Solving for Pattern

“Free as in free speech, not as in free beer,” the slogan of free software advocate Richard Stallman, illustrates the distinction between goods that are naturally scarce (beer) and those that are naturally abundant (speech).

The topic of scarcity versus abundance was discussed by David Bollier in the interview I posted yesterday and is clarified in the figure below, reprinted from an October 2010 post on P&P (“Four types of goods”).

“There are two sets of important distinctions about goods, and they make four cross-classifications. Goods can be either rival or non-rival, and they can be either excludable or non-excludable,” writes Herman Daly in the essay, “Sustaining Our Commonwealth.”

What Daly calls rivalrousness is here written as subtractability: the extent to which one person’s use physically diminishes or precludes another’s.

Excludability (or exclusion) is a legal concept: the ease of precluding others, through defined rights or norms of ownership or use.

In “Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource” (pdf), Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom describe this distinction as the nature of goods (subtractability) versus the nature of property regimes (exclusion). They call it one of “four basic confusions that need to be untangled.” The other three are: (1) the distinction between resource systems and the flow of resource units; (2) the distinction between common property and open-access regimes; and (3) distinctions among the types of property rights involved in “ownership.”

Ostrom presented an earlier draft of this paper at the seminal 2001 Conference on the Public Domain, which included talks by James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglen, Carol Rose, Jessica Litman, Pamela Samuelson, and John Perry Barlow (video downloads available).

See also: Wikipedia on public goods and Paul Hartzog on technology and types of goods.

Commons activist David Bollier was interviewed recently by Matthias Spielkamp of Berlin-based iRights.info.

Much of the talk covers practices, norms, and institutions in the digital commons, and David mentions his work with Massachusetts-based research nonprofit ID3.

At ~23:00 (video link):

One of the interesting things about the commons is that it’s becoming an international phenomenon where people are self-choosing to talk in that framing and discourse.

We have free culture people in Brazil — one of the first free culture nations, one might say; we have subsistence farmers in the Philippines, where there’s something called the system for rice intensification, which is like open source agriculture, where they trade advice; we have hackers in Amsterdam; we have reclaim-the-city people in Stuttgart. There are many different manifestations of the commons, and I think they are starting to find each other and understand some of their shared concerns, despite very different resources and national traditions.

So I see the commons discourse starting to grow and become more crystallized as we move forward.

To the extent that the digital community of commoners can find these other subsets or tribes of commoners, there can be some fantastic innovation that can occur — because there are a lot of environmental problems that can use the ingenuity of digital commoners in helping to understand how we can manage those resources better.

So, what I’m saying is that there are a lot of interesting synergies that are emerging, once you see the world through the commons lens.

“If you don’t like capitalism and you don’t like socialism… what do you want?” asked Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb in a 2012 article (pdf), published by the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland.

This search for models of social-economic organization that better “build democracy, community and equity” is at the heart of Alperovitz’s forthcoming book, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution.

From a February 2013 interview at Solidarity Hall:

In smaller companies, we know that worker ownership is a useful device. Indeed, we are strong supporters of worker coops and worker-owned companies in general. In large firms, worker ownership in some industries might produce different equity results. That is, the larger community has a stake in the impact of their operations. And we’ve been interested in how you can blend these different interests most successfully.

The problem with pure worker ownership of large industries is that the worker/owners are under the same market pressures as any other company. They are therefore as likely to pollute the environment, for example, if they’re under competitive pressures to do so, as the next guys. So that means the worker-owned company’s interests are somewhat different from that of its surrounding community—which includes elderly people, young people, all those who happen to be out of the workforce. After all, half the society at any one time is not part of that worker ownership.

So we think it’s critical, to use economists’ language, to begin to internalize the externalities through structures that reflect the broader community’s interests, rather than putting workers’ interests at odds with them.

From an article last week in Truthout (“The Question of Socialism (and Beyond!) Is About to Open Up in These United States”):

[A] third model that has traditionally had some resonance is to locate primary ownership of significant scale capital in “communities” rather than either the state or specific groups of workers – i.e. in geographic communities and in political structures that are inclusive of all the people in the community. …

Variations on this model include the “municipal socialism” that played so important a role in early 20th century American socialist politics – and is still evident in more than 2,000 municipally owned utilities, a good deal of new municipal land development and many other projects. “Social ecologist” Murray Bookchin gave primary emphasis to a municipal version of the community model in works like Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future, and Marxist geographer David Harvey has begun to explore this option as well. (As Harvey emphasizes, any “model” would likely also have to build up higher level supporting structures and could not function successfully were it left to simply float in the free market without some larger supporting system.)

Current suggestive practical developments in this direction include a complex or “mixed” model in Cleveland that involves worker co-ops that are linked together and subordinated to a community-wide, nonprofit structure — and supported by something of a quasi-planning system (directed procurement from hospitals and universities that depend in significant part on public financial support). An earlier model involving joint community and worker ownership was developed by steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, in the late 1970s.

See also: Gar Alperovitz’s writing as a set of design principles.

