Bricolabs describes itself on its website as a distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities. A global platform to investigate the new loop of open content, software and hardware for community applications, bringing people together with new technologies and distributed connectivity, unlike the dominant focus of IT industry on security, surveillance and monopoly of information and infrastructures.

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/

Creative Labour, an offshoot of the Euromayday network, concentrates on the crative sector. Its members are social activists who are committed and (sometimes too) passionate. It wants to offer an alternative to the labour movement where new issues, eg precearity, can be discussed. Creative Labour learned a lot during the Winter Camp and the event had a huge impetus for them to keep working. Its members hardly ever have the possibility to work focused without working on concrete campaigns.

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 is a collective of international artists and programmers, dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and digital arts. GOTO10 aims to support and grow digital art projects and tools for artistic creation, located on the blurry line between software programming and art. All of GOTO10’s projects are based on 100% Free/Libre Open Source Software.

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.