Each week, we struggle with how our values fit in our workplaces and platforms.

We’re a group of tech workers who see how the tech industry shapes our lives and data, and how it is complicit in forms of oppression, including racism, classism, sexism, cisgenderism, homophobia, and xenophobia. We also believe there are alternatives, through equitable ownership and control. That’s why we’re organizing “User, Worker, Owner! Bringing Democracy to Work.”

Come be part of our gathering on May 2 in downtown Oakland.

Date/Time
Date(s) – May 2, 2018
5:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location
VSCO

Join people from  and other groups committed to tech equity. Participants will define problems they face in workplaces and platforms, connect with like-minded peers, and explore strategies to shift ownership and control with an intersectional equity lens. We’ll have talks from digital labor researcher Niloufar Salehi and co-op scholar Nathan Schneider. Workshop topics we’re considering include:

– Collective governance – representation and consensus-based decision making
– Self-management – conflict resolution and growing pains in distributed team
– Shared finance and ownership – co-operative conversions and alternatives
– Community rules – product ethics, codes of conduct, and trust & safety
– Open space for more!

We’ll have light food and drinks. Nobody turned away for lack of funds. To request free tickets, or to help sponsor the event, email danny@colab.coop.

RSVP on Eventbrite here!

Tell us what you want to get out of this event by filling in this survey 

Photo by JD Hancock

The post User, Worker, Owner! May 2 in Oakland appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Dear Birdies,

The tweet-powered t-shirt vending machine in the room at Twitter’s shareholder meeting didn’t work at first. A Twitter employee attending to the machine walked me through the three hashtags required to get the shirt, but the machine wasn’t recognizing my tweeting. So, after 10 minutes of small talk with the employee about our proposal, I told her “Thank you” and started to go. But then the employee opened the vending machine door and handed me a shirt. Such a simple fix!

At Monday’s annual meeting, Twitter shareholders did not approve our proposal.

But by winning 4% of the vote, we can – and very likely will – resubmit a better proposal next year to democratize Twitter.

Twitter’s opposition statement to our proposal said it couldn’t be done. The truth is, even some of the strongest allies of #BuyTwitter assumed it was too complex. We’ve been through eight months of organizing, from op-ed to petition to proposal, defense, andMonday’s vote tally. Looking back, it all seems simple, like unlocking a vending machine.

Now, after the meeting, everything seems possible for our group.

A stock market analyst who helped guide our efforts emailed me, saying: “This study could be a game changer… You have legitimacy now from the shareholder vote. That carries weight. Leverage it to the fullest. Media coverage may very well be in your favor, too.”

Momentum from the vote is one way that #WeAreTwitter #BuyTwitter has succeeded so far at building organized power among Twitter users and shareholders.

Here is some more of what we’ve accomplished together:

• Advancing democratic ownership and accountability on the platforms we use, including a couple dozen individuals doing analysis, web design, advocacy with allies, and more.
• Dozens upon dozens of articles featuring #BuyTwitter including The Financial Times, WIRED, Salon, Recode, Vanity Fair, and The Co-op Water Cooler.
• Hundreds upon hundreds of tweets in the past week alone about #BuyTwitter, including an original love ballad on YouTube!
• A letter signed by major of coop allies, including the International Co-operative Alliance, Co-operatives UK, the National Cooperative Business Association, and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. You can sign it, too!
• Another letter by the International Co-op Alliance, on behalf of 2.6 million enterprises and 1 billion members worldwide.
• A poll conducted last week found that more than 2 million UK Twitter users would consider investing in a democratic Twitter.
• A Twitter Moment of selected highlights uniting #BuyTwitter, #NetNeutrality, #Coops, #corpgov, and exiting the stock market.

This is just the beginning. What’s next?

• Help build cooperative social media by joining the new Social.coop, a cooperatively owned instance of the federated, open-source Mastodon network. This is just one of many projects you can support in the #platformcoop ecosystem.
• Explore the broader movement for cooperative platforms and an Internet of Owners by attending The People’s Disruption conference in NYC and other events around the world.
• Join the organizing effort in our Loomio group. What should next year’s proposal say? Should we press on as a social media users’ union? A cooperative investment club?

I hope we can get together for an open online conversation. Until then, share our celebration tweet and have a wonderful week.

Onward,

Danny and the #WeAreTwitter team

PS: If someone you know wants a free kitten, tell them to get one here.

Photo by clasesdeperiodismo

The post Twitter, you’ve been served appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A lot of it comes down to how people are welcomed.

