ShiftSpace to Present at Participation Camp

This weekend, ShiftSpace will be at Participation Camp to discuss  political intervention and strategies for collaborative engagement.

Participation Camp is an un-conference that will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation, and collaboration around the question of active democracy and political action.

In recent weeks, several organizations in New York have taken big steps towards making New York City’s public data accessible and useful to software developers.

Participation Camp will host a series of talks and workshops around these efforts, in the hopes of encouraging citizens to take action.

ShiftSpace will present on Sunday, June 28th at 3pm.
View the full event schedule here: http://mudball.net/pcamp09/schedule/

Particiaption Camp is hosted at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at 721 Broadway, 4th Floor.

The event is free and open to the public. Register here: http://mudball.net/pcamp09/

The Highline Park Takes to the Sky

This week the Highline Park opened in New York City’s west side, spanning the section from Gansevort Street to West 20th Street.

The Highline is an elevated railway line built in the 1930’s and later abandoned in the 1980’s. It with was stated to be demolished. Nature took over and the tracks of the Highline became overgrown with shrubs and wildflowers. The haunting images of this peaceful, neglected, elevated oasis brought neighborhood activists to campaign against its demolition and fight for its preservation and transformation for use as a public space.

In 1934 when the Highline was built it operated freight trains from Penn Station at 34th street and ran all the way to to St. John’s Park Terminal, at Spring Street. It was designed to go through the factories and warehouses on Manhattan’s west side, allowing transit to transport meat, produce and other raw and manufactured goods by connecting directly to the buildings and avoiding street-level traffic.

The Highline Park retains the memory of the trains by keeping the railway tracks, beautifully weaving in and out throughout.

The plants chosen are wildflower varieties that naturally grew when the Highline was abandoned. The elevated park still runs through buildings and in sections one can still see old factories with shattered windows, draped in graffiti and barbed wire, but there are also new and elegant views. Now the new Standard Hotel straddles the section at Washington Street, and we see high-end boutiques and restaurants where once stood industrial yards and meat packing plants, marking the neighborhood’s change.

Making use of sweeping views of the Hudson, large reclining benches span a section of the promenade, allowing guests to lay in the sun or watch it set in the west. The Highline is unique among parks, the only similar re-construction of an elevated train line is found in Paris at the Promenade Plante (the planted promenade).

While the park now only extends to 20th street plans are to complete the entire length of the Highline leading up to 34th Street at Penn Station. (The lower section that stretched from Gansevort to Spring Street was not saved and was lost in demolition.) Currently the stretch leading up to 30th street is stated to open in 2010, while the fate of the ending railway yard lines from 30th to 34th street are still up in the air – since this section is owned by the MTA and Related Companies, a private developer. A public hearing is being held in the city today, Wednesday June 10th, on the fate of the railway yard.

Friends of the Highline, the non-profit organization responsible for the preservation of the Highline and its transformation into a public park says:

“The High Line is a monument to the industrial history of New York’s West Side. It offers an opportunity to create an innovative new public space, raised above the city streets, with views of the Hudson River and the city skyline. Its conversion is a global model for the reuse of transportation infrastructure, offering greening opportunities, alternative transportation options, and social and economic benefits to meet changing needs in post-industrial urban environments.”

Evolver Town Hall Expo and Activism in New York City

St. Marks Church courtyard

On Sunday afternoon at St. Mark’s Church in New York, nonprofits, government organizations, local businesses and active individuals all gathered to address the environmental and economic issues that are affecting New York City, and by extension, the world at large. Titled “Evolver Town Hall”, the volunteer organized event featured workshops, panel discussions, music, art and food, and aimed not only at exposing current issues but giving people the ideas, information, connections, and contacts they need for getting involved within their community.

No Impact Man

The Keynote speaker of the day was Colin Beaven, aka The No Impact Man. In 2006 Colin Beaven launched a year-long project in which he, his wife Michelle and their then two-year-old daughter Isabella, experimented with living with as little environmental impact as possible. Colin Beaven began the project because he grew tired of complaining about public policy and feeling disempowered in the face of government. When the United States went to war with Iraq, Colin Beaven, instead of criticizing events in public protest, decided to see how much change he can affect by focusing on himself and his own family:

“And so, at first,” writes Beaven in his blog, “when the politicians said that they were executing the Iraq War to protect the American way of life—my way of life—I was offended and angry. But then I realized how many resources I use in my life, including oil. I used so much that a war might actually be necessary to protect that way of life, to make sure there was enough to supply my endless consumption. If I expect to be allowed to use so many of the world’s resources, aren’t I partly to blame if my government fights to secure those resources?”

