Nethood is a Zurich based non-proft organization working on and with communities, cooperations on tools and infrastructure for community-driven organization of living. Including incorporates housing, neighborhood organization, networking, exchange, and learning. Nethood is a partner of diverse interdisciplinary international projects.

It was founded in 2012 by Panayotis Antoniadis, Ileana Apostol, and Jens Martignoni.

Self-description:

Its [Nethood’s] current activities include the facilitation of information exchanges and collaborations between researchers, practitioners, activists, and citizens around its objectives; the participation in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, education, and action projects; and the development of Do-It-Yourself tools and methodologies for empowering local actors to build networked localities that can support each other without suppressing their differences.

The vision of NetHood is to plant seeds of collective awareness, critical listening, long-term thinking, social learning and refective action toward sustainable social life.

Mazi

Mazi is a research-initiative working on alternative technologies for communities, running from 2016 to 2018, in collaboration with University of Thessaly (GR). Its aim is to foster hybrid networking to empower local communities. It is conducting four pilot studies in Germany, Greece, the UK, and Switzerland. In this course, it developed the Mazi-Toolkit.

Self-description:

MAZI means “together” in Treek and the goal of MAZI is to provide technology and knowledge in order to:

• empower those who are in physical proximity, to shape their hybrid urban space, together, according to the local environment and context.
• generate location-based collective awareness as a basis for fostering social cohesion, conviviality, participation in decision-making processes, self-organization, knowledge sharing, and sustainable living
• facilitate interdisciplinary interactions around the design of hybrid space and the role of ICTs in society. MAZI is working on alternative technology, what we call “Do-It-Yourself networking”, a combination of wireless technology, low-cost hardware, and free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) applications, for building local networks, known as “community wireless networks”.
  By making this technology better understood, easily deployed, and configured based on a rich set of customization options and interdisciplinary knowledge, compiled as a toolkit, MAZI will enable citizens to build their own local networks for facilitating hybrid, virtual and physical, interactions, in ways that are respectful to their rights to privacy, freedom of expression and self-determination.
  MAZI takes the perspective of existing grassroots initiatives, whose goals are social and political in nature, and explores ways that DIY networking technologies can help pursue them.

Interview

Hybrid Spaces. Interview with Panayotis Antoniadis
conducted by Felix Stalder, 6 December 2018:

Openki exist since early 2015 under its current name, but it grew our of “schuel.ch” (founded in 2012), a calendar for self-learning courses and projects in the context of the “Autonome Schule Zurich” (an autonomos education initiative in Zurich). Among the inspirations for it was Sean Dockray’s project “public school” in Los Angeles, and, more generally, the democratic school movement around the Summerhill School (founded in 1921).

The name Openki refers to a fungus with massive biomass and rhizomatic structure. On a philosophical level, Openki sees itself as an alternative to the commonly known structure of the hierarchical tree of knowledge and ultimately replaces this model with a horizontal network of knowledge-exchange.

Openki is not only a platform, but also a community of self-learner and autonomous teachers/students that organizes local events, such as the openki Festival in 2018 in Zurich.

Self-description

Openki is an open education platform. Courses can be proposed, discussed, developed, organized and published. The focus is on the promotion of self- organization, the bringing together of people, groupings and initiatives, and ensure a barrier-free exchange of experiences and knowledge. The courses are accessible to all, regardless of their fnancial situation. The organization behind it is non-proft and Open Source.

Openki belongs to me, to you and to all who participate in it. The application is open source, is available under the TNU ATPG license and is therefore freely available for non-commercial use. Behind Openki is the collectively organized non-proft association “KOPF” (KursOrganisationsPlattForm), which has been developing Openki during the last year.

The software (current version in development since late 2014) and the main implementation is maintained by a loose collective of about 10 people, based mainly in Zurich.

Openki is based, mainly, on volunteer work. Courses are open to all, course fees (beyond costs for materials and rent) are suggested as donations, not conditions for access. The non-proft foundation KOPF accepts donations, as well as public and private (cultural/social) funding, for example, for the Openki Festival 2018.

Sources:

https://openki.net/
https://about.openki.net/

Further reading:

Do-it-yourself-Schule. Antikapitalistisches Lernen 2.0, in: WOZ Nr. 46/2017 vom 16.11.2017) https://www.woz.ch/1746/do-it-yourself-schule/antikapitalistisches-lernen-20

Goteo was founded in 2011 by Platoniq, an media design and arts group, focusing on democratic participation in the digital realm, based on Barcelona, active since 2001. Funding members are Olivier Schulbaum and Susana Noguero, Co-directors Cristina Moreno and Mauricio O’Brian.