Last April, I joined a group of activists and academics in Madrid, Spain, to build software that helps communities self-organize. This group was part of the P2Pvalue project, a three-year research initiative that looked into what makes peer production sustainable in commons-based communities.

To see things in action, I reached out to dozens of community spaces, from meditation centers to pop-up events. My visits, interviews, and workshops with organizers only brought up more questions: Why are the most thriving community spaces often led by volunteers? How do some spaces accomplish so much without the help of any digital tools? And what about these spaces made it possible to charge people either very little or nothing to participate?

At the end of August, I honed in on one space: The PLACE for Sustainable Living in Oakland, California. PLACE, as it’s known to friends and neighbors, is an experiential learning center. It’s a thriving space, where people cowork, garden, repair bikes, make art and music, and so much more. The organization gets people involved through a concentrated effort — a monthly “Action Day.” Every month, PLACE invites people to explore the space, connect with peers, and learn how they can join.

At PLACE, I learned a key lesson: organizers can improve their community space simply by looking at where things break down in welcoming new people.

Translating this and other lessons made it possible for the group in Madrid and me to build a better self-organizing platform. It is now online at http://teem.works and serves dozens of communities.

And to create a second, more accessible resource for community spaces, I repurposed the stories, data, and cartoons from the software development process and created a guide and worksheet to help community space organizers welcome people.

To download the guide and worksheet, scroll to the bottom of this blog post

Here are key points from the guide:

1. What Happens When Someone Shows Up To a Community Space

Welcoming new people is the first step to getting them involved in the space — first impression matters. The next steps after welcoming can lead to three different outcomes: failing, struggling, or thriving.

• Failing

  The community space is a one-time stunt. At first, it enjoys waves of excited visitors — a grand opening party, friends inviting friends, and more. But without organizers showing the work behind the scenes or asking people to get involved, only a few people offer to help and fewer end up actually helping. Sooner or later, the space closes.

• Struggling

  A group manages to keep its space open. Organizers spread the word about activities and projects and open decision-making meetings to the public. Once in awhile, someone “gets it” and takes initiative. They might do neighborhood outreach or balance the books. But without defined roles and responsibilities, even for the core group of organizers, participation is unpredictable and limited. Managing the space involves all kinds of unexpected, unsteady work.

• Thriving

  The healthy, sustainable participation most groups hope for. A critical mass of volunteers show up to help at the community space one day, thanks to word-of-mouth, an article with a call to action, or good timing. After a positive experience, many volunteers come back. Some become active organizers, taking on defined roles and responsibilities. The space grows organically.

In all three of these cases, different practices might lead to better outcomes. What principles are behind better practices?

2. Principles For Welcoming People

How can organizers lift up the vision and values of their community space without shutting down volunteers who bring new perspectives and capacity? The two principles of alignment and affirmation can help turn frustrating questions into productive conversations. This helps bridge the gap from a visitor to a volunteer.

1. Find alignment

   Work towards a common goal by integrating diverse opinions instead of rejecting them. For example, when people are in alignment, they listen to and respect one another — any stakeholder can support a decision even when they have concerns.

2. Offer affirmation

   Encourage and support people, especially as they try new things and take initiative. For example, organizers can encourage everyone to help — even if they fail at first — by sharing positive stories and recognizing effort.

How can we apply these principles?

3. Improve a Space by Making it More Welcoming

One way to explain what happens in welcoming new people at a community space is to break it down into three steps to help people:

1. Visiting – getting curious

2. Trying – seeing connections

3. Joining – making a commitment

To help understand these steps in action, I’ll use the PLACE for Sustainable Living as a case study:

1. Visiting

• Goal: To help people experience the vision of the space.
• Practice: Helping people get curious and explore instead of simply explaining how things work.
• Avoid…
  • welcoming people half-heartedly.
  • making requests for help that are vague or ad-hoc.
  • deferring to outdated documentation, a dense wiki, or a messy Facebook group/page.
• Consider…
  • doing regular outreach to build local relationships.
  • hosting a regular action day.
  • outlining a clear path for volunteers to become organizers.
• Example: Because PLACE is dedicated to spreading its model, it invests heavily in making visits a positive experience by hosting a monthly Action Day, when people can see everything for themselves.

