Without the state

Making hardware 'open source' can help us fight future pandemics - here's how we get there

Making hardware 'open source' can help us fight future pandemics - here's how we get there

elenabsl/Shutterstock

Richard Bowman, University of Bath and Julian Stirling, University of Bath

In factories and industrial estates across the world, exceptional efforts are being made to ensure hospitals have ventilators, and logistics firms have freezers and refrigerators. Behind the scenes, this manufacturing drive has been taking place on an epic, unprecedented scale. In some places, it’s also been horrendously inefficient.

Some of that inefficiency is only to be expected. Manufacturing responsively at such short notice was always going to be messy. But many of the hardware hold-ups we’ve witnessed – from production line bottlenecks to parts shortages – could be avoided in the future by applying an “open source” ethos to the world’s production of hardware.

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Read more: Five ways collective intelligence can help beat coronavirus in developing countries

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Open source design is a form of collective intelligence, where experts work together to create a design that anyone has the legal right to manufacture. The software industry has long shown that “open” collaboration is not only possible, but advantageous. Open source software is ubiquitous, and the servers that power the internet itself are largely run on open technology, collaboratively designed by competing companies.

Early in the pandemic, and in recognition of the global emergency that was unfolding, dozens of the world’s largest companies did actually sign up to the “Open COVID Pledge”, promising to share their intellectual property to help fight the virus. On a smaller scale, more than 100 project teams set out to create and share “open” ventilator designs that could be produced locally, helping address the pressing need for ventilators around the world.

Unfortunately, neither of these initiatives succeeded in producing ventilators at the rate required by stretched hospitals in the early weeks of the pandemic. After examining existing attempts to share the intellectual property of machines, our recent paper concludes that projects must be open from the start in order to make a success of open hardware. Everything from the first doodle on a napkin to the detailed calculations that verify safety must be available if other experts and manufacturers are going to participate in the design.

Medical ventilators have been in particular demand since the beginning of the pandemic. Dan Race/Shutterstock

The road to open hardware

Producing hardware through open collaboration may be daunting. As opposed to the entirely virtual collaboration required for software development, hardware development needs physical parts – raw materials and machinery. It needs testing facilities and engineers to perform stress tests and safety checks.

There are promising signs that these challenges can be met. The RepRap 3D printer project has brought low cost 3D printing to a wider audience, making affordable prototyping possible at a distance. Meanwhile, the CERN White Rabbit project has shown that even the complex electronics that control the Large Hadron Collider can be developed as as open source hardware. But, to be efficient we need better work flows for collaboration – systems to help organise the distribution of tasks and responsibilities on collaborative hardware projects.

The journey from prototype to production is much more difficult, and less exciting, than the technical challenge of prototyping a device. Manufacturers must comply with international standards to ensure quality and manage risk related to their products. This is especially true of medical hardware, upon which lives depend. A key challenge for open hardware will be to achieve this certification in the same way that private companies do today.

Under current regulations, no matter how impressive and safe, ventilators constructed in volunteer maker spaces cannot be certified for medical use. But for equipment which is less strictly regulated, like face shields, open hardware is currently being leveraged successfully.

Achieving similar successes with high-tech medical devices will require organisations that are built to manufacture from open designs – dynamic factories, for instance, which will be responsive to global emergencies. It takes time to establish these organisations. But we can’t afford to wait for the next emergency: we should begin creating them today, in preparation for the next pandemic.

Of course, finding sustainable business models for open hardware is a challenge: can a system be created which shares intellectual property for free while helping designers and manufacturers profit? In one sense, open hardware has an advantage here: people are used to buying products, where online consumers are accustomed to using software for free.

Nonetheless, it’s likely that setting up an open hardware manufacturing ecosystem will need public funding, or investor funding buying into non-traditional business models. This would follow the trajectory of the internet, which began life funded by public institutions and is now home to the world’s biggest private enterprises.

Closer inspection

The open source microscope. Author provided

We’ve experimented with our own open hardware project to help us understand how the future of collaborative hardware might look. Our OpenFlexure microscope is designed to be manufactured at low cost in sub-Saharan Africa, to be used for malaria diagnoses. We’ve probably spent more time designing the processes that help us share our knowledge effectively than designing the microscope itself.

In the short term, this slows our progress. In the long term, we expect that manufacturers anywhere in the world will be able to understand our design and adapt it to their local context. As these processes become further standardised, sharing designs for production will become increasingly simple. The final and most ambitious phase of our project will be working with manufacturers to produce microscopes certified for medical use – a huge step towards open source medical hardware we’d need to better fight a future pandemic.

