McFilter

Don't Buy Innovation, Buy Things. Some Suggestions.

Given that one of my main arguments in my post about "Distributing and Democratizing Innovation" is that funders should buy (or fund communities to buy) actual things they want, rather than trying to buy nebulous concepts like "innovation", I figured I should come up with some examples.

These are all at the smaller-scale end of things, because I'm still circling in on my solarpunk vision of a possible future Liverpool.

So let me come back to you with the network of cargo-bike deliveries; attendant alternative manufacturing firms making said cargo-bikes and other varying sizes and scales of similar vehicles in place of building quite so many Range Rovers; and mass roll-out of solar and community fuel-cells and retrofit of houses to help against the ongoing climate emergency. It'll be somewhat of an update to my It's Liverpool 2020 story.

• I've mostly been collecting my civic-minded, city-wide ideas on the "somebody-should" issue tracker for the city that I set up a few years back.
• The suggestions for cycling in Liverpool that I made a while back in response to a cycling consultation are all still doable.
• Alongside, or maybe as part of, the Council's programme to second folk from the private-sector to shift civil service culture to be "more like a startup" they could encourage teams to attend or run tech meetups, or work from DoES Liverpool (or rotate round the co-working spaces in the city). Again, digging into the archives of this blog, I talked about a finer-grained embedding of the DoES Liverpool ethos a few years back. It also has echoes of Aaron Straup Cope's exhortations to the museum sector to employ digital staff and run at small pieces, loosely joined.
• I don't have a blog post to refer to on this one, but something-something digital/maker bootcamp crossed with Code for America fellowships. Fund (initially, to see if it works) a cohort of folk to learn the DoES Liverpool ethos and have them work on community/neighbourhood projects as they do so. Get STEAM Engineers to run the training, maybe with more help drafted in from across the DoES community; have folk like Julian, Zarino and me on hand as advisors/mentors; and split the locations between time working at DoES and time working with their project.
• Could there be a network of DoES-like spaces across the city? The simple answer is yes, although we're back to the question of how to infuse the new spaces with a similar culture to the current one. One of the ways is that it spins out of the existing community, much like a swarm leaving a beehive. Little Sandbox was one attempt at that, in Norris Green, although it sadly didn't survive the pandemic. Birkenhack is a recent starter, over the water in Birkenhead. With the rise in remote working, and the decline of the high street, there is definitely scope for them to spread into each district of the city. You'd want them to be bringing the empty shop units into the commons though, rather than providing a way for landlords to ride out a downturn with "meanwhile" use. And building out from existing groups and organisations would make them more likely to stick. Funding those groups and also the DoES Liverpool community members to run pop-up makerspaces and skill sessions would be a useful way to both provide extra financial support to them and seed ideas and activity across the city (region).

So if anyone wants to help make any of these happen...

Distributing and Democratizing Innovation

Careful Industries recently published a green paper: From Hype to Hope: How Networked Neighbourhoods can make innovation work for everyone.

I paused my reading of it as it was clear I'd want to write some notes and thoughts about it, and wanted to wait until I had time. This weekend things freed up enough for that to happen.

It's a good paper; well worth a read.

It also lays out some questions, which have proven useful jumping off points for me to think about, respond to, and build upon. The questions, and a couple of other paragraphs that triggered longer responses from me, are in blockquotes below.

1. Fast followers Are there particular benefits or drawbacks to a “fast follower” approach? What are the limits of assigning fast followers within regions, and might national networks be required to support a range of organisations?

I can see how "fast followers" appeals to policy folk and funders. There is also an acute need for the benefits that (useful, not all is) innovation would bring. However, if you want it to bed in and grow beyond the funding then it's an exercise in culture change and that doesn't happen quickly.

Of course, you might not want the culture change, as that will make folk less dependent on you and/or more resilient and harder to control. I think Rachel does want the changes, but ideally it re-balances some of the power between communities and politicians and funders, and the folk with careers in business- or community-support will be (as they should be aiming to) making themselves redundant. I think that if we make these changes then the country will be in a better place and there'll be more opportunities for all of us, including the politicians, funders and support workers, but there's always an uncertainty to change which can worry people.

Culture change requires people. It's hard to accelerate it with cash—the right is continually running that experiment and their successes take years or decades. On the flip side of the money equation, free and open-source software has won out over similar timescales with almost no funding. People learn the culture from each other; it's easy, and the default, for the existing culture to swamp and drown out the new before it can get established.

I also think the followers language sets up a false dichotomy. The paper rightly opens with a quote about how a "cookie-cutter" approach won't work; having leaders and followers is taking that approach. We're (excuse me while I go throw up a little) exploring the innovation landscape and we want more people joining the search.

