Convergence of Commoners Retreat
Beyond the Digital Illusion
Program
Good morning, and welcome to the heart of the Catalan mountains!
This opening session will set the tone for the retreat by:
Introducing the "menu" of the retreat, highlighting key themes and roles.
Discussing the mindset of the retreat: openness, collaboration, and affective engagement.
Presenting and agreeing on the code of conduct, ensuring a respectful and inclusive environment.
Introducing participants with a playful twist, assigning each a "dish" or "ingredient" that represents their contribution to the retreat.
This session aims to create a welcoming atmosphere, align expectations, and foster a sense of belonging from the start.
Convergence began three years ago as a response to the growing need for a dedicated space where commoners could share news, questions, and emerging ideas. Inspired by the experience of the Commons Strategies Group (2010–2018), the initiative aimed to create a safe environment for exchanging "half-baked" ideas and fostering mutual support.
This collaborative approach has led to impactful strategic deep dives, often supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF). As Convergence evolves, its aspiration remains to strengthen the commons movement by providing a platform for connection, exploration, and innovation among commoners worldwide.
Fishbowl facilitation
Exploring Affect with Amber Huff
Affect goes beyond individual emotions and feelings and how they affect individual consciousness. Instead, it’s better thought of as the embodied capacity and potential to affect others and be affected within a social context. This capacity flows between bodies, including people, non-humans, and material entities. Affect plays a crucial role in shaping relationships, socially and between our embodied experiences, social subjectivities, and our recognition of others as singular persons.
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore how we can reimagine digital commons by integrating emotional depth, care, and inclusivity into their design and practices. Using the Four Rs framework—Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, and Reconciliation—we will collaboratively map values, tools, and practices essential for building sustainable, intersectional, and affective commons.
Free walks and Speaker's corner
🎯 Shake things up and recharge!
Introduce the ACT Matrix as a practical tool for understanding and addressing emotional experiences in collaborative environments.
Highlight the role of positive and negative emotions in shaping contributors' experiences and actions in digital commons.
Demonstrate real-world application of the ACT Matrix through a user case.
Equip participants with strategies to harness emotions for constructive and value-driven contributions.
The INSPIRE Data Democracy Lab serves as a creative and collaborative space to rethink how data is used in participatory processes. Its mission is to move beyond "datafied participation," where data often constrains democratic processes, to a model of data democracy, where citizens are empowered as co-creators of data narratives and digital tools for inclusive policymaking.
This approach aligns with the INSPIRE project’s broader objective of fostering intersectional inclusion in participatory democracy by ensuring that data supports, rather than limits, agency, transparency, and accountability.
The INSPIRE Data Democracy Lab also focus on co-creating innovative models of digital participation and data stewardship that empower communities to take an active role in shaping democratic processes. By leveraging the Decidim platform, the Lab explores how digital tools can be designed to reflect community needs, foster inclusivity, and ensure ethical data practices.
New models of digital participation and data stewardship
Zine Making Workshop on Data and Affect
Nathan Oxley - Strange Natures Zine
With Fred
Natasha Hulst presents the Convergence of Commoners Amsterdam Retreat, running almost in parallel. The idea is to facilitate the exchange of messages, missions, or prompts between participants of both retreats, fostering cross-retreat collaboration and dialogue
with Nadia
Co-Design of a Framework for Including Public Voices in Data and AI
How can concepts of intersectionality and assemblage help us recognise and navigate power dynamics and exclusion patterns in the struggle for social justice?
I will share a short provocation on how intersectionality and an assemblage lens might complement each other to deepen understanding of power. I'll use my recent work on youth mental health as an example. Power can be both concrete and organised, aiming to maintain control and authority, and diffuse, creative, and transformative aiming to challenge the status quo.
The provocation will be followed by group activities to prompt reflections on power as a dynamic and distributed force, recognising privilege and exclusions within and outside the commons.
