How platform cooperatives deal with the size-identity tradeoff?

The first presenter was Jovana Karanovic. She is precisely the founder of Reshaping Work, and researcher at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation at VU Amsterdam. Following Carmelo Cenammo, the starting point of her talk was a trade-off that platforms face: the one of the platform size that leverages on growth of network effects (the winner-takes-all logic of Uber, Airbnb, and Deliveroo), and the other being the platform identity, which leverages on market positioning, platform quality and distinct content. The examples Jovana pointed out for the later were Grab and Careem, which beat big platforms by attending the particular preferences of Southeast Asia and Middle East users, respectively.

Her research question, along with her colleagues Hans Berends and Yuval Engel, is the following: how do platform cooperatives deal with the tradeoff between platform size and identity?

To tackle this question, they are comparing four case studies of platform cooperatives across four different industries: Wehelpen (care), Partago (car rental), Stocksy (stock photography), and Fairbnb (vacation rentals). Wehelpen and Partago look for “local” network effects (market segments); Stocksy and Fairbnb look for “global” network effects (entire market).

The key here, in my opinion, is to think if the specific strategic management of the local/global tradeoffs by platform cooperatives helps them to compete with platforms that leverage on ridiculously large financial resources to lower prices and “buy” clients to boost the network effect. These are the insights she presented:

– In terms of control mechanisms, Wehelpen and Partagon bet for an identity-driven market positioning through communication, set different rules for each community they serve, and use the cost of platform affiliation as a mean of control as well. On their “global side”, Stocksy and Fairbnb establish the following control mechanisms: quality base selection (e.g Stocky selects only top photographers) and selection based on adherence to values/principles (e.g. Fairbnb has 1 host 1 house policy).

– In terms of differentiation strategies, Wehelpen and Partago enforce a strong identity and adapts the offer to local particularities. If I understand this correctly, the alternative organization flavor (and its potential impact in terms of purpose and sustainability) can be a distinctive factor in terms of identity. They also stress (of course) the importance of local adaptation and market-segment specialization (which can leverage in their connections and social ties with existing local communities). Stocksy and Fairbnb, restrict market access on the supply side, which leads to offering more consistency. Also, platform architectures can support the identity, attracting a specific type of user (again, e.g., sustainability-driven).

I think that these insights support something that I wrote elsewhere: the fact that they can design a business model not-investor-centered can suppose a greater value proposition to patrons (and other stakeholders). Also, there is the fact that being alternative forms of organization helps them to differentiate their identity in terms of competitive advantage, which is something I was not sure it would happen.

What couriers think about platform cooperatives in Barcelona?

Ricard Espelt, from Dimmons research group at Open University of Catalonia, showed preliminary results of their research on platform couriers working in Barcelona: they are isolated from the perspective of law and they had to rely on emergent or alternative unions. Nor them nor the stakeholders have reached an agreement on how to solve their problems. They are themselves divided in between those that favor the creation of alternative- more coop-oriented-platforms, while others rather prefer to fight for labor rights in the current platforms.

The good news is, therefore, that there are couriers open to alternative forms of organization such as platform cooperatives. I do not think that it is crucial to know how many are they, but their existence, for that fact changes completely the feasibility of their existence. That is important, particularly in those countries in which legislation is leaning towards profit-oriented platforms.

Do algorithms contribute to shape the legal status of platform workers?

Anna Ginès i Fabrellas, professor and researcher at ESADE Business School, took a fascinating look at platform algorithms in terms of how they actually intervene/shape the legal status of workers:

• In terms of the debate “platforms as technological firms that just mediate between offer and demand”, vs “platforms as service providers” (algorithmic management), Anna convincingly argued that the role of the algorithm is so crucial in managing the delivery of services that this platforms cannot escape from the fact that they are service providers. And by the same token, platforms are a relevant productive infrastructure.
• When looking at algorithms as subordination, she showed that the massive data collected by geolocalization systems turns out to be a very effective form of control/management.
• Finally, the nature of platform algorithms (or at least the current ones) kills any dimension of workers entrepreneurship, for they adopt the most relevant decisions.

Anna paid attention as well to the new forms of worker’s precarity, and the different approaches to battle them. Being platform cooperatives one of them, she also pointed to the French regulation of platform worker’s rights, or the proposal of an entirely new legal regime for them.

As I see it, platform cooperatives are the straight-forward solution, because it not requires legal changes on their side.

Would a UBI help a transition to platform cooperatives?

Finally, Melisa Renau, also from Dimmons at UOC, presented her analytical model for conflict social relationships, applied to the courier’s case. Her research question is “How and if UBI could affect power relations between employers and workers by increasing and improving workers’ exit and voice options in the platform economy. Her elegant model, that draws from the Hirschman’s triangle and the Birnbaum and Wispelaere exit options models, showed that UBI is not a silver bullet:

• the empowering potential of a UBI depends on endogenous and exogenous variables.
• Providing economic independence does not mean ensuring equality,

While there is a hype around UBI, I see much more desirable the platform cooperative option, based on workers ownership and multistakeholder governance, (or open value networks, for that matter).

