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Open Organizations
http://www.open-organizations.org/ The idea of Open Organizations was born from the work on the network of independent (of corporate and state capital) media, Indymedia. It was not created as explicitly politically outward, but as a result of desire for more efficient and more radical internal political group work, desire for improvement, criticism and supplementation of methodologies, which made it possible for Indymedia to become a network with over one hundred branches within less then three years. At the same time, our aim is to establish an organizational platform which will enable consistent political engagement, without simultaneously destroying the potentials we are witnessing: dynamic and network operations, a high level of autonomy, solidarity through global use of resources, and above all, reproduction of cultural capital1 which constantly strengthens group and individual network participants. Of course, every definition of politics contains power, i.e. social relations established by it. Since the theory and practice of models of organized work, including those related to Open organizations, deal also with methods controlling the distribution of power within organizations themselves, the question of the relation between internal and outward policies of organizations, at least according to our experience, is the very question of motives and wishes of those developing such theories. How else can we expect a consistent establishment of processes on global and regional level (maybe the state level, as a transitional one) , if we are not able to establish them on the group, organizational and network level? This is precisely the organizational issue presently being forced upon us, as a problem, from several directions of alter-globalisation2 movement: unions (which would, due to their shortsighted pragmatism, make a deal with the devil for their share) and the remnants of the left are pushing their closed and mostly strictly hierarchical model (whose flaws would fill in the rest of this text), while activists groups rooted in direct action offer an anarchist and politically disfunctional utopia (problems with invisible hierarchies, lack of responsibility lines, inability to act strategically, see the Joe Freeman text) which sometimes renders even the remnants of the classical leftists in Britain useful, which is a real achievement; credit for last years largest protest in the British history (two million people against the war in Iraq) is mostly given to the efficient organizing of classical parties and their activists included in the process on the occasion. Certainly, such organizational differences constantly produce conflicts, the last of which is currently growing3 here in Britain, on the issue of the European Social Forum - ESF which is to be held in London in the autumn. While the left still holds to their unchanged ideological principles, ignoring social changes, anarchy-based collectives practice a suicidal idea – suicidal, since it blocks their development – that there is a non-ideological position – their position. In such climate of trench warfare, on the political outskirts, happens our development of the theory of Open Organizations. Such organizations need not necessarily be open to public at any moment (the name is not perfect, but at the moment we can't think of a a better one), but they must never close the door to the radical rethinking of their reality, nor give in to the perceptions judging such rethinking or declaring it impossible. Otherwise, they themselves would become a closed system without adjustment and improvement mechanisms. Perhaps we could conclude: potentially successful political projects conducted through static organizational models are doomed to impossibility of realization of their potentials. As a superficial observation, from the point of view of the South Slavs after fifty years of socialism, this might be valid. Revolutionary and brave membership and leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ) – only twenty percent of the original party members survived the Second World War – within few decades grew into an organization which, without much struggle, handed over the power to domestic and emigrant nationalists and pro-fascists, in other words, former enemies. Or, to be more precise, a part of the KPJ from the 80's transformed into something directly opposite to its original principles. Contrary to conclusions of an extensive research of Dejan Jović4, I am tempted to think that the radical thinking which lead to the establishment of communist parties could not have developed through the kind of organizational structures – in other words internal politics – historically inhereted from the former (and contemporary, from the present angle) regimes of domination. Or, as Michael Foucault said, when discussing revolution and popular justice with the Maoists: "[...] the forms of state apparatus which we inherit from the burgeois apparatus cannot in any way serve as model for the new forms of organisation."5 One of widespread reminders of the issues we deal with is the text by Joe Freeman from 1970, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"6. Widely quoted and discussed, but in practice mostly ignored: perhaps due to complexity of the problem, and due to the ease with which the elites (according to the Freeman definition) maintain itself whilst, from the background and without any responsibility, controlling organizations. True, if the openness – even the internal one, if not the external too – is any measure, or precondition, of potentially more advanced organizational model, and if we may generalize alter-globalisation movement through Indymedia, then the things are getting better: at the beginning received with disbelief, the project of open documentation (Indymedia Documentation Project) has become an important point of the global network collective work, and its number of visitors and usage are on the constant increase7. Generally, the idea of open organizing proved in practice to be efficient in the Free Software