DesCentroPrixArs2007
Origem: CoLab
DesCentro > DesCentroPrixArs2007
Inscrição do DesCentro no prix ars electronica 2007, categoria Digital Communities
Referência: MetaReciclagem ganhou mençao honrosa em 2006. Texto enviado foi esse (http://metareciclagem.org/material/prixars2006.html).
| Conteúdo |
Titel / Name of Project*
DesCentro - nó emergente de ações colaborativas
Type of Project*
* X community project * social software * publication * other
Description of your project*
Web Address of the Project
Project Details
DesCentro is a de-centralised organizational node of colaborative actions, inserted at a broad context of brazilian mediatic activism. This context is formed by a series of organizations, researchers, activists, teachers, hackers and artists in all regions of the country. Formally, DesCentro is a bureaucratic toolkit, an NGO under brasilian law, that can apply for fundraising, maintain offices, buy equipments, and hire collaborators. These tools will be used by DesCentro's broader network to collaboratively create, structure, execute and document actions and projects related with technology, knowledge, media, art and social inclusion, as well as promote effective exchange between these projects and national and international partners.
De-centralized nodes in different locations of Brasil are establishing centers where research and practice will be undertaken. These nodes will articulate and act together globally, via an online collaborative environment: writing projects, sharing resources, and deciding what to do, when, and with whom. DesCentro is organized by two councils. Conselho Consultivo is a bigger consultive board, where representatives from the larger network will discuss project ideas and execution of approved projects, as well as reflect on the objectives and workings of DesCentro as a whole. Conselho Deliberativo is a smaller executive body, responsible for the execution of ideas approved by the consultation council, going through the necessary bureaucratic work, handling fiscal matters, and organizing activity reports.
DesCentro has 3 action fronts: meta-research, context research, and space invaders. In meta-research we study and adapt our organizational model, the decision-making processes, the way different nodes work together, and how we create, fund and structure projects collaboratively, so that together we are more than the sum of our parts. Context research takes care of understanding and documenting our context and history, as independent groups of researchers, teachers, hackers, activists and artists, as well as our work related with autonomous communities, the government, academy, and industry. Space invaders is a practical strategy of symbolic squatting in different spaces we occupy, be it by developing collaboration software for our portal, by organizing a festival like the two editions of Submidialogia, by writing, translating and publishing books and papers, by attending national and international conferences, or by executing the many different projects suggested by our network.
- event production: seminars, conferences, festivals, meetings;
- publishing;
- organizing workshops;
- collaboration in research projects;
- development and management of online collaboration and remote work tools;
- creation of artistic processes and products;
- artistic residencies;
- public access to all the produced intellectual or processual material, with the use of open licenses;
- policy-making.
Objectives:*
What is the objective of your project? What is the common goal, topic, interest, etc. of the community?
DesCentro's main goal is to develop a structural and methodological approach to optimize a network that has been working together for more than five years, avoiding the downsides of common institutionalization. That is to be accomplished by suggesting new perspectives even on the role of institutions, and pointing to solutions that take into account a de-centralised, non-hierarchical, fluid and dynamic organization. In this sense, even the way DesCentro was established is a deep criticism to the well-known NGO "show business".
Another situation DesCentro intends to face is providing ways for people to carry out independent research and practice and still earn their living, respecting the principles of collaboration, de-centralisation, diversity and freedom.
DesCentro's main areas of interest as a distributed infrastructure for research and practice are:
- universal sharing of information and knowledge;
- universal access to media;
- experimentation both with content and the media itself;
- educational practices;
- free cultural and artistic expression;
- critical cultural production, justified by goals of social transformation;
- defense, preservation and conservation of the environment and promotion of sustainability;
- organizational autonomy and self-organization;
- collaboration, cooperation, collective works creation and management;
- intense exchange and re-location of people.
Language and context:
In which cultural and geographic context is the project rooted?
Brasil is a country with continental dimensions, a huge diversity and big contrasts. There are a lot of critical media actions and research taking place in different localities. DesCentro acts as an integration tool for people and groups in these different scenarios, helping on articulating both a national network and insert these people and groups in international networks. DesCentro is also a resistance to the established model of NGO's that profit from our social context. We will not be yet-another-NGO. We will not raise funds only to create enormous festivals where our funders will be served expensive whisky dinners as they watch poor kids perform on stage. We will resist this scenario and present an alternative.
