The concept of Adhocracy itself is a call for action to change the system by changing the way we make things. This exhibition, by embracing open source design, and particularly emphasizing the idea of the commons in relation to the processes of production, has the big challenge of being coherent as a whole.

We are aware that one of the main constrains in the design and cultural world is related with the notion of ownership and how this notion has been controlled along the past decades by the use of traditional copyrights, patents, and trademarks. From the massive struggles about the privatization of universities around the world, to the fights of persons such as Aaron Swartz, who died claiming for the open access to academic papers; there is an urgent need from the cultural, design and architectural fields to really engage with this new model of transforming a noun into a verb: from commons to commoning.

All the team behind Adhocracy—starting with Joseph Grima who first proposed this research topic for the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012—, decided to keep the exhibition evolving. Now, on this new and revised edition Adhocracy Athens, want to focus on the act of commoning as the social element that allows the creation of networks and communities based on exchanging knowledge and resources.

Why to use a Creative Commons license?

The Creative Commons licenses were released in 2002 to forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. These licenses give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. That’s why the Adhocracy team had taken a step further by using a Creative Commons 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0)* for the whole exhibition: curatorial selection, projects (which have to be open source), exhibition design, and graphic identity.

This can be understood as an open formula, or an invitation, to appropriate Adhocracy once it’s finished here at the Onassis Cultural Center, and present it autonomously, small or large, anywhere in the world, following the spirit of Linux and open software which are continuously forked and reinterpreted while keeping certain key elements.

Please stay tuned, more detailed information will be updated on GitHub soon.

* Thanks to Sam Muirhead from Open Source Circular Economy for his advice.