Finally, some of the best outcomes of the event came from the intervention of platform workers. I participated in a walk with two women that founded a union for cleaning ladies like them that deserved a dissertation at UAB. They showed outstanding intelligence, courage, and dignity in front of the abuses of the platform business model. And I could not help to tell them that I will contact them to talk about cooperative platforms.

New Reshaping Work regional events are on the way at Amsterdam, Novi Sad and Stockholm. They will equally stress the importance of research-based knowledge. Keep your eye on the growing list… or organize one in your city!

The post Prospective future of platform cooperatives: my takeaways from Reshaping Work Barcelona 2019 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ana Manzanedo and her colleague Alícia Trepat have documented a set of practices that platform coops are setting in order to solve the downside of platforms. The first outcome of these practices is to set fairness distribution of risk and value generated by the platform activity. In that sense, it is not only that assuming risk is rewarded, but also that the consequences of bad decisions or actions affect those that made them (what Taleb calls having “skin in the game”: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks). The second outcome of the practices is that it establishes the responsibility for the care of all those involved in the platform, which means that their vulnerabilities are covered so the reproduction of the activity of the platform is assured, even beyond the nowadays generation who carries it. We could call that having “skin in the care”.

The real world examples captured by Ana and Alicia reflect the insight explained in this previous post: that solutions for communities having thick relationships do not scale for communities with thin relationships. In fact, in the first kind of communities, emerge a behavior hardly seen in the second: voluntary risk-taking for others, which Taleb calls “soul in the game”. Accordingly, it is not unusual to see voluntary care-taking for others, which we could call “soul in the care”.

The desirable governance of a Platform Coop is the one that promotes skin/soul in the game/care:

Table 1: Desirable approach for risk and care management

Communities of peers have their own ways to avoid risk and care transfer, particularly between their members. Most of the practices described by Ana and Alicia fall in at least one of the following approaches:

Table 2: Peer’s communities approaches to avoid transfer of risk and care

Platform Coops are, like the rest of the platforms, trapped by the “law of power” and by “winner-takes-it-all” dynamics. Yet, departing from the new possibilities offered by technological progress and societal change, we know where the solution might be:

a) Opening and commoning knowledge and resources as much as possible, in order to promote diversity of players and non-monopolistic (rent-free) markets: showing that Platform Coops do not maximize self-interest, and that abundance is possible through cooperation. Attracting individuals and communities with soul in the game and making them interact to create new subjectivities.

b) Making decision-making as much distributed as possible in the communities of life (clubs, neighborhoods, etc.) that are affected by the decision, and in the communities of production (i.e. foundations, coops, etc.) working in a federated way, according to their proved competences. Involving communities with skin in the game, and letting them jump in the logic of the soul in the game.

That, of course, draws a completely different network dynamics, and therefore, a different governance. Here it is my proposal to rethink Platform Cooperativism as Platform Ecoopsystems, (a sort of mix of Platform Cooperativism and Open Cooperativism).

1. Platforms should not be conceived as monolithic architectures owned and managed in a centralized way. They should be conceived as ecosystems, or we will be trapped in the same logic from which we want to escape.

The only reason why platforms are monolithic is because it is the way in which value can be easily extracted in a centralized manner. It is true that some of them offer API’s to third party developers (i.e. Facebook) as long as those development supports their extractive business models. Platform Ecoopsystems, instead, should think in terms of distributed architectures. I suspect that, too often, p2p and sharing initiatives are secretly pervaded by the darling image of the individual entrepreneur, because the tools and practices used are adapted from those of the traditional rent-seeking economy, instead of being created from scratch.

2. There is no technological obstacle to design Platforms with distributed architectures. Let’s do it in order to promote ecosystems.

Once the extractive business model motivation is removed, there is no technological reason to prefer a centralized architecture. Resources are usually already distributed, infrastructures can be distributed, and platforms themselves can be distributed. Although blockchain is the new kid on the block, torrent technologies should not be discarded.

Table 3: Key Differences in Centralized and Decentralized Systems across the layers – taken from the Platform Design Toolkit Whitepaper:

3. Platforms must be organically built as ecosystems in which sustainability is reached by a combination of federation of communities that are trusted for making certain decisions, and market coordination.

What would happen if we think of Platforms more like an Open Source Operation System (such as Ubuntu) than as an App? What are the decisions to be made?

Table 4: Approach to Platform Decisions

The key is to minimize the decisions that must be decided by voting to those decisions where scarcity is real, through:

• Opening, opening, opening.

• Designing in such a way that financial value is distributed through free-rent markets.

• Delegating decisions to trusted participants that excel in the required competencies to perform their duty.

