This week Smith, who heads WeCommune, plans to launch the first software platform designed specifically for, well, communing (if you visit, you may get a splash page while they transition). The platform’s services will allow groups of three or more people to self-organize a “commune” defined by a shared interest or shared zip code, and will provide tools for communicating, organizing and managing projects, and sharing resources.

What is commune-support software?

WeCommune is a networking platform, outfitted with commune-specific project management applications that make it much different from a social networking tool. The software enables common and practical actions – for example, a group of members can organize a buying club, set up a rideshare system, or barter goods and services. And like everything on the web, WeCommune gives users the option to extend their reach: by networking to other communes, groups can make certain assets like bartering and goods-sharing pools more robust.

WeCommune offers the basic platform free to anyone who wants to use it, and even the more complex services are available for a monthly subscription under $2. Smith hopes that by making it affordable she’ll enable communes of all sorts – from those who are already sharing, like condo associations and college dorms, to neighborhoods and interest groups.

“We couldn’t find anything out there like this,” says Smith. “We feel like if we hit a home run, we’re going to be the ultimate community application.”

Why communes need the boost

In her L.A.-based studio, Ecoshack, Smith designs small-scale, modular projects like ecovillages, yurts and tipis that “invent new ways to live lightly on the Earth.” But her real vision for sustainability acknowledges that the way people interact with one another, use resources and build community are the most important components of any environment, from eco-enclave to suburban cul-de-sac. As it turns out, a lot of people were willing to help her test her theory. When she launched a site called Wanna Start a Commune? as an Ecoshack spinoff, she quickly connected with three cul-de-sac neighborhoods in Southern California that invited her to help them start their own communes. Since then, she’s become a self-titled “meta-starter of communes.”

Almost from the first meetings of her three “Beta test” cul-de-sac communes, however, she noticed that even where there was intention, there weren’t effective tools available for completing projects in a group. Nascent communes would have ideas, for example, to create a disaster preparedness plan for their neighborhood, or to turn a neglected space into a community garden. But coordinating schedules, resources, skill sets and other components of the plan among neighbors — many of whom had never been in the same room before — was more trouble than Smith had anticipated. Software seemed like an intuitive solution.

“The group members said, ‘isn’t there an iPhone app for that?’,” she remembers. “And these aren’t 21-year-olds; these are older people, too. I had to solve a technology problem.”

Smith tested out versions of existing social networking software, including Ning and Yahoo! Groups, but didn’t find the functionality that she was looking for. So she sat down and designed her own, with the help of collaborator Matt French and programmer Josh Cain.

An unlikely champion

Smith doesn’t live in a commune herself, and defines herself — somewhat ironically — as a loner. But her comfortable distance from the subject has given her a more objective lens for understanding community – how it works, and what gets in its way. She’s been studying community since the mid-90s, when she explored it in her master’s thesis at Harvard, under the tutelage of master architect Rem Koolhas. Smith found herself in China in 1996, a turbulent time characterized by extreme real estate speculation and the burst of a housing bubble. She focused her research on one intriguing social pattern: as groups of rural villagers moved to the cities in droves, they would often move collectively into one concrete apartment building, and re-create the community structure. Smith found the process fascinating. In her words, “They would take these global pieces of architecture as their own, and make them very local again.” (Her thesis, To Get Rich is Glorious, is published in the collection Great Leap Forward.)

The community solution, Smith says, “allowed these people not only to be housed, but to be housed in these tight communities where they could flourish…it gave me hope that, in fact, local cultures would be able to fight globalization and stay intact.” Now, she says, in the face of the global economic meltdown, she still sees hope for community-based solutions. Ultimately, she thinks, a worldwide trend toward resource-sharing could be just the medicine the economy needs.