According to the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, it was the slavery mentality, of the casa grande e senzala (big house and slave quarters) that fundamented Brazilian's modus vivendi. Based on a type of political, economic and social organization artificially maintained by an external force, the Brazilian state brought more continuity than rupture with the model instated by the European colonizer:
"When the independence is declared, the local dominant class nationalizes itself with joy, preparing to profit with the autonomous regime, very much like it profited with the colonial. (...) It represented the translation of a political regency, from the king to his son, now settled in Rio de Janeiro, where he would negotiate the national independence with the hegemonic potency of its time, England"
It is in this sense that cultural, economic and social traces, forged by four hundred years of slavery, structuring itself as a repressive and controlling political-administrative machine, that Brazilian power always benefited an elite, establishing that certain attitudes of the rural patriarchy soon would be common to all the classes as a ideal conducting norm.
By forcibly urbanizing millions of workers and effectively shutting down the knowledge of our rural and indigenous population, of their biodiversity, the richness of our heterogeneous cultural life against the rational systems of organization of work and life, it occurred slowly a complete depersonalization of the Brazilian people and an understanding of its role, inside a society ever more "developed" for a few. A monoculture (agrarian, cultural etc) was stated everywhere in the country, and this homogeneity can testified, for example, by the Portuguese language, adopted freely in all regions.
In modern times, this archaic (des)organization encountered a new form, the military dictatorship. The recent Brazilian democracy inherited from the military period serious economic problems, aggravated by a series of huge external financings (to build national infrastructure). The period called “Brazilian Miracle” actually culminated in the crisis of the external debt in 1982, when the debts, inflation and social tensions started to disseminate all around the country. During the 90s Brasil registered the highest inflation rates in its history, 2639% a year.
Those tensions of course aggravated the social structure. Disparate income distribution caused violence, a great number of abandoned or working children, and a lot of very young or old women found themselves responsible for entire families without adequate public help. Crime had also organized itself (specially in Rio, where during the dictatorship years political prisoners divided cells with criminals, shaping the first organized criminal faction of the city) and a succession of corruption cases in all levels of power. The judiciary system collapsed, opening doors for impunity, more corruption, narcotraffic and "white collar" (colarinho-branco) crimes.
Currently, the biggest problem of this country is perhaps that a great portion of its population is condemned to live in situations of extreme poverty (over 40% according to IBGE), where mass unemployment and informality cause social exclusion, inside an economy ever more dependent of the centers of global financial capital. This constant dependency has only deepened the contradictions between the privatized state and the Brazilian people. Again according to IBGE 10% of the population richest' income is 30 times superior than the income of 40% of the poorest, being this rich portion of 10% the ones who benefit from 50% of the total national income.
This inequality was historically triggered by the lack of actions and strategies that could influence the decisions related to access and use of resources capable of altering these structures, as much as propose new ones. Illegality in habitation and communication mediums are a result of this lack of compromise with these basic rights. Allied to the economic inequality and political negligence, a bureaucracy reinforces the process that triggers illegality, creating many informal markets ever more powerful.
Our dilemma it is not, and it never was, scarcity but the mode of production and distribution of abundance, that meaning, the inequality - expressed as an economic inequality in the access and use of natural resources, goods and services; the symbolic inequality in the production of knowledge, identity and common values. It is this, and not poverty per se, not a developing but a distributional paradigm, our biggest challenge. DesCentro will live up to this challenge.
Project History:*
What was the project's origin, when and how did it start? How did it develop up to the present day?
A number of groups and collectives have been working together in the fields of critical media, technological appropriation and social action in Brasil since at least 2002. In 2003, some of these groups organized the Midia Tática Brasil (MTB) festival. MTB has been a great opportunity for people who were spread throughout the country to finally meet and start exchanging and organizing. More than 300 people have helped organizing the festival, and nearly 6000 people have attended it. International guests such as John Perry Barlow and Richard Barbrook, brasilian icons such as the then new Ministry of Culture Gilberto Gil and hundreds of activists had the opportunity to discuss and get to know each other.
As a consequence of MTB, some members of brasilian groups were invited to attend Next5Minutes4, in Amsterdam, in september 2003. During N5M, they had the opportunity to get acquainted with people in a whole range of critical media projects from the whole world. Among them, members of the Waag-Sarai platform, who had been developing important exchange regarding old and new media between Netherlands and India.
Some months later, the Waag-Sarai platform has released an open call for south-to-south exchange, asking for projects of media centers. Two proposals were chosen, one by MetaReciclagem and the other by Midia Tática group. They would have six months to develop media center projects, including space design and network infrastructure. By the end of this first fellowship, in december 2004, representants of the two groups went to Bangalore to present their proposals during the Alternative Law Forum. Neither of them proposed exactly what the call asked: Midia Tática got together with Submídia, another group, and proposed the simultaneous development of three different media centers, in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Campinas. MetaReciclagem did not propose a media center at all, choosing instead to try developing an open methodology to occupy a network of distributed centers that had been emerging in different places. Following up on their presentations, the platform decided to support the brasilian groups with three initiatives: funding a publication, supporting a conference and promoting two residencies of MetaReciclagem members in Cybermohalla project, in New Delhi.
In october 2005, two members of MetaReciclagem went to Delhi, the publication - Digitofagias, based in a conference carried out in 2004 - started to be organized, and finally in October the first Submidialogia conference took place in Campinas, aiming at new levels of interaction between the brasilian tactical media scenario, international projects and brasilian government, which by then was supporting a number of projects related to ICT media production access. Submidialogia has been important in the sense of showing that a peculiar form of conference was being created. During Submidialogia and in the next days, a group formed by members of Metareciclagem, Mídia Tática and Submídia emerged and decided to work together within the perspective of developing an organizing node for the brasilian critical media networks, in order to promote the development of tactical media exchange and projects. By then, we had already embraced the opinion that we could not think of working in a single lab, but should instead try to establish a network of self-organized nodes. We called that DesCentro.
Throughout 2006, we have studied brasilian legislation in order to understand what the best ways to hack the NGO regulations would be. Distributed media centers in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and other places started to be established. In october, during Submidialogia #2, in Olinda, we have introduced DesCentro for the wider network of brasilian media activists, and have had great discussions and insights on that matter. From then on, we have decided to open more and more DesCentro, inviting relevant people to our consultive board.
In march 2007, we have had the first DesCentro national meeting, together with the Salvador edition of Upgrade! Festival.
People:*
What is the core team carrying the project? How many (groups of) individuals are currently involved as members or users? How would you charaterize the people participating in the project? Is access to the project open or restricted?
DesCentro has an executive board of 6 people and a consulting board of nearly 20 people from all around the country. All of them are people with a relevant background in our interest areas. DesCentro has also open instances, such as a mailing list and one open conference every year. We plan to release open calls for projects within a year or two, to which anybody will be free to apply.
Lessons learned:
What has worked / what has not worked in the process of realisation of your project?
During the process that lead to the development of DesCentro, we realized that establishing a formal entity the way we want it to operate requires a lot of hard work. It took us more than a year to start to understand all the choices we would have to make in order to create a legal entity, and what are possible ways to subvert the regulations (for instance, not having a president). Another important issue that we are still working on is the balance between deciding locally and taking the time to discuss with the distributed network. We're learning to operate with these two totally different velocities, and transforming that learning into a creative endeavour.
Technical Information
(max. 3.000 characters per question)
Technological basis:*
What is the technological basis of your project or software (infrastructure, operating system environment, connectivity / telecommunication, etc.)?
Due do the partnership with the Waag/Sarai platform, DesCentro has an internet server located in Amsterdam. This server is administered by a collective of web-admins, and provides internet infrastructure for different groups and projects: vhosts, open CMSs, weblogs, mailing lists, icecast server, and so on. This server uses only free and open source software. The nodes and media centers supported by DesCentro are all implemented with the use of free/libre software, and the experimentation that takes place in them uses free software such as Cinelerra, The Gimp, puredata and so on.
Solutions:
If your submission is a software, please describe the problem it is answering to, what solutions and most important features it offers.
Implementations:
In what areas / sectors / regions is your software currently applied? Where are running implementations of your software to be found?
Users:
Who are its (potential) users and beneficiaries?
License:
Under what kinds of licenses do you make it available? How many copies / licenses have so far been handed out/downloaded?
DesCentro research and production use exclusively open licenses and copyleft. We are currently discussing the creation of our own licenses in partnership with http://crieitivecomo.org
Statement of Reasons:*
Why the submitted project deserves to win a prize in the "Digital Communities" category.
DesCentro is a broad, structural environment. It is innovative not only in terms of its research and content production, but as a collaborative approach to bureaucracies and paperwork. Moreover, one of its goals is to provide a sustainable environment for independent research, critical media production and knowledge exchange, avoiding the common problems of government appropriation or lack of infrastructure.
Planned use of prize money:*
Further developing residencies, international exchange, consolidate publication of research.