• If a gatekeeper is unavoidable, then it should be non-profit that distribute value as in rent-free market, assuring the financial sustainability of all participants. In other words, if there is a “cut” that can be captured because of intermediation, it has to be distributed in such way that risk and care is not transferred (see – again – Ana and Alícia for IFTF on positive platforms).

4. The kernel of a Platform Ecosystem should be a non-profit

Depending on the nature of the activity and business model, the initiators and promoters of a Platform Ecoopsystem should not be organized as a cooperative itself, but as a non-profit organization that acts as a sort of kernel of the ecosystem. It could be formed by a group of future stakeholders of the platform that distribute their contribution according to the competencies in which they are publicly recognized. This organization should a) create the initial conditions for the ecosystem flourishing and b) maintain the conditions for its sustainability as a positive platform, that compensate differently to participants according to their contribution and the stage of the project. (For instance, in the early stages, gamification might be used in order to distribute value to those that make the app/platform more viral in order to solve the chicken egg problem.

You may think that how this kernel operates is the actual key of the whole post, and maybe it is, but I prefer to just outline some intuitions about it, and maybe develop the idea in a future post, or just with a conversation in the comments of this post:

• It should release a first version of the infrastructure/platform open source software (code also could be sponsored by future stakeholders of the ecoopsystem).

• It should put in place the right mechanisms for distributing the value.

• It should organize the consultations to stakeholders.

• It should choose providers of the ecosystem, whenever that decision must be taken in a centralized way.

• It should serve as arbitrator of stakeholders’ disputes.

If value must be centralized because of some unavoidable design reason, an instantly updated and transparent accounting must be available, in which is visually clear how the value (compare with average industry) is distributed in the co-owned platform. Let the community be able to deliberate and vote periodically on how the value should be distributed.

5. Platform Ecoopsystems should leverage their two distinctive features in order to outcompete existing platforms: they do not have to create artificial scarcity, and they do not have to centralize value capture.

The ultimate competitive advantage of Platform Ecosystems is that user experience and value are not conditioned by artificial scarcity of features and services, which only purpose is to keep rent-seeking practices. In that sense, Platform Ecoopsystems do have an important business advantage, for they can better suit the needs and requirements of its users.

6. In the same way that FLOSS created their own array legal license options, Platform Ecoopsystems should create their own array of legal ownership options.

New legal agreements of property and decision-making should be explored, in order to dynamically evolve according to the needs of the Ecoopsystem. These agreements should offer different modalities of ownership and decision-making in which participants can be automatically positioned according to predefined parameters.

I have sketched here some canvases that reflect the ideas exposed above, and that could complement others toolboxes, such as Simone Cicero’s Toolkit or Platoniq’s Moving Communities Methodology.

Download the following canvases:

• The Ecoopsystem Idea Tester (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Exploration (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Sustainability Matrix (draft)

The post Platform Coop’s Governance (II): From Coop Platforms to Platform Ecoopsystems appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Three problems of Platform Coops

Firstly, Platform Coops do not promote enough the new interesting subjectivities and relationships responsible for the emerging collaborating, sharing, commoning and p2p dynamics that are proving to be transformational. It is precisely because they are built over the already consolidated thin self-interest-driven-relationships that rule our world since the modern era. In short, they are reinforcing those relationships by giving them new ways to exist. Think, instead, about my meeting with Ana Manzanedo. She is a Ouishare Connector in Barcelona that contacted me right after I started blogging about common matters of concern. In our first meeting we shared not only our personal whereabouts but also kind of coached/mentored each other and shared specific knowledge and ideas in order to help each other to create value in the present, and also prepare the field (invitation to a community of practices, etc.) for eventually creating open value together in the near future. It is not that we were not also looking out for our own interest, but we were both ready to give more than what we were taking, now or in the future. She is not, in that sense, the average kind of relationship I have in my business activity, but sure is the one I am looking for. Building a Platform Coops that does not promote connectors, urban entrepreneurs, open makers, technopolitical citizens or technopolitical civil servants or technopolitical representatives, (and so on) will have a much narrow impact than collectives such as Enspiral, Ouishare, Las Indias Electrónicas, etc. which have this generativity of new disrupting subjectivities (Ouishare considers itself above any other thing “an incubator of people; Las Indias offer different ways to experience with them how to live in abundance as communards; etc.) Out of its members, a Platform Coop only promotes a “responsible consumer” subjectivity using more or less the same approach as their non-peer managed rival organizations. I am in favor of such Platforms Coops in the same way I am for any kind of Coop. However, it remains obscure to me in what sense they will be able to compete and outperform non Coop Platforms. Hence the call for the intervention of governments in terms of regulatory frameworks and financial support. Yet, a strong citizenship movement would be needed for that to happen… which hardly will, if new subjectivities demanding it are not promoted. Politicians only challenge existing established interests, if ever, when taking the opportunity of getting more votes. Way more.