movement. This established culture of knowledge exchange and, as its direct and invaluable consequence, provision of freedom to certain8 means of production, without which the platform would be hardly imaginable in practice (too much energy would be used on distribution of information), found its ground in anarchist activist circles, i.e. in their networked and extremely autonomous functioning, as well as in radical view of private property. What the practice of Free Software lacks and what should be constructed (hence Open Organizations), is a methodology which will provide for wider, social, generic scope of activity. So that "the genuine political emancipation for equal and free collective production"9 may be applied generally, on any domain. After all, V.I.Lenin back in 1917. called for10 what Richard Stallman in the 1980's decided to realize – in his field of work and in his manner – and what is today proudly used and actively contributed to by many political activists. It is interesting that although the Free Software and Linux are projects with highly autonomous models of production, as thus closest to the traditional anarchist organizing, they are still headed by leaders and their assistants, i.e. a certain hierarchical structure. However, the complex ideological web lying at the heart of this paradox, or merely an unusual but efficient combination – whose unravelling, it seems to me, potentially bears the key for the future development of the theory and practice of radically left oriented political engagement – is too comprehensive subject for this text. In short, the Framework for Open Organizations is an effort to construct initial blueprints of such action, which will enable the creation of new "strategic collective subjects"9 – based mostly on recognition and grouping of methodologies and analyses tested in practice, as well as knowledge available through synthesis. As completeness should not be the aim at this moment, the practice itself will deduct and complement with respect to a specific context and scope of organizations or networks using the framework. The development is still in early stages and it will take a lot of time before we become able to take a firm grip on certain clearly problematic points of our theory, above all: how to reconcile the Western and the Eastern (Oriental) understanding of the world; and whether the implemented Open Organizations, through radical change of the process of production, consumption and use of the collective, could mean the beginning of the end of the economic exploitation i.e. is it possible only through radical change of processes, and which processes?, to radically change the state of a given system11. These are all, of course, big and pretentious questions, but from which, in our opinion, there is no escape. Main document authors are: Richard Malter(UK), Benjamin Geer(USA) and myself. Recently, Ricardo Stuven(Chile), with the help from few people, translated some documents into Spanish. Need for the project arose at the end of the year 2001, through local and global work on Indymedia, when Richard Malter and i, while trying out diverse methodologies of collective work, were faced with the resistance that came out of rigid understandings of those methodologies, and with lack of understanding of their link with declared, political, aims and implicit consequences. The Framework had few public presentations12, recently at the London Social Forum – LSF 13. The main document we're currently working on is “Introduction to Open Organizations”14. First version ready for public distribution and practical implementation should be completed by the end of this year. The work on Open organizations is advancing in slow pace through the e-mail list: http://lists.socialtools.net/wws/info/openorg-dev . Besides the original work language, English, you can also write to the list in French, Spanish or Croatian – which will be translated into English.
http://lists.socialtools.net/wws/arc/socialtools-help/2004-02/msg00004.html [4] Dejan Jović, Death of Yugoslavia, Prometej, 2003, Jović claims that the Yugoslav political elite "believing in the concept of withering away of the state decentralized and weakened state functions to the extent that the state became incapable to withstand internal and external challenges" [5] Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge - Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, edited by Collin Gordon, Pearson 1980, pp 27. [6] http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html [7] http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Main/WebStatistics [8] Electronic networks which make the Internet are still almost entirely owned by the capital. However, this could slowly start to change with new technologies of wireless networking and increase of the ad-hoc routing protocol implementations: http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2010 [9] Marcell Mars & Tom Medak, "I đavo i govedo", Labinary 000000101, 2003. [10] V.I.Lenin, Abolition of Commercial Secrecy, Lenin's Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 25, 1964, pp. 65-6, or Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the gates - a selected writings of Lenin from 1917, pp.82, and at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/06.htm [11] Minutes of our last virtual working meeting, where we only started to discuss these topics: http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/MeeTing04 [12] http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/PreSentations [13] http://www.londonsocialforum.org/oct4 and
http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/PreLsfOct2003 [14] http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/IntroToOpenOrg
-- ToniPrug
