local scale, bypassing the need for large factories and highly centralised business practices. In other words it puts manufacturing power back in the hands of everyday people. The most interesting aspect of Maker Culture as far as RoSY2.0 is concerned is the emergence of the Maker Space. Maker Spaces (sometimes known as Hackerspaces) are community operated workshops where people with common interests can meet in order to socialise and collaborate on a wide range of projects. The Doncaster Maker Group (donnymakers.org) have been busy building a Doncaster Maker Space. Having no money themselves the DMG decided to build their Maker Space almost completely from scratch (and scrap) to show just what could be done with the skills and resources that already exist in Doncaster. There’s a whole range of hidden and untapped creative talent in our communities and local waste-streams offer treasure and opportunity to the inventive mind. The DMG also want to emphasise the fact that the principles, practices and techniques of the Maker Culture can also be applied to just about every other aspect of everyday life; from food to fuel, shelter to sanitation, the Maker ethos allows us to take care of vital needs at both an individual and at a community level. To help broaden their skill-base the Doncaster Maker Group have combined Maker Culture with permaculture (permaculture.org.uk). The word ‘permaculture’ was first coined by Australian designers Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and comes from ‘permanent agriculture’ and ‘permanent culture’. In the words of Bill Mollison: “Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.” In practice this involves looking at natural ecological systems and using them to design sustainable human systems. The most obvious area of ecological inspired design is,
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of course, food production and the most famous example of permaculture is the forest garden where plants are grown in a natural multi-level environment. This is not as intensive as traditional agriculture, but the yields are more diverse and once the initial work is done it is much lower maintenance. The Doncaster Maker Group work closely with Doncaster Urban Growers (as mentioned in the Greenjacker article in issue one of the Doncopolitan) to create a range of local permaculture based growing initiatives. Permaculture principles and practices can also be be applied to virtually any area of human activity and on any scale. PermaFuture, a local social enterprise who specialise in identifying underused resources such as waste-streams or neglected land and developing ways to turn them into valuable community assets, have come up with a plan for a Market Garden Housing Estate based on the permaculture zoning system where the straw-bale houses (built using locally grown straw) even include Maker Space style workshops so people can develop their own self-sustaining micro enterprises. Moving up a level the Transition Town movement (transitionnetwork.org) uses permaculture principles to enable whole towns to rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions in the face of global fossil fuel depletion and climate change. The ability to produce more locally also allows us to trade more locally, which places many aspects of the economy back in the control of local people. Money spent with locally owned companies stays in local circulation for much longer than money traded with national (or international) companies. The addition of a local currency such as the Bristol Pound or the newly emerging HullCoin (which, being a cryptocurrency, is different from traditional local currency because it actually adds value to the local economy by mining Bitcoins – see bitcoin.org) gives the local economy even greater levels of autonomy and resilience at a time when the focus of
the national economy is getting ever narrower and more London-centric. What is true of the local economy is also true for local democracy. The strength of Doncaster’s former mining communities came from their ability to organised autonomously to ensure that the community’s needs were met. The collapse of mining in Doncaster, combined with the ongoing (again Londoncentric) centralisation of political power, has left our communities vulnerable and without adequate political representation. As ex-CIA officer Robert David Steele says: “Our entire commercial, diplomatic, and informational systems are now cancerous.” But Steele is not without optimism, his ground-breaking book ‘The Open-Source Everything Manifesto’ offers real alternatives which can be built by all of us from the ground up. In the same way the Doncaster Maker Group believe that Maker Culture can be extended to all aspects of modern life, Steele shows that the widespread application of Open-Source thinking can bring about revolutionary change. Open-Source is the opposite to enclosed proprietary systems where corporations and governments jealously guard ideas, technologies and information just to ensure greater profits or power. OpenSource makes ideas and techniques available to everyone so that they can be developed by humanity as a whole. In Steele’s words: “The open source ecology is made up of a wide range of opens – open farm technology, open source software, open hardware, open networks, open money, open small business technology, open patents – to name just a few.” So RoSY2.0 would be an Open-Source Maker Republic shaped and controlled by the needs, dreams and desires of the people of South Yorkshire for the direct benefit of the people of South Yorkshire. If this sounds like your kinda town then why not join us? The sooner we get cracking the sooner we get there.
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