2. Trying

• Goal: To help people imagine being part of the community and understand its priorities.
• Practice: Creating ways for people to connect with opportunities instead of just matching skills and tasks.
• Avoid…
  • recruiting only for narrow, predefined roles.
  • using jargon, rituals, and “inessential weirdness”.
  • setting a do-it-yourself standard that favors connected people.
• Consider…
  • creating a buddy system.
  • hosting regular trainings and orientations.
  • showcasing projects and the groups behind them.
• Example: PLACE has a vision of resilience that combines self-sufficiency and mutual aid. People become stronger by supporting one another. Getting a real taste of that experience is key for new people to believe another way of life is possible. It also adds capacity to get work done.

3. Joining

• Goal: To grow participation in a healthy way and minimizing growing pains.
• Practice: Making it easy for new people to commit and come back.
• Avoid…
  • sending visitors custom-tailored instructions on how to help.
  • assuming everyone can take initiative alone, or feels comfortable asking for support.
  • hosting one meeting for internal work, for welcoming visitors, and for reviewing proposals.
• Consider…
  • conducting trainings on how to become an organizer, with supporting resources.
  • supporting new people in making decisions in working groups, committees, pods, etc.
  • asking, “Who has power and control in our community? Is it us? Why?”
  • scheduling regular meetings, and regular retreats.
• Example: Stewardship is essential to the way PLACE runs. Its organizers are actually called “stewards” and they take responsibility for everything from facilities and administration to education and events. More broadly, PLACE is organized as a set of groups called “pods” where stewards and others collaborate. Joining the space happens through these pods, where people can propose a project they bring with them (like a pedal-powered pasta maker) or simply work until inspiration strikes.

4. Practice Makes Progress

In community spaces, welcoming people often leads to collaborations on projects that keep everything growing and thriving. However, some people may never feel welcomed in a space.

Progress means returning to these issues time and again. For example, you can continually develop community agreements, a statement of solidarity, or a set of policies. This is where the principles of alignment and affirmation matter most, because they emphasize the role of practice in bringing intentions to life.

Please fill out this form to get PDFs of the full guide and worksheet.

And if you use this resource, please let me know how it goes! Email danny@peakagency.co.

The post How to Welcome and Engage People in Community Spaces appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Teem www.teem.works is a project hub for the commons – projects from community centers to pop-up events that openly share space and resources. It is a web and mobile app where organizers can share images of their community projects, show the vision, activities, and requests, and grow participation sustainably. Because of its participatory design, Teem makes it easy for people to build their vision!

The Teem platform was created over the past two years by a group of activists and academics inspired by what they experienced in communities where organizers include volunteers as peers. The work was coordinated and supported by the www.P2Pvalue.eu project.

Now, Teem is running a global video contest, and everyone is a winner!

To participate, send 1 to 3 project photos with captions to alba@teem.works by November 21!

We’ll produce a video with everyone’s photos, and promote it far and wide.

The post A photo contest to grow community projects everywhere (submit by Nov 21) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The organizers are bringing together fellow Twitter users to try and make a fair deal, and to:

1. Reward the creators
2. Empower the users
3. Innovate through co-ownership

Skeptical? Worried that trolls will ruin it? Fear not, its an amazing group of organizers.

You can become a part of it. Add your name to the petition here.

The post #WeAreTwitter appeared first on P2P Foundation.

How might we help people appreciate what’s going on in common spaces? Can shared pictures do that better than websites and wikis?

The P2P Foundation believes it’s worth exploring. Since April, I’ve been doing research on peer production with a group they brought together. Next week, we’re organizing a participatory show & tell about how people picture their commons – the fun, easy stuff as well as the hard, unseen, and often thankless work.

Join to hear people’s wisdom, share your own, and get involved!

Event Details

• Tomorrow, Aug 26, 1:00 PM PST/8:00 PM GMT
• Hangouts On Air – Broadcast for free

Lead image by Henry Flowers

The post Picturing the Commons: A P2P Foundation Live Conversation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“All emotion is involuntary when genuine,” said Mark Twain.

For anyone starting a co-op, this rings true—even more than the first cooperative principle of “voluntary and open membership.”

Co-ops self-organize out of desperation and determination. With emotions running high, and without access to venture capital, co-op organizers romanticize crowdfunding as a digital barn-raiser.

Intuitively, this makes sense: we want to build a beloved community, not tap people out.

In practice, most co-ops struggle with crowdfunding. Very few campaigns lead to what Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart calls “deep acting,” our genuine emotions at work. Instead, organizers fall back on “surface acting,” the kind of behaviour associated with fake smiles and guilt parties. They often strain volunteers, stress supporters, and fail at their goals.

Marketing has skewed our view of crowdfunding by influencing how we think and feel about community.

