top of page

A long march begins (continues) with a step . .

Updated: Jul 25, 2018


Launching the blog, and website now . . before Open2018 later this week, where I expect to hook up with folks from Commons Transition Loomio and social.coop. Although planned as just a prototype for a wiki, this site already seems like a more significant step than I'd expected. I saw it as a way to weave my projects together better, and this is what it's doing.


I hadn't planned to include History, but it clearly should be here . . and now that it is, I can see it's not just a collaboration with Lucy Gao in Beijing about "lives in STS" (social studies of science) and #radicalscience in Britain and China in the 70s and teensies. It's also the site's workspace for reviewing a lifetime of oppositional #knowledging . . #radicalprofessional formations . . #organicintellectual practice. And that this is a thread of the Commoning story. P2P-commons has shown up now, the latest, largest of these #associationist-#socialist formations, and it has 50 years of rehearsal to call on.

I hadn't intended to include #melancholyterritory here under FoP RoP.

I certainly hadn't intended to include #melancholyterritory here under FoP RoP. But again, I now see it belongs here, as the #heartmind workspace of the site. So when the conference is over, I'll be adding Walking to the site, as the place where #Walker's account of the long march home through melancholy territory can be laid alongside #m's History and #Rogers' Commoning. As well as that trio having walked in uninvited, I also see now that there should be an area of the site for each of the significant organic intellectual #formations across 50 years . .

1 Economy is the 80s #GLC and my #communitydevelopment peers.

2 Commoning is now, the teensies, #P2PF/Commons Strategies - a new and unexpected invisible college (tho if I'm honest, it's what I started looking for two years ago, before RT2.0 - not knowing the formation existed but believing that something ought to).

3 Platforming is part of the long tech trajectory, from #ltw Living Thinkwork's 70s exploration of chemical process design (against my 60s background as a chemical engineering graduate) . . thro the 90s engagement with #cscw Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Lucy Suchman and the lovely others in WPT at Xerox PARC . . to the present unleashed forces of #platform and #cloud, and the optimists of social.coop.

4 History is #rsj Radical Science Journal rolled together with #culturalmaterialism (equals The May Day Manifesto, The Making of the English Working Class and The Long Revolution). And

5 Walking has its place here, not only because Walker has latched on to the skilful tradition of the mindfulness-#dhamma communities, thank goodness (late is better than never) but also because the #moraleconomy thread in Economy and in Commoning requires Walker (and Rogers) to be engaging in crosstalk from the other channels

The #moraleconomy thread requires Walker and Rogers to engage in crosstalk

I thought I had put Activists and the #LongMarchHome on the back burner 18 months ago - the unfinishable story of Walker, m and Rogers. But it seems that their concerns are pressing themselves into the space of these current organising projects that I had intended to supplant the book haha. That's not a surprise. The terrain - #classgeography, #conviviality, #melancholyterritory - doesn't get any simpler. But goodness, it's familiar! The long march thro the institutions continues with another step. Welcome to this website. Travel alongside?

bottom of page