In its decentralized and distributed final presentation (many male voices dispersed in the dark audience setting of the cinema) it felt like a journey to learn what Bricolabs had been going through over the past days. It seemed to be more of a non-definition than a definition.

As a starting point, the Bricoleurs had transformed the network image of Winter Camp into a mesh-network which they perceived more representative of their way of working. Like some other networks, Bricolabs found it problematic to define one network contact – or as Winter Camp described it, a co-ordinator – for Bricolabs it equaled to defining a leader – and in their opinion, representation of networks should be approached differently.

We don’t define Bricolabs, it would die. We describe it.
Bricolabs started and came together in a rather unplanned and spontaneous way and its final presentation mirrored that process. Its mailinglist membership is big (around 400 if I am not mistaken), and many of the Winter Camp participants and organizers are bricoleurs too.

Bricolabs is a network of autonomous actors, agents, with all sorts of organisations and groups involved. It shares a common instinct of things and methods, and not until the Winter Camp had seen a need to articulate these or clarify them. Rather than talking, Bricolabs is about doing; and who contributes to which part in this doing is not really relevant.

Back to the dispersed mystic voices in the dimly lit Studio K Cinema:

Nobody in the network needs a label, no one needs validation.
Bricolabs has no boundaries, it has a centre of gravity around which projects can happen.
Is it a network? If it is a network at all, it is an open network.
Is it a smell? What kind of smell? The smell of Palo Santo wood? Of Mandarins? The smell of home?
Is it a colour?
Who can define the future of Bricolabs?
Who can define its qualities?
Autonomy
Knowledge
Imagination
(BINGO!)
Harmony?
Empowerment?

Come and find out more about it… http://bricolabs.net/

Its members are working in diverse socio-cultural settings and countries, campaigners learn from each other and continue to share expertise. The Creative Labour used the Winter Camp to do some extensive mapping and increase its understanding on who its natural allies could be, analyze its own position and discuss previous interventions. Its actions are as diverse as campaigns during fashion weeks and producing internship survival guides in creative sector.

Creative Labour also spent time discussing institutions and counter-institutions, and managed a design trade union representative, but unfortunately did not manage to meet with their neighbour MyCreativity which involves policy makers.

As Zoe Romano explained, being an activist & creative worker has blurry boundaries.

To better understand the identity of an activist/creative worker, she has expanded the so-called Love-Growth-Cash Triangle which measures how much one is learning, how much love is inputted, how much money one gets by doing a job?
The results are far from rosy, the resulting reality scenarios differ from Entry level job; Shit work but it pays the bills and Just a hobby.

However, factors that count in a creative workers life are personal fulfillment, learning new things, money and social valorization. The triangle therefore needs to be extended to a Square including the factor recognition, and the expectation of happiness.
The two resulting realities then end up being working pro bono or doing temp work in a big brand; and one discovers that there is a rather big difference between the expectation of happiness and the real level of happiness..

Apart from these factors, also the social/environmental impact of the work (extending from me, myself and I, to the impact of one’s work to the whole society). Therefore the square needs to be extended to a Pentagram of Creative Work, including ethical value.

The resulting scenarios would be happiness with big brands or happiness with social brands. There is a need for two complimentary paths: What would be needed are institutions gathering resources to pay people to do good things and to build spaces for increasing social valorization.

But what’s next?

Key questions evolve around:
- What are the current & desired conditions of creative workers?
- What is creative work?
- How do we mobilize around creative work without replicating the ideas of genius hyper-individualism and the creative class?
- What are the side economies of creative work – processes of self- organisation, what do people do when they get fired?
- How is the industry organized?

Creative Labour is interested in finding new members and increasing its knowledge and expertise: http://n-1.cc

GOTO10 describes itself as an invite-only network, so although what it produces is 100% open (Free/Libre Open Source Software), its organisational structure is very closed. You could also describe it as a friendship collective; member’s skills are secondary to friendship. GOTO10 knows a high level of trust, any of the currently 11 members can initiate ‘anything’ by lazy consensus. All communication and distributed working happens online via IRC, but face to face meetings are perceived as very important and take place at least twice a year during the MAKE ART FESTIVAL in France and for general housekeeping purposes.

GOTO10 is self-organized, and finances itself by project grants. Depending on the project, members take on different roles and levels of engagement. Although GOTO10 does not want to grow in (network) size it is highly collaborative; and it is trying to collaborate with other networks, organizations.

One of its largest and very collaborative projects is pure:dyne. To give some examples of collaborations between GOTO10 and other Winter Camp participants, Alejandro Doque is planning to make a Columbian version of pure:dyne in collaboration with an art magazin, Matt Ratto (Critical Making Lab of the University of Toronto) and James Wallbank (workshops at Access Space in Sheffield) use pure:dyne, and  Ramiro Consentino is going to work in collaboration with GOTO10 on streaming software of pure:dyne.

Another GOT010 working method is described as sprint – the initiation and intense non-stop working on ideas.

During Wintercamp, GOTO10 did a sprint on gosub10, a project that had been in the pipeline for 4 years but which they never managed to pull off. Gosub10 is a net label that celebrated its first release on 6 March 2009. It includes a streaming radio station and releases all source code of the individual tracks where possible, so that there is a possibility for users to remix source code.

