Memo

Plan d’action du sport et du plein air urbains 2018-2028

    Initiative guided by

www.economiecollaborative.ca

and

www.sensorica.co

Presented at Plan d’action du sport et du plein air urbains 2018-2028 Ville de Montréal, on May 2nd, 2018

Ce mémoire est le fruit d’un travail collaboratif du réseau Economie Collaborative et Sensorica.

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Contents table

Introduction

Smart, participatory and partner City

The third sector

The forth sector

Some specific recommendations

Soccer in smart cities

Matrioshka

Creation of the Matrioshka, example of a collaborative enterprise

Applications of the Matrioshka

Introduction

We appreciate the recent increase in the number of public consultation initiatives by the city of Montreal. This shows that the city is moving away from a directive approach towards a more inclusive approach that takes into consideration the needs of its population, with a better mapping of hyperlocal, ethnic, gender, age and other subcategories' specific needs. Through this process the City of Montreal also crowdsources new ideas and innovation and finds new partners that can help with policy development and with the implementation of new services. Although we consider this a step in the good direction, we make it our duty to inform the City of additional measures that it should start considering, towards a more participatory and collaborative city, embodying the role of a Partner State.

Smart, participatory and partner City

The predominant model of our local government is "City as a service". Caricaturing this concept, the city levies taxes on its population and guarantees basic services. On the other hand, people expect these services and don't go out of their way to maintain and improve them,  which are perceived as due, since they pay for them. To that, we need to add the growing cynicism amidst cases of corruption and misallocation of public funds. This leads to a very low level of public engagement in local affairs, people just expect the services and complain when things go bad.

The third sector

Local associations and non profit organisations are ways for some people to organise to fill in the gaps where the public and the private sector don't reach. Their activities are organized mostly through voluntary work and some paid work with public funds and private donations. This so called tertiary sector has been restructured under the umbrella of the so called social economy, which proposes a recipe to mix traditional entrepreneurial skills and practices with community organising skills and practices to achieve social goals or to produce social value. The social economy has been under development in Montreal for the past two decades, with a rapid acceleration in recent years due to more effective means of organising, supported by the new digital technology.

The City has done pretty well to integrate the third sector in its activities. This can be observed by looking at the extensive database of such organisations on the City's website. The social economy has been institutionalized through the incessant work of organisations such as Le Chantier de l'Économie Sociale. The local and the provincial government are now using the social economy language, they have created new policies to protect and strengthen this sector, and they have designed new financial incentives to fuel these activities. All these are important social achievements that we need to applaud and preserve.

The same way the social economy emerged and struggled to infiltrate all levels of government, a new phenomena is emerging today and struggles for visibility, recognition and legitimacy. This is what we call the collaborative economy, which forms a fourth sector along the public, the private and the third sector.  

The forth sector

New forms of organisations have emerged with the recent development of web 2.0, and are now going through their second phase of evolution with the emergence of peer to peer technologies such as Blockchain and Holochain. These are network-type organisations. They are open (as in access to participation), transparent (as in access to information), and use horizontal governance models. They have developed sophisticated methodologies and IT infrastructures to structure and support their activities. Some of these organisations have grown in sophistication and scale and have become formidable socioeconomic agents. The Bitcoin network, seen as an organisation of human beings rather than merely a network of computers, is the most perplexing example. Closer to us, the Transition towns movement is another example. These network-type organisations cannot be recognized by their legal structure, there is no legal shale around them. And yet we cannot ignore their positive impact on our local communities.

On the 3d of May 2008 over 50,000 people came out of their homes to clean up Estonia, that's 4% out of a population of 1,3 million. This was a vast network of individuals organised spontaneously using social media and cleaned the entire country in a single day. Estonia was suffering from decaying social services after its transition from communism to the market economy and democratic governance. This was not an NGO-lead effort, not a government-lead effort, it was the effort of a grassroots open, transparent and decentralized network. By the end of 2011 more than 2.5 million people had participated in Let’s Do It! cleanup actions in 16 countries – Estonia, India, Slovenia, Serbia, Finland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Cambodia, Russia, Hungary and Brazil. In some of these countries, this action is now repeated every year. This global movement is now called Let's Do It! World and it is an accredited member of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

There is a tremendous latent potential in our society that doesn't get channeled through our government, our private companies or our associations and non profit organisations. The fourth sector seems to have a good recipe to put it to use for social good. As world renowned pioneers of the collaborative economy, in this document we advocate for a new axis of development that goes along the way of the collaborative economy. We illustrate the concept with two examples of projects. They are to be understood within a different conceptual frame of participatory action, commons-based peer production and open source innovation. In this paradigm, the City takes the role of a Partner State.