It certainly seems like the right platform could touch off a communing revolution. But here’s a thought: while we’re in the kickoff phases, it might also be time for a new term that defines this particular brand of resourcefulness. Smith chose “commune” because it’s actually pretty versatile (she cites Wikipedia’s definition, “a community in which resources are shared”). But even though great, innovative ideas, practices and cultures emerged from communes in the 60s, the word itself remains pretty loaded with counter-cultural connotations that don’t seems as universally sticky in 2009.

Is the 21st Century commune a strategic collaboration? Or does the stretchiness of communal resources make for elastic living? We’ll work on some new language from our end, but in the meantime, call out your best ideas for the new communal meme in the comments.

Finding community (by any name) isn’t that difficult, Smith says, but it can involve looking for things that aren’t obvious to most people.

“You need to understand that your community isn’t necessarily your group of best friends. You need to ask yourself, ‘do we have a shared value set so that we feel comfortable planning projects and sharing resources over time? Do we have people of various ages who feel comfortable sharing their skills? Do we have a social infrastructure for getting things done?”

source: www.worldchanging.com

This interview is in the framework of a Phd research about new technologies and hybrid cities. It aims to demonstrate how this new tools can revitalize public spaces at the city.

how would you define public space?

I understand a public space as an area or place that is open and accessible to all citizens without discriminations; Nowadays public spaces have their digital counterparts where people gather, share, and engage with each other and their environment.

how would you describe public space at our cities nowadays? (problems and qualities)

The integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles is transforming contemporary public spaces. In consequence, it may not only matter how good the physical infrastructure is, it is the software infrastructure that also affects how individuals experience it. The ubiquitous technologies (e.g. mobile phone, RFID, sensors) that afford us new flexibility in experiencing public spaces are simultaneously providing the means to reveal our dynamics through the collection, classification, storage, and dissemination of recorded knowledge constituting a city.  However contemporary public spaces are not only about technology, they are also about interaction designs, about taking into account the wider context of organization, systems and people, and even legal and political contexts, belief systems and social and cultural fabric. If we do not understand these aspects, we are prone to make the same mistakes as those originated by past visions that relied on the fascination around the hard infrastructures and reducing cities and their spaces to systems.

what would you change at public spaces ? (proposals, solutions)

The presence of the soft infrastructure and its logging capabilities implies that we are at the end of the ephemeral; in some ways we have new means to replay the public spaces. This potential echoes very well with the recent interest of urban planners and designers in unconventional data sources. Currently land use and space activity data are mainly collected through very traditional means with people paid to perform manual count. These non-longitudinal data limit the emergence of evidences from the statistical relations with variables (e.g. What is the effect of physical layout on movement? How do people use the space?). With the increasing availability of soft infrastructure the process of data collection is improved. For instance, it allows to better model time, space, and behavior as investigated in the domain of simulations. In contrast, we are also ahead of conflicts to reveal or hide unwanted evidences, when new data can be used to the detriment of some stakeholders. Indeed the retrieved information might not be of primary benefit of each individual who contributes to a census. Moreover, some of this information can challenge political decisions that were previously taken based on assumptions or limited survey data. For instance it might lead to a decrease in the offering of public transport in an unjustifiably well-connected public space.

This end of the ephemeral calls for new approaches to privacy issues. In many domains, there is an ever growing number of personalized records which are being collected in public spaces, and at times disseminated in the databases and customer management systems of businesses, organizations, and government agencies that service modern living. In fact, these digital footprints have become inevitable in contemporary society and also necessary if we wish to enjoy many modern conveniences; we can no more be separated from it than we could be separated from the physical shadow cast by our body on a sunny day (Zook et al., 2004). The growth of our data shadows is an ambiguous process, with varying levels of individual concern and the voluntarily trading of privacy for convenience in many cases.