Humanity already knew how to make ventilators decades before this pandemic hit. What was lacking was the access to this knowledge, the skills to work together on adapting a design, and the logistics to rapidly scale the manufacturing of complex machinery. It will take years to address these issues. Starting that process today will help us tackle global emergencies more dynamically and efficiently in the future.

Richard Bowman, Royal Society University Research Fellow and Proleptic Reader, Department of Physics, University of Bath and Julian Stirling, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Physics, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Democracy is not a one time event.

The idea that democracy stops when you get the decision you like is getting more prevalent unfortunately. I say that regularly in response to comments on Facebook, although it never seems to get through. Only yesterday some ignorant low life tried to tell me I'm refusing to accept a democratic decision because I am critical of St Boris. The same low life also told to go to Europe if I didn't like it here.

I'm 74. I was born here, and I have lived here all my life. My father was born here and served in North Africa in WW2. He was nearly killed in Sicily. In a bizarre way that could well have saved his life, since his regiment took part in the Normandy Landings. My Grandfather was born here and served in France in WW1. He was injured too but survived. My uncle was born here and took part in D-Day. I could go further back too, so I’m not going to have some ignorant #### (insert your own choice of epithet – this isn’t so far a sweary blog) try to tell me I don’t belong here.

The reality is the opposite. The behaviour of this buffoon (on this occasion I don't mean Boris Johnson) is not democratic. It is not patriotic. It is a betrayal of everything my Father, Grandfather and Uncle put their lives on the line for. It is a betrayal of everything he claims to be standing for! It is him and people like him who are undermining democratic processes. It is him and people like him who are undermining the rule of law. It is him and people like him who are enabling and encouraging the growth of racism and xenophobia.

Do not let them get away with it.

Challenge them at every opportunity.

Do not give up.

Another really worrying aspect is the overlap between Brexiters and the COVID19 deniers. It isn't 100% by any means, but enough to be concerned not just about our political and economic future, but literally about our very existence. I've no doubt that we will eventually got on top of this Pandemic, but we also need to learn from it, because there will be another one.

There is little sign though of any capacity to think rationally and logically in either the loudest Brexiters or the COVID19 deniers so the chances of any learning taking place are slim. (It occurs to me that the only Flat Earther I've ever come across in the wild was also a Brexiter...)

A final story.

Ten years after my father was nearly killed in Sicily he almost died again, seriously injured in an industrial accident that with hindsight was probably due to cutting corners by his employer. Leaving the EU also means leaving the umbrella of their worker protection and Health and Safety rules. Tories have already started demanding we cut back on them and on environmental standards.

Don't let them have their own way.

Past generations fought to get us here. We owe it to future generations to go forward, not back to some fantasy of the Empire.

Public housing needs radical reform: here's how - republished from 'The Conversation'

Public housing needs radical reform: here's how

Ben Allan/Unsplash, FAL

Matthew Thompson, University of Liverpool

Britain’s housing system is well and truly broken. House-builders sit on land already granted planning permission and drip-feed the market to keep supply low and prices high. Despite the coronavirus crisis, house prices continue to soar, excluding most from ever reaching onto the property ladder.

Tax subsidies help speculative landlords exploit “generation rent”, who face a future far less secure or prosperous than that of their parents – or even their grandparents. As the welfare state is hollowed out, property assets replace retirement benefits, deepening deprivation and inflating property bubbles.

Widening inequalities collide with privatisation of public housing to exacerbate the homelessness crisis – despite thousands of homes lying empty across the country.

The UK’s housing problems are also grossly unevenly distributed. In economically depressed regions such as Liverpool, where I’m based, the state has been demolishing “obsolete” houses owing to “housing market failure”.

Yet only a few hundred miles away lies the epicentre of the property boom, London, where demand and financial speculation are so intense that local authorities engage in the creative destruction of ex-council estates. Thousands of tenants are displaced, often out of London, to clear sites for lucrative redevelopment as private flats with minimal affordable housing.

In both London and Liverpool – two extremes of Britain’s polarised housing market – activists have been busy re-imagining the future of public housing. One way this is being explored is through the use of community land trusts (CLTs), a form of collective ownership of land for affordable housing and other community uses, innovated in the 1960s American civil rights movement. I’ve been studying them over the past decade and recently published a book on the topic.

In London, led by East London CLT in Tower Hamlets, the CLT model has been used to contest the adverse effects – gentrification and displacement – of housing markets becoming “too hot”.