A great recent example of a Partner State initiative can be found in the Commons transition plan for the City of Ghent^[1], in the Netherlands.  

Some specific recommendations

In line with the Plan d’action du sport et du plein air urbains 2018-2028, and to illustrate our proposed approach, we have chosen to present two projects from Sensorica, an incubator of collaborative enterprises and projects.

Soccer in smart cities

The Soccer in smart cities project is about stimulating public engagement in amateur sports, and about the culture of sports.

Amateur sports are rarely promoted in mainstream media, mainly for lack of time, but also because of the high costs involved in the production. This is changing, new technology has reduced the costs of video equipment and allows automation of most of the video capturing and streaming process, with acceptable quality. We are expecting a wave of amateur sports coverage in social media, leading to a larger democratization of sports and leisure activities.

The goal of this project is to create a family of hardware and software technologies that allow streaming and recording of amateur sports games, with social interactivity.

Social media provides a perfect environment where people can share their excitement about sports with family and friends. Amateur sports can propagate beyond the field into the social sphere, thus giving others the possibility to follow and to participate.

The project was started by Oscar Rivas in August 2017, who is an affiliate of Sensorica and lives in Hermosillo Sonora Mexico. Oscar has prototyped an open source hardware system and the practice of recording amateur soccer. He is now perfecting content editing including commentaries. The system is undergoing tests in different cities in Mexico, in collaboration with local soccer leagues.

We believe that this project will have an impact on the sports culture by democratizing content and the discussion around sports.

Physical activities will reclaim their primary purpose, to achieve a healthy and joyful life, rather than compete for fame and money.

It is important to realize that in order to optimize the potential of the crowd, the infrastructure on which these crowd-based activities are deployed need to escape the control of private interest, and should not be managed by the state. How can an infrastructure be properly maintained outside of the private and the public sector? Without the previous introduction to the forth sector this could make no sense. We are now well advised that large scale peer to peer infrastructures that are not private or public, such as the Bitcoin network for example, already exist. They are sustainable and have already demonstrated their potential. We continue to provide the example of Bitcoin, because of its popularity, but we acknowledge that it is not even the best example among the multitude of similar open networks that have mushroomed in the past three years.

Matrioshka

Matrioshka est le nom d'un mobilier urbain mobile, autonome en énergie, connecté et interactif. Il a d'abord été conçu par Quatorze^[3], une association d'architectes de Paris, en France. Le premier prototype, basé sur un design open source, a été produit et installé à Paris en 2014.

Creation of the Matrioshka, example of a collaborative enterprise

Matrioshka is the name of a mobile, energy independent, connected and interactive public furniture. It was first designed by Quatorze, an association of architects from Paris, France. The first prototype, based on an open source design, was produced and installed in Paris in 2014.

Quatorze was invited in the summer of 2016 to Eco2Fest, an event organized by Ouishare Montreal. It took place in the Foire Ecosphere at Montreal’s Jarry Park and coincided with the World Social Forum. Eco2Fest can be understood as an incubator and accelerator event for collaborative projects, turning them into for-benefit collaborative enterprises. During one week, the Matrioshka and other projects were open to anyone who wanted to participate in improving the design and finding new applications. The activity took place in a fully equipped makerspace created under a tent in Jarry Park. Sensorica provided technical support to 3 projects, including the Matrioshka.

The Ouishare Makerspace at Jarry Park during Eco2Fest 2016

After the event, the new prototype was placed at the Sensorica lab in Montreal. Sensorica can be seen as a permanent incubator of collaborative enterprises, providing a secure environment for collaborative economic activities based on open innovation and peer production. Six months after Eco2Fest, a new group of collaborative entrepreneurs formed around the Matrioshka and started to plan its commercialization on the local market.

Matrioshka under construction, Sensorica lab

The prototype after the Eco2Fest event only had the solar panel energy generator. The first objective at the Sensorica lab was to build a better prototype that integrated Internet connectivity and interactivity, and to expose it at public events in order to find commercial opportunities.

