also sells telecommunications services like voice and data.

Yet what’s special about the project is that it involves a registered not-for-profit company which works with cooperatives in the community to deliver affordable voice and data services. Crucially, the project also keeps money in communities like Mankosi, often beset by high rates of unemployment.

The community networks model has proven successful elsewhere in the world: the largest is in Spain – the Guifi.net project. Others that have been developed successfully include projects in Zambia and Mexico.

How it works

The Mankosi project was launched in 2012 and legally registered in 2014. I have done research on information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) in the Mankosi area since 2003. Since then, colleagues and postgraduate students have also worked, even lived, in the area for extensive periods of time.

To establish the Zenzeleni network we approached local leaders to help get the community on board and we provided help and mentorship. Ultimately the residents run the project themselves.

With the local authority’s permission, a cooperative comprising ten local and respected people was formed. This group designed the network layout, and built and installed a dozen solar powered mesh network stations. These are mounted on and inside houses around Mankosi. These are organised in what we call a mesh network and WiFi stations cover an area of 30 square kilometres.

Zenzeleni constitutes a fully fledged Internet Service Provider (ISP), equipped with an Internet and Voice-over Internet Protocol gateway, and a billing system in isiXhosa run by community managers.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), which grants licences to ISPs and collects fees where necessary, granted Zenzeleni a licence exemption; so it costs Zenzeleni nothing in fees to operate infrastructure and sell services. The community only has to pay for the backhaul Internet connectivity, which they can get at wholesale prices from companies like EastTel and OpenServe, and for educational use from TENET.

Any device – even a low to mid-range smart phone – that’s WiFi-enabled can access the network. There are two dedicated wireless connections to “point of presence”, or POP, fibre in Mthatha.

Zenzeleni’s voice calls and data costs are much cheaper than what’s offered by the big mobile operators. For example voice calls can cost 20c a minute rather than the standard R1.50 or more while data costs can be between 20 and 40 times cheaper.

The solar powered stations also charge cell phone batteries less than what’s usually charged by spaza shops or shebeens. Those shops also tend to be some distance from the village, so people save time as well as money.

A true community project

Community is at the heart of Zenzeleni’s model. All revenues stay in the community: each cooperative has a bank account, and all residents get together to decide what to do with the money that’s been paid for Zenzeleni services.

For example, the Mankosi cooperative has provided micro-loans to residents for starting small businesses.

No one is currently earning a salary from the community network. Yet when usage grows, as we expect it will do with super cheap data, revenues are likely to grow so much that the cooperative will want to install more nodes and hire people to actively maintain them making the network more resilient. Since March 2014, the project has earned around R33,600 (about USD$2422.16).

Keeping money at home

On the surface it may appear that Zenzeleni cannibalises the revenues of big telecommunications companies like MTN and Telkom. We believe the opposite is true. Firstly, Zenzeleni purchases backhaul Internet connectivity from areas like Mankosi that Telkom and others have failed to connect – so it’s operating in entirely new areas that have been ignored because they’re considered too remote to generate good revenue.

Secondly, all telecommunications companies earn interconnect fees. Calls to mobile and landline numbers across South Africa incur these fees, which are charged when calling from one network to another. This is also true for Zenzeleni so that’s extra money in the bank for all telecommunications companies.

Lastly, and most importantly, most of the money generated by this project stays in Mankosi. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Zenzeleni model, and one we believe will foster economic growth which will benefit people living in and around the village, and enable them to purchase telecommunications, and other goods and services, that they currently cannot afford.

Zenzeleni Networks’ next goal is to build critical mass to support between 20 and 30 communities surrounding Mankosi. When this happens, about 300,000 people will be able to sustainably connect themselves – and their schools, clinics, hospitals and homes – to cheaper voice, data and phone battery charging. This puts telecommunications into their own hands, by themselves.

Bill Tucker, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of the Western Cape

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo: A Zenzeleni cooperative member carefully aligns some equipment in the village of Mankosi, Eastern Cape /Bill Tucker

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It may seem odd to think that passionate amateurs, open source hackers, various professionals and ordinary citizens could actually collaborate and produce interesting new ideas. But that is precisely what Medialab-Prado has succeeded in doing in the last eight years. It has invented a new type of public institution for the production, research and dissemination of cultural projects. It is committed to exploring collaborative forms of experimentation and learning that are emerging from digital networks, especially those practices that enact the commons such as free software, hacker ethics, the Internet as an open infrastructure and peer production dynamics. Medialab-Prado serves as a municipal cultural center that promotes commons-based research, experimentation and peer production, especially through its “Commons Lab.”

