about the publication: In March 2009 the Institute of Network Cultures brought 12 networks to Amsterdam for a week of getting things done. Aim of Winter Camp was to connect the virtual with the real in order to find out how distributed social networks can collaborate more effectively. The more people start working together online, the more urgent it becomes to develop sustainable network models. Do we just go online to gather ‘friends’ or do we get organized and utilize these tools to provoke real change in how we work together? How do networks deal with difference, decision making and economic issues? Together with 28 online interviews, this report provides a comprehensive overview of the general issues that the participating networks dealt with during Winter Camp.

colophon: Editor: Geert Lovink. Editorial Assistance: Margreet Riphagen. Copy editing: Marije van Eck. Design: Michael Schekyr www.schenkyr.com. Printing: Raamwerken Printing & Design B.V. Illustrations: Het Harde Potlood. Photos: Anne Helmond and others. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. ISBN: 978-90-78146-08-7.

Order a free copy by filling out this form.

The whole project is now documented together with the videos and the photostream. Download here the pdf.

We hope that the interviews will be viewed, downloaded, screened and shared extensively, and would like to thank all the networks and interviewees for collaborating with us on this wonderful collection of insights into how networks work. A special thanks goes out to Gerbrand Oudenaarden from Engage! Tactical Media, who did the entire production. And thanks to Urte Jurgaityte, for assisting Gerbrand and the meta-group interviewers in getting this done. And of course Margreet Riphagen and Minke Kampman, who made it all happen.

Link to interviews: www.networkcultures.org/wintercamp/videos.

We’d like to inform your about what’s next for the Winter Camp meta-group. The post-production of the video interviews is in full swing, and the results look excellent. We will upload everything on Vimeo and will send an announcement when everything is online, which will be end of April. Of course we’re closing the project productionally and financially, to report to our funders. Early spring we will produce a Winter Camp report, which is mainly based on the blog posts and dispatches, pictures and illustrations we made throughout the event. The next step will be to start working on a winter camp publication. Of course all suggestions are welcome (for contributions, interesting materials for the report or the publication, etc).
Flickr users: please tag all your uploaded Winter Camp pics with the tag wintercamp09, and add them to the wintercamp09 Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/wintercamp/.

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?

UPGRADE! by Niels Kerssens
GOTO10 by Annette Wolfsberger
MYCREATIVITY by Niels Kerssens
GENDERCHANGERS by Rosa Menkman
MICROVOLUNTEERISM by Anne Helmond
FLOSS MANUALS by Rosa Menkman

FREEDIMENSIONAL NETWORK performance by Anne Helmond and presentation by Niels Kerssens
EDUFACTORY by Anne Helmond
DYNE.ORG by Rosa Menkman
CREATIVE LABOUR by Annette Wolfsberger
BRICOLABS by Annette Wolfsberger
BLENDER by Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff
PLENARY CLOSING DEBATE by Rosa Menkman