From the Mosaic press release:

OAKLAND, CA — (April 8, 2013) Mosaic, an online marketplace that connects investors to high-quality solar projects, just received approval from securities regulators to offer $100 Million worth of solar investments to residents of California. …

‘California has always been a leader in solar energy. We’re thrilled that now any resident of California can invest directly into solar energy for as little as $25,’ said Billy Parish, President & Co-founder of Mosaic. …

In January, Mosaic launched their first return on investment solar projects to the public, selling out all three in less than 24 hours with over $300,000 invested.

Last week saw the one-year anniversary of the U.S. JOBS Act; Title III of the Act would allow companies to crowdfund from non-accredited investors. While the Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to issue regulations on Title III (or other parts of the Act), legal commentators William Carleton and Joe Wallin both find it flawed as currently written.

Here’s hoping the California / Mosaic experiment lights the way. (See the offering memorandum pdf, from Mosaic Solar Investments LLC.) Washington State legislators have introduced a crowdfunding bill as well.

My post of last summer: Four dimensions of crowdfunding.

(Misspelling in “Securities” corrected after posting.)

Organizational and social innovation cannot happen without the emergence of novel practices, norms, and other institutions. In a word: creativity.

But how well is creativity understood, and to what extent can it be described as a process of abductive reasoning? — as referenced in recent talks and articles by Roger Martin in Design Observer, Carl Steinitz at the GeoDesign Summit, Jon Kolko in Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Dan Berrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight,” wrote philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce.

“The very possibility of abduction is a little uncanny,” marveled cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, “and the phenomenon is enormously more widespread than [one] might, at first thought, have supposed.”

Here’s how Peirce outlined the process in 1903: “The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course; Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.”

For example: I observe that birds can fly; But if the magic of flight were in the wings, then the fact that birds can fly would be a matter of course; Hence, I suspect that the magic of flight is in the wings, and I build a machine with wings to see if it enables me to fly.

Abduction, as defined in The Compact Oxford English Dictionary: “A syllogism, of which the major premiss is certain, and the minor only probable, so that the conclusion has only the probability of the minor.”

In an 1878 essay, Peirce referred to this process as hypothesis making, a form of synthetic inference along with — yet distinct from — the process of induction.

Here is a comparison of syllogisms, adapted from Julie Hui, Tyrone Cashman, and Terrence Deacon.

And here is a comparison of processes, adapted from Hans Rudi Fischer. Solid boxes contain premises that are presupposed as true; dashed boxes contain premises that are inferred.

Worth noting: In addition to the terms hypothesis and abduction, Peirce also referred to this form of reasoning as retroduction — and wrote in 1911:

I do not, at present, feel quite convinced that any logical form can be assigned that will cover all ‘Retroductions’. For what I mean by a Retroduction is simply a conjecture which arises in the mind.

References:

• Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, p.157.
• The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition). 1991.
• Fischer, H. R. 2001. Abductive Reasoning as a Way of Worldmaking. Foundations of Science 6:361–383.
• Hui, J., Cashman, T. and T. Deacon. 2008. Bateson’s Method: Double Description. What is it? How does it work? What do we learn? in J Hoffmeyer (ed.) A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics.
• Peirce, C. S. 1878. Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis, in N. Houser and C. Kloesel (eds. 1992) The Essential Peirce, Volume 1.
• Peirce, C. S. 1903. Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, in Collected Papers v. 5, viewed at: http://www.textlog.de/7664-2.html.
• Peirce, C. S. 1911. A Letter to J. H. Kehler, in New Elements of Mathemaatics v. 3, viewed at: http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/retroduction.html.

Just glancing at the January 2013 publication, Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, edited by Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love.

From the introductory chapter by the editors:

Among anthropologists, Leslie White was most prominent in writing about energy, analyzing its relation to the evolution of culture and the development of civilization (1943, 1959). In his earlier work (1943), White advanced the fundamental hypothesis that “other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work,” a seminal idea that he developed more extensively in his 1959 volume, The Evolution of Culture. …

White’s basic insight that transformations in technology — including the intensification of use of energy — are coupled with transformations in cultural contexts and social institutions presents a compelling touch point for contemporary research on the impacts of consumption and technology on the natural environment.

At the same time, White’s narrow focus on technology, the satisfaction of human needs through reliance on material outer forces, such as tools, weapons, and other materials, rather than “inner resources” contained within the human organism, such as myth-making and social associations, seems artificially to separate and unproductively to decouple technology from social values.

As the chapters in this volume demonstrate robustly, contemporary uses of and relations to energy are intimately connected with people’s social values and images of energy and its associated technologies; how people use energy is related to how people value it; and how people value energy is related to what it enables them to accomplish not only materially but also socially and culturally.

“Activism is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark” — Rebecca Solnit, writing in the spring of 2003, after massive global demonstrations had failed to stop the war in Iraq.