The model is quite simple: Medialab-Prado acts as a platform where anyone who has an idea can meet other people and form a work team to develop and prototype the idea. Projects developed at the lab vary immensely, as the list above suggests.

The beauty of the Medialab-Prado process is the inclusive invitations to anyone with the knowledge, talent or enthusiasm to develop a new idea. Through different kinds of open calls for proposals and collaborators, teams are often formed to develop projects in production workshops. Each group is an experiment itself in team- and community-building as it blends people with different backgrounds (artistic, scientific, technical), levels of specialization (experts and beginners) and degrees of engagement. Each group, overseen by the promoter of the project, needs to self-organize and arrange the rules and protocols by which the contributions of participants will be incorporated or rejected, and with what types of acknowledgments. This is why Medialab-Prado has been sometimes defined as an incubator of communities – and commons.

At the heart of Medialab-Prado’s “innovation hosting” of projects is its commitment to free software tools and free licensing. This facilitates the local participation of those that want to contribute to the common good. It facilitates online participation as well, and also in the proper documentation of projects, which is crucial in replicating them elsewhere and in tracking the reasons for the success, failure and procedures of commoning experiments.

Since its creation in 2007, the Commons Lab has evolved from a seminar in which members’ unpublished working documents on the commons were discussed, to an open laboratory that invites the participation of any collaborator, including amateurs, academics and professionals, who wish to join a project.

The Commons Lab has been remarkably productive. Its projects include Memory as a Commons,⁸ which explore the collective creation of shared memory during conflicts; guifi.net Madrid,⁹ which imagined and produced a local telecomunications wifi infrastructure that works as a commons; Commons Based Enterprises, which examines recent models of business management that have made contributions to the commons;¹⁰ and Kune, a web tool to encourage collaboration, content sharing and free culture.¹¹

Besides such projects, the Commons Lab has hosted many public debates on commons-related themes involving cities, rural areas, digital realms and the body. It has also made public presentations about projects such as Guerrilla Translation, a transnational curator and translator of timely cultural memes,¹² and Mapping the Commons, a “research open lab on urban commons.”¹³  Guerrilla Translation is a P2P-Commons translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain. It consists of a small but international set of avid readers, content curators and social/environmental issue-focused people who love to translate and love to share. The group seeks to model a cooperative form of global idea-sharing, by enabling a platform and method for opening dialogues. Guerrilla Translation does not rely on volunteers, but on building an innovative cooperative business model which “walks the talk” of much contemporary writing on the new economy and its power to change.¹⁴

Since moving to a new venue in 2013, the Commons Lab has been less active, even as commoning practices and the commons paradigm have played an increasingly important role in other lines of work and projects at Medialab-Prado. In the near future, the Commons Lab is going to reinvent itself as a project and pull together a history of its achievements to date and comprehensive and introductory material for the general public on the commons theory and practice.

Through public policies and institutions that incubate new commons projects, and enable civil society to create value directly, the commons paradigm may allow us to reinvent public institutions. It can engage people more directly, developing their capacities and participation, and providing accessible open infrastructures that require what anthropologist and free software scholar Christopher Kelty calls “recursive publics” – “a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public.”¹⁵

Medialab-Prado, as a public institution that is part of the Arts Area of Madrid City Hall, tries to advance this point of view. It tries to learn from commons-based practices and apply them in the public realm – sometimes succeeding, and sometimes not. But as an organization committed to commons as a model of governance, Medialab-Prado regards its workshops, convenings and events as an indispensable way to continue this important exploration.

Marcos García (Spain) is Director of Medialab-Prado, an initiative of Madrid City Hall devised as a citizen laboratory for the production, research and dissemination of cultural projects.

Photo by Medialab Prado

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Calling for action to protect open wifi networks, the Pirate Party’s Julia Reda writes how collectively built-up, not-for-profit wireless networks like Freifunk provide Internet access to refugees, “allow[ing] them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.” In the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, where activist-coordinated refugee solidarity groups support housing projects, there is a growing need for internet connectivity and regular maintenance. Working in a similar ethos, Exarcheia Net provides internet access and technical support to 10+ locations around Exarcheia – facilitating internet access for over 1,000 people.

