My abstract for the British HCI conference 2015 at the University of Lincoln. I'm on the 'HCI, politics and activism' panel. In this talk I reflect on the history of hacking and its origins in the 'commune' of the academy (Winn, 2013). I then discuss the role of Copyleft licenses (Stallman, 2010) as "the practical manifestation of a social structure" (Weber, 2004, 85; Winn, 2015); a form of administration for the production of 'commonism' (Dyer-Witheford, 2007; Neary and Winn, 2012). Finally, I argue that the emerging form of 'open co-operative' can be understood as a latent material response to Stallman's original predicament when Venture Capitalism took over his 'Garden of Eden': mutual ownership and control of knowledge production. Significantly, the "crucial innovation" for an emerging form of 'open co-operative' (Bauwens, 2014) is a further adaptation of Copyleft called Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses, or 'Copyfarleft' (Kleiner, 2007), thereby uniting co-operative legal structures with subversive licensing contracts. To what extent can we reconstitute higher education and the idea of the university along the lines of an open co-operative, so that academic science can continue to contribute to the common good? (Winn, 2015) All Power to the Communes!

1. Communes, Commonism
and Co-ops:
Rethinking the University as
a Hackerspace
Joss Winn @josswinn
School of Education
University of Lincoln

2. What’s your university
‘Intellectual Property’ policy?
• Employment (wage labour) contract
• Copyright, designs and patents act of
1988, sections 11 and 215: “ownership of
any such property that has come into
existence in the course of employment is
vested in the employer”.
• Exceptions: ‘scholarly work’, teaching
resources, etc.

3. Stallman’s Commune
• History of MIT/hacking: Consultancy, patents,
investment of war capital (1940) but no means to
take basic research to market. Science: The Endless
Frontier (1945). Redefined role of universities.
‘Linear model’ of innovation. ‘Technology transfer’.
Harvard/MIT invention of Venture Capital (1947).
DEC (1951). Software wars (1982-3). Stallman leaves
(1984). Copyleft/GPL (1989)
• “EMACS commune”. “Distributed on a basis of
communal sharing”. “…you are joining the EMACS
software-sharing commune.”
• Academic labour. Hacker values/ethic are academic
values (Winn, 2013)

4. Venture capital in the
“Garden of Eden”
• “’It was a bit like the Garden of Eden,’ says
Stallman, summing up the lab and its
software-sharing ethos in a 1998 Forbes
article. ‘It hadn’t occurred to us not to co-
operate.’”
• “Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for
the hacker ethic. The flexibility Stallman had
built into the software not only encouraged
collaboration, it demanded it.”
(Stallman
and
Williams,
2010)

5. Commonism
• Nick Dyer-Witheford: Commonism
• Mike Neary: Anti-value in motion
• Tony Smith: “Lacking an adequate concept of
capital, [Benkler] lacks an adequate appreciation
of the totalizing force of the commodification and
valorization imperatives.”
• Guido Starosta: ‘total capital’ (Marx). “the real
determination of value actually transcends the
isolated single commodity as such.”
• Gigi Roggero: Institutions of the Commons /
‘living knowledge’. The university as the site of
social struggle.
(Neary and Winn, 2012)

6. Licenses as administration
Weber argues that for open source
communities, ‘licenses act as the practical
manifestation of a social structure that
underlies the open source process’. The use
of these licenses acts as ‘an ordering device’
in the absence of an organisation so that
‘licensing schemes are, in fact, the major
formal social structure surrounding open
source’ (Weber 2004, 85)

7. Commons-based
reciprocity licenses
• Peer Production License (Dmytri Kleiner) –
‘Copyfarleft’
• The PPL is based on the CC BY-NC-SA
v3.0 license with an additional restriction
that favours worker co-operatives (anti
wage-labour, pro common ownership)

8. 1) the commons are open to non-commercial usage
2) the commons are open to common good
institutions
3) the commons are open to for-profit enterprises
who contribute to the commons.
“The exception introduced here is that for-profit
companies that do not contribute to the commons
have to pay for the use of the license. This is not
primarily to generate income, but to introduce the
notion of reciprocity in the market economy. In other
words, the aim is to create an ethical economy, a
non-capitalist market dynamic.” (Bauwens 2014)
(Winn, 2015a)

9. Open Co-ops
1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards
the common good
2. That coops need to have governance models including all
stakeholders
3. That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of
immaterial and material commons (‘crucial innovation’ –
Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses)
4. That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a
global basis, even as they produce locally.
(Bauwens
and
Kostakis,
2014)
(Winn,
2015a)

10. Platform Co-operativism
Trebor Scholz: ‘Platform Co-operativism’ (cf.
‘digital labour’ research)
“Worker-owned cooperatives could design
their own apps-based platforms, fostering truly
peer-to-peer ways of providing services and
things, and speak alternatives to the new
platform capitalists. Cooperative might then be
able to use regulatory templates, created by
companies like Uber, created at the frontiers of
regulation.” (Scholz, 2015)

11. Co-operative University
1. Conversion
2. Dissolution
3. Creation
1. The co-operative movement
(social history, critique of
political economy)
2. Co-operative organisation
(governance, legal structures,
i.e. labour and property)
3. Co-operative learning (re-
learning how to learn)
(Winn, 2015b)
1. Pedagogy
2. Governance
3. Legal framework
4. Business Models
5. Trans-national networks

12. References
Bauwens, Michel and Kostakis, Vasilis (2014) From the communism of capital to capital for the commons: Towards an open co-
operativism. tripleC, 12 (1) http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/561/678
Dyer-Witheford, Nick (2007) Commonism. Turbulence, 1. http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/commonism/
Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2012) Open education: common(s), commonism and the new common wealth. Ephemera: Theory &
Politics in Organization, 12 (4). pp. 406-422.
Scholz, Trebor (2015) Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy.
https://medium.com/@trebors/platform-cooperativism-vs-the-sharing-economy-2ea737f1b5ad
Smith, Tony (2012) Is Socialism Relevant in the “Networked Information Age”? A Critical Assessment of the Wealth of Networks. In:
Taking Socialism Seriously (eds.) Schmitt, Richard and Anton, Anatole. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Starosta, Guido (2012) Cognitive Commodities and the Value-Form, Science & Society, 76 (3) 365-392.
Stallman, Richard and Williams, Sam (2010) Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution, Boston: Free
Software Foundation.
Weber, Steven (2004) The Success of Open Source. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Winn, Joss (2013) Hacking in the university: contesting the valorisation of academic labour, Triple C : Communication, Capitalism and
Critique, 11 (2) 486-503.
Winn, Joss (2015a) Open Education and the emancipation of academic labour. Learning, Media and Technology, 40 (3).
Winn, Joss (2015b) The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy. Power and Education, 7 (1). pp. 39-55.