http://www.open-organizations.org/ The idea of Open Organizations was born from the work on the network of independent (of corporate and state capital) media, Indymedia. It was not created as explicitly politically outward, but as a result of desire for more efficient and more radical internal political group work, desire for improvement, criticism and supplementation of methodologies, which made it possible for Indymedia to become a network with over one hundred branches within less then three years. At the same time, our aim is to establish an organizational platform which will enable consistent political engagement, without simultaneously destroying the potentials we are witnessing: dynamic and network operations, a high level of autonomy, solidarity through global use of resources, and above all, reproduction of cultural capital1 which constantly strengthens group and individual network participants. Of course, every definition of politics contains power, i.e. social relations established by it. Since the theory and practice of models of organized work, including those related to Open organizations, deal also with methods controlling the distribution of power within organizations themselves, the question of the relation between internal and outward policies of organizations, at least according to our experience, is the very question of motives and wishes of those developing such theories. How else can we expect a consistent establishment of processes on global and regional level (maybe the state level, as a transitional one) , if we are not able to establish them on the group, organizational and network level? This is precisely the organizational issue presently being forced upon us, as a problem, from several directions of alter-globalisation2 movement: unions (which would, due to their shortsighted pragmatism, make a deal with the devil for their share) and the remnants of the left are pushing their closed and mostly strictly hierarchical model (whose flaws would fill in the rest of this text), while activists groups rooted in direct action offer an anarchist and politically disfunctional utopia (problems with invisible hierarchies, lack of responsibility lines, inability to act strategically, see the Joe Freeman text) which sometimes renders even the remnants of the classical leftists in Britain useful, which is a real achievement; credit for last years largest protest in the British history (two million people against the war in Iraq) is mostly given to the efficient organizing of classical parties and their activists included in the process on the occasion. Certainly, such organizational differences constantly produce conflicts, the last of which is currently growing3 here in Britain, on the issue of the European Social Forum - ESF which is to be held in London in the autumn. While the left still holds to their unchanged ideological principles, ignoring social changes, anarchy-based collectives practice a suicidal idea – suicidal, since it blocks their development – that there is a non-ideological position – their position. In such climate of trench warfare, on the political outskirts, happens our development of the theory of Open Organizations. Such organizations need not necessarily be open to public at any moment (the name is not perfect, but at the moment we can't think of a a better one), but they must never close the door to the radical rethinking of their reality, nor give in to the perceptions judging such rethinking or declaring it impossible. Otherwise, they themselves would become a closed system without adjustment and improvement mechanisms. Perhaps we could conclude: potentially successful political projects conducted through static organizational models are doomed to impossibility of realization of their potentials. As a superficial observation, from the point of view of the South Slavs after fifty years of socialism, this might be valid. Revolutionary and brave membership and leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ) – only twenty percent of the original party members survived the Second World War – within few decades grew into an organization which, without much struggle, handed over the power to domestic and emigrant nationalists and pro-fascists, in other words, former enemies. Or, to be more precise, a part of the KPJ from the 80's transformed into something directly opposite to its original principles. Contrary to conclusions of an extensive research of Dejan Jović4, I am tempted to think that the radical thinking which lead to the establishment of communist parties could not have developed through the kind of organizational structures – in other words internal politics – historically inhereted from the former (and contemporary, from the present angle) regimes of domination. Or, as Michael Foucault said, when discussing revolution and popular justice with the Maoists: "[...] the forms of state apparatus which we inherit from the burgeois apparatus cannot in any way serve as model for the new forms of organisation."5 One of widespread reminders of the issues we deal with is the text by Joe Freeman from 1970, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"6. Widely quoted and discussed, but in practice mostly ignored: perhaps due to complexity of the problem, and due to the ease with which the elites (according to the Freeman definition) maintain itself whilst, from the background and without any responsibility, controlling organizations. True, if the openness – even the internal one, if not the external too – is any measure, or precondition, of potentially more advanced organizational model, and if we may generalize alter-globalisation movement through Indymedia, then the things are getting better: at the beginning received with disbelief, the project of open documentation (Indymedia Documentation Project) has become an important point of the global network collective work, and its number of visitors and usage are on the constant increase7. Generally, the idea of open organizing proved in practice to be efficient in the Free Software movement. This established culture of knowledge exchange and, as its direct and invaluable consequence, provision of freedom to certain8 means of production, without which the platform would be hardly imaginable in practice (too much energy would be used on distribution of information), found its ground in anarchist activist circles, i.e. in their networked and extremely autonomous functioning, as well as in radical view of private property. What the practice of