Alongside this work, James Lewis, the initiator and facilitator of Exarcheia Net, is supporting community members in establishing cooperative networks. But the objectives of Exarcheia Net go beyond providing Internet connectivity to these places and include the following:

• providing internet access and service infrastructure for grassroots institutions like cooperative and non-profits,
• creating and maintaining associations to facilitate the sharing of Internet access among groups of people,
• piloting and prototyping a new type of neighbourhood/district-level community network that includes physical spaces and regular face-to-face meetings for governance, training and engaging people, cultural activities, etc ,
• demystification of technology and emancipation of citizens in building and operating their own technology infrastructures,
• using locally-run services (e.g. secure messaging, file share, video streaming, internet radio)
• organising ExarcheiaNet projects in a P2P way by facilitation rather than hierarchy and project management, building in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing peer to peer, and allowing networks to grow and connect to each other in an organic bottom-up method rather than ‘funded’ and top down.

Greece is home to a number of community network projects, each following their own governance model, such as Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN), Sarantaporo.gr, and Wireless Thessaloniki. Community network projects bring with them lower data costs, often faster internet speeds than telecom-provided internet, and benefits of privately owned infrastructure such as privacy and locally run services.

From June 12-16, you can join Exarcheia Net for a series of workshops,  where Exarcheia residents will join in on a public introductory workshop and guests from Freifunk (Germany), Altermundi (Argentina), Guifi.net (Catalonia), Ninux (Italy) and OpenFreenet (India) will lead an open debate on building self-organized community networks at the neighborhood level.

Exarcheia Net is looking for more people interested in working  “hands-on” in community networking and setting up p2p infrastructure. To connect with Exarcheia Net, check out the Wiki or join a weekly meeting by contacting James Lewis: lewis.james at gmail dot com.  

Lead image “Le libraire d’Exarchia – Athènes, Grèce” by ActuaLitté, Flickr

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Outline

• What are the commons?
• Is there an example of a commons business model?
• In what areas are commons active?
• Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
• How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
• What is the importance of digital commons?
• What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crisis?
• What are briefly the differences between commons and markets?
• Further reading

What are the commons?

Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system — any resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work.

Photo by 4nitsirk

The post A Shareable Explainer: What are the Commons? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

tl;dr: Projects building open communications networks using custom router software are playing an important role in providing refugees with Internet access. Last year, largely unbeknownst to the public, a new EU directive was passed on the regulation of radio equipment. This directive may limit the software that can be run on WiFi routers to those certified by the manufacturer. This could keep initiatives from being able to provide such open networks in the future. Now is the time to get active in your member state to protect open WiFi networks!

In cities throughout Europe, people are seeking refuge from war, discrimination, hunger and persecution. Initiatives from civil society have been building up free Internet connections surrounding camp sites and housing projects.

Freifunk in Magdeburg Olvenstedt (Photo: Keywan Tonekaboni, CC-BY-NC/4.0)

Many had to flee from their countries in months-long trips. Free WiFi connections allow them to participate in society, in culture and everyday life, which has become unthinkable to most of us without access to the Internet. It also allows them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.

In Germany, Freifunk and other initiatives have been building up free and open – that is: collectively built-up, not-for-profit – wireless networks for more than a decade. Similar initiatives exist throughout Europe, such as Guifi.net in Spain or Funkfeuer in Austria. In the current situation, Freifunk and others have committed themselves to an additional, humanitarian goal.

They provide Internet access to refugees by way of installing customized software onto devices such as routers and WiFi access points. They are replacing the software (so-called firmware) originally installed on the devices by their manufacturers. Using their own software, they can build up free and open networks more easily and automatically.

Radio equipment rules with unwanted consequences?

There are common rules for devices that communicate using radio waves in the European Union. They have been put into place to avoid devices interfering unwantedly with other devices, as well as to keep certain frequencies clear for communication of airplanes, emergency services and so on.

WiFi access points and routers are subject to these regulations. The overhaul of the old directive (Directive 2014/53/EU on “the making available … of radio equipment”) early in 2014, at the end of the last parliament’s legislative term, introduced a new requirement for hardware manufacturers to demonstrate that software running on devices comply with rules regarding the use of certain radio channels, for example. This not only applies to firmware shipped by device manufacturers but also to any kind of software installable on the devices.

In Article 3.3 (i) of the directive, it says devices need to be built in a way to “ensure that software can only be loaded into the radio equipment where the compliance of the combination of the radio equipment and software has been demonstrated”. This could be interpreted as a requirement for manufacturers to only allow certified software to run on their devices. Projects like Freifunk and others as well as commercial third-party producers would suffer as a result, lacking proper certification.

The original Commission draft of the directive (PDF), however, includes a recital (19) that explicitly mentions: “Verification … should not be abused in order to prevent [the devices’] use with software provided by independent parties”.

It is now a matter of the member states’ transposition of the directive into national law whether the recital’s intention is kept.