In Liverpool, a city where housing markets are “too cold”, having lost close to half its population in the second half of the 20th century, communities facing forced eviction and the state-funded demolition of their neighbourhoods have come together to campaign for CLT alternatives. Granby Four Streets and Homebaked are the country’s very first to pioneer the model for inner-city regeneration in contexts of urban decline.

Community alternatives

Granby Four Streets won the Turner Prize in 2015 – the first architectural project ever to do so. The award recognised the creative work of architects Assemble in bringing residents together in a democratic do-it-yourself rehabilitation process – what they call “community homesteading”.

This built on years of residents’ hard graft – and creative craft – to resist the bulldozers since the 1990s and transform their neglected neighbourhood into a horticultural wonderland, with street planters, vegetable plots, climbing flowers, garden benches and artistic murals; hosting a popular street market once a month.

Such guerrilla gardening was inspiration for a vision to establish a CLT in 2011 to restore derelict properties as decent affordable homes. Some were too dilapidated to save, transformed instead into a beautiful Winter Garden with subtropical plants, an artist studio and community meeting house.

A view of the winter garden. © Matthew Thompson, Author provided

This is about more than just bricks and mortar. The CLT is revitalising Granby’s struggling local economy through providing a permanent home for the street market, creating space for new businesses and community enterprise, providing new jobs as well as public space and community facilities for residents to engage in festivities and the collective management of their neighbourhood.

On the other side of the city, right opposite Liverpool Football Club, is Homebaked. This started life as a public arts project funded by the 2010 Liverpool Biennial called “2up2down”, which invited residents to re-imagine the terraced house.

 

Having successfully campaigned to save the local bakery and its terraced row from demolition, 2up2down evolved into Homebaked CLT to take on the ownership of the buildings and bring the bakery back into use. Plans are now afoot to renovate the terrace into cooperative housing and, on the ground floor, provide space for community enterprise, including their sister organisations Homebaked bakery co-op and Homegrown, a food growing and beer brewing collective. All of this is part of a long-term vision to democratically transform the neighbourhood.

Stronger foundations

CLTs such as Granby and Homebaked provide an inspiring blueprint for reconstructing public housing on stronger social and economic foundations.

They are legally incorporated with an “asset lock” which protects the land from being sold off and ensures that all surpluses from renting buildings get reinvested for community benefit. They are governed democratically through a trust structure with board members elected by the wider CLT membership, open to all local residents.

This also enables a public-common partnership approach with local authorities. In return for public land transfer and development expertise, CLTs make their permanently affordable homes available to local people in need.

But Granby and Homebaked remain artistic exemplars – too few and far between to make a huge difference to widespread housing problems. These extraordinary practices need to be replicated across Liverpool, London and beyond through radical new initiatives, so they become more ordinary features of public housing.

Learning from Liverpool

Public housing in the UK is witnessing a revival. Tight borrowing constraints imposed on councils have been loosened to enable the construction of new council housing for the first time in decades.

Yet it is vital that local authorities don’t repeat past mistakes. Bureaucratic and paternalistic management of council estates and the undemocratic commissioning of alienating designs, unresponsive to residents’ needs, inspired a backlash from tenants and gave hostile politicians the ammunition they needed to systematically privatise public housing.

By outsourcing public services to unaccountable firms seeking higher profit margins at all costs, privatisation paved the way for the Grenfell Tower tragedy, when 72 people lost their lives. Learning from more imaginative and democratic alternatives to this broken system is urgently needed.

Matthew Thompson, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why lockdowns don't necessarily infringe on freedom

Annelien de Dijn, Utrecht University

Europe is dealing with its “second wave” of COVID-19. And governments seem powerless to stem the tide. Dutch political leaders find it difficult to convince their citizens to wear face masks. A large majority of French voters think that Emmanuel Macron’s government has handled the pandemic badly. And Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, is facing anger from all sides about the circumstances that led to a new English lockdown.

According to these leaders, the arrival of a second wave has nothing to do with their own policy failures, or poor communication. No, the numbers are rising because Europeans are freedom-loving people and it’s hard to make them follow rules. “It is very difficult to ask the British population, uniformly, to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary,” said Johnson for example, in response to criticism of his government’s testing policy. Similarly, in the Netherlands some were quick to attribute soaring infection rates to the fact that the Dutch are famously averse to being “patronised”.

The same explanation is often invoked to account for why Europe is doing significantly worse than countries in East Asia, where the disease seems more under control. According to some commentators, the authoritarian, top-down political culture of countries like China and Singapore makes it far easier to implement strict measures than in liberal Europe.

