APCNews asks, Felipe Fonseca responds

Is your work volunteer based? What is the recipe for maintaining a project without paid staff? Is enthusiasm and conviction enough to carry out a project like this?

Many of us are remunerated in a decentralised manner. MR is not “contracted” to carry out a specific action, rather the people and organisations that make up MR are. That is when the volunteers come into play. This happens, in our case, not only due to enthusiasm or philanthropy but mostly to the decentralised rhythm of innovation of the process we call “distributed learning”- a series of specialists from different areas that are forced to maintain a level of exchange that avoids jargon and very specific vocabulary.

The result is that whoever collaborates with MR goes through a learning process that is, first of all, satisfactory, and the process is part of a larger movement. In other words, volunteerism is important but it often takes place thanks to personal motivations. We have to keep this in mind and promote a constant rhythm of innovation and knowledge exchange in order to maintain the interest of volunteers in this context.

Your slogan is “reappropriating technology for social transformation”. How does this transformation take place? Is it a parallel route to political movements? Or are they two complimentary things?

I think they are two complimentary things. We are, with great pride, very close to certain social movements, especially those that fall within the context of tactical media. A recent issue is, precisely, the nature of the transformation. Until recently it seemed that this transformation was topic-based and punctual: people that individually came into contact with other ways of relating to technology. Today, in the meantime, it seems that the things happen more in the field of subjective influence: indirectly showing people that many of these self-imposed limits do not exist.

MR’s actions have happened spontaneously and do not require our direct participation, which makes me very happy. Each of these actions has its own reproduction cycle and local influence and the result is a continuous and sustainable process of building autonomy and public consciousness.

You decided to not become an NGO, but rather to maintain a less rigid structure. In what measure does that facilitate or complicate your day-to-day work?
 
It makes demonstrating a structured action more difficult. But we are working in the sense of developing one or more NGOs that will become the executors of MetaRecycling. In other words, structures that integrate the MetaRecycling network as actors and not as central institutions. The idea is to treat MR as an open, free and self-organised movement and not like a limited structure.

Precisely, the advantages of a decentralised structure are the possibility of being everywhere and the fact that MR is independent including from the people that created it. It takes on its own coherence, and goes beyond our individual action. It is an emerging, decentralised organisation that does not need to adopt a competitive position with its peers and works towards the ideals of free collaboration and open participation. 

What is participation in the discussion like? What issues do they deal with? Who participates? How many participants are there?

Today the MetaRecycling list has over 250 people. The issues dealt with go from the details of a Linux kernel configuration to more conceptual discussions on how to metarecycle a school, or deeper reflections on the role of technologies in day-to-day life. Participants have a varied profile: from MetaRecycling project leaders to individuals that simply want to participate in e-mail discussions. This spans educators, community leaders, journalists, software developers, media related political activists, implementers of technology-related government programmes and many more. 

Are there face-to-face encounters? Or is virtual contact enough (for the trainings and installing a telecentre, etc)?

During the Metá:Fora project we learned that there are some types of activities that can be carried out without face-to-face contact, but they are very specific. For most of the activities we need face-to-face encounters. We carry them out in a decentralised self-organised manner but the need for these encounters reflected in the MetaRecycling organisation itself, in three spheres, two in person, and one online.