A collective account of ecosophical experiences

2021/2 N° 51

Translated by Connie Chow-Petit

This article recounts the ecosophical experience of the La MYNE third-place communities, a singularity in the French landscape in its practices ‘on the edge of chaos’, with multiple realities, and around the values of caring, experimentation and documentation under free licences.

If you’re interested in a systemic approach to society that takes account of different scales while trying to preserve the individual, you might like to read it.

The article summarised here was written on a collaborative document shared online by members of the La MYNE community.

What is La MYNE?

MYNE is a community of people from a variety of backgrounds, born out of the desire to create frameworks for re-appropriating research around the themes of ecological transition. In 2015, the Metropole of Lyon rented a house in Villeurbanne (1, rue du Luizet) to the recently created association to carry out participatory research and citizen entrepreneurship projects.

By hosting citizen projects on subjects as diverse as food, technology, energy, sociology, the arts, etc., the community and the space are being built physically and mentally into free and open source third places (TiLiOS) in which the political stakes are growing.

The primary aim of La MYNE is to provide a framework for the development, documentation and sharing of concrete projects led by its contributors. Over a hundred projects have been launched since 2015. To achieve this, practices for welcoming projects and people are being put in place as we go along. These involve facilitating access to and the exchange of a number of pooled resources to help these projects get off the ground, from conceptualisation to practical and often collective implementation. These resources vary according to need, but are often a combination of physical tools, knowledge, practices and spaces for exchange: machine tools, meeting spaces, contacts with research laboratories, funding resources, spaces for freedom of expression, discovery and socio-cultural diversity, and so on.

In a spirit of coherence and curiosity, and to support this unusual setting, the collective has been experimenting for several years with new ways of exchanging knowledge, living together, creating economic value and contributing to societal change. MYNE is building a political project rooted in the practices of making, experimenting and serving a more liveable and sustainable society.

An ecohacklab for ecological projects

Originally conceived as an eco-hacklab, La MYNE federates a wide range of citizen projects promoting ecological transition. La MYNE’s members are all involved in groups working to reduce waste, promote urban agriculture, improve air quality and promote renewable energies. Their common goal is to make more room for the living world as a whole and to reduce the impact of human activity on natural environments.

Through multidisciplinary brainstorming sessions and the prototyping of concrete solutions, the members of La MYNE are proving that everyone is capable of addressing the ecological and social issues that affect us all. Numerous projects have thus become meaningful realities for a greener society, such as :

L’Atelier Soudé (http://atelier-soude.fr/), a workshop for the joint repair of electronic objects, operating in 3 locations in 2020, with 3 employees and around 50 active volunteers;
The Fabrique des Energies, born out of the DAISEE project, which aims to support common energy sources;
The Kukki air pollution sensor, used to raise awareness among residents and children in the Buers district of Villeurbanne,
Or the DOZE park exhibition at the Saint-Etienne Design Biennial, inviting visitors to reflect on biomimicry and nature/electronics hybrids.

As a complement to nature protection associations, La MYNE’s initial aim was to offer shared infrastructures to promote biological and/or chemical solutions for environmental remediation. It has equipped itself with the tools and skills to do this. Public access to disciplines such as chemistry and biology is rare. In order to provide this opportunity to manipulate and experiment at reduced cost, MYNE has for a long time been implementing a ‘biochining’ approach, which consists of recovering and improving old biological and chemical manipulation equipment, with the aim of reappropriating these disciplines and taking action on related issues. In the end, however, the high skills required and the safety issues involved limited access to this equipment.

Many members of La MYNE identify with the ‘low-tech’ movement. This approach, or philosophy, consists of designing each project using as few resources as possible (material or energy), with the aim of producing objects with a very low ecological impact (in their design, but also in their use or life cycle). This approach involves investing time in creativity, engineering and eco-design, so as to reduce material costs.

La MYNE, for example, has carried out all its interior design work using recycled materials (including paint), has experimented with food preservation methods such as the Zeerpot (desert fridge), and grows vegetables using rainwater.

Links with various groups are also a strong point of the community: for example, OpenSource Ecology, or the LowTechLab for ecological techniques, and many others in other fields. This encourages ecological dynamics with a systemic as well as an operational vision.

The design and use of the spaces in the communal house are also rooted in today’s social reality. While one group takes charge of setting up the vegetable garden or collective composting, another repairs old 3D printers to limit purchases and waste. However, at La MYNE, the temporary rental lease has the effect of limiting investment in self-construction for thermal renovation and/or limiting/reusing wastewater, for example.

