Is standardization the right way for a better future?

[hoijui]

Something we have to think about and evaluate:

(as a direct reaction to this link: https://re-publica.com/de/session/engaging-communities-collecting-data-and-solving-problems)

Thanks for sharing. Looking back at the project I am wondering what model and to whom it will serve to standardize and collect and analyze data, this data driven and standard driven approach...
It does seem more clear that the "NGO model" as we called it in our documents, is the framework for IoPA. If you are an NGO that is mandated with $ by the UN to intervene in a region that is hard to reach, you need standardization and data-driven approaches. The NGO would need to find local centers of fabrication and education, pools if specialized skills, etc. and engage them effectively. Then, if the intervention requires hardware, they need to effectively communicate to these local centers what to fabricate and how. But this framing is not firstly oriented towards increasing local resiliency. It is firstly oriented to increase the efficiency of the NGO. The Introduction of strict standards is a form of colonialization, to speak a language that I am not so familiar with, but since there are a lot of these operations in the developing world, I think it's appropriate. So here are these white people, again, with the UN (the new Rome) telling us how to format our local knowledge and know how and how to speak about what we do.
There's something that brushes me the wrong way here... It's like social media, it will connect people worldwide, it will speed up the circulation of ideas, the future will be bright! But the framework of the company was not that, their primary incentives were to sell out attention. The psycho-social negative effects of these private social media platforms are directly related to this misalignment of framing or goals!
Same thing here... there are local communities and maker-spaces and fab-labs, doing their own thing and wanting to connect to other entities like then around the world. And then there's the UN and these NGOs that have their own motivations.

by Tibi@sensorica on discord
(copied from the iopa channel they have there)

he continues (already much less to the point in our case, I believe):

These NGOs deploy a lot of money and have the ability to pervert these local agents, shifting them from their primary role.
When these people from the UN and from these NGOs speak about makerspaces something is off... I'm telling you that since grassroots makerspaces have been part of my life for the past 14 years. It's not the same thing hearing from these local people directly involved in these makerspaces.
I don't know if pushing for a universal standard to be adopted by all makerspaces around the world will produce more local resiliency. I tend to believe the contrary, especially when these standards are built by people from these NGOs and the UN, to instrumentalize these local production agents for top-down action. I am not saying that these local agents should not find ways to connect, transact, etc. But these ways can emerge among them, with a focus on their local roles and activities.

There's all this nice language to help these poor people in these poor countries, which has been the NGOs' mantra for decades. "Miraculously" these people are still poor, no matter how much money they UN spends on them 🙂
There's this unhealthy relation between Big Pharma in the USA and a growing population living with chronic disease. The more Big Pharma pushes to save these people the more people get sick. Same with Big Food, the more these companies try to better feed the people the more obese they get 🙂 That's what you get when the incentives are not aligned!
I see the same pattern here. The more NGOs we create to solve problems in the development world the more corruption and problems we get there.
So... I can't automatically trust these initiatives that push for standardizing all the open source designs and production. Who will really benefit in the end?
We need to take control of that. Money coming from the top can, not necessarily, but can pervert or corrupt or shift things. There is nothing in this podcast that proves the contrary.