Will manufacturers have to verify third party software?

It is curious that according to recital (29), “conformity assessment should … remain solely the obligation of the manufacturer”. Depending on the implementation of the directive into national law, manufacturers would subsequently have to verify third party producers’ software. It is hitherto unknown if manufacturers are sympathetic to the idea of having to spend money and expertise on this process.

Governments need to make sure open WiFi projects can continue

Volunteer projects throughout Europe that are building WiFi networks for refugees, similar to Freifunk in Germany, have made headlines and earned sympathy this summer. Lawmakers in Europe need to make sure these projects can continue their work.

EU member states have until 13 June 2016 to complete their national implementations of Directive 2014/53/EU. A freedom of information request brought forward by Michel Vorsprach in Germany has already produced an answer from the ministry for economic affairs. According to their reply, the German draft law is in its final stages and implementation will happen in due time. Governments throughout Europe need to implement the radio equipment directive in a way that does not hinder the free and open internet movement.

Manufacturers must not be lured into implementing even more restrictive measures than they are already using to prevent installation of third-party firmwares. It is a basic necessity for volunteers to be able to install customized firmware onto routers. Only if they can overcome the boundaries of what hardware manufacturers had originally planned for their devices to do, can free and open Internet projects continue to flourish.

Act Now!

If you are working with an initiative that provides free and open networks that are based on OpenSource firmwares like OpenWRT or DDWRT, or if you are willing to help them continue to do so, you have to act now:

• Ask your national government how it is planning on implementing Directive 2014/53/EU in its national law and if your WiFi routers can subsequently still be equipped with customized software.
• Ask your routers’ manufacturers how they plan on handling the requirements that arise from Article 3.3 of Directive 2014/53/EU.
• Ask politicians with special expertise in all political parties about how they envision an implementation that encourages Freifunk-like projects.
• Write to [email protected] with any answers you have received.
• Translate this call to action to your native language so we can mobilise activists in all member states. We’re happy to publish translations here that are sent to us via [email protected].
• Forward this call to action to 5 friends.

Photo by slworking2

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The Barcelona city government is led by former housing activist Ada Colau, who was elected mayor in May 2015.  She is a leader of the movement that became the political party Barcelona En Comú (“Barcelona in Common”). Once in office, Colau halted the expansion of new hotels, a brave effort to prevent “economic development” (i.e., tourism) from hollowing out the city’s lively, diverse neighborhoods. As a world city, Barcelona is plagued by a crush of investors and speculators buying up real estate, making the city unaffordable for ordinary people.

Barcelona En Comú may have won the mayor’s office, but it controls only 11 of the 44 city council seats. As a result, any progress on the party’s ambitious agenda requires the familiar maneuvering and arm-twisting of conventional city politics. Its mission also became complicated because as a governing (minority) party, Barcelona En Comú is not just a movement, it must operationally assist the varied needs of a large urban economy and provide all sorts of public services:  a huge, complicated job.

What happens when activist movements come face-to-face with such administrative realities and the messy pressures of representative politics? This is precisely why the unfolding drama of Barcelona En Comú is instructive for commoners. Will activists transform conventional politics and government systems into new forms of governance — or will they themselves be transformed and abandon many of their original goals?

The new administration clearly aspires to shake things up in positive, transformative ways.  Besides fostering greater participation in governance, Barcelona En Comú hopes to fortify and expand what it calls the “commons collaborative economy” – the cooperatives, commons and neighborhood projects that comprise a remarkable 10% of the city economy through 1,300 ventures.

For example, there is the impressive Guifi.net, a broadband telecommunications network that is managed as a commons for the benefit of ordinary Internet users and small businesses.  The system provides welcome competition to the giant Telefónica by providing affordable Internet access through more than 32,000 active wifi nodes.

The city is also home to Som Energia Coop, the first renewable energy coop in Catalunya. It both resells energy bought from the market and is developing its own renewable energy projects – wind turbines, solar panels, biogas plants – to produce energy for its members.

Barcelona En Comú realizes that boosting that commons collaborative economy is an act of co-creation with commoners, not a government project alone.  So the city has established new systems to open and expand new dialogues.  There is a group council called BarCola,  for example, which convenes leading players in the collaborative economy and commons-based peer production to assess the progress of this sector and recommend helpful policies. There is also an open meetup called Procomuns.net, and Decim.Barcelona (Decide Barcelona), a web platform for public deliberation and decision-making.

