The Free House project is a speculative idea for a new tenure model for housing; combining the concepts of stewardship, perpetual bond finance and zero-carbon construction. The project is aimed to build a single prototype house as a demonstrator of this new reality, with the home itself being represented as a digital autonomous organisation and held by a civic trust.

Agenda track: 1 Nature – human, 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some
Screen need: Needed all the time

The overall aim would be to create a new housing market for high quality, zero carbon homes that become cheaper over time. If successful, this housing model could create a new template for public housing provision – one that’s both genuinely affordable, materially circular, and civically governed.

We would like to especially invite housing activists, developers, designers, and socially minded real estate professionals to this session. Policy makers and administrators in housing and community wealth building. Property lawyers interested in new models of ownership and regenerative construction.

Dark Matter Labs is interested in designing and developing prototype housing models that create spatial justice; with housing and real estate representing one of the biggest barriers to climate and social transition we face. By starting small, and using the single house as a system demonstrator, the aim is to delve further into the design challenge that this represents.

After the festival, we’re looking for partners, funders, policy makers, legal experts and designers to help make this prototype house a reality; building a real world example within the next 2-3 years.

Dark Matter Labs is a multidisciplinary discovery, design and development lab behind Freehouse, working with partners, clients, and collaborators across the world to develop new working methods for system change.

Meggan Collins & Linnéa Rönnquist are both Strategic Urban Designers and Architects at Dark Matter Labs.

Twitter: @DarkMatter_Labs
Website: www.darkmatterlabs.org 

The Democratic Climate Model is an innovation for climate action at a local level. This model takes a systems approach to pathways towards climate resilience, making explicit the relationship between design, power and social justice, and where inequity and citizen disempowerment weaken governance and climate resilience. 

Agenda track: 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: Some
Screen need: Needed all the time

Our Model aims to foster higher quality democracies and more participatory approaches by sparking conversations with public sector leaders, civil society and communities on more just, inclusive, community-led approaches. It seeks to shift ‘climate innovation’ away from a tech focus, influence governance and policy, and help cities think about what ‘scaling up’ for more durable, longer term change takes.

It is positively framed around four categories of ‘conditions’ we see for climate resilience:

  • diversity of actors
  • participatory culture
  • resourcing
  • subject-matter expertise. 

The Model is developed through our partnership in EIT Climate-KIC for achieving carbon neutrality, which runs across more than 10 EU cities. 

During this workshop session we will showcase the use of our model to date in local contexts and discuss potential levers for overcoming the identified barriers to climate action.

We warmly invite change agents for climate action in their respective fields to this session.

By including different community members (experts across sectors, civil society organisations), we aim to shift the conversation to longer term debates and discussions beyond a project cycle approach. In this way, our model can incorporate a shift to more democratic processes and decision-making on climate action. 

Democratic Society a European international democracy organisation, supporting our cities and residents to ensure that radical climate transformation is a democratic not just a technocratic process. Through democratic design, organisational development and practical participation exercises, they are building long-term resident participation in all the decisions, plans and projects that affect them. 

Twitter: @demsoc
Website: www.demsoc.org 

For our collective future, we are trying to steer somewhere between “business as usual” and “degrowth”, envisaging a world where our living standards change remarkably little, but our resource use more than halves, through the “Lean Green Model”. To create this world, nothing can be thrown away or squandered. We will present a model in which physical goods are tied to information infrastructures, which ensure that they are reused, repaired, and resold over, and over, and over again by hundreds of different people before they are recycled.

Agenda track: 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some – lots of discussions
Movement level: None
Screen need: Good to have

This project started from basic research on climate refugees and how to provision physical systems for food, shelter, water and so on as we start to have hundreds of millions of displaced people around the world. There is a deep relevance to these ideas beyond simply reducing our environmental impact.

At Mattereum we have defined and developed an end-to-end ecosystem that brings security and trust to the intersection of distributed commerce and trade of physical assets.

The Mattereum Protocol combines a precise definition of the state and properties of assets in the Mattereum Asset Passport which sets out the unique nature, or non-fungibility, of the asset, together with legally binding mechanisms for dispute resolution. This enables NFTs to be securely linked to the ownership of physical assets for the first time.

The long-term potential of this technology can help untangle the legal grey area that exists between “smart” online contracts and physical contracts.

This capability to extremely securely bind information to matter gives us the ability to take completely new economic models, including shared ownership and complex financialization, and implement them on top of the material goods of the day. Almost any policy objective, from carbon taxes to a shared economy can be implemented: it is the bedrock for all other kinds of political experiments.