Secondly, (and this is connected with the first problem), in this model the capture of value generated in the network is still centralized. We want that those that add value and risk something in the platform are affected by the eventual downsides or upsides. The fact that a Coop Platform does it in a more ethical way, and that it redistributes the value afterwards does not change the fact that it keeps disempowering non-owners of the cooperative. Non-owners may consider that they are, to more or less degree, in the flow of value distribution, but not in its generation nor in its governance. The straightforward approach is to use new technologies based on blockchain (or other even more interesting technologies) in order to make distribution fair, keeping the self-interest motivated actors in the game. But if we design a Platform in which every aspect of the relationship must be translated into an algorithm and coded as a smart contract, then again we are consolidating and making fresh room for the already existing subjectivities. Even more, that will erode the real face-to-face trust thick relationships that may exist. A completely different thing is to use blockchain technologies for doing boring accounting that has to be done in a p2p organization based on thick relationships, or between p2p organizations linked by thick relationships. As in the centralized case, a decentralized architecture based on thin relationships could be, in the best of the cases, a transitory step to something much more interesting, once the limitations of the model are reached and new opportunities are explored.

The third problem is that the Platform Coops, in order to compete in the market with regular platforms, may need to transfer risk or care to some of their stakeholders. The reason why most of the regular platforms thrive is because they avoid granting the usual benefits (care) that workers get in the traditional economy (pension, social security, paid vacations, etc.), and additionally, force workers to carry most of the risks (accidents, illness, etc.). Unless clients are aware and concerned about workers’ conditions — which is an emerging but not yet a game-changing trend — the market will make more competitive those platforms that cut costs that way, not to mention that most of them are fueled with big investor’s money in order to keep litigating with authorities and workers, and operating under financial losses for years. In order to survive and keep their share of the market, Coop Platforms may be tempted to practice the less aggressive practices of risk and care transfer to workers as a way of surviving.

In the second part of this post, I will explore operational responses to these problems.

The post Platform Coops’ Governance (I): Challenges appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The first problem I encounter is pervasive in all the writing out there on the sharing/collaborative economy and p2p theory: the lack of a clear and operational definition of what a peer is and what a community is. The truth is that we may need a “taxonomy” of peers and communities, since we call peers and communities in a wide range of different realities.

How do we recognize someone as a peer? I can be tempted, as we do often colloquially,  to define my peer in terms of characteristics of the person (i.e. same hierarchical position, same knowledge, same skills, same values, etc.). But homogeneity is not what we find in peer relationships out there. Actually, we find more value in diversity. A peer is better understood not as someone that is like you, but as someone that you like. And if we think about organizations, as someone you would like to do things with.

This points out important consequences: a peer can only be defined as long as it has a peer; and what makes possible to call them peers is the existence of a certain kind of relationship. In this relationship, both feel comfortable with the idea of being peers, and this reciprocity can only be maintained as long as they both agree on which terms the idea of being peers is established. Therefore, the key aspect of the relationship is reciprocity in the agency of the parts.

The word agency comes from Latin agere that means “to do, to act in such way that has an effect”.  Amy and John will be peers as long as they can define together what constitute their “peerness”, and this is the primary agency that regulates the rest of agencies once they recognize each other as peers. What makes them peers is that they are able to define what kind of reciprocity makes them peers, and consequently, what effect it has in what they can or cannot do because of this relationship. All human groups exist because they accept a list of dos and don’ts. But groups of peers can co-create them. Since doing is what constitute the very essence of a peer-to-peer relationship, that relationship will be freely established in terms that both parts will be capable to do more or different things thanks to it. A p2p organization empowers both parts through reciprocity. This way, the eventual common characteristics of the peers that form a p2p organization are not the reason that made them peers, but the consequence of being peers. But “peer” and “community” are buzz-words nowadays. For instance, there are plenty of communities in which participants are called peers but they are not. People join them and accept the “peer” label just because they get some value from being there, and no cost for being called “peers”.

This leads us to the core of the problem. In order to give stability to relationships, people need trust; a reasonable confidence in what we can expect from others to behave.  We know from the sociological tradition that there are two kind of ties to build trust. The first kind are ties established through mechanisms of socialization and emotional engagement, while the second are ties established through the assumption that others will act according to rational and self-interest calculations. The first characterizes traditional communities, the second is the one that has shaped our modern societies. The first shapes communities that are protecting and comforting but also stiffly and rigid; the second shapes communities that are liberating and innovative but also alienating. Communities and societies present, at the end, a combination of the two types of ties, but our current economic system is based mainly in the second type, and they are dramatically corroding the first type. Some authors hypothesize that the tension between the two is provoking the emergence of collaboration. Others, just the simple collapse of our current societies, and we should not take collaboration for granted unless we work on it.