Last week at the annual PNCA Edelman Lecture, Solnit looked back from a ten-year vantage point on those events and reiterated the themes of her 2003 essay, “Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage”:

The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime, and if you’re lucky you don’t know how long that is. The future is dark. Like night. There are probabilities and likelihoods, but there are no guarantees. …

As Adam Hochschild points out, from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue of slavery, three quarters of a century passed before it was abolished it in Europe and America. Few if any working on the issue at the beginning lived to see its conclusion, when what had once seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable. …

Nobody knows the consequences of their actions, and history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways.

Solnit’s wisdom stands in counterpoint to more tangible efforts at evaluation of systemic social interventions, which remain invaluable.

Case in point, from the UK nonprofit Nesta, a diagram that outlines five levels of evaluative evidence, from the March 2013 publication “Making Evidence Useful”:

See also: Caroline Fiennes on the Nesta evidence hierarchy.

Update: John Thackara follows up with the observation that, by other definitions, slavery has not been “abolished” — linking to the new book Cultures of Energy.

The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Dan Berrett on “Creativity: a Cure for the Common Curriculum”:

Creativity, when conceived of as a thought process rather than an inherent attribute or talent, has theoretical roots in psychology and philosophy.

J.P. Guilford, the psychologist, drew a distinction between two forms of thinking, convergent and divergent. With its frequent use of standardized tests, education today tends to skew heavily toward convergent thinking, which emphasizes the importance of arriving at a single correct answer. Divergent thinking, however, requires coming up with alternative theories and ideas, sometimes many of them, to produce a useful solution.

Guilford devised tests of divergent thinking, including one in which the test taker invents as many uses as possible for a paper clip. Children typically clobber adults on this test, says Mr. Fisher.

“Humans are naturally playful, creative beings,” he says. “We’re doing something to kids in grade school that drums the creativity out of them.”

The philosophical antecedents harken to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Charles Sanders Peirce, the American pragmatist, drew on the forms of inductive and deductive logic categorized by Aristotle in his Prior Analytics. Peirce added a third strain of logic, which he often called abductive.

Each has its advantages. Deductive reasoning confers a high degree of certainty in its conclusions. Inductive logic works well when data are readily observable. Abductive logic, Peirce posited, relies on inference to make creative leaps in situations in which information is incomplete. It yields a large number of possible answers.

See also: Science, humanities, design: The three cultures.

“There is a need for a paradigm shift in the way publicly owned irrigation systems are managed,” writes Aditi Mukherji in a World Water Day (March 22nd) post (“Cooperation by water users: Does it work?”).

She summarizes a review of 108 cases of irrigation management transfer (IMT) and participatory irrigation management (PIM) across 20 countries in Asia. It’s the broadest meta-analysis to date of efforts to foster local governance of modern irrigation systems through water users associations (WUAs).

Think analogously, in a U.S. context, of irrigation systems like the Columbia Basin Project in southeast Washington state, built by the Bureau of Reclamation from 1945 to 1955 and then transferred to local irrigation district governance in 1969.

Of the 108 cases, the authors rate 42 as successful and 66 less so, with findings mapped out as below.

Mukherji, also lead author on the review, was the first recipient of the recently inaugurated Borlaug Field Award, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Agriculture and Ecosystems blog is a project of the CIGAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems, and CGIAR is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a global amalgamation of 15 research centers, along with funding and other supporting entities.

Some key pieces from the review paper (“Irrigation reform in Asia: A review of 108 cases of irrigation management transfer,” pdf).

Critique of IMT:

There are three theoretical assumptions behind IMT, assumptions, that we contend, have not been unpacked properly. First, it is assumed that because traditional self governed irrigation systems have endured, therefore, WUAs in modern canal systems too will. Second, it is thought that most of these public systems have potential to be financially and economically viable, but government management is not the ideal way to achieve this. Third, it is assumed that resource users (i.e. the farmers) are ideally suited to manage these systems, because they have the largest stake in long term sustainability of the resource.

Definition of success:

[W]e define IMT/PIM intervention as successful when there is a marked improvement after transfer or transferred systems fare better than non-transferred ones because users receive adequate and reliable supply of water at reasonable and affordable costs over a sufficiently long period of time enabling them to increase their crop production, productivity and incomes.

Factors supporting successful projects:

[W]e find that active farmers’ participation (Japan), small size of systems and presence of rich social capital (Nepal), long drawn involvement of NGOs (Sri Lanka and India) and provision of correct incentives to the irrigation official and farmers (China) led to success. The important point here is that all these are hard or costly to replicate, except perhaps the provision of right incentive structure.

Conclusion:

This review of 108 case studies shows that IMT/PIM is far from a panacea to all problems and that there is no magic formula for crafting successful WUAs. Our review of evidence from some decades of experiments is far from encouraging; by far the most celebrated experiments—catalyzed, sustained and micro-managed by NGO’s with the help of unreplicable quality and scale of resources and donor support (e.g. Gal Oya in Sri Lanka, Baldeva LBMC in Gujarat) report only modest gains in terms of performance and sustainability, leading researchers to demand ‘reform of reforms’.

On the Columbia Basin Project, see: “Irrigation Management Transfer in the Columbia Basin, USA: A Review of Context, Process and Results” (pdf), by Douglas Vermillion.