The result became a year-long adventure in minimizing waste, going off the power grid and eating locally.  The many trials and errors of his project were documented daily on his blog, No Impact Man, and provided a narrative vehicle for engaging the public on issues of food system sustainability, water scarcity, climate change and energy and material resource depletion.

Evolver Town Hall panels

The series of panels hosted at the Evolver Town Hall included talks on “Taking Back the Commons”, “Collective Consciousness” and “Real Food and Water”, among many others. The organizations that were present include: Sierra Club NYC, Regenerative Culture, Vertical Farms, Rooftop Food, Eco Eatery, Just Food, Trust for Public Land and Green Edge Collaborative, among many others. Some of the prominent writers that were present include Daniel Pinchbeck, who is also the co-founder of Evolver, and Douglas Rushkoff.

Complementary Currency

Media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff presented on the panel concerning “Complementary Currency”. Douglas Rushkoff has recently completed a book tilted “Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and What You Can Do To Take It Back” which traces the origins of corporations back to the Renaissance and the founding of chartered monopolies. In his work Rushkoff argues that our current way of life evolved through a series of steps by which the corporation has infiltrated all aspect of our daily lives. In his talk, Rushkoff, along with representatives of Time Interchange of NY and the Woodstock Time Bank, attempted to present alternative ways to create and share wealth.

Complementary currency is a term referring to currency that complements the National currency. It is often used locally, by a community, on the value of real resources, or often it is time based, where the unit of account is the hour; such that if I do something for you, I have a credit of an hour and can use that credit with someone else, creating a community currency based on sharing time, skill and resources.

Bernard Leitaer, the Belgian economist and author said in an interview for the magazine Nexus:

“Time dollars are helping in a lot of communities where conventional money is scarce (…) It’s working, it doesn’t cost anything to the taxpayer, it doesn’t create a huge bureaucracy, and it encourages the solution of the local problems by and with the very people who know most about them.”

What is money? Most textbooks, Leitaer says, only define what money does:

“I define money, or currency, as an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. It’s therefore not a thing, it’s only an agreement – like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal. And most of the time, it’s done unconsciously. Nobody’s polled about whether you want to use dollars. We’re living in this money world like fish in water, taking it completely for granted.”

The ideas presented in the panel is that money is one of the highest leverage points for change in society. Complementary currency can be just one suggestion for challenging our relationship to money, and therefore also our interactions with those that we exchange with.

To find out more about the Evolver Town Hall, and various ways to get involved see here.

Prop H8 and ShiftSpace Intervention

California recently voted to uphold Proposition 8, banning legal marriage between gay couples. Thousands of people who opposed the bill voiced their frustration in a series of public protests around the country. As reported in the New York Times, opponents of the bill are disturbed to find that for same-sex couples outsider status would be forever “enshrined in our Constitution.”

Alan Van Capelle, executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, said in a statement to the New York Times:

“Today’s ruling from the California Supreme Court missed an opportunity to do what courts are supposed to do and that is to make sure that all people are treated equally under the law.”

Amidst all the public protests in the streets, a ShiftSpace user took his protest to the web. Erich Blackhound announced on Twitter that he had replaced the banners on the Prop 8 website with his own graphic:

His act of political intervention, sparked a discussion on BoingBoing and illustrated a core aspect of the ShiftSpace design; that in light of the web ShiftSpace can serve as a public platform and function in subversive and meaningful ways; whether for social critique or involvement in political action, or interaction in the shaping of information.

As one of the ShiftSpace founders, Mushon Zer-Aviv says: “Today we live not only in geographical space, but also in information spaces that define our perception of the world and our private and public identity.”

Now, if only we can all “shift” the Constitution to give equal rights to all citizens…

photo from Steve Rhodes, via Flickr

North Korea, Revealed by Google Earth & Citizen Activists

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/technology/23link.html

Citizen activists have been pooling information about North Korea in order to reveal the locations of hidden prisons and other sites of interest in the humanitarian effort to effect greater transparency on the isolated regime.

“Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts,” the Wall Street Journal reports, citizen activists “affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe.”

Curtis Melvin, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University in Virginia, has been using the Google Earth platform as well as information from various sources, including former members of the U.S. military who once studied the country professionally, to create a more informative map of the country. “Once you start mapping the power plants and substations and wires, you can connect the infrastructure with the elite compounds,” Mr. Melvin says. “And then you see towns that have no power supply at all.”

Melvin’s work, and the work of other individuals, illustrate how collective intelligence, coupled with available technology, has a shrinking effect on our world; that the spread of knowledge cannot be contained and that governmental secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet. “Google has made a witness of all of us,” says Mr. Brownback (Senator of Kansas). “We can no longer deny these things exist.”

Joshua Stanton, who maintains the website Free Korea has mapped out the confines of Camp 22, a labor camp and detention facility on the northeastern tip of North Korea.

“Camp 22 is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children. We can only see one portion of the camp with Google Earth’s high-resolution photography.”

image of camp 22 from http://freekorea.us/camps/22

Revealing maps and documented information about labor camps and other secret facilities has aided Human Rights activists such as David Hawk, who, working for the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, has published a paper titled “The Hidden Gulag” based on these findings.

“The media have also failed to tell this story. The few reporters who go to North Korea seldom venture far from the capital, Pyongyang. When they do go, Internal Security Bureau minders drive them all along pretty much the same circuit of palaces, tombs, and monuments. None ever gets within miles of Camp 22, and few ask. Still, they bring us back footage of tombs and monuments and strident quotes from their minders and tell us how much more we now know about North Korea than we did before. Until the international media decides to cover the story of Camp 22, it will remain out of sight and out of mind.”

Other community efforts for the free distribution of information include WikiLeaks which aims to reveal unethical behavior in governments and institutions worldwide. The site maintains disclosed documents that are “classified, censored or otherwise opaque to the public record” and relies on readers to alert their community and the press about revelations found here.

The Free Culture World: Open Platforms, Community and Participation

shanghai, photo by andy doro

On Monday, writer David Bollier was at the Courant Institute at New York University to promote his new book “Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of their Own” (free press). The book is a history of the free culture movement and the sharing economy. It is about how the phenomena of free and open source software and the growth of non-market creativity are disrupting the corporate structure-holds and re-shaping politics and culture.

Bollier talked about how today we are experiencing a hybrid world, one in which mass media and centralized control is finding itself in a dialogue and negotiation with the macro-economic, cultural force of open access advocates and citizen activists whose efficient, user-driven creativity on open platforms is driving new market structures and leveraging change in the way we access information.

Bollier defines the sharing economy vis-a-vis open source in all of its manifestations: open business models, open access journals, open code, open education, etc. – all of these changes to the way we share information and to our cycle of discovery and innovation, are creating what Bollier calls a new “commons”, a virtual open space common to us all. Unlike the commons described in the “tragedy of the commons” (where individuals acting in their own self-interest destroy a shared limited resource disregarding their own long-term interests) the online commons is an infinitely extensible resource and sharing the space in an open, decentralized way actually drives innovation and expands the richness of the commons.

The commons, Bollier says, is a new social metabolism in our cultural ecosystem for governance and law. Cicero said “freedom is participation in power” and perhaps, Bollier suggests, in our current globalized and digitized world we see a new kind of citizen emerge. A citizen who asks for open access, the freedom to participate, the need for transparency, and for social equity. We see activists and citizen bloggers exposing things neglected by mainstream media and, in a way, forcing mainstream media to take notice. The creation of the Creative Commons license grew out of a need to re-address the current copyright acts and, to an extent, the monopoly on culture. In a variety of ways, along a spectrum of initiatives, the “Commoners” (as Bollier refers to this new type of citizen) is asking for a discourse on open access.

hell's kitchen, photo by andy doro

Bollier’s ideas are reminiscent of another book along similar themes. In his book “Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists and Vacant Lot Gardners are Inventing the Future Today” Chris Carlsson writes: “As capitalism continues, colonizing our thoughts and desires, new practices are emerging that are re-defining politics and opening spaces of unpredictability in the detritus of modern life.” Chris Carlsson identifies an emerging group of people, drawn together by shared values, alternative living arrangements and non-economic relationships, that are forming a communal solidarity to confront the everyday commodification of capitalism. They are forming networks of activity that refuse the measurements of money; but instead of opposing technological advancements they are engaging with technology in creative and experimental ways. Carlsson chooses the term “Nowtopians” but the idea is similar to Bollier’s.