Free Software lacks and what should be constructed (hence Open Organizations), is a methodology which will provide for wider, social, generic scope of activity. So that "the genuine political emancipation for equal and free collective production"9 may be applied generally, on any domain. After all, V.I.Lenin back in 1917. called for10 what Richard Stallman in the 1980's decided to realize – in his field of work and in his manner – and what is today proudly used and actively contributed to by many political activists. It is interesting that although the Free Software and Linux are projects with highly autonomous models of production, as thus closest to the traditional anarchist organizing, they are still headed by leaders and their assistants, i.e. a certain hierarchical structure. However, the complex ideological web lying at the heart of this paradox, or merely an unusual but efficient combination – whose unravelling, it seems to me, potentially bears the key for the future development of the theory and practice of radically left oriented political engagement – is too comprehensive subject for this text. In short, the Framework for Open Organizations is an effort to construct initial blueprints of such action, which will enable the creation of new "strategic collective subjects"9 – based mostly on recognition and grouping of methodologies and analyses tested in practice, as well as knowledge available through synthesis. As completeness should not be the aim at this moment, the practice itself will deduct and complement with respect to a specific context and scope of organizations or networks using the framework. The development is still in early stages and it will take a lot of time before we become able to take a firm grip on certain clearly problematic points of our theory, above all: how to reconcile the Western and the Eastern (Oriental) understanding of the world; and whether the implemented Open Organizations, through radical change of the process of production, consumption and use of the collective, could mean the beginning of the end of the economic exploitation i.e. is it possible only through radical change of processes, and which processes?, to radically change the state of a given system11. These are all, of course, big and pretentious questions, but from which, in our opinion, there is no escape. Main document authors are: Richard Malter(UK), Benjamin Geer(USA) and myself. Recently, Ricardo Stuven(Chile), with the help from few people, translated some documents into Spanish. Need for the project arose at the end of the year 2001, through local and global work on Indymedia, when Richard Malter and i, while trying out diverse methodologies of collective work, were faced with the resistance that came out of rigid understandings of those methodologies, and with lack of understanding of their link with declared, political, aims and implicit consequences. The Framework had few public presentations12, recently at the London Social Forum – LSF 13. The main document we're currently working on is “Introduction to Open Organizations”14. First version ready for public distribution and practical implementation should be completed by the end of this year. The work on Open organizations is advancing in slow pace through the e-mail list: http://lists.socialtools.net/wws/info/openorg-dev . Besides the original work language, English, you can also write to the list in French, Spanish or Croatian – which will be translated into English.
==================================================
[1] Toni Prug, "On Networked Cultural Capital: recognition, accessibility and non scarcity of power“, 2002
http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/OpenOrgNetCultCapital
[2] Anti-globalisation movement is a contra-productive term.
For discussion on use of solely constructive terms see Richard Malter, "For Positive Terms and Ideas", 2002
http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/PositiveTermsIdeas
[3] Oscar Reyes, alternative report from the meeting of the ESF organizational committee, February 6, 2004 http://lists.socialtools.net/wws/arc/socialtools-help/2004-02/msg00004.html [4] Dejan Jović, Death of Yugoslavia, Prometej, 2003, Jović claims that the Yugoslav political elite "believing in the concept of withering away of the state decentralized and weakened state functions to the extent that the state became incapable to withstand internal and external challenges" [5] Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge - Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, edited by Collin Gordon, Pearson 1980, pp 27. [6] http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html [7] http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Main/WebStatistics [8] Electronic networks which make the Internet are still almost entirely owned by the capital. However, this could slowly start to change with new technologies of wireless networking and increase of the ad-hoc routing protocol implementations: http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2010 [9] Marcell Mars & Tom Medak, "I đavo i govedo", Labinary 000000101, 2003. [10] V.I.Lenin, Abolition of Commercial Secrecy, Lenin's Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 25, 1964, pp. 65-6, or Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the gates - a selected writings of Lenin from 1917, pp.82, and at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/06.htm [11] Minutes of our last virtual working meeting, where we only started to discuss these topics: http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/MeeTing04 [12] http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/PreSentations [13] http://www.londonsocialforum.org/oct4 and
http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/PreLsfOct2003 [14] http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/IntroToOpenOrg
|
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. To contact us, please use the openorg-dev mailing list. |
-- ToniPrug
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Main.EssayOoIntroEng moved from Main.EssayOoIntro on 05 Mar 2004 - 16:50 by ToniPrug - put it back