In summary, at the same time as ubiquitous geoinformation gives us new means to map and model human dynamics, it will also challenge current notions of privacy and make the object of study much more fragmented, dynamic, and chaotic. The challenge will be to appreciate and use the complexity and richness of ubiquitous geofinformation without crystallizing into authoritarian structures.

how do you think new technologies influence on public space’s changes? (hybrid spaces)

The ubiquitous technologies that afford us new flexibility in conducting our daily activities are simultaneously providing the means to study our activities in time and space. Indeed, the logs, fruits of these interactions, could reveal elements of human and social use of the ubiquitous technology itself and people’s mobility and travel behaviors. These latter evidences could be employed as indicators of the evolution of the attractiveness of the public spaces amongst other things (Girardin et al, 2009).

In other words, the aim is exploit the information membrane hovering over the physical fabric of public spaces to shift the urban design and planning practices from the speculative predictions and accommodation to more factual observations and improvements. Besides my work on urban attractiveness indicators, other research groups have been using a reality mining approach to derive specific characteristics of urban dynamics (Kostakos et al., 2008). A major challenge in this type of approaches is to draw a clear understanding of the boundaries and biases of the data. Nevertheless, these works support novel ways to describe public spaces leading to an approach we would coin as “human/database urbanism: It could consist in the use of:

The qualitative analysis to inform the quantitative queries: This approach first focuses on people and their practices, without the assumption that something computational or data process is meant to fall out from that. This qualitative angle can then inform a quantitative analysis to generate more empirical evidences of a specific human behavior or pattern. A few approaches in that domain address this perspective. Williams et al (2008) for instance argue that our understanding of the city could benefit from a situated analysis of individual experiences within cities, rather than taking particular urban forms as a starting point for the study of urban experience.

The quantitative data mining to inform the qualitative enquiries: In that approach, the quantitative data help to reveal the emerging and abnormal behaviors, mainly raising questions. The qualitative angle then can help explaining phenomenon in situation. The qualitative approaches actually requests to ask the right questions to learn anything meaningful about a situation.

In conclusion, beyond a utilitarian perspective, we have to consider the promises and hopes around these future cities and their informational membranes. If researchers and practitioners offer citizen better awareness of the dynamics of public space and power to influence their design and evolution, this does not mean they will accept the gift. Indeed, taking the example of citizen-science (Paulos et al., 2008) and volunteer-generated information (Goodchild, 2007), citizens might just not be interested in the collection of data, and the opportunity might increase the divide between the people who are able to participate and those who are not or do not.

Interview: video.

References:

Girardin, F., Vaccari, A., Gerber, A., Biderman, A., and Ratti, C. (2009). Quantifying urban attractiveness from the distribution and density of digital footprints. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructure Research, 4

Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as voluntary sensors: Spatial data infrastructure in the world of web 2.0. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 2:24–32.

Kostakos, V., Nicolai, T., Yoneki, E., O’neill, E., Kenn, H., and Crowcroft, J. (2008). Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

Paulos, E., Honicky, R., and Hooker, B. (2008). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, chapter Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism. Hershey.

Williams, A., Robles, E., and Dourish, P. (2008). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, chapter Urbane-ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions
Behind Urban Informatics. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.

Zook, M., Dodge, M., Aoyama, Y., and Townsend, A. (2004). New digital geographies: Information, communication, and place. Geography and Technology, pages 155–176.

Fabien Girardin is a researcher and engineer at Lift lab, a research agency he co-founded. He studies and provokes the interplay between urban infrastructures, ubiquitous technologies and people practices. His research employs qualitative observations to gain insights from the integration and user appropriation of technologies in urban environments. Subsequently, Fabien mixes the gained knowledge with engineering techniques to foresee and prototype ideas and solutions for designers, urban service providers, city planners and decision makers.

He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Digital Communications from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain and an engineering degree from the Biel School of Engineering and Information Technology, Switzerland. Along his academic journey, Fabien was also affiliated with the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA to lead the development of analysis methods of spatio-temporal records generated by human interactions with urban pervasive infrastructures.

I would be grateful for any suggestion and contact of other people who might be interested in being interviewed about public spaces and new technologies.

Domenico Di Siena