For a more concrete example we can look at hackspaces and makerspaces. In some way the newer ones are following the older, but each time they evolve and grow to match their surroundings. Most, but not all, will have a laser-cutter and a 3D printer; some will have a more industrial vibe with lathes, welding gear and CNC mills; others embrace fibre arts with knitting and sewing machines, and CNC embroidery machines; there might be an events space for community meetings and talks; a few have co-working spaces attached, and non-maker/hacker members. Their legal form could be a company limited by guarantee, or a community interest company, or a charity, or...

In reality there are a load of design patterns that each one chooses from and mixes and remixes to suit their own needs. The successes and learnings don't all flow in one direction, the "leaders" can pick up and adopt patterns from the "followers" when they can see an improvement.

2. Funding and investment What would need to be in place for sustainable, regionally managed funds to be viable? What special conditions would be required to support the investment of different kinds of capital? What are the challenges in growing these funds? Might another funding route be more appropriate?

If someone wants to give DoES Liverpool enough money to buy a premises that we'd put into the commons (a CLT or similar), that would be lovely. There are a couple of candidates locally that could work: £750k would let us double in size; for £3.2m we could buy an entire office block to repurpose.

Such a suggestion only really makes sense because we're an established organisation that's grown from nothing to over 4000 sq. ft. of space with no funding and continues to exist 14 years after we were founded. Even with all that, such a jump would be risky and not something we'd take on lightly. We might even turn down such a seemingly generous offer. Hedging it by putting the building into a community ownership vehicle seems a sensible approach from both sides: if the investment does result in killing the patient then at least the community, rather than some property developer, can pick up the pieces and try something different.

As I said earlier, it's hard to usefully throw money at the problem. Again, looking at the concrete example of makerspaces, virtually all of the ones that were set up with external funding lasted only as long as their funding did, and have long since closed their doors.

Four years ago I argued that the most useful approach (assuming you aren't willing to fund UBI or even a better social security net) would be to buy things you want. The problem then is how to find the problems that neighbourhoods need to solve, and how to let those neighbourhoods choose to spend the cash.

3. Define success for inclusive growth How have other successful inclusive growth projects been measured? Are there particular success criteria that would be relevant for the UK, or for particular nations and regions within the UK? How might varying contexts be understood?

Forbid any measurements that include numbers.

Which is better? This slide deck explaining what DoES Liverpool is where you'll hear the names of actual people and businesses that you could follow up on; or a an innovation hub "creating a cluster of over 300 new businesses and over 1000 jobs".

Particularly when the former has helped create more businesses than the latter, with £12m less in funding. Although neither are anywhere near 300 new businesses (though at least DoES Liverpool continues to operate and might still get there)

There's are continual attempts to replicate "innovation" success by building the symptoms of that success rather than the causes. Cambridge isn't a hotbed of tech because it has a science park, it has a science park because it's got lots of businesses that need office and lab space. The property developers have understood the opportunity presented by politicians looking for quick wins, and profited handsomely from it. Maybe that's the real reason for turning everything into numbers—those of us who care about such things take ourselves out of the competition because we can't sincerely claim such ludicrous upsides.

Technology sovereignty needs more than an elite international workforce, it also relies on more people from across the UK being able to adopt and adapt existing technologies and for more people from diverse backgrounds to become innovators, solving a wider range of problems.

Across the UK tech scene, relationships and reputation are a vital currency, brokered by a small number of individuals and organisations who weave networks and broker introductions.

This is very true. There's a London-centric equivalent too, although that's been softened a little since the pandemic with people getting more used to meeting online, and with folk moving out of London across the country thanks to remote-work. It does feel like, at the grass-roots level, the UK tech scene is less well connected than it was in the late 2000s. Back then, barcamps and hackdays meant that the geeks in the UK were very well networked and inter-connected. It definitely skewed towards those with the privilege of being able to spend weekends following their interests, which I'm sure skewed white, male, and younger; but addressing that and building something similar would be very useful.

How would you grow more folk like me? Malcolm Gladwell is much derided these days, but there's an element of the maven role that he laid out in Tipping Point. An element of helping to connect folk and projects, while acknowledging that the link might not be of interest or useful, or at the right time. Collecting people who have an interest in local links, but who also are looking and connecting outside of the network and outside of the local geography. Folk who are open to new ideas and give newcomers the benefit of the doubt while applying critical thinking to what is presented. Those with a confidence (but not arrogance) in their own capabilities that they don't have to dress it up as more than it is, and then who don't see others as a threat.

Years ago, Francis Irving semi-idly proposed that we should look for interesting people, have a chat with them, and also ask them who they thought was doing the most interesting work (project, art, startup, whatever) in the area. Then go repeat the process with those people. And the ones they recommended, and so on.

1. Is there a preferred mix of type of organisations – anchor, frontdoor, superconnector - within a region or a neighbourhood, and what is the interplay between them?

I think a diversity of organisations, of approaches, and of areas of interest is important. At DoES Liverpool we often talk about how the non-geeks and non-makers in the community are just as important. The tech and the making aren't useful if they exist in a vacuum and successful projects and businesses will need more than just a leet coder.

