How to do curating - Basic literacy in commoning

dear Mike

there are two places to find info on biophysical accountability,

i.e.here on the general topic https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Thermodynamic_Efficiencies (with also https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sustainable_Manufacturing)

and https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting for the accounting systems specifically

I also recommend checking out https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination

and as for James Quilligan

he is all over our wiki, as he should be, i.e .about a dozen titles and several dozen text mentions,

see https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?search=Quilligan&title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=1

bring him on

being explored here https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Relational , https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Facilitation, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Intelligence

curation is something you do yourself, stewardship is what supports others to do the curation ?

as for grandchildren you are probably familiar with john heron's take on the evolution of hierarchy, autonomy , cooperation

and this is pertinent as well: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Evolution_of_Childhood_and_Parenting_Practices

that message was never sent, it stayed in draft mode, really sorry

it has to be starting at 9 pm for me, I'm rarely there before ..

so we need another day and time, sorry for that

Apart from sorting out whatever happened with the comment, I'm very happy to see discussions on P2PF content taking place on Loomio, which is a much better medium. Would you like me to link to this discussion at the end of the post? (Or @asimong can do it too)

Done, thanks for the prompt, Stacco @staccotroncoso

With respect to both @mikeh8 and @michelbauwens1 I'd like to try bottoming out the distinction between (the overlapping concepts of) curation and stewardship, and I'm trying to move on from my earlier statement that I hadn't yet made a distinction.

It makes sense to me, along with Michel, that curation is in effect a relationship between a person and some resource, often in our discussions (though not always) an information resource. A phrase that is often repeated in definitions of curation is "select, organize, and look after" collections of items. This fits well the two examples in my P2PF post, so I'm happy with the word and its meaning here. Especially in the context of the P2PF wiki, the task of writing and maintaining category pages seems to me to fit well into the definition of curation. If you have an introductory page on some concept, not only will you be looking around carefully for which pages give detail to the concept, but also you may be helping to keep those particular selected pages up to date.

Stewardship seems to me to differ from curation partly in being a wider concept, but perhaps more precisely in that while stewardship definitely includes "looking after" or taking care of something, to me there is no implication of selection. So one can "steward" a process of "curating": the curation would be of the data, and stewardship would be of the processes around that data. Wikipedia gives "Stewardship is now generally recognized as the acceptance or assignment of responsibility to shepherd and safeguard the valuables of others."

We probably see ourselves as stewards of the natural world, in the sense of looking after it, including all its natural diversity, and trying not to interfere in destructive ways. We can curate a collection in a museum of dead specimens, but the concept of curation doesn't quite fit looking after living things, because the 'selection' part of curation might imply that we simply ignore, discard or even throw away the items (species or individuals) that are not of value to us.

The process of curation by people is also alive, so we steward that process rather than curate it. Back in relation to my blog post, we can take up the responsibility of stewardship of the culture, or the economy, of distributed curation.

Another nice aspect of the concept of stewardship distinguishes it from ownership and (more autocratic forms of) management. As a steward of the natural environment, I make no claim to own it; nor do I presume that I (personally) have the authority or capacity to take a controlling managerial position with it.

It might be an idea to elaborate this in respect to commons thinking. Does either of you (or anyone else) know of any writing about this? I can imagine an outline easily enough. It might help people understand more about commons processes and how we relate to them personally.

it's a very useful distinction, but they are also polarities and sometimes a person or group needs to do both,

also polarity , because many stewards would actually intervene when the eco=system itself is actually at risk (think about invasive species, which many ecological stewards feel strongly towards, eventhough they are not positive curating per se

so negative curation, in the sense of protecting the integrity of the eco-system, seems part of stewardship, certainly is part of the work of open source maintainers and knowledge editors

I'm a curator when I select myself, but a steward concerning the open contributions of others,

never forget that some people and forces actually want to destroy your commons, for all sorts of reasons

this is why un-moderated lists, where everything goes, don't survive

Michel

I absolutely didn't mean to suggest that different people necessarily do the two things, which are functions not roles. It's a dialectic,walking on two legs. Some kind of social division of labour (based in skill, personaility, institutional location, etc) is likely to offer itself, in principle all persons have an orientation to both functions.

Definitely, negative curating is a core part of stewarding

some people and forces actually want to destroy your commons

But the skills and temperament may mean that some folks pick up more on one than the other. They must be integrated in the collective.

Three notes in response to simon . . . First, I'm intentionally using the active transitive verb forms curating*ing* and steward*ing* not the abstract nounds curation and stewardship or the roles curator and steward. The former bcos it's abstract and I'm seeking descriptions in terms of material practices and use-values, the latter bcos it's a function-based dialectical conceptualisation that's needed, which shouldn't be ossified in a role structures.

Second, the distinction in a sentence: curating is oriented inwardly, to loving/nurturing/cultivating the material stuff of the commons, the resource base; stewarding is oriented outwardly, to disciplining the traffic between the commons and the practices of the rest of the economic pluriverse, including the lives of individual commoners and the various usages they might attempt.

