IASC commons Nairobi

Panels proposals for the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, June 19-24 2023 in Nairobi and online.

Panel – What about revitalising African knowledge commons for/through education?

Hosted by Barbara Class and Fabio Balli. Id 6.9.

⏪ Open Education

In this panel, we suggest to discuss knowledge commons beyond the 2030 agenda and beyond theories of development, within the framework of Open Science (UNESCO, 2021).

Leveraging epistemologies from the South, we explore how to move away from post-positivist approaches created by the Global North, first by recognising absences, and next by encouraging emergences of different knowledge systems (Santos, 2016).

How can overall life philosophies such as Maat or Ubu-ntu contribute to create alternative ways to education? How can educating in community languages empower learners towards a holistic cultural identity? How can leadership be developed to train individuals to become bridges, proficient of one local culture / language of the Global South and one of the North?

Taking advantage of the momentum and current awareness with regards to knowledge commons in Africa, i.e. topics that concern the Global South and are discussed in and for the Global South in journals hosted for instance on African Journals Online (AJOL), education is discussed in a much deeper sense than schooling, in temporalities that far exceed international agendas.

Finally, rather than addressing knowledge and natural commons as two different entities in the modern perspective (Latour, 2006), we consider them one and the same commons, in interaction, and nurturing one another. This with respect also to traditional ways of educating through initiation which take place in forests.

Panel – Open Source Hardware in the medical field

Hosted by Pascal Carpentier and Fabio Balli. Id 7.2.

⏪ Health and law-making

Over the past fifteen years, technological evolution allowed hobbyists and amateurs to gather, exchange information, and build innovative objects. They opened a new field of open source development; Open Source Hardware (OSH). A movement that aims to replicate the OSS model’s success but in the physical world with tangible resources.

Over the past years, Open hardware products’ complexity drastically increased from merely printed simple objects in 3D to very ambitious and complex projects like an Open MRI. Some projects became real commercial successes, like Arduino, selling more than ten million units of its multipurpose electronic board. However, the comparative advantage with the proprietary model is not yet fully understood, and globally, literature is lacking due to the relative youth of the development model.

The COVID pandemic recently acted as a catalyst for OSH projects that were suddenly under the spotlight worldwide. Communities helped healthcare workers to face the sanitary crisis with countless medical spare parts, respirators, or face shields projects. Although this common-based mode of production demonstrated a genuine capacity to propose pragmatical and decentralized solutions to this unprecedented situation of generalized supply chain disruption, a vast majority of these projects failed to reach the hospital bedside. These communities underestimated the gap between the willingness to share knowledge and functioning prototypes and a final product up and running in a hospital.

Contribution – From impoverishment to empowerment: what if we had the means to ensure that each and every human lives decently within nine months?

Proposed by Fabio Balli as part of the panel "Public health services as a common good in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals"

In 2014, a colleague and I started to build games with the aim to ease respiratory treatments. We then started to host multidisciplinary events to collectively create freely reproducible games and devices. In parallel, I started to reflect on how our socio-economic framework hinders access to health, what can be called critical public health.

I came to identify three collective narratives that make us perpetuate suffering:

1. The myth of scarcity: We 'believe' in scarcity as we learn to search for the recognition of the authority, rather than to give and get recognition to and from our peers. In the first case, there is scarcity in the economy of strokes, in the second, there is abundance.
2. The myth of competition. We compete because we fear of lacking resources. As we are not in peace within ourselves, we built narratives that foster competition and pseudo-rationalism, that is war against those deemed different.
3. The myth of the state and the market. Ignorant of our individual and collective capacities, we rely on external authorities to make decisions for us. Hence we come to believe that companies create jobs, and the state provides us with a safety net. In reality, companies and the state only exist because they extract value from the multitude, in the form of the collective intelligence brought, or taxes for example.

Once aware of these myths, we can explore new avenues:

1. scarcity could easily be antiquated by mutualising resources. For example, Germany could spare 200 million euro yearly if MRI scanner manufacturers shared their designs – this, without major changes on their economic model.
2. competition could be antiquated by relying on peer production networks, such as for distributed manufacturing. For example, makers in the USA produced over 34 million units of protective equipment in 2020, for a value estimated 163 million dollars. And in India, Maker's Asylum was able to mobilise 150 organisations to build oxygen concentrators from scratch in eight weeks!
3. the state and the market could be antiquated by hosting three-day events every month, where people would agree to: listen to each other; agree on the most pressing collective needs; put in commons their skills and resources to co-create freely reproducible knowledge and technologies.

As we the people increase awareness on our collective and individual capacities, as we contribute to commons-commons commoning (vs private-public or public-commons partnerships), we may come back to embracing our subjectivity (vs universal), to take care of ourselves and the alien (vs 'health'), and to uncover our very own humanity (vs coverage).

Some leads to go further? exploring the awareness of one's sensations, introspection, arts, play, ...