Mal au Pixel: Altlabs
lauantai 11. kesäkuuta 2011,
Juha Huuskonen
Some discussions that started in LabtoLab event in Nantes are continuing in Paris, in the 6th edition of Mal au Pixel festival.
The Altlabs event took place this afternoon, featuring presentations by many independent labs: media labs, hacklabs, fab labs, biohacking labs, etc.
Many of these independent labs manage to make a lot of things happen with very little funding and resources. It might be a good idea to make this fact more clearly visible, for several reasons: in order to show how much more efficient these small organisations can be compared to big institutions, in order to build more trust towards the community involved, in order to pass further knowledge about the resources needed for realising different kind of projects.
One of the featured labs in both events, Plataforma Cero led by Pedro Soler, has already started doing this in a rather straightforward way. You can find the budgets from their website alongside other basic information (see for example 'Prespuesto anual de plataforma cero' link here). Pedro used the term 'crowd accountancy' to describe this experiment. This practice will most likely be challenged from two sides: from the funders (Laboral institution) and the local people who are participating in the activities, who can now see who is getting paid and who is not. An important issue is that once people get used to transparency in certain issues, it's difficult to go back to secrecy.
Regarding this same issue, Pixelache Helsinki decided some years ago that we would include the basic budget information in our annual portfolios which are publicly available (we should probably make it easier to find this information). Also the budget for the Alternative Economy Cultures programme of Pixelache Helsinki 09 has been published online.
The Altlabs event took place this afternoon, featuring presentations by many independent labs: media labs, hacklabs, fab labs, biohacking labs, etc.
Many of these independent labs manage to make a lot of things happen with very little funding and resources. It might be a good idea to make this fact more clearly visible, for several reasons: in order to show how much more efficient these small organisations can be compared to big institutions, in order to build more trust towards the community involved, in order to pass further knowledge about the resources needed for realising different kind of projects.
One of the featured labs in both events, Plataforma Cero led by Pedro Soler, has already started doing this in a rather straightforward way. You can find the budgets from their website alongside other basic information (see for example 'Prespuesto anual de plataforma cero' link here). Pedro used the term 'crowd accountancy' to describe this experiment. This practice will most likely be challenged from two sides: from the funders (Laboral institution) and the local people who are participating in the activities, who can now see who is getting paid and who is not. An important issue is that once people get used to transparency in certain issues, it's difficult to go back to secrecy.
Regarding this same issue, Pixelache Helsinki decided some years ago that we would include the basic budget information in our annual portfolios which are publicly available (we should probably make it easier to find this information). Also the budget for the Alternative Economy Cultures programme of Pixelache Helsinki 09 has been published online.