Researching "Political" User Experiences and affect (T4.1 Inspire)
In this session, we explore how affects influence and shape digital architectural processes, transcending the hierarchical organization of its agents (bottom-up & top-down). However, neither of these approaches, nor their combinations, proves adequate to promote a trend that, due to wicked problems, inherently involves an affective connection with individuals, other entities, and the planet
We propose a path where digital architectures can disrupt the bottom-up and top-down dualities based on the attributes that shape them, as it is the affects that permeate all human and more-than-human bodies. If digital platforms are machines of interaction, extending their heterogeneous networks beyond their immediate users, we need to address the movement of affects so that digital architectures become tools for coexistence on an already wounded planet.
Crowd intelligence and commoning
Bon apétit
🎯 Shake things up and recharge!
"Data visualization is never neutral; every choice—fonts, colors, scale—carries emotional and political implications."
Introducing pioneers like W.E.B. Du Bois, who used data visualization to highlight racial inequalities, and Florence Nightingale, known for her use of statistical diagrams to influence public health policy, will provide an inspiring historical context to the workshop. Pairing this with art-based methods to address complex themes, such as intersectionality, offers a creative and participatory way to engage with social issues.
Szilvia Nagy will introduce Challenges of Qualitative Data Visualisation
Message for the Workshop:
- Data visualization is a tool for storytelling.
- Decisions in design can amplify or diminish narratives, especially for marginalized groups.
- Highlight the importance of making intentional, inclusive design choices.
Mission: Bring your visualized insights into participatory online platforms such as Decidim and Consul.
- Task: Design a strategy to embed your visualization into an online deliberative process.
- Example: Use Decidim’s assemblies, proposals, and accountability modules to integrate your data story into public decision-making.
- Example: Highlight disparities with your visualizations in online debates or participatory budgets.
At Komons, we have spent the past five years analyzing cultural battles across diverse contexts through the lens of narrative change—exploring dominant, marginalized, and emerging narratives. Our work spans topics such as disinformation, hate speech, and narratives of collaboration. By examining digital complexity and fostering collective processes, we’ve observed how understanding these dynamics can empower diverse social actors to collaborate effectively, even amidst their differences.
In this session, we invite you to experiment with a prototype solution we have developed. It aims to foster positive experiences by engaging with challenging contexts and uncovering insights to better understand complexity. Participants will be invited to converse for a few minutes with an AI prototype, designed to embody distinct perspectives on climate change. These bots, built on digital analysis, provide a platform for reflection and discussion of diverse viewpoints.
We encourage participants to converse with one of the bots with an open mind, setting aside assumptions to enrich our collective understanding of complexity. What might we discover? What can we empathize with?
The goal is to test whether these virtual interactions can foster empathy and increase awareness of the complexities surrounding social dynamics and climate change. Join us on this experimental journey to explore how AI might help us navigate complexity and deepen connections in an increasingly fragmented digital age
What does affect mean for digital encounters, architectures and spaces?
Designing the Podcast Series Blueprint
This podcast explores the intersection of democratic innovation, data governance, and artificial intelligence within the broader framework of commons. In a world shaped by deepening crises—ecological, social, and economic—these issues demand urgent attention.
The episode is inspired by the Convergence of Commoners Retreat, a vibrant gathering of practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and artists who came together to explore the transformative potential of commons-based approaches. The retreat tackled how care, mutual aid, and relational politics can redefine governance, especially in the digital realm. Together, we delved into the challenges of building resilient commons in the face of systemic pressures like privatization and commodification, and how these ideas intersect with emerging technologies and global crises.
In this episode, we explore the intersection of mental health, grief, and participatory approaches to building collective well-being. How can we reimagine mental health as a shared commons, where safe spaces, digital platforms, and community-led tools like legislative theater enable healing and inclusion? Through the lens of affect, we discuss the power of collective action, intersectionality, and mutual aid in addressing societal and environmental challenges, fostering resilience and transformation. Join us for a conversation that bridges personal struggles with community empowerment.
¿Cómo podemos contrarrestar el avance de la extrema derecha en la arena cultural y digital y construir narrativas progresistas e inclusivas?