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Open Source Agriculture

Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era
Authors: Giotitsas, Chris;

Open Source Agriculture

Abstract

I have spent most of my life (so far) in and around a farm in one of the most remote and poor areas of Greece. Being surrounded by farmers and people working in the primary and basic construction sector, I had not appreciated the ingenuity and collaborative effort these people put in their day to day activities to achieve sustainability. It was not until I had spent several years away from my family homes that it dawned on me how uncritically immersed urbanised societies were in the technology they are handed. I had always been enamoured with information and communication technologies. I was experimenting with free and open source software and tinkering with hardware to get my work done affordably and to have control over the digital technologies. But I came to understand that the open source is something beyond an efficient approach to hi-tech. It is a social movement. Openness, sharing resources, and other terms like these are used today to add a “sexiness” factor to products or institutions that do not deserve the name. This has led to the term “openwashing” (borrowed from “greenwashing”) to call out this trend. Similarly, participatory or user-driven design, co-creation or co-construction and other concepts have been proposed to include the public or at least some diversity of stakeholders in the technology development. However, such initiatives, mostly externally driven, are often organised top-down and do not essentially involve citizens. Hence, the dichotomy is maintained between expert and layman ignoring the social complexities of stakeholder engagement. This book explores those initiatives that have been self-mobilised from within farmer communities, in a bottom-up fashion, and are engaging in technology development for the community itself. The practical lessons learned from this research project are being applied in our efforts to provide the local community, where I grew up, with the tools to formulate an effective organisation similar to the ones I discuss here. This book explores technology designed and produced by farmers to accommodate their particular needs. I trace the emergence of a new social movement that facilitates and promotes this type of technology. I thus discuss two case studies of social movement organisations and their technological communities: the Farm Hack network in the USΑ and the L'Atelier Paysan initiative in France. The focus is on how they frame their activities and how this translates in the alternative technology development model. I use the following conceptual tools: Framing analysis and resource mobilisation theory from the social movement research field; and the constructivist approach and critical theory of technology from the technology research field. This book illustrates how individuals refuse to embrace a technological system of mainstream agriculture that does not reflect their values and interests, and instead rely on alternative framings of technological culture to give meaning to their vision of how agriculture should be. By doing so, I address a novel collaborative mode of technology production, substantially different from the dominant market-driven one. I employ the concept of the social movement to describe this collective activity, albeit in an early stage. This enables the tracing of the various ideological frames that contribute to the creation of a common set of principles and goals for those engaging in this activity as well as their efforts to gain support. That is why framing analysis has been selected as a key theoretical approach, combined with an investigation of the incentivising and resource management processes within the movement organisations. I also examine the details of the production process in the broader sociotechnical environment. I argue that this emerging mode of production signals a break from the capitalist mode of technology production and formulates a more democratised alternative.

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
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