basic info

• congres homepage - http://opencongress.omweb.org/modules/wakka/HomePage
• event wepage at tate britain (see attachement)
• congress programme - http://opencongress.omweb.org/modules/wakka/programme

rough pre-taste of the session

• critique of key concepts that the open organizations framework operates within
• introduction to open-org framework
• its roots and its possible future directions.

• invitation to collegues who share some of the open-org values
  • Lisa Haskel, Saul Albert and Stefan Szczelkun were invited. all turned up

core of the invitation i sent (verbatim)

I'd like to invite you to talk about your experiences of doing
organizational work (and that of producers and facilitators, or whatever
you would call your work yourself) using openness and transparency - and
working on principle of regarding "participants as producers or
potential producers"[1].

You work is in the field that conference wants to address, yet it shares
some "ways of doing" (values) with the open-org framework. 

References for invited collegues

• [1] http://mediaartprojects.org.uk/reports/tech_nicks/conc.html (Lisa)
• http://docs.metamute.com/view/Home/UniversityOfOpeness (Saul)
• http://stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/ (Stefan)
• http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/UoHc - Historification Committee (Saul)

what actually happened, i.e. the questions

Puzzle called "What openness? Which Boundaries?" is slightly less blury, that's for sure. Certain key intersections are becoming visible, and that shows where to dig next.

an important note!

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note: All those difficult question are not listed below to make our life misreable, nor to expose how much is there to be done, nor to create noise (which is often the case when lots of unaswered question are asked concurrently). They are here because i touched on all of these in some way during the open congress session, and during the interview after the event (mute writer and event documenter asked me some fantastic questions about some issues i deliberately avoided during the session). The reason for touching on all those issues is that they've been occupying my mind last couple of years, but I was unable, and still am in many parts, to even give an outlines of further investigations. Also, these questions are not here to be answered with solutions, but to challenge the relations in which our framework stands with them.

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other theories and practices of openness?

• how does our notion of openness stands in the relation to other politicaly charged practices and theoriese of "openness" (practices that called itself open, and theories that supported them)?
• how do those other concepts inform own understanding of our openness?
• is "open organizations" thus justiable name at all?

boundaries and their comparison?

• what are boundaries of those other practices&theories of openness?
• what are boundaries of open-org openness?
  • how do those stand in comparison with others?

political implications and their comparison?

• what are political implications of openness as preached by those other practices/theories?
• what are political implications of our own concept of openness

further unpacking of our own concept of openness?

• nation state, capitalist-parliamentary state and openness
  • how do we differ?

in more detail ...

• beaurocratization
  • how does our openness stand in relation to it?

• laws and institutional legal frameworks
  • how does our openness stand in relation to it?

• private property
  • how does our openness stand in relation to it?
  • does land ownerships needs a category on its own, or can it fit in here?
  • what is the intersection (as in maths set theory) of permaculture's and marxists' critique of land ownership

• our opennes and parliaments
  • i'd say our concepts reject representation, in that sense:
    • what is our critique of parliaments

I'd say that we understand that both

1. volunteer/activist form of organizing that stands on the shoulder of free software collaboration ways
2. hierarchycal model of political parties (left/righ/green) and capitalist businesses

are not good enough. However, in the light of success, and continous expansion, of capitalism to bring about economic and social order that's unaceptable to us, how do we reflect on past efforts -- and mostly failures -- to bring about organizational system that share some of our organizational values (for example: anarchist workers collectives, self-management in Yugoslavia, cooperatives^?, Paris commune and russian revolution^? that advocated radical form of delegation instead of representation). In addition, was there ever a radical social change that we would support that was not strictly hierachical? If yes, let's have those cases studies. If not, may some special powers of imagination, speculation and dialectics be with us!

and some even more hard core questions that ought to be dealt with

• our openness and religion
• our openness and human rights
• our openness and past socialist/communist revolutions and states

where does out concept stand in relation to laws and intelectual property?

let's start from immediate issue in our own work

should we use Libre Commons instead of creative commons ?

Read commns withoug commonality as a starting point in this discussion

THEN, consider droping CC, droping our copyright entirely, and instead using Libre Commons. That's what i feel like after finnaly finding something that makes some sense (libre commons), since CC never made much sense to me, but it the least bad solution of all that we knew about.

methodology: how do we produce knowledge for the framework?

This is on of the issues that i tried deliberately not to bring up in the session at open congress, but i was proven wrong in taking such patronizing approach (why not theory proper!?) by both Stefan and Saul, who both, in different ways and contexts, brought the issue of methodology up (i'll document later what they actually said).

See MethodologyHome

Video footage of session + audio of the interview

Session was recorded with 2/3 video cameras. Interview was recorded on a mp3 recorder. I'll do my best to get those recordings unedited.

New possible open-org modules

Historification working group

See ModHistorificationWg - to maintain and uphold the reputation of an open organization, as it is inserted into various historical records. Practiced by and taken from University of Openess).

Theoretical working group

see ModTheoryWg - production of theory is necessary for the production of new practices.
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