This is also one of my regular reminders that I should reinvigorate the #LiverpoolHannahLinks project that the pandemic interrupted; but that link shows some of the wealth of interconnected projects across the city. Finding useful ways for them to interact and convene more often remains a challenge.

The other important point to make about the interplay of organisational actors is for them to see each other as peers. I often half-joke about there being a mutual lack of respect between us and (certain members of) the Council. Some councillors think we should tug our forelocks because they're The Council; and we think they should listen to us because we're actually making shit happen. Ditto the universities. Thankfully they're all big enough organisations that there are good people who "get it" and with whom we can work, but finding them is hard.

If the aim is to build more than just tech startups (as it should be) then there likely is more of a role for government; but if we expand the leaders to include communities as well as entrepreneurs then I still think Brad Feld's book "Startup Communities" captures the correct dynamics well, putting government and universities as important-but-supporting. This review of the book provides a useful summary.

2. How might partnerships between Networked Neighbourhoods and/or regions be fostered and what are the incentives for collaboration?

The million-dollar question. Can I come back to that?

3. As a Connected Organisation develops and changes, how might support and infrastructure needs vary?

I think recognising that it will change as it develops is an important point. And one that those of us inside organisations don't always remember or even notice.

Like any organisation, you can get away with less infrastructure at the start, when it's small enough that everyone largely knows what's going on. Adopting the tools for the next scale up just before you need them is likely a good aim, as then you might have them sorted for when you actually need them.

I'm a big fan of the maxim that you should have as little process as you can get away with, but no less; and as much process as you need, but no more.

To return to the idea of design patterns for such organisations, then a variety of patterns to apply at varying scales would be good.

I think support that grows as the organisation does would be best. As I said at the start, DoES Liverpool could make good use of a building, and now that we're established (and that point was likely quite a few years ago) I think there's proof to the wider community that such support wouldn't be misplaced.

From the perspective of a volunteer-run consensus-based organisation, support that was patient would help. There isn't a "key decision-maker" you can have a meeting with and then something happens. Similarly, opportunities with short-notice deadlines are likely to be passed up because we aren't going to have the internal capacity to engage with them.

Being open to exploring what the support might look like would also be useful. I remember Andy Goodwin and I seeking out a meeting with the Local Enterprise Partnership to see how we might work together; we started the meeting explicitly stating that we weren't looking for money, and were curious about what other options there might be. They continually brought the discussion round to potential funding bids, as that was (a) how their work was measured and (b) basically the only thing they could imagine.

It could have been people from the LEP working from the co-working space once-a-month to better understand the community, build links, and surface new ideas; or working together to find and raise the profile of local manufacturers (it was the early days of the Indie Manufacturing project); or doing events or other work to find the potential founders for DoES Liverpool-like spaces across the city region; or...

All of that requires a deeper commitment and more work than is strictly necessary. It would also give the space (and credibility) to challenge and push us to achieve more. If nothing else in order to surface what the real barriers are. I firmly believe that the DoES Liverpool community has done a lot of epic shit in its fourteen years, but there are still huge amounts of untapped potential in it.

Imagine organising a birthday party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of learning objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would those objectives be aligned with the mission statement for education in the society to which you belong? Would you create a project plan for the party with clear milestones associated with empirical measures of achievement? …

No, instead like most parents you would create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviour, you would use attractors (party games, a football, a videotape) to encourage the formation of beneficial largely self organising identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early, to prevent the party becoming chaotic, or necessitating the draconian imposition of authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been a success, but you could not define (in other than the most general terms) what that success would look like in advance.

Maybe I should start posting that quote into any funding application form I can find.

1. What are the most effective theories of change for complex, systemic change happening across multiple domains?

Approaching it as gardening a culture rather than dictating things to do. Turns out I already wrote up my thoughts on that.

We had a theory of change workshop within the DoES Liverpool community as an outcome from one of the early Future Gazing sessions, and it resulted in us publishing (on posters in the space as well as online) the DoES Liverpool values.

Although I think this is our actual theory of change:

2. What are the most directly measurable outcomes for innovation at national, local and regional, neighbourhood, and individual level?

I'll refer back to the Dave Snowden quote here ;-)

However, I will also note that such similar powers of ten-style perspectives are laid out in our periodic Future Gazing workshops, where the community comes together to think about and discuss ways that the space could evolve and grow and how we might impact and help our area, the city, country and planet.

3. How might – or should – this theory of change enable partnership and multi-stakeholder collaboration?

We should be more intentional in inviting outsider friends along to our Future Gazing sessions. They're a good point at which to inject new ideas and perspectives.

Funding and support that's flexible and can adapt to emerging opportunities would be useful. I don't think that would need to be a huge amount, but should be able to buy equipment and pay for people's time (on a project-http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/thinking/dont_buy_innovation_buy_things_some_suggestions.html or part-time basis).