We invite circular economy activists and blockchain people asking for more meaning and substance in the blockchain world to this session. Together, we will run through the “lean green” model, and look at some concrete early examples, running on the Ethereum blockchain.

After the festival, we would be very happy to work with anybody working in the circular economy space, and have cheap turnkey systems they could use for prototyping and proof of concept work.

Vinay Gupta is Founder and CEO of Mattereum. He is a leading figure in the blockchain space, having coordinated the release of blockchain platform Ethereum in July 2015. He is also the director of the Hexayurt Project, a 20 year old volunteer effort working in the refugee shelter space. Mattereum is an impact-driven venture capital-backed technology enterprise with a new protocol for digital trade. Mattereum was founded in 2017, and is based in London. The organisation is setting out to change the world by redefining the relationship between physical assets and distributed digital commerce.

Twitter: @Mattereum
Website: mattereum.com

Rather than seek answers to “what is right” externally to ourselves, Moral Imaginations invites a discovery of purpose and morality by directly cultivating imaginative explorations of our moral sense, deepening empathy and igniting prosocial creativity. The potential to build civic movements, local solidarity and networks of action from this place is exciting and under exploration.

Agenda track: 1 Nature – human, 3 Civic imagination, 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Possible to use audio only

This discovery is conducted through radical perception shifts and development of connection to humans and non-humans across the past, present and future. Important to our work is building on existing bodies of work such as narrative therapy and associated narrative methodologies, theatre and the arts, deep ecology practices, contemplative practices, futures thinking, and embodied complexity methodologies. Such practices lead participants to experience an expanded sense of meaning and deeper connection to their core values and purpose.

This session will run in two parts. In the first part, we will introduce people to a growing body of work and approach to use powerful imagination exercises with groups to shift perception towards more than human and deep time perspectives. Moral Imaginations is a collective, community and toolkit of approaches that was born out of the pandemic when people were craving an experiential connection to the possibility of better systems and a better society.

During this first part, participants will be able to experience an immersive collective imagination exercise where they connect to future generations. You will need a good internet connection, but video is not necessary, although preferred.

The second part of the session will be hosted as a collective imagining session around the potential for imagination to inform legislation and policy. We hope to attract those with policy-making experience and those who seek to innovate policy. 

Together, we will brainstorm and develop ideas on how the power of imagination could be harnessed to shift policy on the local, national and international level. This will be a participatory exercise and will be co-hosted with partners who are developing such thinking in their own work and projects.

We invite political and social entrepreneurs, civil society leaders, policy-makers community leaders, movement builders, artists, activists, and local change-makers to come join us at this session. Jointly, we can use our imagination to open up new avenues for change.

After the festival, the next step will be to work out how to bridge the potential of imagination with legislation and the development of new and promising policy.

Moral Imaginations is a project that develops, designs and delivers rigorous imagining for moral futures. They develop and work with imagination exercises to develop empathy, meaning, agency, belonging and a connection to what’s important. They label themselves as a “feel thank” – A think tank, but for feelings. Moral Imaginations works to combine rational, strategic approaches to change with approaches that draw on intuition, imagination and the cognitive sciences to work at the level of feeling to affect inner change in people across local communities, organisations and policy.

@moral_imagining, @solarpunk_girl, @liamckavanagh, @lai 

moralimaginations.com, phoebetickell.com 

 

Our liberal democracies have traditionally based their legitimacy on a stance of near-omniscience and self-righteousness. Unfortunately, in a world of high uncertainty and continuous crisis, such a position leads to political stalemate. This impedes our society’s ability to change at a time of great transformational need.

Agenda track: 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: None
Screen need: Needed all the time

Many of our governmental processes work against solving long-term solutions to the global and complex challenges we face. They are remnants of a bygone era of linear predictability. Humble Governance is a new stance adapted to the 21st century. which could fully unleash the still hindered energy of governments, politicians and civil servants to actively solve these issues.

Humble Governance is a new but tested approach that fosters political and societal trust despite political disagreement, and enables ambitious reforms under current conditions of uncertainty.

Using a current real-life case from the US State of Colorado, we invite you to jointly explore what innovative solutions, benefits for citizens, and challenges can come from humility.

Together, we hope to be able to develop first-hand understanding of this new governance paradigm and ideas on how to share, implement and adapt it globally.

The session is hosted by Demos Helsinki, and based on work co-developed with RadicalxChange.

Vincent Lassalle has been a practitioner, a consultant and a writer on organisational innovation and societal change for over a decade. He is the author of Bridge Builders: Learning from those ushering the future of society, a personal essay following a year-long international study on post-industrial transition.