La MYNE’s experiments are also looking at the legal and territorial aspects of society, and it could be that this precarious state of occupation will evolve into something more permanent and cooperative.

Caring for society, communities and individuals

As time has gone by and the La MYNE community has grown, the projects and activities of La MYNE have rapidly diversified and become more complex. The ambition of the objectives to be achieved and the actions needed to achieve them have a well-known tendency to push individuals and organisations towards structural biases: overwork, disinvestment, personification of the association, information overload, rigid processes, loss of diversity or cohesion, reductionism and collectivism that are not conducive to the diversity of initiatives.

In view of this risk, La MYNE has chosen to strengthen the foundations of conviviality and to remain frugal in its operations, so that it can grow organically while respecting the existing contributors. Created from human ties, the community has grown from strength to strength through experience, working together and the reality of projects. By advocating personal and collective emancipation as a key value, La MYNE is engaging in a wide range of reflections to encourage fulfilment, joy, links and good care.

Every day we strive to imagine a place where everyone can fulfil their potential, and we are experimenting with a way of life where everyone is invited to take care of themselves and others. Collective management, the capacity for individual initiative and the importance attached to taking care are essential: some of the innovations we are testing, such as co-postulation and collaborative documentation open to all, have been developed to limit the pressure on each individual.

Knowledge of potential individual weaknesses represents a collective strength for the community, which is in fact able to compensate for these weaknesses or contribute to their development. Reliance as ‘the sharing of accepted solitudes and the exchange of respected differences’ (Marcel Bolle de Bal) enables adaptation and takes into account the potential for failure. A framework and philosophy of support for emerging lifestyles makes it possible to link people, organisations, technologies and ideas in order to generate, adapt, validate and ultimately modify existing systems (social, technical, political, etc.).

In concrete terms, the mental health of La MYNE members is being sought through practices and experiments that have been put in place over time:

The concept of well-treatment has gradually replaced that of benevolence (mainly contributed by Thomas Wolff and Stéphane Langlois): everyone can take their place in space and time, everyone can do what they want (do-docracy), with a principle of non-judgement.
The administrative burden and responsibilities are shared out: the open collegiate council (then the current work to create a permanent general meeting) and the system of governance in working groups distributes the administrative and management tasks among the most active members as much as possible; the founding members hold handover sessions and distance themselves from the ‘pillar’ tasks, as well as from the ‘representation’ figures; the most active members meet ‘in the green’, to take a step back and work in more convivial conditions close to nature.
Decision-making is also becoming increasingly distributed, involving consent-based decision-making, co-budgeting and online voting.
Exchange sessions (e.g. the ‘lifecaring’ sessions initiated by Connie & Benjamin Chow-Petit) have begun to appear, providing an opportunity to engage in reflection and get to the heart of the psychology of individuals. The cognitive laboratory developed by Jerémy Virgo also aims to study cognitive care and the development of abilities through the spectrum of cognitive sciences.
The welcome given to new people is more personalised and should facilitate the inclusion of all, while avoiding the pitfall and illusion of being able to welcome everyone. Openness and care for each and every person remain a common thread in the values of mynois-es.
MYNE is a place and a community open to everyone, whatever their individual characteristics. Particular care is taken to respect and value each person’s specific characteristics. For example, what is considered a handicap in a standardised world can be transformed into a strength and original vision in an open system.

La MYNE’s realities are complex and varied, and reflect those of society in general. There are economic, scientific, personal and interpersonal issues, as well as democratic, technological and environmental issues… This is not to paint an idyllic, utopian picture of the ways in which the La MYNE community has found to deal with these issues, but something is working.

In this context, where each person can find his or her place, a community of living beings is created, independent but connected to each other by conviviality, a common experience, completed projects and shared dreams. The fact that there are no constraints in terms of qualifications, working hours, specific communication skills or particular achievements means that individual and collective well-being can be nurtured in this fast-paced environment.

Finally, in their constant concern to protect themselves from the forms of alienation produced by our ever-accelerating societies, the members of La MYNE have always considered independence to be a key factor in the emancipation of individuals and groups (see Guillaume Bagnolini’s thesis). In practice, this means a high degree of financial autonomy, a budget that is still self-managed, and even decreasing from 2018, but also less and less proactive presence on communication networks (press, social networks). Emancipation means a new management of time, focused on authentic moments, whether between members or with chosen partners. The qualitative follows closely on the heels of the quantitative, where usually one comes at the expense of the other.