Self description:

“Goteo is a platform for crowdfunding or collective financing (monetary contributions) and distributed collaboration (services, infrastructures, microtasks) for projects which, apart from giving individual rewards, also generate a collective return through fomenting the commons, open code and/or free knowledge. As a member of the network you can have one or various roles: presenting a project, co-funding, or collaborating on one.“

“Crowdfunding is a form of cooperation between a lot of people to gather a sum of money to help in the development of a specific project. Goteo is a new way, based on this model, to stimulate collaborative projects of an open and/or free nature. As an alternative or complement to financing from public administrations or private companies, Goteo reactivates the co-responsible role of civil society.”

Difference to other crowdfunding plattforms:

• Commons, open and free: we promote projects working for the commons, open code, and/or free knowledge, putting the accent on the public mission and favoring free culture and social development.

• Free and/or open licences: projects that wish to be co-funded with the help of Goteo must permit, through the use of licences, the copying, public communication, distribution, modification and/or use of part or all of each creation.

• Collective return: Goteo seeks the social return of investments and for this reason apart from individual returns, the system is based on collective returns for the development of the commons.

• Social investment market: We manage a feeder capital (Matchfunding > capital riego) with contributions from public and private institutions and businesses for co-responsible investment with a multiplying effect in projects that rely on the support of civil society.

• Distributed collaboration: In Goteo, apart from monetary contributions, it is possible to collaborate through services, material resources, infrastructure, or by participating in specific microtasks needed for the development of projects.

• Two crowdfunding rounds of 40+40 days: There are two cofunding rounds, each with a duration of 40 days. The frst is an “all or nothing” round for the minimum essential budget, while the second is for an optimum sum to carry out additional improvements.

• Community of local nodes: Goteo is a community of communities, a network of local, independent, inter-coordinated nodes which serve to localise the digital, contextualising it.

Goteo is governed through the Goteo Foundation, a non-proft organization which unites all the agents committed to the development of the project, and which is in charge of managing a public-private social investment fund of Matchfunding.

Sources:
https://www.goteo.org
Goteo Fundation: https://fundacion.goteo.org
Platoniq: https://platoniq.net/en/

Interview

Crowd Benefits. Interview with Mauricio O’Brian
conducted by Felix Stalder, 15 September 2018

She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels (since 2003). Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts.

With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D tracking, modelling, and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen, a foundation for multi-visual research, with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and is currently curator of the Research Centre at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels).

Sources:

https://monoskop.org/Femke_Snelting
https://snelting.domainepublic.net/

Further Reading:

Codes of Conducts. Transforming Shared Values into Daily Practice. In: Sollfrank, Cornelia (ed): The Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century, London: Minor Compositions, 2019.
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=976

in german: Codes of Conducts – Gemeinsame Werte in alltägliche Praxis umsetzen. In: Sollfrank, Cornelia (Hg.): Die schönen Kriegerinnen. Technofeministische Praxis im 21. Jahrhundert. Wien: transversal texts, 2018
https://transversal.at/books/die-schonen-kriegerinnen

Interview

Forms of Ongoingness, Interview with Femke Snelting and spideralex
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 16 September 2018

Active Archives is an initiative founded by Constant (Brussels), in collaboration with Arteleku in 2006. It currently holds ongoing collaborations with Constant and e.r.g (Ecole de Recherche Graphique Brussels).

Active Archives are concerned with decentralizing the archive, with the importance of ownership of the infrastructure, the nessecity to include other media than text, promoting re-use of content, and rethinking taxonomies and classifcation of content.

Michael Murtaugh is a technologist based in Brussel. He is a member of Constant, association for arts and media, and a lecturer at Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for Experimental Publishing at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

Self-description:

Active Archive aims at creating a free software platform to connect practices of library, media library, publications on paper was magazines, books, catalogues), productions of audio-visual objects, events, workshops, discursive productions, etc. Practices which can take place on line or in various geographical places, and which can be at various stages of visibility for reasons of rights of access or for reasons of research and privacy conditions.

The Active Archives project starts from the observation that most of the interesting cultural archives that have been developed over the last few years have taken advantage of those new facilities for instant publishing, but mostly in the form of websites that mirror regular information brochures, announcements and text- publishing. Often, they are conceived as “We” give information to “You”. Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.

Sources:

https://activearchives.org

“Archiving the Data-body: human and nonhuman agency in the documents of Kurenniemi”, with Teoff Cox, and Nicolas Malevé, in Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History, edited by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka, MIT Press, 2015
Draft online: https://activearchives.org/wiki/Archiving_the_Data- body:_human_and_nonhuman_agency_in_the_documents_of_Kurenniemi

Webseite of Michael Murtaugh: https://automatist.org/

Interview

Ecosystems of Writing. Interview with Michael Murtaugh
Conducted by Shusha Niederberger, 15 September 2018