Singapore’s “effective crisis management”, for instance, was supposedly made possible by the fact that its government “has always wielded absolute control over the state, with an iron fist and a whip in it.” Conversely, many believe that a devotion to “individual liberty” doomed the west to its ongoing crisis.

A coronavirus screening centre in Singapore. EPA-EFE

Is this true? Is a poorly functioning government indeed the price that must be paid for freedom? If that is the case, then perhaps we had better give up on liberty. After all, anyone who is dead or seriously ill does not benefit much from being free.

Collective freedom

Fortunately, that’s a conclusion we needn’t draw. As history shows, freedom is quite compatible with effective government. Western political thinkers ranging from Herodotus to Algernon Sidney did not think that a free society is a society without rules, but that those rules should be decided collectively. In their view, freedom was a public good rather than a purely individual condition. A free people, Sidney wrote for instance, was a people living “under laws of their own making”.

Even philosophers such as John Locke, it is worth noting, agreed with this view. Locke is often portrayed as a thinker who believed that freedom coincided with individual rights, rights that should be protected at all costs against state interference. But Locke explicitly denied that freedom was harmed by government regulation – as long as those rules were made “with the consent of society”.

“Freedom then is not … a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any law,” he wrote in his famous Second Treatise. “But freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.”

It was only in the early 19th century that some began to reject this collective ideal in favour of a more individualistic conception of liberty.

A new liberty

In the wake of the French Revolution, democracy slowly expanded across Europe. But this was not universally welcomed. The extension of the right to vote, many feared, would give political power to the poor and uneducated, who would no doubt use it to make dumb decisions or to redistribute wealth.

Storming of The Bastile, Jean-Pierre Houël, 1789. Wikimedia Commons

Hence, liberal elites embarked on a campaign against democracy – and they did so in the name of freedom. Democracy, liberal thinkers ranging from Benjamin Constant to Herbert Spencer argued, was not the mainstay of liberty but a potential threat to freedom properly understood – the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods.

Throughout the 19th century, this liberal, individualistic conception of freedom continued to be contested by radical democrats and socialists alike. Suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst profoundly disagreed with Spencer’s view that the best way to protect liberty was to limit the sphere of government as much as possible. At the same time, socialist politicians such as Jean Jaurès claimed that they, and not the liberals, were the party of freedom, since socialism’s goal was “to organise the sovereignty of all in both the economic and political spheres”.

The ‘free’ West

Only after 1945 did the liberal concept of freedom prevail over the older, collective conception of freedom. In the context of cold war rivalry between the “free West” and the Soviet Union, distrust of state power grew - even democratic state power. In 1958, liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in a one-sided reading of the history of European political thought, stated that “Western” freedom was a purely “negative” concept. Every law, Berlin stated bluntly, had to be seen as an encroachment on freedom.

The cold war is of course since long over. Now that we are entering the third decade of the 21st century, we might want to dust off the older, collective concept of freedom. If the coronavirus crisis has made one thing clear, it is that collective threats such as a pandemic demand decisive, effective action from government.

This does not mean giving up our freedom in exchange for the protection of a nanny state. As Sidney and Locke remind us, as long as even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom.

Annelien de Dijn, Professor of History, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Another reboot

Technorati Tags: politics,blogging,writing

This blog began a long long time ago in a far away country with a Labour government with some radical ideas - for a while at least until Tony Blair began to have dreams of being a world statesman.

Initially it began as an adjunct to the one man consultancy I was running which had a loose focus on supporting community groups in various ways. Later after the consultancy was wound up it had a more eclectic mix of posts on politics, philosophy, art, the environment and a whole lot more. Later still it changed its name to 'Without the State' with an explicit focus on what I thought of as 'practical anarchy', trying to provide an alternative to the insidious growth of right wing libertarianism and looking at practical ways for local communities to manage their own affairs without excessive centralisation.

That focus weakened, especially after the election of the Cameron government and it became more eclectic again, but also less regular as the enthusiasm waned and Facebook grew. Of late though I have begun to hate the sheer nastiness of social media and begun to think again about 'long form' blogging. I'm not sure what the audience for such will be, I was told a few days ago that something I wrote was too long at 2000 words, but I don't care. This blog never had a huge audience anyway.

So, this is is it. These days I also have an arts blog and shop trying to sell my own work and after I clean up all the links in the sidebars and look again at the layout I'll add that to the blog roll. Coming up I discovered some notes for a post on (in)equality which I started ages ago but in the light of BLM and the disaster that we will all be facing if Trump is re-elected seems very much on topic.

Oh - and if you are reading this in the USA and haven't voted yet I only have two things to say.

1. Vote

2. Don't for all our sakes, vote for Trump. Please!