The way interpersonal relations work is designed to encourage emancipation by trying to give priority to minimalist operating principles (good treatment, open licence documentation, experimentation). One of the challenges is to limit the operating rules to those people who feel they need them or when they are absolutely necessary to meet the basic principles set out earlier.

This independence involves, for example, the ability to produce documents that promote reciprocity. Launched in 2015, reciprocity frameworks help to create comfort zones between participants in a common project: each party expresses what it is capable of providing and what it is looking for, so as to clarify expectations as far as possible. Although still experimental, these frameworks help to ensure that cooperation or collaboration is more serene and respectful of everyone’s contributions, and ensures more conscious involvement (see François Korrman’s master’s thesis).

To give a concrete example, a person with limited verbal communication skills and high cognitive abilities will be totally unable to communicate in a noisy environment, where polemical orality is favoured; conversely, they will be highly able to communicate in a setting where the written word is favoured in a calm environment. Conversely, other people will be more at ease in the first context. It is for this reason that a rigid framework will necessarily favour one profile of person, and that working on the flexibility of frameworks is the starting point for opening up to a multiplicity of personalities and modes of operation.

What’s more, this type of approach gives access to a wide range of life experiences that are sometimes overlooked:

A person suffering from burn-out or on sick leave who, over and above their own problems, will have a clear vision of the failings of a system that has contributed to their condition.
A person with a disability or a family carer, who brings a vision of society and what constitutes appropriate help (does the help provided meet the need?)
A person whose integration (family, social, professional) has been disrupted, who finds in the secure but shifting and flexible framework of the community an opportunity to connect with other people.

Since 2017, La MYNE has moved from a focus on ‘projects & development’ to a focus on ‘individuals, quality of life and cooperative practices’. It has also adopted a principle of frugality for the association in its communication, budget management and event life.

Far from slowing down projects, limiting the entry of new members or reducing the influence of La MYNE, the exact opposite has happened in the years since. Rather than a form of centralised wishful thinking, letting go, mutual trust and proactive care have enabled a vibrant ecosystem to develop and a shared culture to emerge. This culture and these practices are necessarily diversified, but at the same time form a common base, which is tested in moments of cross-fertilisation, synchronisation and rethinking of the issues at stake.

La MYNE, a project and a political reality

As well as carrying out projects committed to a more sustainable society, the people involved in the La MYNE community have gradually built up their own political vision. The internal rules are regularly redefined. In an effort to tailor the organisation to the proven needs of community members – who are constantly on the move – a succession of governance models have been adopted, largely inspired by existing horizontal models and practices. A number of rules have come into conflict with each other: do-docracy, sociocracy, the law of two feet, stigmergy, etc., so much so that some define the system as an ‘adaptocracy’.

It’s a strange mix of practices that, somehow, works. In fact, attempts at modelling have very often failed, even when attempted by outside scientific teams. Perhaps it is the profoundly lively and adaptive nature of the Myno community that makes it fundamentally difficult, if not impossible, to reduce it to a fixed photo, a schema of simple states or processes. Some see it as a form of ‘chaos engineering’, which embraces variation as inherent and simply seeks to ensure the overall health of its dynamics through micro-interventions and the preservation of its own internal diversity. This can be seen as ‘Bringing chaos where there is too much order and order where there is too much chaos’. In this way, the energy cost of responding to a need, a crisis or developing a project is greatly reduced, once this adaptive way of working has been integrated by the practitioners. It is also the search for the ‘closest’ alignment between the vision, the resources, the opportunities invested and the cohabitation of the short and long term that motivates and guides this perpetual adaptation.

In this respect, the mynoise community is its own research field: it continually questions, self-analyses and challenges itself. It invites, welcomes and sees outside researchers and players come and enrich this self-analysis with their own point of view and propose angles that are different or even opposed to those that dominate within the community. This often leads to fruitful cooperative action research projects.

It is through these organisational experiences that La MYNE has developed a certain reflexivity about its political dimension.

Although not everyone recognises themselves in a single value system, the members of the community construct and reconstruct their rules ad infinitum, in conjunction with concrete achievements. It is in this way that MYNE can be defined as a Commons (Elinor Olstrom’s definition), and that its political vision has been built.