It remains to be seen how these bodies will evolve, but their clear purpose is to strengthen the commons collaborative economy as a self-aware, active sector of the city’s life.  The administration is exploring such ideas as how existing coops might migrate to open platforms, and what types of businesses might be good allies or supporters of the commons collaborative economy.

Some sympathetic allies worry that Barcelona En Comú is superimposing the commons ethic and language onto a conventional left politics – that it amounts to a re-branding of reform and a diluting of transformational ambitions.  Critics wonder whether the commons is in danger of being captured by The System. They ask whether “participative governance” in existing political structures is a laudable advance or a troubling type of co-optation.

While such questions may be inevitable, I think the answers cannot necessarily be known in advance, or even while pursuing them. When the commons start to go mainstream, there are so many unknown contingencies. Inventing an unprecedented new system within the matrix of the old one entails many unknown developmental factors. There will always be gaps, uncertainties and complexities that are encountered for the first time, which can only be addressed on-the-fly with creative improvisations.

Many of these improvisations will invariably be seen as politically motivated even if they are unintentional. Progress will involve two steps forward and one step back. Some smaller coops in Barcelona complain that they are not able to participate in city procurement projects.  Others are worried that the re-municipalization of the city’s water system will ultimately fail and result in it becoming privatized once again.

Francesca Bria, Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona, works at the epicenter of many of these forces. At a public panel that I shared with her last week, she noted that many “small but irreversible changes” have already been made in the city.  She also conceded that transformational change is difficult because “the public sector was not designed to serve the people.”

Sadly, this is absolutely true. City governments are usually designed to cater to wealthy developers, investors and corporations. A charmed circle of dominant players tend to get the most lucrative city contracts, the most valuable tax breaks and subsidies, and the special legal privileges. Transforming city systems to make them commons-friendly is a daunting structural challenge fraught with many administrative, legal and political complexities.

At a more subtle level, we are captives of a very language that can inhibit change. Consider the word “smart city,” which was the name of the event that I was invited to speak at – the Smart City Expo World Congress.  This is an annual event in Barcelona that is physically adjacent to two massive trade shows – for vendors of “smart city” information technologies and municipal water technologies.

The term “smart city” is a technocratic/marketing term that the IT industries love because it highlights their sales pitch.  Their products purport to make city systems more flexible and efficient for energy, water, traffic management, governance, etc. The term implies a private black box of proprietary technology that can be purchased, but is off-limits to ordinary mortals. Not quite a vision of the commons. Systems, not people, lie at its heart.

As the host for the Smart City Expo, the city government wanted to broaden the discourse of “smart cities” at this event, and so it invited the likes of me and David Harvey, among others.  Harvey is the celebrated Marxist scholar who has written so brilliantly about global capitalism and the “right to the city” movement. His talk, which occurred before I arrived, surely must have struck many participants as provocative and curious.  I can only imagine how Harvey regarded the buzzing, shiny corporate trade show 100 yards away.

My keynote presentation, on the “city as a commons,” introduced the commons paradigm and described many enclosures of the city.  I also focused on a variety of commons-based urban initiatives such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, participatory budgeting, data commons and platform cooperatives.  (I will post a link to the video when it is available.)

For the corporate vendors, it must have been a bit of jolt to consider whether real citizens can be integrated into the “smart city” and given some genuine sovereignty.  Tech people don’t generally consider the politics of enclosure or the idea of commoning.  Within a few minutes of finishing my talk, however, I was surprised to receive an email from a Dutch banker who had been in the audience.  “Don’t you think cities have grown too big to become a commons?  Haven’t people become too opportunistic to create and share fairly?”  (I replied:  “Institutional structures and social norms can achieve a lot despite humanity’s less attractive side.”)

But the deeper point remains:  How to integrate commons-based systems with the complex realities of city governments and markets as they exist today?  Or must commons occupy a different sphere entirely?

I confess that I do not have a fully satisfying answer to these questions.  For a workshop held the next day, however, I did come up with a rough typology of hybrid commons that attempt to “make nice” with city government and markets.  I’d love for commons to open up new lines of interaction with the logic of government and market, but it is paramount that in doing so commons affirmatively protect their sovereignty and integrity of vision.

I am reminded of the grim conclusion of Lewis Hyde, the gift economy scholar. In his book Trickster Makes this World, based on his study of mythological tricksters as change-agents, Hyde argues that the inevitable fate of any subversive with dangerous powers is either to be cannibalized or exiled.  Powerful institutions must “either expel or ingest their troublemakers.”  A third, more precarious option is to “stay on the threshold, neither in nor out.”  But is that sustainable?

!

Photo by Luc Mercelis

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