João Sigora is works on Governance Innovation at Demos Helsinki. The core of his everyday work involves experimenting with new approaches to governance and building public servants’ capacity for reimagining and co-creating desired futures.

Demos Helsinki is a globally operating, independent think tank. We conduct research, offer consultancy services, and reimagine and experiment futures with a global alliance, Untitled.

RadicalxChange (RxC) is a global movement for next-generation political economies, founded by Glen Weyl in 2018. We’re committed to advancing plurality, equality, community, and decentralization through upgrading democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons, and identity. The RadicalxChange Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the RxC movement, to building community, and to education about democratic innovation. RxC connects people from all walks of life – ranging from social scientists and technologists to artists and activists. 

@DemosHelsinki, @RadxChange

demoshelsinki.fi, radicalxchange.org

A parallel polis is a space of human creativity and agency that connects all citizens to practical solutions to our environmental, social division and well-being crises. In this session you are invited to imagine a parallel polis through architecture that can connect community agency-networks (CANs) locally and internationally and sketch its potential impact.

Agenda track: Ontological politics
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: Some
Screen need:  Needed all the time 

A parallel polis is constructed out of:

  1. A global system of place-based cosmolocal CANs that bring together
  •       civil society organisations and their clients
  •       social entrepreneurs and all those building the 4th sector economy
  •       those traditionally excluded from mainstream political discourse but who share values with the above
  •       those who may not share these values but live in the locality and take part in its social life
  1. A new media system serving the CAN of CANs.

This parallel polis is fundamentally autonomous, but has the capacity to partner with governments to create improved outcomes for people and the planet. Its main attraction is future-oriented creativity that recognises our collective need for agency, meaning, purpose, freedom and belonging.

We begin this session by looking at the psychosocial needs and resources of the polity to set the tone of the ‘onto-shift’ – a reorientation of people power from homo economicus to homo ludens: every person is a creative, capable of playing our way out of crisis. 

We continue by inviting you to design the architecture that can connect CANs in towns and cities, through regions to an international network of people’s parliaments. What kinds of constitutes can successfully contain people power? What tools and practices can enable relational governance? What sense-making tools can help interpret the diverse desires and imagination of citizens? Where do citizens and people’s assemblies fit in? What tech is useful, what is not? What new currencies can enhance the viability of the CAN of CANs?

In the course of the session we will sketch out how the parallel polis made up of an international CAN of CANs can

  •       transform citizens experience of cosmolocal power
  •       give rise to new system fractals, capable of replicating throughout the world
  •       establish a new political axis, linking the flourishing of people, community and planet (I, We, World)
  •       how that in turn can generate the demand for a wider system shift

We are hoping to attract builders of the parallel polis, including:

  • those who are involved in running and building Commynity Agency Networks (CANs) anywhere in the world
  • those who are already designing the tech capable of creating governance systems for CANs
  • tech designers for the international CAN of CANs
  • tech designers for the new media system
  • cosmolocal media practitioners
  • artists, designers, theatre professionals
  • help to finance the ten-year project

This session is especially beneficial for political and social entrepreneurs, civil society actors, movement builders, artists, educationalists, tech designers, and spiritual activists.

We started The Alternative UK in 2017 on the day that British MP Jo Cox was murdered. We were clear that the party political system operated through opposition and could not bring people together to face the multiple crises of this time. Across Europe and the US, only 2% of people are members of political parties. Any promising progressive political agenda can easily be hijacked by those who know how to manipulate social media.

After nearly five years of observing the innovation and self-organising outside of the mainstream of socio-political-economic systems we were convinced that the key to transformation was to harness human agency cosmolocally through community agency networks (CANs). These are not formal, bureaucratic organisations directed by authorities, but responsive, creative and ambitious spaces where any and every element of a new socio-political-economic system can gather. They have diverse forms and styles of agency, held together by careful facilitation, capacious narratives and the best of relational tech.

In these spaces, every kind of citizen can experience participation and the chance to create a future they can look forward to. With civil society and social entrepreneurs at the core, their work is not voluntary, but constantly generating community wealth and a growing 4th sector economy.

The session is led by Indra Adnan & Pat Kane

@AlterUK21
www.thealternative.org.uk

We invite anyone interested in bringing concrete utopias to their communities, whether it is your workplace, housing cooperative, city council, home town, or football team. Session participants will get to experiment with new forms of transformative learning developed in the research project Pedagogy of Concrete Utopias. The research project develops pedagogy that supports learners to design new and even radical solutions and ideas for ecologically sustainable ways of organizing life and activity.

