Reposting here, as requested, the proposal mailed a month ago.
This post contains the preamble and digest. Whole proposal, see a pdf here: https://freelab2014.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/robin-hood-thermaikos-proposal.pdf
Groundwork for Freedom
Towards Liberatory Technologies
Development and proliferation of open technologies to support independent society development in Rojava, Greece and beyond.
Proposed model, set of activities, system of seed funding and cooperative investment fund.
Digest
In the search for „alternative” social models, a lot of effort is spent on finding political and economic constructs. Much less attention is paid to the fact that technology (or, as somone may say, „technical culture”) is closely related to those two areas. In fact, every political and economic system introduces its own way of dealing with production, services and logistics, which in turn makes certain technical solutions privileged, while other ones
obsolete. Some of the most subversive concepts are plainly excluded from circulation and labeled as hoaxes.
If we want to support the construction of new society, we need new technological ecosystem.
I propose to create a center (house) for advanced open technologies, aimed to support the development of resilient, self-governing societies in Greece and Rojava – and possibly beyond.
Assuming rules of self-governance based upon Murray Bookchin's municipalism. social economy based on the cooperatives, open technologies will complete the system, providing ways of production tailored to the political and economical needs of the society.
This proposal integrates my previous thoughts and concepts, until now separately developed for Rojava and Greece.
The goal of the house will be:
- To interact with communities, identifying their current and future needs. Chief criteria of the selection will be: resilience, sustainability and compatibility with the social system.
- To select, elaborate and implement open and appropriate technologies meeting the identified needs.
- To monitor and audit previous implementations, providing learning feedback loop.
The house will be formed as a cooperative, with stakeholders being various entities of the solidarity society. The cooperative will not be scaled up beyond regional level. Instead it will work as an example to be replicated in case of need. The house will develop a business model (subject to stakeholder decisions) to become financially independent.
The testbed for the house will be the Thermaikos region in Northern Greece, near Thessaloniki. Initial team will be created by the local citizens' association members, a group of volunteers in Rojava and several open source activists from Europe and beyond.
I propose that RobinHood Coop would become one of the f(o)unding stakeholders, assist in setting up the general financial framework, provide seed funding and establish a cooperative investment fund to support implementation of the solutions developed.