Third . . no I'm not aware of literature on this, but have my antennae out. I'd be surprised if the Bollier/Helfrich oevre doesn't pick up on this, but don't know where. @michelbauwens1 do you?

I don't mike,

but I have a request to you or simon, when you feel satistied about the dialogue, an article on the curating/stewarding distintion would be very helpful for our wiki and blog,

Michel

I can't participate properly here (i.e. closely following the whole discussion), sorry; however I generally agree with the distinction you make @asimong between stewarding and curating.

FYI I have a work-in-progress formal definition for the verb steward, and just added one for curate, in MOT:

*steward: *

To steward is to persistently and comprehensively support one or more specific agents or resources.

curate:

To curate is to select, organize and steward resources, or copies of resources, of a specific type.

^ The new entry for curate is based mainly on the discussion here (thanks!) However, I have (for now at least) directly included the concept of stewardship i the entry for curation.

My definition for stewardship is rather strict/specialized, to distinguish it clearly from the concept of support.

Of course, my terminology is highly debatable. Questions and comments welcome, and thanks in advance for any further discussion here!

Great stuff, thank you both @michelbauwens1 and @mikeh8 for your comments here. I'll take this one step further, see if you follow me.

Michel, your analogy with invasive species provokes useful thinking, thank you. And naturally I would agree that stewarding of an ecosystem can involve curation in the negative sense of deselection of invasive species that threaten to disrupt or destroy the ecosystem commons. What I'd like to expand on is your comment "some people and forces actually want to destroy your commons, for all sorts of reasons".

Let me rephrase that to something that I can readily agree with. Some people sometimes (and may be a persistent and frequent habit) display behaviour patterns that violate commons values and tend to destroy commons value. What I'm longing for is the kind of attitude, which comes up often in spiritual traditions, that does not identify any individual him or herself as a member of an invasive species, but considers that it is their behaviour that is invasive or destructive. We are looking, if you like, at memes, rather than genes, in human culture.

And here's an article of faith: for any invasive or destructive behaviour pattern, there is a potential commons-based remedy. Given that article of faith, we can move from an attitude of rejection / expulsion / punishment to an attitude that leads us to search for what that remedy might be -- or better still, what the preventative measure might be to avoid the problem behaviour appearing in the first place; and then on to restorative approaches to justice, education, re-enculturation.

Please don't mistake what I'm saying here as starry-eyed idealism. I'm highly aware of the enormous political as well as cultural obstacles. But as far as is feasible and practical, (recognising that is isn't always,) I would like to live in a prefigurative society that adopts that article of faith as a guiding light.

It's partly to enable restorative approaches to invasive behaviour patterns that I am so clear in my own mind about the importance of the kind of personal knowledge that comes easiest through face-to-face interaction. Here we are again with the issues of intrapersonal and interpersonal commons, connecting with Denis Postle's work.

I'll be happy to write or co-write that article in due course, Michel!

Mike -- let's have an argument offline about spirituality and faith! :slight_smile:

dear Simon,

I agree with your take and with the potential with commons remedies,

but let me give you an example,

yesterday I met Simon Edhouse of bittunes, a system that uses bitcoin to create very inclusive music markets based on a open source foundation

he's supported by VC funder David Orban who funds network infrastructures

the first thing he said is: careful with security as the first thing the majors (music) will do is plant copyrighted music files in order to be able to sue you,

in this case, it doesn't really matter whether these people are evil or not, they could be really nice family people, they are just get paid to put other people in jail and destroy their projects in businesses

what matters is, do you have the defensive measures in place or not,

personally, I like Chinese ducks, yet 99% of the environmentalists in the flanders want to eradicate them as they are pushing out all the other ducks

this of course is a difficult decision about live beings

in our world it is simpler, we just want to avoid certain behaviours

Michel

Indeed, established interests will always seek ways to attack initiatives that seem threatening to their existence or (more exactly in a capitalist society) profitability. I don't want to ignore or minimise that at all. And as our society continues to spiral down into increasing inequality (seemingly unavoidable according to the likes of Piketty, until some pretty radical changes are made) there will always be people who succumb to financial incentives to do the ugly will of those in power (a bit like prostitution). When I talk about prefigurative, like some of the discussion about Occupy, I guess, I mean a restorative system within the group of people who are "signed up" to commons values. I hope that within a commons "ecosystem", there will be enough commons power to overcome the invasive behaviour patterns within the commoners themselves. I completely agree that we as commoners need to defend ourselves against hostile outsiders, including those who try to sneak inside under false pretences. Thus, back to the vital nature of face-to-face in depth knowledge and trust.

Perhaps more significant, in our culture, is that we aspiring commoners are bound on occasion to feel pressure to act against the commons. It is that temptation that needs to be addressed; those behaviours that need to be called out quickly, and restorative processes implemented.