What does “community” really mean here? Community is collective action with a shared story. We join clubs and co-ops that offer material benefits — things that matter to us on a daily basis—and we stay because of solidarity with our peers and a purpose we can achieve together. The more we act collectively, the more we strengthen these incentives.

Incorporating as a co-op is a long way from building community. There’s a grain of truth to idea that co-ops are the original crowdfunding, yet people experience them in our organizing and campaigns, not the bylaws or business plans we might be tempted to show them.

We can’t extract generosity through crowdfunding—that’s what marketing tries to do in platform capitalism. Instead, we must form relationships rooted in reciprocity.

I learned these lessons last year, when I partnered with Loconomics to grow their membership and crowdfund their platform.

On paper, Loconomics had a beautiful model: a local services co-op owned by the freelancers doing the work. The user-owners get tools for booking clients, a growing marketplace, and a dividend based on the co-op’s performance. But the appeal of joining a co-op needed as much validation as the platform itself.

To research freelancer needs, I interviewed a representative group of a dozen local service providers—some with their own client base, others taking odd jobs on platforms like TaskRabbit. Nobody felt misinformed, much less exploited, with what they get through on-demand service platforms. However, everone craved the feeling of belonging to something bigger. A part-time plumber with a philosophy degree described the ideal as “less a client base, more a partner base”—in other words, a co-op. But, would anyone pay to join one?

People will give endless feedback on ideas, but only commit if they see value. A sure way to make this shift is through opportunities for people to test a prototype and express their emotions.

Emotions on the Internet

For anyone who has run a crowdfunding campaign, mobilizing genuine emotion can sound like difficult, draining work.

After working in dozens of campaigns, I’ve seen a tension play out between crowdfunding and membership. Crowdfunding is a one-off moment of collection action, but when the projects that we care for also take care of us, people come together and stay together.

How might we reinvent crowdfunding campaigns so collective action continues?

It’s tempting to search for answers on the Internet. But before going online, consider the case of a real-life forest:

Neera M. Singh, author of a 2013 forest conservation study in Odisha, India, found a region that challenges the logic of paying individuals to manage resources as market goods. She observed how villagers harvest only what food and wood they need from the forest, and sing songs celebrating its cool breeze, too. Singh concluded that community stewardship sustains thousands of villages because people organize their labor both effectively—forming accountable relationships around their work, and affectively—developing shared identity in the process.

The story of stewardship in Odisha shows another side of crowdfunding and collective action. While starting a project might depend on pooling financial contributions, sustaining it requires emotional investment.

How do emotions look in Internet marketing? Query your favorite search engine for “women laughing alone with salad,” and you’ll see a cliché used to evoke health and happiness.

I suggest taking a look if you haven’t recently—partly because it’s hard not to laugh at the fake emotions, but mainly because a similar caricature shows up in how on-demand service platforms market themselves. TaskRabbit, for example, portrays images of smiling helpers cleaning kitchens while women hold babies. Unlike stock photos, however, we meet TaskRabbit in real life.

Source: TaskRabbit please don’t sue me

Their marketing may be full of clichés, but on-demand service platforms are full of opportunities to become emotionally invested.

Platforms like TaskRabbit leverage our emotional investment to grow their user base. Their user experience is designed to delight us, especially at key moments around transactions. When interacting with a chef, host, or any service provider who loves their job/gig, we enjoy acts of kindness that have little to do with rating systems. But platforms do not support self-organizing. Instead they leverage community activity to increase user engagement, and resist attempts to leave. TaskRabbit charges a $500 finder’s fee to move consumer-provider relationship off of its platform.

This is the norm in platform capitalism: products extract value from transactions for outside investors. The platforms connect us to resources more than they operate as a resource themselves or a place to gather. In this context, our emotions are more like “laughing alone with salad” and less like singing together in Odisha’s forests.

The real issue with emotions lies with the conditions in which they are extracted. Emotions on the Internet can be better understood with Hochschild’s theory of “emotional labor,” which describes how we adapt our emotional expressions in deep and superficial ways to align with workplace rules. While Singh found villagers laboring happily, defying market logic, Hochschild argued more than 30 years ago that emotions get commodified in a capitalist service economy.