Maybe the answer is to find gardeners and give them a budget and no (or minimal) strings.

[I also thought I'd make some more concrete suggestions but this was already something of an epic essay, so I posted them separately]

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 21st 2025 Edition

• Olivetti’s Ivrea: How an Italian Tech Giant Built the World’s Most Progressive Company Town. An excellent (although a fair bit seems lifted verbatim from this piece in the Guardian) exploration of how Olivetti tried to build (and succeeded for a while) a better sort of company town in Ivrea. Ever since I visited an exhibition on Olivetti and Ivrea at the end of my time in Torino I've been interested in the civic and social side of Olivetti. Also worth a read is this catalogue from a 1952 MoMA exhibition on Olivetti.
• Five levels of note-taking in meetings. Most of the time I manage at least level 1, and often somewhere between levels 3 and 4.
• Short Mastodon thread from Christopher Neugebauer on the problems with open-source licences.
• The Algorithmic Anarchist: 2nd Edition. This is excellent.
• It’s Time For Democrats To Get More Annoying "Better than spending all this money on telling people what good stuff we would do for them if we were in power, we could just show them, by doing good stuff. We should live our values, not just endlessly reiterate them." This is about the US elections, but applies just as much to the UK.

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Lifehouse, Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield

Lifehouse:Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield (on OpenLibrary) was a much anticipated book here, and it was better than I expected.

For someone well versed in how much of a mess the world is in (even more so than when I read it late last year) the first section is something of a recap, but it's handy to have the overlapping crises pulled together in one place. After that there's a healthy history of the ways folk have built more equitable structures of living, and the power brought to bear against them in response by the rich.

And then some sketches of a possible future, and ways we can look to get there. I think the notes from a proto-lifehouse that I wrote, in response to an earlier article on the idea from Adam, still captures a lot of my thoughts on it; but there are a few asides among my dog-eared pages from reading the book.

I can recommend it. And I'm always interested in meeting fellow/potential lifehouse-keepers, particularly local ones.

Page 5

It's that doing something that I want to spend the rest of this book exploring—both the commitment to local, self-organized action itself, and everything it opens up for us, in a time when so much else about our lives feels like it is shutting down.

Page 15

Nobody can do that for us. We have to do it for ourselves. This book is about what happens when we let go of hope, stop waiting and start doing.

Page 52

[Writer of essay "How Complex Systems Fail" Richard] Cook observes that, whatever safety mechanisms they may have been equipped with, what all such systems have in common is that they are kept within safe operating margins via the continuous adjustments of human operators. This seems commonsensical enough. But what he argues next is somewhat startling: these adjustments are invariably in the nature of a "gamble." Whatever decision is at hand, it will always be a bet made about the future in the presence of imperfect information.

[...]

In his essay, Cook says one other interesting thing about complex systems, which is that it is quite possible for them to "run in degraded mode" for extended periods. That is, they are so well defended by their many layers of backups that they can accumulate damage for many years before hitting the point of absolute breakdown. They simply go on working, without their operators or anyone else necessarily realizing the extent to which everything under the hood has corroded away to nothing.

The most obvious example of this in societal terms is the Soviet Union, which continued to maintain a certain façade of robustness even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and indeed right up to the point of its dissolution on Christmas 1991.

Page 64

The legacy of [Occupy Wall Street] was evident in the incredible speed at which the relief effort [of Occupy Sandy] took shape: it was because of the social connections, and the trust for one another, that activists had forged in the course of those ecstatic and difficult weeks in the park that they were able to stand up the sprawling networks of sites and activities so very quickly. It was evident in the the immediate sophistication of the logistical systems they organised at each of those sites, which owed something to the pop-up infrastructure of the makeshift society formed over the fifty-nine days and nights in Zucotti. And it was most evident of all in the set of values that guided the relief efforts—which should surprise no one, given that they were the selfsame values, held by a group that included many of the same people.

Likewise the way that the loose network of maker and makerspaces could respond to the pandemic. Existing social connections and organisational practices from group projects.

Page 69

They went into the housing projects and up to the darkened floors, keeping faith with the places, and the people, other relief workers evidently found so daunting. And rather than presuming that those they came across were victims in need of rescue—and offering them generic aid packages in response, as a Red Cross outreach worker might—the members of OS field teams treated them as peers and equals, the ones who knew better than anyone else what their actual needs consisted of. Each interaction between a volunteer and someone affected by the storm therefore started not with an assumption, an assessment or a judgement, but with a question: "How are you doing?"

No attempt was ever made by Occupy Sandy to sort bodies into those that were deserving of care and those that were not, the way other relief organizations did. Nobody involved with the effort would ever ask for proof of address, a Social Security number or any of the other documentation required by government agencies like FEMA before they'd furnish aid. Nobody made you fill out paperwork just to prove that you were who you said you were. OS volunteers offered assistance to anyone who asked, whatever their immigration status, whichever side of the law they were compelled to operate on.