The Nowtopians, Carlsson explains, are a new form of Utopians, who seek to create a contemporary commons out of vacant lots and open bandwith. “Really, really free markets”, writes Carlsson, “anti-commodities, festivals and free services are imaginative products of an anti-economy provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and inventive people.” Growing out of the communal movements of the 1960’s, the be-ins and the Green Revolution, this group of Nowtopians are searching for an Exodus out of capitalist society and are building communities within the shell of our current system.

“Fragmentation and crises”, Carlsson writes, “are besetting the world order and the government and economic institutions on which this order is based are becoming increasingly dysfunctional while losing creditability.” The Nowtopians are tinkerers and experimenters, DIYers (do it yourself-ers) who support an open source technosphere and an alternative food system (local, seasonal, organic as opposed to mass produced). Their social alternative to a meritocratic society is to embrace co-ops and collectives.

While Bollier focuses more on digital innovations and his book does not extrapolate as far as Carlsson’s, he does explore how Commoners are engaging with market structures by often building new markets on top of the commons (we see this in the bankability of social networks like Twitter and Facebook). And, despite an uncertainty on how the growth of an open society will relate with or change current systems of power, there is nonetheless an exploration taking place in both of these books on how the market economy is adapting or prevailing to the change. Furthermore the conversation extends to ecologists and futuroligsts.

In his book Peak Everything Richard Heinberg predicits: “once we accept that energy, fresh water and food will become less freely available over the decades we see that while the 20th Century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of scale, scope and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st Century will see contraction and simplification.” If one thing has resonated out of this new openness of information it is perhaps a greater understanding of the delicate balance of a global ecology and maybe the understanding that no nation is completely independent, and that all the world’s resources are shared.

astor place and broadway, photo by andy doro

Grassroots Art Collectives go to Washington, talk about Public Art

This week art collectives were invited to the White House to discuss public art and “the issues related to the disappearance of common access to public space”. The Wooster collective was just one of 60 organizations dedicated to grassroots art initiatives that met with officials in the Obama Administration “to listen and learn what the administration was thinking in regards to the arts, to ask questions, and then to participate in working sessions” on issues they felt passionate about.

The role that public art plays in city life is an interesting topic to explore, especially the relationship between commissioned public works and spontaneous street art. Public art often enriches a community’s positive sense of identity and helps enhances roadsides, pedestrian corridors, and community gateways; but spontaneous street art can also have a strong influence on a community, and street art is universal. Its experimental nature, outside the realm of cultural institutions, can challenge perceptions of public space and can open dialogues with the surrounding environment. It is interesting to see the White House taking an interest to meet with artists and artists collectives to open up a dialogue about the arts, and the importance of public art to education, civic life and community building.

Endangered Languages

There are maybe over 6,800 known languages in the world today, and many more dialects. Already over 400 of these languages are close to extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left (Busuu in Cameroon, Chiapaneco in Mexico, Lipan Apache in the United States, Wadjigu in Australia, etc.) and 3,000 or so others are endangered. Linguists classify languages on a scale ranging from “safe” (learnt by all children in the group, and spoken by all its members) to “critically endangered” (only a few old speakers). On that scale, “endangered” comes in the middle, meaning that children no longer learn the language and only adults speak it.

One such endangered language is the language of the Kalash. It is a Dardic language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian group. Currently about 5,000 people speak Kalasha and is considered critically endangered by UNESCO.

Until the latter 20th century, Kalasha was an undocumented language. More recently, through the work of a Greek NGO and local Kalash elders seeking to preserve their oral traditions, a new Kalasha alphabet has been created. Taj Khan Kalash has also been influential in the development of the new alphabet and creating The Alphabet Book, a primer used to teach the alphabet to the Kalash children.

The Long Now Foundation, which is a foundation that focuses on thinking for the extended future, has began an extensive catalogue of the world’s languages. An article in the Wall Street Journal pointed to the fact that emerging technologies do not represent many of the world’s languages.”The idea of having your cultural identity represented in this technology is increasingly important.” If each language is a “window to the world”, when languages are lost so is the culture and wisdom of a people.