The values that have underpinned La MYNE since its inception are often debated, but always echo the issues of emancipation, popular education and the power to act and think. These concepts, which are sometimes used casually, are in fact the subject of meticulous research on a regular basis. Many people in mynois are reading up on them, or doing research on the words and concepts they deal with. These periods of research, knowledge exchange, debate and dialogue create real political time and space, during which the people of myn are the community’s raison d’être and reason for action.

In practice, internal political projects are rarely communicated via manifestos and/or politicised actions, although La MYNE also recognises itself in the manifestos of certain collectives such as TILIOS (Tiers-lieux libres et open Sources), and members of La MYNE may be activists in various political movements.

The way in which La MYNE operates is often akin to ‘hacking’, particularly at institutional level: by implementing project engineering with institutions, Mynoises’ ways of doing things and ideas are passed on to La MYNE’s partners. The fact that the experience is different from the usual one, but nonetheless understandable, encourages the emergence of Commons and changes in the points of view, if not of the organisations, at least of the individuals within them.

This is how the CDI Communautaire came into being. The CDI Communautaire is an experiment born within the Myno community. Its aim is to create a new type of employment contract to combat job insecurity among self-employed workers and entrepreneurs. The idea is to create an open-ended contract that is not tied to a single person, but rather to a role and a function or mission carried out by a group of people. This project is run by Oxamyne, a cooperative structure co-created by the association La MYNE and the SCOP SA-CAE Oxalis. It is also supported by the “Agence Nationale d’Amélioration des Conditions de Travail” (ANACT).

Sociologist Antoine Burret describes this process of re-politicisation, of which third places are a catalyst. The mixing of people from different worlds and backgrounds, driven by a common objective, in a (third) place that everyone can make their own, generates situations of politicisation. There are few places where the dynamics of degrowth, start-ups, scientific research, neighbourhood life, industry, philosophy, mechanical engineering, art and education can come together…

By taking on this role, La MYNE and its members are establishing themselves as a non-political player, but one that tackles political issues, fully taking its place as a place of citizen power. Over and above the challenges of reappropriating systems through action, prototyping and research, there are many opportunities for exchanging knowledge and points of view (masterclasses, informal exchanges, joint work, etc.).

The ‘MYNEMix’, organised regularly alongside (and in preparation for) the general meetings, regularly question the established principles, and build lines of action on updated strategic subjects. These multi-day events bring together people from other third places and other communities, who come to inspire, observe and explain the dynamics underway at La MYNE. They reflect on social links, political games, organisation and the role of La MYNE within a standardised institutional and local ecosystem. At each brainstorming session, the political project, the raison d’être, the values defended and the actions to be taken can be clarified and recomposed for the months or years to come.

MYNE is also sometimes described as a factory of citizenship and the Commons. By taking a step away from traditional decision-making systems, La MYNE and its members put the individual back at the heart of action and decision-making. Each project or action is carefully chosen to put people and communities first. In other words, MYNE doesn’t exist without the people of Myune and their ideas. This approach allows us to give power back to individuals and to the dynamics they drive. These dynamics then become Commons, meaning that they are the result of collective work (past or present), documented so that they can be passed on according to the established rules of reciprocity.

We can speak of a ‘learning community’, where what is being done is shared in a variety of ways (digital, peer-to-peer, face-to-face, in texts or other media, within La MYNE or elsewhere), and where any activity can be a pretext for ‘taking on board’ a one-off or regular contributor, learning along the way. This process engages the people of La Myne in the society they are building, and helps to raise the community’s overall skills and awareness.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts: how to take care of sometimes divergent realities

That’s how the Mynois ecosystem came into being:

Exchanges of individual energies
Information and knowledge from a variety of individuals in a variety of environments and situations
Interfaces between worlds that are different, or even opposed in terms of language, practices or values
Exchanges of materials or services (reciprocity)
Links with the living
Conviviality 😉

From these healthy relationships that ensure a reality of mental ecology emerge projects, achievements that attempt to best respond to the constraints of the environment, whether human, natural, institutional, technological or systemic. The mynois living system is part of a political and ecological reality thanks to its operation. Compostability is thought out and prepared in advance: each step taken is documented and accessible to all, it is possible to learn from everything that has been done, whether the project has succeeded or not.

It is sometimes necessary to end a project: indeed, an incomplete achievement or an abandoned project is not without reason. In the same way that we will learn from our mistakes, it will be possible to identify factors of success or failure in what has been undertaken. In this, thanks to the sincere sharing of all the resources produced, all projects become compostable because the analysis of their progress and what worked or not can serve as fertilizer for other projects or relaunch those that could not be carried out. Making your project compostable means fertilizing ideas by sharing them, and tending towards more lively, lively and livable organisations.