There was a fundamental respect for people's autonomy in all of this, not to mention their dignity. It was one of the qualities that most sharply differentiated Occupy Sandy from the Red Cross or the National Guard, and it emerged directly from the principled distinction between mutual aid and charity.

Page 83

But it nevertheless gave voice to a conclusion that was becoming increasingly hard to avoid: that if no real relief from their troubles was forthcoming, despite all the Head Starts and VISTAs a wealthy society could dream up, Black people would just have to set about organizing that relief for themselves.

Page 87

This was the genesis of Free Breakfast for Children, the People's Free Food Program and all the many other ways in which the Panthers proposed to care for the people. "All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution."

Page 102

(The economics of such projects were further bolstered when members of parliament representing the radical-left party SYRIZA agreed to tithe 20 percent of their salaries to the support of solidarity initiatives.)

Solidarity among the Greeks, and the sort of example you'd like to see from more politicians.

Page 105

Here scott crow's description of Common Ground's understanding of the people they worked with as "active participants in the struggle to make their lives better" was echoed virtually word for word, inscribed in a practice that defines mutual care about as well as anything could.

This, then, was deinstitutionalized care, responsive to the needs of a population laboring under all the physical and psychic assaults of Crisis. All of the practical knowledge involved in setting up a clinic that worked this way, and running it on an ongoing basis, was shared through the solidarity network: how they went about securing the resources they needed, what kind of maintenance was required by the more delicate equipment, when and under what conditions they pursued alliances with other local actors, even how they physically laid out their spaces.

Page 110

Even at its most complete, the care that people accessed through the state was always contingent, conditional on a government remaining in power that was willing to undertake robust and continued investment in the national health. Any faith that such conditions might persist into the indefinite future was a faith misplaced.

Page 112

At least, this is the deeper lesson for the Long Emergency: lifesystems must be designed so that they're as robust as possible to fluctuations of the underlying political or economic order, because fluctuation is all we are likely to know for the foreseeable future.

Page 122

Bookchin named this Communalism, with a capital C, in explicit allusion and homage to the Paris Commune of 1871. Communalism was designed around a set of "preconditions for human survival," among which were "the anarchist concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized society." Taken together, these would constitute nothing less than "a new politics structured around towns, neighborhoods, cities, and citizens' assemblies, freely confederated into local, regional, and ultimately continental networks."

Page 130

If nothing else, the ability to participate in consequential decisions helps to shift the psychological locus of control, however incrementally, from external to internal. The world is no longer quite so much something that happens to you, and that you have no choice but to accept, but something you can intervene in, concretely and directly. The ability to act upon the world in this way is in itself palliative of the awful helplessness in the face of events that characterizes our time.

But it's also about something even larger than that. For the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, justice is more than merely a question of the equal distribution of goods. It is a condition in which "action, decisions about action, and provision of the means to develop and exercise capacities" are accessible to all. This is why the practice of deliberative assembly isn't simply about getting together to vote for one or another among the options before us. In helping us build our capability for collective self-determination, and giving us a venue in which we might employ it, the assembly is, as directly as it is possible to be, concerned with the achievement of justice.

Page 132

Rather than concentrating the power to decide in a single leader, or tightly sharing it among a party cadre, horizontalism distributed it across everyone motivated enough to show up and participate. Sometimes, the decision logic employed was the pursuit of full consensus, at others a simple majority vote. But materially, this looked much the same, wherever on Earth you happened to encounter it: people gathered in a rough circle, often in a courtyard, clearing or public plaza, visibly and volubly discussing the matter before them.

Page 134

For many participants, myself included, this tide of protest [of Occupy and the "movement of the squares"] constituted the first time in our lives that our subjective experiences of the world were reflected in mass political action of any sort. We had grown tired of being told that politics would only ever amount to the choice of the least-worst option and that the best we could ever expect to achieve was the most tepid and incremental sort of reform.

Page 146

With a population of somewhere between 2.5 million and 5 million, and persisting in some form from July 2011 to the present, Rojava appears to be modern history's largest-scale and longest-running example of a place where order was achieved in the absence of a state, where decisions of real material consequence were made by ordinary people sitting in assembly.

This is already extraordinary enough. But what is still more extraordinary, and what particularly commends it to us in our time of troubles, is that the people of northern Syria achieved this with their world on fire, amid circumstances of the most terrible devastation. And what is most extraordinary of all is that so little is known about it outside the region, even now.