Another project that GOTO10 had planned to work on but still needs some more time to develop is a FLOSS repository for software art. The project is currently still in its preparatory stage.

To conclude, GOTO10’s outro highlighted some issues: Their artistic research/flow is quite opposite to product design, and its processes are very often very unfinished. GOTO10 describes itself as a ground to sow seeds; as a collective at the cross-roads of networks than a network itself, but whatever its typology it stresses that a network is not an end in itself but a playground.

The blogger team would really like to thank everybody that worked to make Winter Camp happen, especially the INC team! We had a great time. Thank you very much!

Click here to view the embedded video.

What is the role of networks in this tangle of creeks and oil pipes? Both social and technological networks can be used to inhabit institutions. The long-term aim of the project is to map and track environmental and human rights issues in the Niger Delta. And also to mobilize the people in the region to form communities and networks that can help with the mapping and tracking and use that data as a platform for campaigns.

Microvolunteerism has brought various networks together and in the constitutions they have mobilized other institutions. The relation between networks and institutions serves as an instrument to achieve their goals. It is important to get a sense of the nature of the role of institutions. In Nigeria for example there is a democratic framework. They want to inhabit the (existing) institutions and use networks to develop a platform that will allow people to recognize themselves in the institutions.

Microvolunteerism acknowledges that there are a lot of different people with a lot of different talents. During their sessions they had several visitors from different disciplines: hardware hackers, firmware / software developers, web developers, new media people, advocates, documentary makers and artists. The power of Microvolunteerism lies in being able to bring these people together and have these people make their own specific contribution.

There are different components to approaching the Nigerian delta project and its problems. There is a need for understanding the hardware, how can we protect and secure the data, how can we use it to lobby / to make change and to put pressure on the oil companies and governments. Finally, how can we create artistic expression to move other people to also care about this issue and help us?

Winter Camp has made a difference by bringing the network together, or rather it has brought the several networks together. Melanie Rieback expresses this by saying, “lovely we are now a family!”

However, the problem with families is discipline. How to use a vehicle that relies on volunteers, coordinating microtasks and how to use a network to run a campaign? It is difficult and involves an architecture that coordinates the network. There needs to be preparations in advance and a concrete vision of what the network has to do and this has to be instituted into the architecture of coordination.

So far, the network has been building two things:

1. a social network
2. a tech infrastructure to support this social network.

During their meetings they also had an expert on crowdsourcing volunteerwork join them. They raised questions of how can we build a tech infrastructure to support loose contributions that the organizers of the network never comprehended could have existed? There will be loose collaborations on projects. The coordinator is often the bottleneck, he or she does so much that there is an almost inevitable overload and nothing actually gets done. How do we crowdsource so these bottlenecks don’t occur?

As I described in an earlier post, FLOSS Manuals focuses on the documentation of Free / Libre / Open Source Software. In the final plenary session, Adam gave us a short history of his collective and then went deeper into the outcomes of their week of labour, which they presented via a diagram.
FLOSS Manuals outcomes’ of the Winter Camp are both internally, located within the organizational structure of the network and externally, located within the new FLOSS Friday – sessions. How these new organizational structures will turn out and when their new project will actually start, we will soon read on their website. So it might be a good thing to keep an eye open at the upcoming projects page.

Photography: Anne Helmond

Click here to view the embedded video.

// Idiocracy // Dyne.org // Freedom of Creation //

Based on an interview with Denis Jaromil Rojo

Dyne.org is a decentralized, open, nomadic and displaced network, that exists through and in cooperation with multiple networks. Dyne.org mainly operates like a fluid grassroot power, through institutions. This means that the network will and can never be institutionalized (because this would mean settling down). Jaromil, who founded Dyne.org in 2000, acknowledged however, that it is impossible to refuse institutionalization completely, most importantly because this would lead to the exclusion of certain resources. Dyne.org has chosen to become a foundation, which gave the network a solid base for activities and the possibility to work together with other foundations and institutions like Montevideo (who now offers server space). In fact, having a foothold as a foundation and working together with other art institutes also gave Jaromil the status of migrant instead of deserter.
The main purpose of Dyne.org is providing people, activists and artists alike, with free software (as in freedom of speech). They hope to share knowledge in any context, whether with state owned companies as well as NGOs, or with local indigenous people. Although having a disposition with institutions seems disruptive for a network like Dyne.org, this is not the case. Instead, over time it has proven to be very effective to weave through big, corporate and state owned networks. An example of the impact to act like such a virally weaved network can be found in the case of netstrike.it, when the people were asked to petition their opinion online. Because members of the Dyne.org network worked in state owned telecommunication corporations, they were informed of the government ordering this particular company for releasing the ip-addresses of people giving their opinion. This is how the network could prove that the 42 people that were arrested with charges of conspiracy and “subversive association”, were actually arrested for voicing their opinion on the internet.