The project adopted Sensorica’s economic model and was organized as a collaborative enterprise. Participation was open to anyone who wanted to contribute and add value to the project, as is the case with any open source project. Calls for participation were broadcasted through social media and other channels. In order to ease the integration of new participants, everything about the project was published on a website with public access, keeping with the open-source tradition of full transparency.

Three Sensorica affiliates, three independent individuals, one startup, one manufacturing company, one graphics design/printing company, Quatorze (association of architects), and OuiShare (open network) joined the project. Work was organized in sprints for conceptualization, design and prototyping, borrowing from the agile development methodology. A social contract was established within the group, which stated that participants could log their contributions to the project (in time, shared material assets, and money) and that future benefits were to be distributed according to everyone’s logged contributions. Some participants elected not to log their contributions, being satisfied with other forms of benefits that they could extract from the project: learning new skills, making new friends, gaining experience with collaborative practices and the collaborative economy, applying and testing some of their technology in the Matrioshka context, gaining exposure through the Matrioshka endeavour, etc.

The group shared the risk for the project: if they were to succeed in generating benefits they will all be winners; otherwise, everyone gained a new experience and learned some new lessons. This is counter to relations established in a traditional organization, where employees are paid a salary in exchange for their labour. The employees transfer their risk to the company and, by the same token, transfer their ownership of future benefits. Within the Matrioshka collaborative enterprise, no one was paid, but everyone was guaranteed ownership of future benefits in proportion to everyone’s contributions. In that sense, the product development process is a truly collaborative one, as everyone involved builds on everyone else’s work to achieve a common goal, while sharing the risk and the burden for the venture.

In order to complete the enhanced Matrioshka prototype, the group needed to come up with a new concept integrating connectivity and interactivity. The mechanical structure had to be re-designed. The electronic system and supporting software also had to be designed. New applications were envisioned, which generated new user experiences.

The shared Sensorica lab was used for conceptualization and prototyping of electronics and software. A local startup specializing in electronics openly shared technology that it had already developed and wanted to test within the Matrioshka application context as a public showcase. A manufacturing company offered a mechanical engineer, a technician, an industrial grade CNC, and the space required to fabricate the new mechanical structure. A printing company offered a graphic designer, a technician, and printing equipment to produce the graphics material to be placed on the structure. Two independent artists also contributed to the graphic design and other aesthetic aspects of the Matrioshka. In the end, everyone contributed to the integration of the entire prototype.

Matrioshka in use

From the log tracking all the resources that went into the realization of the final prototype (including equipment, space, materials, time, and skills), the group estimated the total cost at $77,000. Only $2,000 in cash was spent for the entire project, which was completed in less than 2 months. 

Matrioshka cost structure

The accounting above reveals a striking reality. An individual living with a Matrioshka dream in his basement is confronted with a $77,000 barrier to make it a reality. The traditional economy recipe to realize the dream prescribes exchange relations. That means that for every resource needed, money is needed for its acquisition - be it skills, equipment, materials, space, etc.

The model practiced by Sensorica prescribes collaborative relations, utilizing every contributor’s excess capacity and industry. As opposed to the so-called sharing economy or models similar to Uber and Airbnb (TaskRabbit, for example), participants in the Matrioshka project do not engage in exchanges among themselves. No one pays anyone else, they cocreate and they agree on a way to share the benefits.

The success of building the new Matrioshka prototype shows that this new kind of arrangement works well in drawing resources to a new venture. The fact that almost 40 times less money was needed and that the process was completed in less than 2 months proves that this new arrangement can lead to very efficient processes. It also shows how this flavour of collaborative economy establishes new flow patterns in innovation and production. It bypasses traditional centralized and controlled processes, scarce monetary currency, and the labor market.

How many brilliant minds will come out of their basements and realize their dreams if we consolidate and scale this type of collaborative economic model? How many world problems are we going to solve? As pioneers and practitioners of this model for the past 8 years, we are confident that this is something that the government needs to encourage. In fact, we believe that the government has an important role to play in this, as an active partner in facilitating the development of decentralized networks and open communities for the benefit of the common good.

Applications of the Matrioshka

A study was also performed to understand how the Matrioshka can be integrated as a mobility hub.