Institutioning the common

Abstract

Participatory Design (PD) has recently seen eforts to reinvigorate its political capacity, including relections on the relations between its practices and institutions and a renewed political agenda in the contemporary stage of capitalism, such as the one of nourishing the common. This paper addresses both of these directions, questioning how a renewed political agenda of PD intersects the processes of institutioning in which PD itself takes part. To do that, we refer to an European-funded project called Commonfare, aimed at designing a digital platform fostering the emergence of a new economic model in the domain of the institutions of the welfare state. We conclude by discussing how a PD political agenda based on the critique of the current forms of capitalism aligns with or challenges existing institutional frames, supporting the emergence of new institutions. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing;

Algorithmic Food Justice

“…relating to sharing and voting), and, depending on the design of the system, they may register the contributions made by actors. For example, the blockchainbased co-operation platforms Backfeed (Pazaitis et al, 2017) and Commonfare (Teli et al, 2018) use the 'reputation' token as a way for community members to collectively address issues of contribution and reward for participation in an emergent, consensus-based fashion. Our work attempts to add to these discussions, albeit through the production of conceptual prototypes rather than computational platforms.…”

“…The gameplay involved two of the authors acting as chairpersonsleading each of the groups through a pre-designed Meeting Agenda which presented a series of propositions that participants had to improvise around. We worked with questions around membership, fair shares and conflict resolution that are also being experimentally negotiated in blockchain initiatives (Pazaitis et al, 2018;Teli et al, 2018;DisCO.coop et al 2019).…”

Algorithmic Food Justice: Co-Designing More-than-Human Blockchain Futures for the Food Commons

“…Experimental platforms such as Backfeed [49] -a blockchain-based platform supporting decentralised cooperationand Commonfare [62] -a blockchain-based platform for a new model of welfare -illustrate how tokens can be used as a means of value exchange, for example through local currencies, as well as providing a mechanism for a social protocol to help achieve consensus about the value produced by community members' contributions to a collective effort and its appropriate reward. This happens via the awarding of non-exchangeable tokens called reputation.…”

“…Another key issue revolves around the exchange of currencies leading to conflicting incentives, as illustrated in the case of Commonfare. While a non-exchangeable community currency incentivises contributions to the community values, an exchangeable currency may lead to simple accumulation instead of circulation inside the community [62]. This then leads to tensions between sovereignty and scalability: a completely independent currency, while allowing for greater control by those who support and use it, "has issues of scalability, as its adoption can be limited only to the ones who control it" [ibid].…”

“…The DAOs addressed the different design principles, revealing opportunities for managing thriving more-than-human food commons on the blockchain. As in examples such as Backfeed [49] and Commonfare [62], exchangeable tokens in the form of a currency, and non-exchangeable tokens in the form of reputation, were used in all three DAO prototypes to manage the rules in ways that are fair for multispecies communities. New rules could be proposed and voted on by those who participate and are affected by the rules (design principle 3), with the help of reputation tokens and smart contracts, allowing the DAOs to evolve over time.…”