Agenda track: 1 Nature – human, 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some
Screen need: Needed all the time
Day: Thursday 23 September

First, we will briefly introduce the ideas of concrete utopia and life-centric view. A concrete utopia exists between the present moment and a utopian vision. It serves as a stepping stone or bridge towards a more sustainable future, or as a laboratory of the future we want to build.  Life-centric views orient us to widen our circle of care and thought beyond humans.  

The introduction is followed by hands-on work in break-out rooms, where participants will experiment with the tools developed in the research project to envision and build their own concrete utopias. 

We will be closing with a collective discussion of the ideas generated in the breakout rooms, as well as critical reflections on the suitability of the ideas and tools introduced in the sessions for use in different settings. 

Our research project focuses on the public sector, and specifically on educational institutions as platforms for sustainability transformation. However, the session is for anyone interested in bringing concrete utopias to their own communities.

We believe that education can no longer emphasise enculturation into existing cultures that have shown to be unsustainable. There is a need for new ways of living, thinking and consuming. Concrete utopia is an exciting concept that opens up new avenues for radical imagination and experimenting with new ideas in practice. 

We’d hope that the participants will gain insights from the session about how to envision and build possible and impossible futures in different contexts in their work and personal lives. We also hope to get feedback about the applicability of our ideas and tools in different types of settings.

The session is hosted by the research group Pedagogy of Concrete Utopias. The facilitators are:
Antti Rajala, Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher, University of Oulu
Pihla Soinnunmaa, Doctoral researcher, University of Helsinki
Aki Saariaho, Teacher, Otaniemi Upper Secondary School

@ConcreteUtopias

In order to take on the challenges of our time, we need to get better at making decisions as groups. At RadicalxChange, we are developing tools for group decision-making that can help identify stakeholders or impacted persons, facilitate liquid networks of trust, surface shared values or ideas, and steer groups toward consensus rather than disagreement. We have brought some of those tools together in an end-to-end decision-making platform we call RxC Voice.

Agenda track: 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Needed all the time

We believe that inclusive, productive deliberation is paramount to a healthy democracy. In order to make this possible for large groups (e.g. cities) and digital communities (e.g. blockchain communities), we need to design digital platforms on which group members can engage in conversations that move toward consensus rather than divisive argument.

In this session, we will discuss the components that make a successful decision-making process. We will also be running interactive demos with innovative democratic tools and share findings and anecdotes from experiments with governments, social movements, blockchain communities, and more. Finally, we will be discussing next steps for the RxC Voice project and democratic innovation and imagining radical futures of deliberative democracy and community self-governance.

This session is for anyone interested in exploring tools for more successful deliberation at scale, digital democracy, or decentralized decision-making. If you think we need to update the platforms on which groups discuss important decisions and issues for healthier democracy, then you will enjoy discussing this project with us.

We hope that our session will inspire you to experiment with new democratic tools such as RxC Voice, Pol.is, and Quadratic Voting. These tools have already impacted the way that many groups deliberate and make decisions, including governments, DAOs, corporate boards, social movements, and more. We hope you will contact us if you would like to pilot RxC Voice with your group, collaborate with us on the project, or fund our efforts.

When our deliberative tools fail to surface the shared values of a group, democracy suffers and lapses into authoritarianism or plutocracy. We hope you will join us in rethinking the ways that constituencies express their wants and needs to each other and to their leadership.

RadicalxChange (RxC) is a global movement for next-generation political economies. It advances plurality, equality, community, and decentralization through upgrades of democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons, and identity.

Alex Randaccio is a Project Developer at RadicalxChange, leading development of RxC’s suite of experimental governance tools. Jennifer Lyn Morone is RadicalxChange Foundation’s CEO and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience with technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future.

Twitter: @RadxChange
Website: radicalxchange.org

At the theatre by Jussi Helsten Helsinki Marketing

Casino Égalité is a dream of strengthening solidarity and sharing within the cultural scene. By celebrating chance and the luck of the draw, the idea is to give art and artists space(s) in which to be unexpected and uncontrolled. Sortition could be a way of governing such spaces to strengthen the feeling of equality, where responsibility and possibility go hand-in-hand. This session contains deliberation, gambling and redistributing.

Agenda track: 4 Heterodox institutions
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Good to have
Day: Friday 24 September

The initiative, which goes under the working title Casino Égalité, aims to create a new cultural oasis for the independent theatre scene in Helsinki and to work as an experiment of an alternative way of governing, tackling the challenges of meritocracy, hierarchy and lobbyism. 