For more information on the Kalash, see here: http://kalashapeople.org/

Local Economies and the Church of Life After Shopping

photo by yovel schwartz

I mentioned the Reverend Billy yesterday and I thought I would write more about him:

The New-York based activist, Reverend Billy is an Elvis-inspired, white-suit-clad iconoclast and self-ordained minister of his own Church, the Church of Life After Shopping. As reverend he preaches the evils of consumerism. But with a 40 member choir and a feature film under his belt, “What Would Jesus Buy”, Reverend Billy is not just a fringe comedian, he has become a recognizable figure and now he will be running for mayor of New York City.

Simultaneously mocking the religious right and consumerist culture, Reverend Billy acts like a televangelist as he preaches his dogma of local business first and how to empower communities to fight against the corporate landscape. He pushes for “community finance” – neighborhood banks that lend to local business, allowing profits to stay in the community, and he is campaigning on a community-first platform, under the Green Party ticket.

“Our actions to support independent business, unions, and sweat-free labor are rooted in the struggles of particular communities emblematic of larger struggles.  In particular, many of our actions focus on New York’s East Village, internationally recognized as a site where flourishing shops and culture are seriously threatened by a rapid influx of chain stores.  Currently, between 2nd Avenue and Avenue D and Houston Street and 14th Street there are less than 10 chain stores, making it one of the last few commercial sites in Manhattan where independently owned business predominate. The struggles to defend the East Village therefore set precedents for communities around the world.  In protecting and strengthening neighborhood diversity, we build critical case studies that emboldens healthy neighborhoods everywhere to fight their own extinction.” (~Reverend Billy)

photo courtesy of mushon zer-aviv

As reported in the Wall Street Journal:
Sure, it sounds kind of dreamy, but such systems are already in place in the neighborhoods large and small. Small businesses thrive, but they are often at the mercy of big banks who giveth and taketh credit according to shifts in economic cycles. “The Wall Street experience is parallel and equal to the destruction of neighborhoods through chain stores,” Reverend Billy says. Basic economics are on the Reverend’s side. For every dollar spent at a chain store, studies show only 50 cents stays in that community. By contrast, 90 cents of every dollar spent at a local business remains in the local economy. “It’s a little reductive, but people recognize there’s a truth in it,” Reverend Billy says. “Neighborhoods are economic powerhouses.”

Although he has little chances of winning the bid to be Mayor of New York City, Reverend Billy is using the political platform to bring attention to his cause. Although he strikes up his fair share of controversy he is also bringing to the forefront the issue of the importance of building local communities, an issue that the mainstream media is starting to take notice of, as evidenced in this recent NYT article about a car-free community in Vauban, Germany.

Life, Inc.

Media theorist and social critic Douglas Rushkoff will have a new book due out in June called “Life, Inc.” For the past couple of months I have been contributing to the making of a promotional short film for the book, directed by Janine Saunders. The short film is a synthesis of the ideas contained in the book, in brief about how “the world became a corporation” and what we can do to “take it back.”

We used a lot of archival footage and some of the original footage I contributed contained images from New York and San Francisco, of people shopping and consuming – including Black Friday shoppers in New York and a little protest organized by Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping.

But, one of the most unique and fortuitous experiences I had was attending the GSMA mobile world congress in Barcelona. Unrelated to the filming of Life, Inc. I was invited to film the GSMA summit by Jeffrey Schwartz as a freelance videographer, but ended up using some of the footage we filmed at the conference for the Life, Inc. film as well – since the corporate landscape of the cell phone conference, with over 50,000 attendees, was a perfect example of the themes of Rushkoff’s book.

One thing that came out of filming the conference was that I found a lot of the truly innovative technologies to be missing from the corporate event. In fact, it seemed like the corporations were acting more like gatekeepers, choosing which technologies at their disposal to release, based on what would be profitable, a not necessarily based on what was truly innovative. More on this in later posts, but attending this conference was a real unique and illuminating experience for me.

photos by yovel schwartz

photos by yovel schwartz

You can see more information on Douglas Rushkoff’s new book on his webiste, which includes our short film:
http://www.lifeincorporated.net/