Peerness’ reciprocity is the obvious way to prevent relationships from being stiffing or alienating. This way, you may find egalitarian intentional communities with thick ties (which members share a roof and livelihood) or the community of torrent users with thin ties (which members hardly know each other), that they do not feel trapped or alienated by their communities.

So, then, what is a community? Traditionally, community is understood as a group of people that share something in common, but also, as the very conditions for sharing that in common in the first place. If peers share an agreement of what they want to do together, (and at the end, members of communities come and go!), then we better understand community as the set of institutions that builds the confidence/trust for doing things together.

We are ready to see a taxonomy of paradigmatic communities in the economic world:

Taxonomy of Communities

We see four kind of different communities for which we do not have a name, but their paradigmatic examples are clear: a family business, a corporation, a kibbutz, and a consumers’ cooperative. They are “not peers with thick ties”, “not peers with thin ties”, “peers with thick ties”, and “peers with thin ties”. You may think, “and what about my peer colleagues in my department”? Well, you tell me. How are your relationships? Like members of a family? Like members of a corporation? Like members of a kibbutz? Or like members of a consumer coop?

Until now, each kind of community faced different limitations. For the sake of simplicity (I will refine this in my next post), let’s say that those communities based on “thick ties” had a limit of scale, being the Dunbar number their limit to growth without loosing their thick ties. Although they have the strong commitment of its members, they never had the critical mass to face big investments for major operations in order to compete with bigger organizations. On the other hand, communities based on “thin ties” have flourished and gained an outstanding influence, at the cost of the alienation of its members. Despite all their efforts for developing strong cultures (sic) and aligned missions and visions, and so on, Gallup found that “71% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive”.

Traditional Limits

But technological development has changed and is still dramatically changing the economy through:

– A reduction of the optimal scales of production

– A reduction of transaction costs

What it is interesting is that the reduction of the optimal scales of production and transaction costs are affecting the four kind of communities very differently. The traditional “commitment-scale” trade off is vanishing, and this is the true cornerstone of what we call the collaborative economy:

New opportunities

So yes, we can look back to the book’s insights and agree with:

1. Centralized platforms’ business models are old wine in new wineskins, being the wineskins the new business models for rent-seeking.

2. Centralized platforms disempower its users, so they can capture all the value.

But then others deserve to be analyzed further:

3. Centralized platforms fake trust environments

Well, yes and no. They disguise as much as they can thin ties’ trust with the appearance of thick ties’ trust. But they deliver a trust environment; otherwise they would not exist.

And others become problematic, because they clearly do not apply to all Coop-Platforms…

4. The time for Coop Platforms may have arrived

5. Coop-Platforms can offer what centralized ones are pretending -but are not able- to deliver

 …because they depend on the particular architecture of each coop-platform:

 6. However, decentralization does not imply equality.

7. New decentralized architectures need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist

And at the end, most of the Coop- Platforms discussed in the book are not designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist. This way, value will still be captured in a centralized way despite:

8. Platforms are us: community is what gives value

For instance, it is true that Coop-Platforms as Fairmondo, (which by the way, is a company that I LOVE), have set mechanisms for returning value to society, which leaves its community out of the equation:

The usual justification is that some Coop-Platforms articulate community and society through special boards, because:

9. Coop Platforms are not as much for autonomy and independence as for multi-stakeholder interdependence.

And… we really must stop here. What is the role of the community in an multi-stakeholder interdependence scheme? I am afraid we cannot discuss multi-stakeholder interdependence if we do not look first at the “governance” of each kind of community that we described before. Otherwise, how could we rightly understand interdependence with other stakeholders?

This will be the object of discussion of my next post.

Photo by antonychammond

The post On Platform Coops: what the heck is a peer? And a community? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ok; this was the short answer to the question I posed in the tittle. But if you want to know a little more about the book content, keep reading. I am going to share with you some key ideas developed in the book. All the companion quotes are from the book, so you have a glimpse of what you will find.

However, I have some objections and for me some things are missing. In my next post I will engage critically with the book. In the meantime, you may want to read a critical perspective that Las Indias Electrónicas just posted about the Coop Platform movement.

1. Centralized platforms’ business models are old wine in new wineskins

• “It’s the same old industrialism, being practiced with powerful new digital tools” (Douglas Rushkoff—Renaissance Now)
• “Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own no vehicles or real-estate, capture profits from the operators of the cars and apartments for which they provide the marketplace. Neither of these business models is very new” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).
• “The decisive question is not who owns any kind of means of production but who owns the dominant means of production. These used to be the factory, the machinery. They are now becoming the big algorithms, the constantly adjusted and ever-developing virtual machinery.” (Christoph Spehr)

2. Centralized platforms disempower its users

• “The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).
• “Capitalist platforms based on the sale of audience commodity and capturing marketplace rents demand a sacrifice of privacy and autonomy” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).