Page 157

In such a mediation process, the members of the peace committee—none of whom needed to be legally qualified, many of whom remained untrained by anything except experience—gathered an alleged perpetrator, their victim and any witnesses in a series of informal conversations, which ordinarily took place in homes or other noninstitutional locations. There they would collectively attempt to determine what had taken place and what, if anything, could be done to repair it. Perhaps the most unfamiliar aspect of this is that it odes not rely upon the adversarial framing common to Western systems of jurisprudence, in either common-law or Napoleonic varieties: there is neither prosecutor nor defense. The emphasis is placed, rather, on consensus and on a collaborative search for measures of redress and rehabilitation that can be agreed to by all parties.

Page 158

Should the members of a commune- or neighborhood-level peace committee for whatever reason not be able to achieve agreement, they were able to invoke a larger-scale form of public safety administration, known as the "justice platform." These convened anywhere up to 300 people to hear cases, drawn from "related communes and councils, civil society organisations [and] social movements," and were considered to be the final arbiter short of the formal court system. Due to their size, these more often resorted to a majority-vote-decision rule than the strict pursuit of consensus, but the spirit in which proceedings were conducted was the same: the search for a resolution that all parties could live with.

Page 161

The lesson appears to be that if you can build something that tangibly improves the scope of agency experienced in daily life, people will flock to it, whatever reservations they may hold.

Page 167

The fundamental idea of the Lifehouse is that there should be a place in every three- or four-city-block radius where you can charge your phone when the power's down everywhere else, draw drinking water when the supply from the mains is for whatever reason untrustworthy, gather with your neighbors to discuss matters of common concern, organize reliable childcare, borrow tools it doesn't make sense for any one household to own individually and so on—and that these can and should be one and the same place. As a foundation for collective resourcefulness, the Lifehouse is a practical implementation of the values we've spent this book exploring.

Page 168

Then the odds that any one of us will get meaningfully involved in the stewardship of collective services increases considerably.

Just like the phone chargers on the table outside C-Squat, think of the infrastructural provisions as the "killer app": the compelling proposition that pulls people into the Lifehouse. But the deep value is in the other voices we encounter there.

Or as we phrase it: "come for the 3D printer, stay for the community".

Lifehouses would be most useful if we thought of them as places to help us ride out the depredations of neoliberal austerity now, as well as the storms to come. This means furnishing every cluster of a hundred or so households with access to a structure that's been fitted out as a shelter for those displaced from their homes, a storehouse for emergency food stocks and a heating-and-cooling center for the physically vulnerable. It should be able to purify enough drinking water, and generate enough electric power, to support the surrounding neighborhood when the ordinary sources of supply become unreliable. And it should be staffed, on a 24/7 basis, by volunteers who know the neighborhood and its residents well and have a developed sense for the matters that concern them most.

This is part of my work at DoES Liverpool. It provides a commons for the means of production, which helps me earn a living, but it is also partly prepping for whatever crises are heading our way. We have a way to go to reach the level of capability laid out above, although if (and it is understandably a large if) we had access to the Internet, or enough warning to acquire the relevant information on it, we could spin up some of it when needed.

I'm not sure about the 24/7 staffing of the Lifehouses. I'm not sure it's necessary, particularly before an acute crisis arises; and when one does, that will shift the priorities and possibly the availability of the volunteers to allow a just-in-time provision of greater access. Maybe that's a difference between how you'd run one now, and how it would operate as the Long Emergency develops.

Page 174

The mutual aid slogan has it that "audacity is our capacity."

[...]

Being able to draw upon the resources of a properly outfitted Lifehouse has surprisingly deep implications. A community that is able to house, feed and care for its members, furnish them with clean water to drink and generate enough power to heat or cool them will find that it is broadly robust to the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. It is effectively autonomous.

This is not the same thing as autarky, or total self-sufficiency, which is in any event never truly achievable. But a degree of self-reliance in these matters does afford a community significant room for maneuver in a world that is otherwise defined by the constraints it imposes. Become resourceful in these specific ways, and the ability of others to place limits on your freedom of action is sharply circumscribed. You can participate in larger networks or decouple from them at will, without affecting your underlying capacity to provide for your neighbors.

Page 175

In hard times, then, what we're really after is a distributed structure, in which independent capacity and decision-making authority reside in every local node in the network, and each is free to connect with any or all of the others, on a horizontal, peer-to-peer basis.

Page 185

One way would be for each community to develop some capacity for "autonomous production," or what the theorist Jason Adams glosses as "local production for local use, outside the bounds of the wage-labor system." In concrete terms, this turns on access to a workshop furnished with a usefully broad range of machine tools and equipment, from drill presses to TIG welders to sewing machines, ideally co-located with other facilities in the Lifehouse itself.

[...]

The answer may lie in the volunteer-run workshops that already exist in most big cities, which rather uninvitingly tend to be called "makerspaces," "hackspaces" or "fablabs".

[...]

Just as important, the global maker community nurtures within its membership the hard-won knowledge of how to use these tools safely, efficiently and well. And that knowledge tends to drive a set of politics that are broadly consonant with the aims of a Lifehouse network.

