New Power & Place (part 1)
S1, E3: New local power. Plus: where's the new power in the May elections? Is the 'open movement' doomed? And what happened with that Amazon unionisation?
Welcome to the third edition of The New Power Review.
Pubs are back in England, so we’ve got a heart-warming piece from Vice on community pub ownership, which leads a whole section of interesting new-power-related local projects. It’s election day on 6 May, so we look at two crowdsourcing projects aiming to shift more power to citizens. And we’ve a thoughtful critique of the ‘open movement’ — and a roundup of other delicious, snackable content.
Cheers 🍻 and forward this email on to your bubble, rule-of-six outdoor-drinking pals, or anyone who needs to understand new power.
New power and place (part one)
This month the new power project is looking at places! Where we live is important to us and who has power matters. From official sources of power like the council to new kinds of online community groups like mutual aid groups, where does power lie? Got examples of new power in places? What’s new in organising, co-creation, local platforms? Let us know by reply to this email.
🍺 As pubs in England start to reopen, Vice shared the success story of The Ivy House, now a cooperatively owned boozer. Increasingly, the value of land that a pub sits on is worth more than the pub — but if we don’t want to lose these important local hubs, taking them into community ownership is one answer. This can start with a council designating a pub as an ‘asset of community value’, giving communities a chance to get themselves as organised as you know the property developers will be.
⚽️ Newcastle United Supporters Trust is fundraising to be ready to buy (some of) the club. The fund will be overseen by four ‘guardians’, one of whom is the local MP, Ian Mearns. A tiny fraction of football clubs in England are fan-owned, something that’s the norm in Germany, thanks to the 50+1 regulation. Newcastle legend Alan Shearer was quick to support the plan, sharing the Trust’s uplifting launch video — ‘it’s about the pride we have in our city; the pride we have in our area.’
🥕 Kindling Farm — a planned 128-acre community-owned ‘agro-forestry’ farm outside Manchester — is raising £650k to launch. The project is backed by Coops UK and hopes to help fight the climate emergency, pioneer sustainable food production and build community. As well as that enormous social return, they’re also aiming for a 3% financial return on their crowd-investment.
🍩 Tens of local communities have been inspired by Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ — so how can those areas best support each other? Raworth’s writing and speeches outline a goal of co-creating 21st century economies that meet the needs of all people while not going beyond the means of the living planet. Raworth and others established the Doughnut Economics Action Lab — to ‘co-create a new economy’, which is now hiring a Cities & Regions Lead. It’s all about channelling new power. Their values include ideas such as ‘unleash the power of peer-to-peer inspiration...create big ripples’ as well as ‘don’t be the movement — join the movement: create tools that can be integrated into the work of others, to connect with and build the wider movement for economic transformation’. They also identify challenges that speak to many new power projects, such as how to build a decentralised and diverse team when you’re an English-speaking organisation based in the UK.
🏡 A new ‘tiny house’ coop has been chosen as a preferred bidder on a plot of land to be sold by Bristol City Council. Tiny House Bristol say they are ‘co-creating a regenerative, systems thinking, community-led alternative’ to the housing market and are now putting together a planning application for their first settlement. The tiny-house movement aims to change consumerist mindsets (if you have less space, you buy less to fill it), while the co-housing movement hopes to use the built environment to best help communities form. Tiny House Bristol combines them both.
Election day is coming...
🗞 A Bristol newspaper is trialling a Citizens Agenda project for the local elections: they’ll report on — wait for it — what citizens want to know. The Bristol Cable, co-owned by 2,500 members, is applying its cooperative approach to its 6 May election coverage. First they will survey people in Bristol to find out what they care about, then they will get the views of the candidates on those issues. It sounds obvious, but there has been a problem with ‘horse-race’ reporting in elections — who’s ahead, who’s behind — placing power with the journalists, rather than an effort to focus on citizens’ needs, political accountability and those things that democracy’s supposed to deliver. The Dublin Inquirer tested the Citizens Agenda approach in Ireland’s 2019 elections.
🙋♀️ Volunteers have crowdsourced the names and parties of all 6 May’s election candidates. In one of those things you assume the state does in some way, but in fact it doesn’t — a group of volunteers at Democracy Club crowdsources data on the UK’s elections: every ballot and every candidate. This distributed solution has solved a significant data problem, and met voters’ expectations for this information to be online, which more formal, old power institutions like the BBC were unable to solve. But — plot twist — only some of those old power institutions make use of this data: The Electoral Commission’s election lookup service uses the open data, but BBC News’ website doesn’t — why not?
The Open Society and its Frenemies
🔓 ‘Make things open, it makes things better’ is one of the design principles of the Government Digital Service. It’s a philosophy that has grown up with the web — not least via Tim ‘this is for everyone’ Berners-Lee. GDS was set up in 2011 — more utopian times, perhaps, before the tech companies came along and attempted to enclose everything (see last week’s edition).
💰 360Giving is a good example of the open approach. It’s a UK charity that encourages charitable trusts and grantmakers to publish open, standardised data on their grantmaking. This open data makes it easier to find out what money is going where, with data from over 500k grants — £100bn’s worth — from 192 grantmakers. 360Giving says: ‘When funders publish information on who, where and what they fund in the 360Giving Data Standard it means they are sharing it in a way that others can access and use for free. Because the data is standardised, it can be looked at and compared all together, helping us to see and understand grantmaking across the UK. Having this information means funding can be more informed and effective.’ 360Giving is currently recruiting a Policy & Engagement Manager.
❓ But openness isn’t a guarantee of making things better, argues the thinktank Open Future Europe. They published this smartly presented theory piece on the failure of the ‘open movement’, suggesting that ‘sharing economy’ projects or open content licensing are unable to escape existing power imbalances, or in the worst case, risk increasing power inequalities. The thinktank argues for a kind of new manifesto for open, one that better understands power, and calls for European leadership — from civil society and the Commission in its next digital strategy.
Bar snacks
🫂 The power of community gets overlooked in favour of scale and growth says former Googler, Sarah Drinkwater, writing on why tech companies should hire more community-focused roles: ‘Would Facebook be in a better place if there had been a Chief Community Officer all along?’
🎟 Event organisers should think twice about using the Chatham House rule. ‘Many interpretations of the Chatham House Rule produce summary documents that don’t allow for an understanding of power dynamics or the incentives of speakers. It matters who said what!’ Kendra Albert argues that the rule disadvantages those attendees who might need recognition for their ideas.
👹 Salesforce has a staff team whose job is to try to ensure the product isn’t used for evil. The $200bn database company’s Office of Ethical and Human Use has ‘a mandate to ensure that Salesforce technology is used to help, not harm, society and uphold the basic human rights of every human being. The company is recruiting policy leads who ‘will have an understanding of the potential societal repercussions of emerging technologies...’. Sounds good, but who is going to win in a battle between the Sales team and the Ethical Use team?
💪 Organisers in an Amazon warehouse in the US lost a vote on unionisation. As covered in previous Reviews, this fight was seen as totemic — Amazon ‘fought dirty’ — but US public support for unions is at an all-time high and organisers remain optimistic. Onwards!
Thanks for reading. Let us know what you think — and send us your examples of new power in local areas! Just reply to this email.
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