Dyne.org aims to develop software that can run on old (or less advanced) hardware, to oppose the consumer approach. A lot of the members of Dyne have their roots in the demoscene (a subculture focused on maximising hardware with software). This has proved to be very useful in a society in which we have moved towards small power devices and ‘mini’ graphics, like mobile phone applications. Today we have to invest in really expensive processors. But not only buying these expensive machines means supporting this consumer society; the fact that while we are using our new and expensive machines, half of our CPU is pirated by blinky advertisements displayed on websites is both unfair and inefficient.
Another negative example of the globalized “fail” economy can be found within the videogame console industry, which right now is the biggest device industry. A problem with these technologies is that they are not open to learn, change, sell and resell. We cannot use them to re-appropriate content and more importantly, to create local economies. In comparison to televisions, whose technologies are fairly documented, open and standardized, game consoles are black boxes. We cannot open and repair them – it is illegal.
We need to realize that when we purchase an object, there should be no strings attached. For the purposes of a self organized, local economy, it should be illegal to close devices like it is done right now. We need to start being able to mod consoles with the help of mod chips and legalize modding shops in which we can buy and resell our home-made mod consoles. There is also an architectural issue to this point because right now, every city is starting to look the same. Our cities are hijacked by the same advertisements and big commercial billboards and store windows. If people could legally create mod consoles, they would be able to start their own shops and create their own, local pirate economies as well as a difference in the look of the town that is starting to obey a preset template architecture.

During Winter Camp, it was the first time that all the programmers of Dyne.org were involved and got to meet each other (except for kysucix). It is striking to see how so many different people at the same time share a common goal; a grassroot hacker community providing access to technology, education and freedom.
The background of the members is very diverse; they range from radio makers to humanitarian organizations, medical researchers and musicians. Their main goal in participating in Winter Camp is to connect all developers involved in free online streaming technology FreeJ, which is based on a new free codec (“Ogg, Theora”). FreeJ is a vision mixer, an instrument for realtime video manipulation used in the fields of dance theater, VJ-ing, medical visualizations and TV. It lets you interact with multiple layers of video, filtered by effect chains and then mixed together. The resulting video mix can be shown on multiple and remote screens, encoded into a movie and streamed live to the internet, all using free software and codecs. The project is sponsored by the Digitale Pioniers Foundation.

One of the members working on FreeJ is Asbesto from Sicily. Asbesto is in charge of Freaknet (the hacklab of Dyne.org) where he runs the museum of working computers (obsolete computer systems that have been restored into beautiful working order). I really enjoyed meeting him because over the last years I have come across more initiatives like this, notably the MO5 (paris), the Cyberpipe (Ljubljana) and I think the work they do to restore and document these old machines is often very underappreciated.
Also working on the FreeJ project is the Mexican audio / visual artist Vlax. His roots are a basic ingredient to everything he works for, which comes down to creating audio as well as video and the distributing of knowledge on media that facilitate the freedom of speech. During Winter Camp I found Vlax often busy with his microphone, because the many sound of Amsterdam (the First World he was ‘going to try to figure out’) were new to him. The sounds he recorded were beautiful and made me aware of my earlids (that filter out the sounds that I think are normal). After this discovery, Vlax told me about his reasons for being part of Dyne.org. He, alongside 800,000 other Oaxacans took active part in the rebellions against the exclusion of the indigenous population by the Mexican state Government (the most recent rebellions took place in 2006 and resulted in the death of 26 activists). By pirating state radio and television and starting new radio stations, the Oaxacans learned “to speak”; how to have a voice. Vladimir describes that now the Oaxacans have learned to speak, they need to learn how technology works from its source, so they can maintain having a voice. He is trying to create, translate and distribute this knowledge to make this possible in the future. Overall he works to generate and distribute new (old) sounds into the world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the final plenary session the network showed a visualization (made by Crash) from the edits of FreeJ software files from the starting point of the project (November 2001) until now. This video was very interesting because it very clearly shows the workflow on a central project and the major players taking part in the creation of this big project. But you can also recognize a demoscener attitute, which is often very competitive. Demosceneres or not, they are definately a very social network of people.
No Estamos Solos!

Edu-factory reflects on the dynamics of Winter Camp as a group and on what happens when networks meet face-to-face. What is the status of the term network itself, or is it a disposable term? Aren’t there better ways to describe some of the groups present here at Winter Camp? Is “network” the most relevant term? It also has to do with the network dynamics which can fall away when meeting face-to-face.

Edu-factory came across problems in their own internal process but came up with a series of proposals and steps to translate their activities out into the wider network. There are some dangers we perceive when acting like groups. Groups in the form of networks are often seen in two forms: the network as community or network as institution. Edu-factory is interested in heading for the network as an institution, or rather, a new institutional form.

They have made an inventory of specific events that can help them achieve this goal. They are doing their planning around four events in Brazil, India, Taipei and Minneapolis.

Networks often have various planes of activity: different email lists, websites, blogs, etc. How can these relate to each other, how do they communicate with each other and what is the hierarchy. There are verticalities operating within the Edu-factory network and the main question is how to let these parts develop on their own grounds? The Edu-factory web journal is an important method to build a trans-national institution and to organize information in different parts of the globe.

More information, goals and backgrounds can be found in the Edu-factory Manifesto.