Page 187

The values of open access, solidarity and self-reliance held by so many in the maker movement make them obvious as prospective partners in any Lifehouse-based production workshop.

Page 200

If we want to build ourselves a refuge against the hard times to come, then, at least one way of doing so seems clear. We don't have to imagine the revolutionary seizure of state power, or some deus ex machina event that wipes the slate clean and allows us to begin anew. All we need to imagine is a meshwork of Lifehouses spanning the land, each one a place where people come to avail themselves of sanctuary, restoration, sustenance and solace, each one managed and governed by the people who use it. If this is in some ways an ambitious vision, it's also one that is comparably modest and achievable.

Page 201

But here I want to invoke what I earlier described as "the great secret of Occupy Sandy," a quality that we know from the testimony of people involved is something it shared with Common Ground, the Greek solidarity clinics and the communes of Rojava above all: taking initiative in this way feels wonderful. Taking concrete action in defense of our communities—doing something about the situation we find ourselves in and exercising collective power over it—is reparative in itself and a specific for the numbing dread that otherwise gnaws at us in this time of storms.

Community, Leadership and Power

Terence Eden recently reposted a link to an old blogpost of his: I don't have a community.

I don't believe that he isn't a member of a number of communities, but maybe he means in some sort of officially-recognised capacity. He might be right in that. However, he seems to then extrapolate that into him not listening to any "community leaders". No-one's telling him what to do, right?!

I agree that "community leaders" is a pretty ham-fisted term but let's cut the media some slack on that; what else would they use? Influencer?

I'm also on-board with rejecting the sort of top-down communities in favour of the bottom-up grassroots sort of groups that he hints at.

But.

I'm not on-board with the atomised, individualistic disassociation with society. Maybe that's not intended, but it reminds me of the disdain for management and the let's-keep-politics-out-of-tech culture in tech.

I understand (and share) the appeal, but the problem with that is that it surrenders our power (however little that is) to others who aren't necessarily as benevolent as we are. Maybe the problem is that we know how much work it would be to manage projects properly, or to fairly use that collected power, and it's not the type of work we enjoy and there's already too much to do.

The risk with that is that the folk who do it instead are those who don't care that the projects are managed properly or that the power they wield is used equitably. And we're reaping the "rewards" of our avoiding that work over the past couple of decades now, with fascist techbros looting the US.

I am some sort of community leader. As a co-founder and director of DoES Liverpool I have more explicit and implicit power and influence than other members of that community. Similarly, within the #FolkRidingBikes group—despite my attempts not to be—I'm one of the people folk look to for choosing routes or making decisions.

I think it's important we realise and recognise when we do have power; and aim to use it responsibly and to encourage others to develop theirs and to share it with those less privileged.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 10th 2025 Edition

• Excerpt from The Boy in the Box; The end (p. 352) "The good thing about everything being so messed up is that no matter where you look there’s good work to be done."
• Who is Free Software for? This. We need more of us to be building tech that works for others where they are.
• What You Should Do. Trying to channel the advice in here, as well as I can. And while it would be easier if I had more money, or had started earlier, or, or, or... I also know that I need to start from where I am, not some mythical ideal place.

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 27th 2025 Edition

• The end of the playground. "By mandating which services have to be funded while simultaneously capping the taxes that pay for them, Westminster has decided to cut or halt funding to an array of other services and pretend that this is the choice of local councils, which of course it isn’t." The legacy from the Tories, which Labour seem to be doing little to address (I know, it's hard, but doubling-down on "hard choices" that only seem to apply to the least able to bear the cost doesn't scream "we're running a more equitable Government" to me), and meanwhile Reform go from nowhere to 11% of the vote in last week's council by-election. The easy way out is to demonize those voters, but I think Tim Bray's suggestion (see "In The Minority" below) is better; along with continuing the quotidian work of finding small ways to meet and connect with them.
• Dual Power Supply: Snapshot. I'm a fan of both this research project looking to develop open-source hardware flow batteries, and how open they are about sharing their research journey. These are the sort of weeknotes I should be finding time to write.
• In The Minority.

  Basically, in Modern Capitalism, whenever, and I mean whenever without exception, whenever someone offers you an “opportunity”, they’re trying to take advantage of you. This is appallingly tone-deaf, and apparently nobody inside that campaign asked themselves the simple question “Would I actually use this language in talking to someone I care about?” Because they wouldn’t.

  Be blunt. Call theft theft. Call lies lies. Call violence violence. Call ignorance ignorance. Call stupidity stupidity.

  Also, talk about money a lot. Because billionaires are unpopular.

• Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01. Long but interesting investigation on AI, self-driving cars, etc. from someone who's been deep in that area or research and academia for many years. It's rather less "rah, rah, it's all going to be amazing" than the "AI" techbros or the politicians. I didn't find much I could pick holes in.
• A Rant About “Technology”. This is excellent. "I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do."