I am under no illusion: restorative practices practiced only by self-identifying commoners cannot hope at this stage to be restorative to a large majority of people who have not yet arrived at any commitment to "secede from the broadcast". I guess that is where politics is (and here's to hoping that your political ambitions come to fruition, Michel!) but not where I am personally at present.

I think there are 2 polarities here,

one is the creation of high trust environments, the Enspiral way and also now the p2p foundation way, i.e. the functioning of our core group

second is the open source or trustless methodologies,

we try to the second, but though nearly everyday people are registering, there are not contributing,

using yes (65 million or so views to date),

to be honest, I have given up , I've reached the limits of what I can do

Thank you @michelbauwens1 for all you do! I hope you don't see it as failure that you can't curate an entire world of p2p information by yourself. We're all limited by the tools we use, and we do indeed need many more people to be contributing (and to be sufficiently motivated to contribute). We'll get there.

BTW I don't perceive any stark duality between a high trust environment such as Enspiral's (which I'm familiar with) and open source or 'trustless' methodologies. IMO all communities need filters and "immunity systems", sometimes creating different contribution roles and even different levels of contributor. Personally I'm still working to develop p2p community media network governance which (hopefully) creates sufficient motivation & responsibility to ensure sustainable constructive activity of all important types, including content curation.

I think we need both, and depending on context, one or the other is more important, so we have a larger trustless world for scaled up interactions, and smaller one's that provide for deeper human needs,

Michel

@asimong @michelbauwens1 I’m going to take a break from this thread, have other things to juggle. So state of play . . .
- I’m looking forward to co-authoring a piece on curating and stewarding.
- Clearly the discussion tips over into ‘ethics’, with stewarding having to deal with malicious actions, foolish weakness, stupidity, prejudice, lack of care and attention, etc etc. I’m quite reluctant to settle for a discussion that rests in abstractions like ‘values’ or in ethical schemes, and would want to take things forward in terms that are more descriptive of actual cultivatable, demonstrable forms of practice. This definitely goes over into practice and skill ‘in-here’, in the heart-body-mind (the intrapersonal); and thence into the interpersonal (as one of the main things that the in-here is constantly responding to).
- I regard intrapersonal commons as central in liberation, and in building a society of caring-curating commons. But I’m not sure that Denis Postle is the person to go with here, just because he happens to have coined the term ‘psycommons’. I think he thinks that more people are saner and less in need of ‘work’ than I do! Yes I’m a pessimist (of an optimistic kind). Also, I’m very far from convinced that co-counselling (the go-to solution for Denis) is the obvious ‘answer’ to problems of unwholesome emotions in (or against) commoning.
- This is complicated stuff, hard to find language for, hard to ground-out (because these things typically are so abstracted and over-generalised), not easy to agree across temperaments. I would be glad to see how far we can get with writing about stewarding and curating, as broad, dialectically-intertwined modes of practice, before we also have to write another article about handling the negative character of species humans, selves included. This is difficult water: roots of behaviour, ethics, spirituality, faith, justice. I’d like to get something simpler written before diving in there.
- Regarding the latter, though, I need a better understanding of what Simon is meaning by restorative. I use the term myself and regard it as very significant, but I sense that the two usages may differ somewhat. At root, I understand restorative practices to be grounded in enabling skilful action ‘in-here’, in the face of one’s own greed, hatred, delusion, incontinence, inattention, etc etc; and I regard these as matters of practical skill (cultivateable and demonstrable, experienceable qualities of the heart), rather than abstract ‘values’. This is grounded broadly in dhamma thought. Secular dhamma. I guess, where Simon said “for any invasive or destructive behaviour pattern, there is a potential commons-based remedy”, I would say that there’s a commons-building remedy. We may mean the same thing. I certainly would be thinking here of transformed relations of production of the heart-mind (the in-here forces of motivation and desiring), held as a commons.
- I acknowledge Simon and Michel’s strong inclination to face-to-face interaction as a foundation for ethical relationship, well-judged response, trust and well-founded communication and collaboration. I do recognise its importance and accept that some things are impossible without direct experience of others sharing parts of the practice, but I also want to note that the strength of this as a need varies substantially between folks with different temperaments. (This is usually expressed as introversion/extraversion, though these are flaky notions and I wouldn’t want to boost that classification.) I don’t regard face-to-face as bedrock or an unquestioned norm, just as a significant preference of many, to be kindly accommodated as part of diversity. This is a melancholic speaking. We’re all human. Some people are intensely oral/aural, other are really happy on the page. One of the people I’ve trusted most in my life is someone I never met. Yes, a pluriverse.

Simon, I think we may meet at Open2018? Not long now. Let’s pick things up there (face to face) after sleeping on this a while?

thanks for this recap,

I hope I can one day write something about my own perspective on curating and stewarding, after 10 years of practice at the p2p foundation and 30 years overall,

Michel