3. Centralized platforms fake trust environments

• “turns out that we act differently when we rate people to when we rate products […] The distorted rating distributions serve the interests of the platform owners, making the platform appear to be a higher-trust environment than it really is […] (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis)

4. The time for Coop Platforms may have arrived

• First, disruption. Things are very much up in the air. Uber is growing dominant in personal-transportation services in the United States, but Uber could still be the Friendster, or at most the LinkedIn, of the on-demand economy if the cooperative movement moves fast into a broad range of services. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Second, we are in the cultural moment of cooperation. Wikipedia, free and open-source software (FOSS), citizen journalism, and other forms of commons-based peer production have made normal people encounter cooperation and its products as a matter of everyday practice. The decades-long insistence of expert economics that we should think of ourselves as self-interested rational actors acting with guile is bumping up against a daily reality that refutes it (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Third, commons-based peer production has provided a template and experience with the possibility of large-scale enterprises managing and governing themselves through online cooperative platforms. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Finally, networks have destabilized the model of the firm. Transaction costs associated with both market exchanges and social sharing have declined; interactions once preserved for firms that combined capital with contractual commitments for labor, materials, and distribution can now be done in a more distributed form (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Platform co-ops can benefit from the bursting of the content bubble (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible)
• App store opportunities are drying up (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible).

5. Coop-Platforms can offer what centralized ones are pretending -but are not able- to deliver

• “The dominant players continue to brand themselves as a community, while users experience the systems more like customers. There is an opportunity for platform co-op designers to revive the project of establishing genuine community” (Cameron Tonkinwise—Convenient Solidarity: Designing for Platform Cooperativism)
• “In many ways, the platform co-op model is well suited to counteract some of the ownership and sustainability problems intrinsic to venture-backed enterprises that we encountered firsthand. But near-future tech platforms will be built upon rapidly evolving infrastructures and will require sudden adaptations to new capabilities” (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible)
• Platform cooperatives—as a directed affront to the platform of monopolies characterizing digital industrialism—offer a means of both reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need to work toward our collective good” (Douglas Rushkoff—Renaissance Now)
• “open cooperatives internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of immaterial and material commons; and are socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally” (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis—Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops)

6. However, decentralization does not imply equality.

• The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics. (Rachel O’Dwyer—Blockchains and Their Pitfalls)

7. New decentralized architectures need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist

• Going back to an early Internet architecture of cooperative, decentralized servers, as projects like Diaspora, GNU Social, and others are attempting to do, will not work. This is precisely the sort of architecture that antidisintermediation was designed to defeat. Decentralized systems need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist. Central to the counterantidisintermediationist design is the end-to-end principle; platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platforms users (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).

8. Platforms are us: community is what gives value

• Platforms are us: Platforms aren’t just software applications and the companies that administer them. What gives a platform value, in most cases, is the community of users that employ the platform, along with the networks, data, and ideas they create (Janelle Orsi—Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative)
• As part of our project, we are developing our own conceptual framework that identifies six dimensions to assess and measure value: 1. Community building 2. Social use-value of the resource created 3. Reputation 4. Achievement of the stated mission 5. Monetary value 6. Ecological value and derivative processes (Mayo Fuster Morell—Toward a Theory of Value for Platform Cooperatives)

9. Coop Platforms are not as much for autonomy and independence as for multi-stakeholder interdependence.

• This kind of shift in focus means leaving behind some of the cherished emphasis that the last cooperative wave put on autonomy and independence; instead, cooperative developers have been enthusiastically exploring ways to partner with city governments, labor unions, forward-thinking philanthropy, and impact investors to create mechanisms to finance and support the work of building a more democratic economy. Cooperative purity can easily become an obstacle to achieving meaningful scale and inclusive impact. For instance, insisting that members self-finance their own enterprise risks creating a closed circle of relative economic privilege rather than a movement to truly democratize capital. Similarly, insisting on autonomy from government intervention and support means that the policies behind traditional economic development will continue to grind away, subsidizing corporations and leaving cooperatives to fend for themselves (John Duda—Beyond Luxury Cooperativism).

10. Well designed Coop Platforms can provide dignified and sustainable livelihoods for those who work on them

• Based on this research, we’ve begun to identify some principles or rules that should guide designers in order to achieve more positive outcomes for workers: 1. Earnings maximization, 2. Stability and predictability, 3. Transparency, 4. Portability of products and reputations, 5. Upskilling, 6. Social connectedness, 7. Bias elimination, 8. Feedback mechanisms (Marina Gorbis—Designing Positive Platforms)
• Those of us who are striving to organize workers in the online economy have to build a theory for reputation portability and protection into our other organizing work (Kati Sipp—Portable Reputation in the On-Demand Economy)

11. Governments cannot remain spectators of the tremendous effects of centralized platforms

• “Cities and governments have not yet fully grasped that power lies, today, at the level of data” (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• “The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all productive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses); the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, networked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new economy serves more than the platform-builders’ profits” (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• Many of the business models of the “sharing economy” are based on the strategic nullification of the law. Companies knowingly violate city regulations and labor laws. This allows them to undermine the competition and then point to a large customer base to demand legislative changes that benefit their dubious modus operandi. (Trebor Scholz—How Platform Cooperativism Can Unleash the Network)