This venture has two exceptional features it wants to experiment on: governance by rotation of responsibility and sharing of resources between institutional and independent players. The goal of both is to allow for greater diversity of approaches in performance arts.

The field of performing arts is often not really lacking infrastructure nor material resources required for production. The problem is rather that the resource distribution is asymmetrical, leaving out the ever growing pool of theatre freelancers. There is a substantial workforce of artists hungering for the opportunity to create and present their art, but they have very limited possibilities to do so. Access to resources is regulated by a set of opaque requirements difficult to decode and held aback by rigid structures. Getting the chance to produce one’s work is often not a question of skills or passion, nor even the luck of the draw.

The whole venture of Casino Égalité is based on exactly that – the luck of the draw, namely; governing by sortition. From selecting the productions of the upcoming season to the curation of additional programmes; to appointing administrative and technical staff; all is based on the rotation of responsibility, selected through sortition. This means that the topics and aesthetics of the productions and additional programming are liberated from conformism to trends and cronyism. It also means that the artists and ensembles creating these have no pressure to have impressive résumés or charming personalities.

Instead, the pool of professionals engaged in the (serious) play of Casino Égalité all have equal responsibility for managing the venture, and equal possibility to produce and realise their artistic work, regardless of status, merit or charisma.

By practicing sortition as the principal modus operandi, which is not a new invention as a democratic practice (see previous examples here or here), this cultural oasis would on a broader spectrum function also as a laboratory for an alternative way of governance that tackles the challenges of meritocracy, hierarchy, bias and lobbyism. These phenomena undermine both diversity in the arts, as well as from a broader societal point of view threaten belief in change through elections and representative democracy.

This session is for everyone who enjoys culture and arts, indeterminacy and gambling, art practitioners, institutions and funders. The aim is to gather unexpected perspectives and connections to further develop the initiative. Also, the session hopefully awakes the pleasures of sharing and gambling and gives a glimpse of the possibility of sustainability without austerity to the participants.

Rasmus Slätis is a Finnish theatre maker engaged in acting, teaching theatre and trying to make spaces of freedom for artists and art. Having been based in Berlin the past decade he has recently returned to his hometown, Helsinki.

Twitter:  @rabbeson
Website: www.rasmusslatis.com

Some links on sortition as a democratic practice:
Voting undermines the will of the people. It’s time to replace it with sortition.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/14/voting-undermines-the-will-of-the-people-its-time-to-replace-it-with-sortition

The Irish citizens assembly chooses representatives by lottery not election.
https://www.buildinganewreality.com/the-irish-citizens-assembly-chooses-representatives-by-lottery-not-election 

What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.12651 

Brett Henning: What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people?
https://www.ted.com/talks/brett_hennig_what_if_we_replaced_politicians_with_randomly_selected_people?language=en

Photo by Jussi Helsten, Helsinki Marketing

RegenerativeGovernance-ImageByJessicaPerlstein

In this session we will be organising a simulation experience of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). This done by playing a game to learn peer-to-peer governance. This game is based on 13 years of real world R&D, finding and experimenting with replicable solutions in over 200 cities around the world. The session relies strongly on audience participation and interaction.

Agenda track: 4 Heterodox institutions, 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some
Screen need: All of the time
Day: Thursday 23 September

Prior to the DAO simulation in the session, Kiwi child-friendly city expert and curator Hannah Mitchell will be hosting a meditation session.

After the festival, Bloom will be hosting the first Bloom Womb cohort. This program seeks to bring to real-life the experiences gained in the DAO simulation.

Bloom Womb is a two-month in-depth introduction to regenerative cultures. It utilises a short syllabus, and a weekly meeting to engage and encourage deep connections and support among peers. At the end of the two-month period, there is a real-life weekend where participants near each other physically carry out a part of their goals or interests together. This program tangibly supports Untitled participants in following through on gems from their Untitled experience. It also builds deeper connectivity between our communities, and would support Bloom Network in starting a small revenue stream to continue bootstrapping our collaborative efforts.

Bloom is a grassroots international community of people and projects working toward regenerative cultures, founded in 2008. Local Bloom hubs around the world grow participation in practices such as food security, local economies, celebrations of diversity, and art as cultural transformation. There are tens of thousands of solutions for climate restoration and social equity all over the world. However, they are invisible to the general public and disconnected from one another. Bloom aims to connect people and existing initiatives, locally and globally, to build capacity together and inspire a billion acts of regeneration.

@ourbloomnetwork
bloomnetwork.org

Illustration by Jessica Perlstein / Bloom

Photo by Bloom