Creative Process Engine - collaborative toolset for research-creation

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#1

Team Size: 7

Joel Auerbach, Leslie Plumb, Matisse ApSimon, Ben Munoz, Jhave David Johnson, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi

Description:

3 Ecologies Institute Creative Process Engine

The 3 Ecologies Institute is a collective research-creation environment. It is an outgrowth of the SenseLab international network of artists, academics and activists, which has been in operation for more than 15 years from a base at Concordia University, with active “hubs” in Europe, Australia, and Brazil and over 1000 online and in-person participants. 3E spins off from the university into an autonomous, self-organizing organization. Information is available at SenseLab.ca and the 3E Institute Patreon page. SenseLab has been funded for the last 7 years by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 3E aspires in the long run to be a self-funding alter-economy integrating a commons-based cryptoeconomic platform. For the present, it is crowd-funded and will be seeking support from the Canada Council for the Arts for the development of an open-source creative-collaboration tool-set that would become the core of the 3E platform. The tool-set will also be made available free of charge to other autonomous organizations for adaptation to their needs and desires, in ways that encourage inter-organization collaboration and mutual aid. We believe that Holochain provides the best technical and ethical environment for this project, and would like to actively solicit the input and collaboration of the Holochain community.

3E Process Seed Bank

3E is a registered nonprofit arts and education organization whose mission is to serve as a prototyping and proving ground for new approaches to collaborative creative process. At the heart of the 3E is the “Process Seed Bank,” a digital platform conceived as a “creative process engine”: a distributed digital collaboration and self-governance platform for shepherding creative projects through conception to implementation. The core component is a suite of smart contracts, styled as “self-organizing propositions” (SOPs), that create an organizational channel through which the creative process flows. The organizational flow is modeled on forms of conviviality rather than bureaucratic organization, and operates along the principles of a collective gift economy (as opposed to the conventional model of a transactional economy among atomic individuals). The core SOPs have been extensively workshopped internationally, and preliminary coding has been under way for a year. The online platform is not meant to be a self-enclosed community. It is meant, rather, to serve as a hub for moving between online collaboration and off-line interactions. In the case of SenseLab and 3E, the latter take the form of movement- and materials-based explorations, research-creation events, experimental-format publications, and community and activist interventions.

Resources: where can we get more information? add your repo link, any docs here

3E Process Seed Bank
3E Github

Similar app or site:

We don’t know of any similar projects – if you know of any, please let us know

I am at…:

Proof of concept stage : While we feel that Holochain is right for us from the point of view of the ethos, we’re sure yet if is the right tool for us. We’re still looking for help refining and fleshing out our proof of concept.

Skills: list any skills that are needed for your project. Includes technical (languages, technologies) and not-so-technical (fund raising, community outreach). Rate your team proficiency from 0 - 10 for each skill

· Holochain knowledge: 0

· Front-End: React(5), Angular(3), JS3(7), CSS(8)

· Back-End: Rust(7), C++(7), NodeJs(64), SQL(10), Python(8)

· UI/UX: CSS(3), Photoshop(10), P5js(6), three.js(5), d3(5)

· Others: fund raising(8)

Commitment: how much time are you willing to commit for the project

Currently each team member can contribute about 10 hours a week. If we obtain grants funding, we will be able to dedicate more time.

What do I need: what do you need for your project to go further?

At first, we’d like to be able to consult with folks knowledgeable about building on Holochain, to refine our understanding of its affordances and what it would really mean for our app architecture and technical planning. Down the road, we may be looking for other technical help and more sustained collaborations with developers.

6 Likes
#2

Hi! This is Joel Auerbach from 3E. I work mostly on the back-end; I’ve been working on building a very rough prototype (using Node.js + a SQL database), and would love to talk with someone about porting some of these processes over to the Holochain ecosystem. My background varies from philosophy to data science (as a programmer, I’ve worked mainly in JS, Python, and Ruby). I’m happy to field any questions about where we’re at with the project from a technical perspective, and would also love to talk broadly about what’s technically and organizationally possible on Holochain.

#3

3E sounds vaguely like a DAO - have you looked at Aragon?

#4

Thanks for the tip. We’ll look into Aragon and the projects that have been based on it. There do seem to be similarities. We do think of our project basically in terms of a DAO, but we struggle with some of the presuppositions and existing models of interaction that are often built into them – understanding relations between people in an exchange-based way as transactiona, seeing collective action as built upon individual inputs with any synergies as emergent from that, seeing process as driven by product goals, and using a model of governance, rights and authorities as the framework. We’d like to explore the possibility of inverting all of that, and seeing if collective synergies can be made the starting point, and that the capture of creative appetite be the driving force rather than anticipations of individual gain, and having the process lead, with products more like emergent by-products of it. It’s an experimental proposition that tries to put creativity first. A bit of an outlier, but worth the try, we think, as a kind of prototyping of alternatives to existing governmental and economic presuppositions. We are thinking that if a project is to work on the model of conviviality and gift economy in a serious way, that has to go all the way down into the most basic functions. One of the big things we’ve working on is reconceiving how people enter and recognized/authorized as participants by the system. We’ve been working on what we call an Entryway self-organizing proposition (SOP) that embeds registration on the platform in a process of gifting and hospitality, rather than the usual contractual/governmental approaches. This is one of the things we’d love to have help with and conversation around.

#5

I did get the general idea from the description - and the differences are interesting and not entirely incompatible I think. The DAO projects I have in mind for Aragon are all non-profit and co-operative and so far I think all the Aragon stuff is essential but the 3E stuff could also be useful as well.

I will be interested to follow your developments!