rworld – Listening Closely

In a recent post about the rwebdb project, I argued that tomorrow will be influenced more by “something else” than by banks, corporations, governments, and universities:

… if you listen closely enough, you can sense where that something else is located. It is definitely not in our institutions. It’s rather in our people. It’s in our common bonds and in our ability to build tomorrow as if people and nature mattered.

Pursuing this thought would only have diverted the earlier post, but here I provide four of any number of places to listen closely. What they have in common is a view of tomorrow distinctly different from what exists today.

The article by John Curl contains a nice quote by Thomas Jefferson that I think can be revised to apply to learning. According to Curl, the concept was key to Jeffersonian democracy. It was also the basis for Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act which opened up million of square miles of land to people willing to work it. Jefferson wrote:

Whenever there are in a country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate the natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.

An education version might look like the following.

Whenever there are in a country uncultivated educational resources and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate the natural law. Knowledge is given as a common stock for everyone to learn and thrive on.

Maybe what we need now is a modern day Abraham Lincoln and LearnSteading legislation. But that defies what I believe to be true, that we can only turn to ourselves and to each other for help. Institutions are too bankrupt (some literally) and need time to regenerate themselves.

 

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Making good society.
Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland.
March 2010.

[A]lthough civil society in its widest sense is very plural, at its heart are some very clear values.

These ideas of civil society extend well beyond the much older traditions of charity and mutual support, though they grow out of them. They are an amplified expression of the impulse of charity to address the underlying causes of suffering and need, which can include attempting to challenge power structures. They put a strong emphasis on rights to voice or democracy and, compared with traditional approaches to charity, assert that beneficiaries are best placed to define and understand their own needs.

gml: This is a policy document complete with findings and recommendations. I pretty much ignored these and listened instead for the meaning of “civil society.” It is not a utopian view, and I found this refreshing. See especially the final report of the commission (PDF).

 
The Cooperative Movement in Century 21.
John Curl.
2010

Today’s cooperative movement has centuries of history behind it. At the same time it is also a new movement of a new generation. Like every social equity movement, the cooperative movement rises and subsides, and its deeper goals cannot be permanently achieved because society is always changing: all social goals must be constantly renewed, and all social movements must go through cycles of renewal.

gml: This is a long article tracing the history of cooperatives, primarily in the United States. It concludes with a nice list of how today’s cooperatives differ from those in the past, and in general finds that “the movement for worker cooperatives, workplace democracy, and social enterprises is resurgent around the world today.”

 
The Foundation for P2P Alternatives.
Michel Bauwens and others.

We study the impact of Peer to Peer technology and thought on society.

gml: The wiki of the P2P Foundation now has more than 12,000 entries [according to Bauwens in a post today, 12-July-2010]. As a place to “listen closely” for the immense number of activities interstitial to state and market, you can do no better than check out this site.
 

A Gathering of Ideas.
Stephen Downes.
June 10, 2010.

What I do care about is the personal. … I am interested in the person as embedded in society, the person as a member of a network of communications and collaborations, a person who works and creates with and for other people, a person who experiences sociality, but also, and contra the mass nation, a person who is self-governing, guided by his or her own interests and principles, and is living a fully engaged life in a technological civilization.

… My view of the internet is as far from the factory as one can imagine. But not as an inevitable or guaranteed future. Only one where there is a determined and directed effort to place the tools – the physical tools, the digital tools, and the cognitive tools – into the hands of a worldwide population, to do with as they will.

gml: This is a very interesting stance. Individuals, networks, collaboration, creativity, tools. Like the notions of civil society, cooperatives, and peer-to-peer technologies in the sense that the approach is interstitial. But with a twist “to do with as they will” that seems radical in its hands-off approach. Laozi in Daodejing would applaud, although I’ve no idea what philosophical foundations Downes drew on for this idea.