Looking at how emotions change over time, however, shows how people become invested. Beth Hoffman, in a 2015 study of worker co-ops, found that embracing emotion ultimately benefits democratic participation. How? As individuals get comfortable expressing themselves, they develop an identity as co-owners. Hoffman quotes someone from Organix Co-op describing the freedom to be sincerely happy:

If something is great, I say so. If I think everyone is working well, I tell people around me that. Here, I’m free to be enthusiastic. I can get pumped up about the co-op, and it’s not nerdy, or sucking up. Hell, there’s no owner to suck up to. I’m the owner! So I’m not sucking up; I can just tell everyone when things are going great!

Emotional labor in co-ops can undo habits formed in extractive contexts, to the point where co-owners feel like their coworkers and workplace are like “family” and “home.” An office worker at Chemical Cooperative says how:

Where I worked before is a lot worse, a lot worse. Because people there were, spending a lot of time protecting themselves in writing and defending their position… It’s not at all like that here. But it takes some getting used the fact that you can be yourself here. Like you can take your shoes off when you get home.

Such transformative, humanizing experiences in co-ops contrast with how we relate to one another through one-off moments in Internet marketing. It’s also the kind of place where emotional investment grows into stewardship.

Barn-raisers for Stewardship

Happily, my partnership with Loconomics concluded with them focusing on community before launching a product.

To see what invitation attracts people most, they swapped their full website for a simple sign-up page. And to learn about user experience, they welcomed service providers and clients to events where they could try the app, volunteer, or become owners. Getting together finally made it possible to experience what a community might feel like—a celebration.

At a minimum, community is a shared feeling of belonging. These feelings well up when people come together, through book clubs and parties, and they evaporate when the organization shuts down, puts up a pay-wall, or simply has a change of heart. Such precariousness is hidden, however, when a platform manages to balance user satisfaction and extraction.

Building community through crowdfunding plays out in a similar way. It starts with a goal of mobilizing contributions from many individuals. With enough incentives and excitement, the possibility of passing a funding threshold triggers collective action. This usually happens only once. 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.

Marketing strategies extract generosity and resources by developing an audience, message, and call-to-action, like guilt parties where people leverage relationships unfairly.

For crowdfunding to become stewardship, we need rolling barn-raisers—activities for guests to co-create with their gifts, celebrate their accomplishments, and build again.

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 emotions 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 and/or online.
3. Sustain engagement. A call-to-action limits inputs, but engagement supports democratic ownership and control. Seek participation more than financial contributions.

By starting small and learning as they go, barn-raisers can “grow the pie” for co-ops. Organizing a crowdfunding campaign can follow the same steps.

This is how a crowdfunding becomes stewardship: raising expectations, embracing the challenge, and sharing the value as community grows.

The post Organize Barn-Raisers, Not Guilt Parties appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This creates an awkward situation for marketing. Tasked with growing revenue for apps and platforms, marketing adds a community layer without sharing ownership or control with users. But for co-ops — and really, any democratic endeavor — shared power is fundamental.

How can co-ops engage users without losing their democratic backbone?

I propose a set of metrics for online platforms to cultivate community power from within, not as a thin layer on top.

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor-activist, gives instructions on how to “run your startup like a cult.” History may be on his side. As neighborly behaviour goes the way of the bowling league, a layer of social interaction on apps and platforms gives them a competitive edge.

Consider the sharing economy platforms that promise a sense of community. They’re among the most profitable, fastest-growing companies. Countless companies are hiring community managers, a new managerial class that even hosts meetups to exchange best practices. Airbnb genuinely believes their home-sharing hosts cultivate a sense of belonging. They’ve recently begun hiring political organizers to grow their community into a movement.

Beneath their community layer, however, these platforms are made up of users, investors, and engineers. Users have no ownership or control to make the platform work for them. But wherever marketing reaches cult-like levels of engagement, users cheerily overlook their lack of power.

As the digital economy grows, the future for users is virtual feudalism. At the same time, I am optimistic about “platform cooperatives” emerging where users can become members and owners.

Cooperatives that organize their membership can buck the trend of powerlessness.

Cooperatives are associations that organize to serve collective needs, especially when markets fail to do so. During wicked recessions, co-ops persevere and prosper.

Grain silos in ancient Mesopotamia and grain elevators in the Midwest are classic co-op examples, insuring members against market volatility and stabilizing commodity prices. Member-owners are the main investors in the co-op, so they make smart, democratic decisions. To continue creating value, they take collective pay cuts before making layoffs. For greater economic gains, they pool resources and form federations.

Although co-ops emerge from market failures, they tend to lose when markets bounce back or new players reach their niche. The most infamous case took place in Austin, TX, where Whole Foods Market took after beloved Wheatsville Food Co-op and grew into a nation-wide behemoth. Wheatsville still exists, however, thanks to its local and loyal members.