12. Civil Society and Governments have to co-create an eco-system for Coop Plataforms to flourish

• “The big companies that rule the Internet aren’t coming to dominate just because of a good idea and a charismatic founder; they grow out of supportive ecosystems, including investors, lawyers, sympathetic governments, and tech schools. Perhaps most important is their culture—the festivals, the meetups, the memes, the manifestos—that share norms for what kinds of practices are expected and celebrated. To change these norms, we need to cultivate an ecosystem for platform cooperativism” (Editors -Showcase 2: Ecosystem)
• The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all productive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses); the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, networked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new economy serves more than the platform-builders’ profits. ( Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)

13. Some administrations are beginning to realize the potential of cooperative platforms, or at least allowing new opportunities for them to emerge.

• A very interesting example of a city that is putting forward alternative policies and forward-looking regulations is Barcelona. (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• The Securities and Exchange Commission has enacted new rules on crowdfunding, through the JOBS Act, that are opening up the ways that everyday people can invest in the companies that best align with their values. These new rules allow non-accredited investors to invest, and they also allow for investments to occur without the intervention of brokers. It has become easier, in this way, for us to be responsive to the people we hope to serve and partner with (Karen Gregory—Can Code Schools Go Cooperative?)

14 . Coop Platforms need initially both a core limited multi-skilled team and a wide community to succeed.

• I have found that innovation occurs most readily in small teams with shared goals but different skill sets. Big groups, on the other hand, are good for education and organizing work, and for refining existing platforms. But to innovate, I like to work in core teams of three to six people, as this allows for deep relationships, shared memory, and relatively fast decision making, since each person can speak for ten to twenty minutes per hour in meetings (Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…).
• If you can’t raise $300,000 a year for a core team of five, don’t build a demo site that barely works or buggy software that won’t last—organize great events and build community! (Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…).

15. In Coop Platforms terms, ownership is what matters.

• With less than 10 percent of Americans currently owning their own businesses and workplaces, today’s “new, new organizing” begins to address the skewed imbalances between capital and labor and the power this distortion produces and exercises (Michael Peck—Building the People’s Ownership Economy through Union Co-ops).
• Starting in the spring of 2014, 1worker1vote.org set out to demonstrate that widespread workplace equity and democratic participation can return America to its original system of individual and local community ownership (Michael Peck—Building the People’s Ownership Economy through Union Co-ops).
• Very few campaigns lead to what Hochschild calls “deep acting”—our genuine emotions at work. Most campaigns fall back on “surface acting,” the kind of behavior associated with fake smiles. These campaigns strain volunteers, scare supporters, and fail at their goals. And if a project does get funded, any future collective action depends on whoever owns and controls the value created. Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).

16. Coop Platforms can offer a wide range of ownership/membership alternatives

• These DCOs are connected intellectually to a variety of related decentralized ownership models. They range from the FairShare Model of Karl Sjogren, which proposes a structure of different classes of ownership shares for different contributors—for founders, people with a continuous working role, for users, and for investors—to the Swarm approach to “crypto-equity” crowdfunding developed by Joel Dietz. If the rules for equitable value distribution are well defined, generally accepted, and become “normal” in the same way that employment for salary at a shareholder corporation was in the twentieth century, perhaps the providers can then focus more of their efforts on creating value (Arun Sundararajan—Economic Barriers and Enablers of Distributed Ownership).

17. Coop Platforms will be developed more quickly if depart from what already exists, and traditional cooperativism and unionism experiment with it.

• It’s important for folks in the platform-cooperative community to understand that there are existing worker-led organizations that are set up to deal with multi-employer, disaggregated work situations—and that we can build from their model, rather than starting from scratch. (Kati Sipp—Portable Reputation in the On-Demand Economy)
• What both of these paths signify is the potential for value when organized labor and worker cooperatives team up in the “gig economy.” (Christoph Spehr—SpongeBob, Why Don’t You Work Harder?)
• Here is an often-overlooked challenge: try to join and add to existing cooperative platforms, rather than building your own from scratch.(Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…)
• As a movement, cooperativism will only succeed by moving fast and decisively, learning from the near past, and sharing our experiments and knowledge quickly and repeatedly in a network of cooperatives. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)