Among the recurring characteristics of Mynois practices:

Permanent self-reflexivity on practices, tools, operating modes and their impacts
A flexible relationship to time that is compatible with both short-term (response to essential needs in emergencies, adaptability, etc.) and long-term (research, reflection on one’s own practices, etc.)
A reappropriation of existing systems
A capacity to do in difficult or unknown contexts: for example, the Mynoise community quickly started producing and distributing hydroalcoholic gel when a territorial shortage appeared in March 2020.
Doing & emancipation at all scales: from individuals to public organizations, new forms of partnerships are emerging. For example, MYNE works on Public-Private-Individual Partnerships (PPPP).
Taking into account the socio-economic aspects of its contributors and its environment in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system.

Taking care of different realities in correlation with each other represents a proven complexity, because the whole is more than the sum of its parts. This therefore requires adapted forms of operation:

Practice adaptive governance & “continuous” tiling. Be aware of the articulation between collective and individual energy, and have several organizational schemes to activate them as needed. Or bring out new ones when the time comes.
Adopt a governance that is fluid enough not to impose and constrain members: no alienating framework (#loidesdeuxpieds).
Accept being on the edge of chaos while respecting simple and clear principles for all, a form of semi-open organization.
Position yourself as best you can in your environments (which can themselves change) and act as accurately as possible in each context.
Develop the ability to shape frameworks and seek to act on them rather than blending into them (with strengths and limitations).

Indeed, the ability or inability to act will depend on numerous factors and it is necessary to question what is the responsibility of the people, what is the responsibility of the context, what is the responsibility of the framework…

Let us take the concrete example of the governance methods of the association La MYNE. Formally, it has an open collegiate council that can have few participants (“good” for decision-making, “bad” for democracy and the level of information of members) or on the contrary many (“bad” for decision-making efficiency, “good” for democracy and the level of information of members). “Adaptocracy” consists of noting these states of affairs and finding a complementary mechanism for the weak point. In this case, this can take the form respectively of a contributory event (“good” for democracy and the level of information, “less” for efficiency) and the self-constitution of a small experimental team (“good” for efficiency, “less” for democracy).

Ultimately, despite the appearance of complexity, this has allowed the Mynoise community a good level of efficiency in its governance in terms of energy invested in relation to results and alignment with values.

If we look at Donella Meadows’ twelve levers for changing a system, we realize that a paradigm shift is of the highest level of difficulty: addressing this complexity requires a form of humility and courage. Connecting the sometimes contradictory advances of a diverse community is a way to understand dynamics that are necessary and transposable to societal developments.

“Relié is passive, “reliant” is participating, “reliance” is activating”; Edgar Morin. Reliance is the stem cell of complex thought. In an uncertain societal and environmental context, is the Mynoise dynamic a stem cell of another complex form of living together? Providing answers to the changes to come will not be an easy task and a good start could be to ask good questions:

How not to lose sight of a paradigm shift objective when practical operating constraints are under pressure?
How to maintain a practical sense without forgetting the deep philosophical sense?
How to make decisions when a choice between short-term practical necessity and long-term need for meaning are in contradiction? And above all, how to avoid having to make this type of choice?
Should we evaluate the impacts and efficiency of complex dynamics when the relevant indicators do not yet exist? If so, how?
What priority should be given to the readability and accessibility of these dynamics, compared to preserving their dynamic and multiple nature?
How much time should be devoted to trying to modify existing systems compared to creating new ones (“push” vs. “pull”)?

In conclusion, we would like to share a saying: “A third place is not told, it is lived”.

If you feel like it, we invite you to look curiously at this strange object that is La MYNE and to get in touch with its community. You will certainly find limits, problems, nuggets and opportunities: your critical eye will be welcome.

The research is ongoing…

Useful links

Short texts by Guattari: https://www.revue-chimeres.fr/Archives-Guattari
Ecosophy on Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Écosophie
Guattari on Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Félix_Guattari
Episode of Vlan on ecosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M82BpxkW6XE
About Ecorev: http://ecorev.org/spip.php?rubrique2
François Korman’s thesis: https://cloud.lamyne.org/s/NTB59gZ8zfQgicd
Guillaume Bagnolini’s thesis: http://www.applis.univ-tours.fr/theses/2018/guillaume.bagnolini_16637.pdf
Twelve levers for intervening in a system: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douze_leviers_pour_intervenir_dans_un_system