Co-op membership is so much more than a customer loyalty card or a paid app subscription.

On the Internet, I certainly believe co-ops need marketing to survive. Like any enterprise, co-ops have to communicate the unique value they offer in the marketplace. Users looking for music or freelancers looking for gigs have little tolerance for crappy apps and platforms. This holds true even for die-hard co-op enthusiasts.

Organizing matters more than marketing, however, because even if co-ops are competitive, they need to achieve their potential as democratic communities.

* * *

Let’s use Pirate Metrics for marketing, and Mutiny Metrics for member organizing

Marketing professionals familiar with Pirate Metrics use them to grow a user base like its their job. To be fair, that is their job. They add a community layer to make users happy, but the objective is the same: growth. Cooperatives are different than startups. Their promise of community ownership and control goes beyond marketing.

By showing the limits of Pirate Metrics, and drawing a lesson from pirate history, I propose a new set of metrics for organizing community.

Pirate Metrics

Back in 2007, Dave McClure introduced Pirate Metrics as a way for startup marketers (AKA “growth hackers”) to get traction with users and keep them engaged. He proposed the acronym AARRR(!):

• Acquisition — users sign up for some product, subscription, etc.
• Activation — they get started on the app or platform
• Retention — they come back
• Referral — they bring others
• Revenue — they generate value for the platform

These metrics are strictly business.

To see how they work, consider Loomio, a New Zealand worker cooperative that built a decision-making platform. They raised over $100k via crowdfunding in 2012, and have grown their user base by applying Pirate Metrics to create a positive user experience, welcome emails to thank-you notes. People love Loomio. I love Loomio. But in terms of marketing, Loomio operates much like any startup.

For startups and co-ops, success depends mainly on operations.

Some of the most democratic operations in history were, in fact, pirate ships — despite their criminal ambitions. In fact, I recently became friends with a lawyer who swears by pirates. He recommended The Invisible Hook: The Law and Economics of Pirate Tolerance. Here’s what I took away from it:

The ever-present “mutiny” element helped pirate ships become both competitive and democratic. On pirate ships, captains only earned 2x the rest of the crew, and could be replaced whenever they displayed cowardice or failed to go after a bounty. Occasionally, pirate ships would form a fleet for collective action against really big bounty. They also had many black crew members who were free men and participated at all levels, from crew to captain. The merchant marine, on the other hand, operated as a slave ship with 6x differences in income and a punitive approach to handling nearly everything. Mercantilism helped build empires, but even good commerce is hardly democracy.

As a metaphor and a moral tale, pirates have a lot more to offer.

Mutiny Metrics

I propose “Mutiny Metrics” as a starting point to build better community with cooperatives, guilds, and commons of all kinds. While marketing is about revenue, a basic necessity for any enterprise, organizing is about community power, a moral high-road.

The MORAL acronym stands for:

• Membership — users become members and get a vote
• Ownership — they contribute equity/investment
• Reciprocity — they practice mutual aid
• Association — they create a structure of belonging
• Leveling — they maintain equality and fairness throughout the platform

These metrics are far from precise or linear, and their application for community engagement is open-ended.

For example, whenever Loomio’s team sees groups use the platform in innovative ways, the team invites them to share insights with others and play it forward with new users. Growing this community of practice can produce beautiful results for meaningful association, full of participation. And as Loomio grows their business in the US, they might get creative sharing ownership through community investment through a Direct Public Offering or better yet, through non-extractive finance. A quick review of Mutiny Metrics can generate many more ideas for better community.

* * *

A few reasons to consider Mutiny Metrics:

First, they focus attention on intention. For getting users and growing revenue, we have Pirate Metrics. Cultivating community power requires a different approach. And instead of prescribing actions, Mutiny Metrics are flexible and adaptive, a natural fit for what MobLab calls open campaigns.

Second, they invite pleasant surprises from community participation.Campaigners at SumOfUs hacked Pirate Metrics for community engagement, but their framework is still a one-to-many model. Mutiny Metrics go beyond user experience design to what we might call member experience co-design.

Finally, these metrics are a work in progress. Try them and see if they help make community participation easier or democracy more possible.

* * *

Danny Spitzberg believes that membership in community is vital for a democratic society — from bowling leagues to, well, whatever voluntary associations work for you.

For more thoughts & resources on this topic, sign up for the Peak Agency email letter or tweet @daspitzberg

The post The Thin Community We Get From Marketing appeared first on P2P Foundation.