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 30th 2024 Edition

• You Can't Rebrand a Class War. This is about America, but the Labour Party seem intent on telling everyone the system has failed over the past decades that it's not possible for it to improve, and will then be shocked when the populist fascists get more votes for their lies that they will improve things; just as happened with Brexit.

  When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it.

• To Hell With Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition. Excellent take on the "use AI for good" approach. Now I need to go read the original Ivan Illich speech that it's referencing.
• The Failure, Fear, And Frenzy around Luigi Mangione. Excellent stand-up routine by Josh Johnson about, well, lots of things, but ostensibly the recent CEO murder.
• Edward Henry KC's closing statement in the Horizon Post Office inquiry. When are the high-profile prosecutions going to happen, pour encourager les autres?
• Meaning and origin of ‘pour encourager les autres’. And in double-checking that I'd got the phrase in the last point correct, I found that it's just proof that the arse-covering has been going on for centuries: "After the trial, public clamour rose high against the ministers, who had not supplied Byng with a properly manned fleet, but who, in order to save themselves, had thrown a great part of the blame upon Byng."

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 16th 2024 Edition

• against the dark forest. Lovely writing about a social Internet that works for us all.
• UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings. Maybe a system that pitches companies aiming to develop the drugs that are more profitable against other companies that are doing all they can not to use them isn't the perfect market we were led to believe. What if financial return for shareholders isn't the best proxy we could find for keeping the populace healthy?
• The Fun’s in the Fight. "So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it."

A Pattern Language for Pattern Languages

Many people I respect are big fans of Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" (online PDF copy). I've leafed through it myself and had added it to my to read pile from an urbanism/architecture perspective.

I was also interested in the format itself. A book of patterns rather than rules feels like a much better way to approach group endeavours. In particular it felt like a good way into writing a "handbook" for DoES Liverpool—here are the ways we've found to organise the work and running of the space; they're not set in stone, but some of the panelling on Chesterton's fence here was put there for a reason, and you'll need to explain how your proposed change takes that into account.

However, I wasn't sure what a pattern language looks like in practice. I wondered if there was a pattern language for writing pattern languages, but hadn't come across one.

I figured I'd just have to get round to reading "A Pattern Language" in order to have at least one example from which I could extrapolate.

Finally started doing that today, just to find that the first nine pages of that are an explanation of pattern languages and how to lay them out:

The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

For convenience and clarity, each pattern has the same format. First, there is a picture, which shows an archetypal example of that pattern. Second, after the picture, each pattern has an introductory paragraph, which sets the context for the pattern, by explaining how it helps to complete certain larger patterns. Then there are three diamonds to mark the beginning of the problem. After the diamonds there is a headline, in bold type. This headline gives the essence of the problem in one or two sentences. After the headline comes the body of the problem. This is the longest section. It describes the empirical background of the pattern, the evidence for its validity, the range of different ways the pattern can be manifested in a building, and so on. Then, again in bold type, like the headline, is the solution—the heart of the pattern—which describes the field of physical and social relationships which are required to solve the stated problem, in the stated context. This solution is always stated in the form of an instruction—so that you know exactly what you need to do, to build the pattern. Then, after the solution, there is a diagram, which shows the solution in the form of a diagram, with labels to indicate its main components.

After the diagram, another three diamonds, to show that the main body of the pattern is finished. And finally, after the diamonds there is a paragraph which ties the pattern to all those smaller patterns in the language, which are needed to complete this pattern, to embellish it, to fill it out.

There are two essential purposes behind this format. First, to present each pattern connected to other patterns, so that you grasp the collection of all 253 patterns as a whole, as a language, within which you can create an infinite variety of combinations. Second, to present the problem and solution of each pattern in such a way that you can judge it for yourself, and modify it, without losing the essence that is central to it.

Let us next understand the nature of the connection between patterns.

The patterns are ordered, beginning with the very largest, for regions and towns, then working down through neighborhoods, clusters of buildings, buildings, rooms and alcoves, ending finally with details of construction.

This order, which is presented as a straight linear sequence, is essential to the way the language works. It is presented, and explained more fully, in the next section. What is most important about this sequence, is that it is based on the connections between the patterns. Each pattern is connected to certain "larger" patterns which come above it in the language; and to certain "smaller" patterns which come below it in the language. The pattern helps to complete those larger patterns which are "above" it, and is itself completed by those smaller patterns which are "below" it.

[...]

You see then that the patterns are very much alive and evolving. In fact, if you like, each pattern may be looked upon as a hypothesis like one of the hypotheses of science. In this sense, each pattern represents our current best guess as to what arrangement of the physical environment will work to solve the problem presented. [...] But of course, no matter what [our indication of our certainty in each hypothesis] say, the patterns are still hypotheses, all 253 of them—and are therefore all tentative, all free to evolve under the impact of new experience and observation.