18. Platform Coops must put “humanizing” emotions into equation (and crowfunding efforts are examples of this).

• Elizabeth Hoffman’s 2016 study of worker co-ops found that embracing emotion ultimately benefits democratic participation. As individuals get comfortable expressing themselves, they develop an identity as co-owners—their workplace and co-workers feel like “home” and “family.” Such transformative, humanizing experiences contrast with how we relate to one another through marketing. These are also how investment grows into stewardship. (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).
• Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations. For crowdfunding to become stewardship, we need rolling barn-raisers—regular activities in which guests can co-create with the gifts they bring, celebrate their accomplishments, and build again. Marketing strategies extract generosity by developing an audience, message, and call-to-action, leveraging one-way relationships. A barn-raiser is an organizing strategy for a cooperative alternative that involves people, invitation, and engagement (think p-i-e): 1) Connect with people. Audiences are passive, but people put emotion at the core of cooperation. Learn who might join the effort, and what they’re trying to get done. 2) Make an invitation. Messages are static, but invitations cultivate voluntary and open membership. Define what you want to celebrate, together—in person or online. 3) Sustain engagement. A call-to-action limits inputs, but engagement supports democratic ownership and control. Seek participation more than financial contributions (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).

19. Traditional Coops may be in a privileged position for building Coop Platforms, but they have to understand the power of commons first.

• In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting, or producing commons, and they usually function under the patent and copyright system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around their local or national membership. As a result, the global arena is left open to be dominated by large corporations

20. The best Platform Coops could be envisioned as infrastructures for Open Value Networks built over “natural abundance”

• “In a natural extension of such capacities, open value networks, or OVNs, are attempts to enable bounded networks of participants to carry out crowdfunding, crowdsourcing of knowledge, and co-budgeting among their identifiable participants. OVNs such as Enspiral and Sensorica have been described as an “operating system for a new kind of organization” and a “pilot project for the new economy.” (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity […] Open cooperatives, in comparison, recognize natural abundance and refuse to generate revenue by making abundant resources artificially scarce. […] Second, a typical commons-based peer production project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute […] Open co-ops, therefore, practice open-value accounting or contributory accounting […] Third, open cooperatives can secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “CopyFair” licenses. […] Fourth, open cooperatives are able to make use of open designs to produce sustainable goods and services […] Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives reduce waste [… ]Sixth, open cooperatives can mutualize not only digital infrastructures but also physical ones (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis—Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops).

21. Governance of Platform Coops, Open Value Networks and commons requires a distinctive set of management practices

• 1) Find the right people, 2) Explore different strategies for self-management, 3) Consider conversion, 4) Define the parameters of your cooperative environment, 5) Join a cooperative network (or two), 6) Invest in other cooperatives, 7) Choose free tools to run the business. (Micky Metts—Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Tech Co-op)
• Our Good Work Code is a set of eight simple principles that can serve as a framework: 1) Safety, 2) Stability & Flexibility, 3) Transparency, 4) Shared Prosperity, 5) A Livable Wage, 6) Inclusion & Input, 7) Support & Connection, 8)Growth & Development (Palak Shah—A Code for Good Work).
• We considered the following six interrelated factors as determinants and drivers of commons governance: 1) Mission 2) Management of contributions. Greater flexibility of participants seems to be conducive to higher degrees of contribution. 3) Decision-making with regard to community interaction. Consensus-based decision making is frequent in commons-based peer production but the methods differ. 4) Formal policies applied to community interaction. 5) Design of the platform. 6) Platform provision (Mayo Fuster Morell—Toward a Theory of Value for Platform Cooperatives)

22. Blockchain technologies could actually be an opportunity for Coop Platforms, but should not be used for promoting cooperation without trust.

• Although Bitcoin itself has been designed to serve familiar capitalist functions (tax avoidance, private accumulation through speculation), the blockchain ledger is significant because it can enable highly reliable, versatile forms of collective action on open networks. It does this by validating the authenticity of a digital object (for example, a bitcoin) without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body. This solves a particularly difficult collective-action problem in an open network context: How do you know that a given digital object—a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certificate, dataset, a vote, or a digital identity asserted by an individual—is the real thing and not a forgery? (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons)
• In the United States, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has proposed using blockchain technology to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses coordinated as commons (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• This field of experimentation may yield another breakthrough tool for forging digital commons: smart contracts. […] These transactions could, of course, be used to invent new types of markets, but they also could be used to create new types of commons (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will (Rachel O’Dwyer—Blockchains and Their Pitfalls).

23. Those that want to build a Coop Platform should get rid of mainstream mindsets

• Cooperatives tended to focus too much on how the value would be shared rather than on a compelling offer to create the value in the first place (Arun Sundararajan—Economic Barriers and Enablers of Distributed Ownership)
• We embed values into our technologies, and today such values are reflections of Silicon Valley’s ethos and funding models (Marina Gorbis—Designing Positive Platforms).
• Platforms don’t need to be treated as commodities: It’s easy to develop a platform fetish as a result of their seemingly magical potential to create billionaires. Yet all along, it is the users themselves, and the rents they pay to platform companies, that enable the billion-dollar valuations (Janelle Orsi—Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative)

24.There are plenty of experiences to learn from that are documented in the book. Far too many to pick excerpts. Get the book and read it.

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