Welcome : What's on
this site
This website is a rough-cut prototype for a wiki, built around archive outputs and current work-in-progress, by Mike Hales and researcher-developers with related agendas.
It has five areas . . . Economy, Commoning, Platforming, History, Walking. It also has a resource collection (download links, PDFs) and a tag-searchable blog.
1 Economy #civecon
Contains conceptual development related to a book group project - Making the civil economy. That project is celebrating and developing the work and vision of radical economist and social venturer-activist, Robin Murray.
2 Commoning #commoning
An umbrella for work in progress towards a #patternlanguage for commoning: making and organising around resources in commons. This work broadly follows a pattern model developed in the 60s by Chris Alexander for architecture and built infrastructure but with significant departures - because curating and stewarding an architecture of commons practices is not the same as building buildings.
Peer-to-peer (#P2P) commons production is the basis of the cultural and economic vision. Patterns are patterns of #practice, formations of #literacy. The work is theory-of-practice for ongoing #libertarian-#socialist economic and cultural activism.
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This conceptual scheme will also serve as a pattern language for 1 Economy seen as an economy of commons.
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4 History contributes to the scheme because there's a living story ('a usable past' as Stephen Yeo calls it) to be taken forward in practice - in actual activist lives - about how patterns of literacy and class have shifted in the past couple of generations - organic intellectual skills in cultivating collective capacities to know and act (the second of three landscapes of literacy in the pattern language).
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3 Platforming contributes through its window into the fast-shifting material base of literacy and collectivity - an important (post-Fordist) aspect of the landscape of material means of subsistence and wellbeing in the pattern language.
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5 Walking contributes the 'personal is political' dimension of activist life and literacy of the heart-mind - the basis of one of the three landscapes of literacy in the patterns language.
3 Platforming #platforming
Presents conceptual development related to social.coop and its cultural environment. Social.coop is a social venture which operates a platform instance of the free open software, Mastodon - a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter.
In the world of free code production and use, social.coop is interesting in setting out to develop a cooperative form of governance over an internet platform service, while also serving user communities in coop ventures, federated/P2P production, open-value economic systems, solidarity economy organising, socially-owned currencies and open free code.
In both respects, this connects with the work of 2 Commoning.
4 History #organicintellectual
This thread originates in the ongoing history of #radicalscience movements and a reflexive, participant analysis of historical radical science movements in Britain in the 30s and 70s. On this basis it explores the possibility of a radical science/responsible innovation movement in present-day #China.
In this actual historical development, activist cultural #formations that are by no means primarily oriented to ‘science’ have been very significant. This project attempts to identify these too, and explore the relevance of this living story, to present-day practice in a life of #STS or #P2P-#commons activism.
STS = science & technology studies, a complex research field - possibly also an activist field - embracing sociological, anthropological, historical, policy and management orientations to scientific & technological research & development.
This project centrally draws on and contributes to #capabilityecon and #danceofknowing in #patternlanguage. It considers the literacies underlying the discovery in C20 of #organicintellectual practice and its self-conscious cultivation, as a kind of cultural formation, by members of the #babyboomer generation.
The work can broadly be regarded as an investigation of #P2P questions around open and collaborative knowledge, theorised in a cultural materialist mode. Like the work on pattern language, this too is theory of living practice.
5 Walking #heart-mind
This thread carries work on the production of altered relations of production of the #heart-mind. The work is fundamental in the pattern language of commoning: This domain of materiality - sankhara is the dhamma name for it - is what ceaselessly produces our movings-towards and our turnings-away, our desiring and disdaining, appetites and collapses into shame, hungers and disgusts, affiliations and Otherings. Tribes grow from it and commons are constituted here.
This is basic activist literacy! Interwoven with the disposition of enduring bodies and stuff in the out-there material economy, mediated by the point-to-point dance of knowing that constitutes labour power, this stuff in the in-here landscape is where history continually arises and stares us the face. It’s where the rubber hits the road.