vation foundation’, Nesta, has published a great overview of similar initiatives called Digital Social Innovation. They see a European-wide rise of “collaborative methods for financing, development and production, leading to services that are provided neither by the state nor by the market” (Bria, 2015). Interesting as these examples are, Nesta also sees a challenge here. While local and small scale examples abound, it is still hard to scale these or find room for further experimentation (Bria, 2015). Hackable City Research Question 6 How can we align, engage and reward various stakeholders around the organization of urban infrastructures or issues as a commons?
HACKING & GOVERNANCE A second discussion central to the hacker ethos revolves around the organization model and 26
governance of hackable city processes. As many have pointed out: hackers distrust central authorities and prefer to work in a decentralized way. As Voltaire would say: they mend their own gardens. This leads to two potential challenges: a) the organization and commitment within projects, and b) the relation between a collective project and society at large. To start with the first issue, some have argued that for the realization of communal goals, the bottom-up approach may be too non-committal. Some advocates of open source software such as Eric Raymond have therefore argued for strong leadership. Successful examples of open source software, he claimed, happened because of the benevolent dictators that oversaw them, the production of the open source browser Netscape being his central exhibit (Raymond, 1999). His argument reflects a wider discussion on the role of centralized positions in horizontal communities. This discussion also directly relates to the necessity of institutions or other central agents that should have an overview and guide processes, even when the processes themselves are open, participatory and hackable. Some projects resolve this internally, but in many projects, new roles may emerge for campaigners, community organizers or civil institutions. On a second level, conflicts may arise between the goals of a collective practice of hackable citymaking, and the public interest at large. The hackable city assumes a form of (civic) empowerment, giving agency to the public to take initiative upon issues of their concern. At the same time, it poses the question of democracy. How do new opportunities for self-organization compare to institutional practices of democratic decision making? In the framework of a hackable city, who secures that the purposes of a self-organised group will not overshadow the interests of the general public? Despite the charm of people joining forces to inflict positive change in their environments, we must not forget that these are also unsolicited actions that may be undemocratic. The discussion on these possible conflicts of interests has recently taken off. On the one hand national and city governments in The Netherlands (and other countries as well) are enthusiastic about the possible rise of a ‘participation society’ in which it’s no longer the welfare state that takes care of all kinds of social provision, but citizens who will organize themselves, start helping out each other. In the ‘energetic society’ that the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency