Download the paper here: Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative, Policy and Practice

Photo by phedot

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Launched last December, AnyShare is a complete cooperative in that it allows multiple stakeholder groups to become members, vote, participate in decision-making processes, and receive profits. The stakeholders in the AnyShare Cooperative are founders, investors, employees, and community members. All receive dividends and a vote in the annual general meeting. A fifth stakeholder — the environment — receives dividends and a board position.

We talked to Eric Doriean, co-founder and operations chief, about AnyShare’s journey to become a FairShares platform cooperative.

Darren Sharp: How was AnyShare set up?

Eric Dorien: AnyShare was formed after a multi-year collaboration between its co-founders, Rob Jameson, Alison Gianotto, David Linnard, and myself, to find ways to unlock the abundant value that exists in our communities.

Our journey began with building an online platform called Mass Mosaic. The idea behind Mass Mosaic was to gather the needs and resources of as many people as possible and to create matches between them. The site grew to 15,000 users, but never had the critical mass to make diverse matches possible and truly unlock the abundance around us. We did find, however, that the groups on Mass Mosaic did work, as critical mass wasn’t needed for their success. It was with this knowledge that we refocused our efforts to build software to empower groups and communities. Late last year, AnyShare was launched and you can now start a free trial of the software on our website.

Long before meeting my beloved co-founders, I was fortunate enough to be an early employee of an internet start-up. In my time there, the business grew, and we listed through an IPO. It was then when my eyes started to open to the problems with unfettered growth and profits for shareholders being the only goal.

As time went on, I continued to learn about the extractive nature of business as usual and was attracted to the cooperative model. There were issues with cooperatives, in raising capital and not sharing the decision-making and value created with all the stakeholders that a technology-oriented business would impact. I began to imagine a hybrid cooperative that would create a business structure that would appease what had become a long list of requirements for me.

This is when I came across the FairShares Multi-Stakeholder Cooperative model. The FairShares model has four default stakeholder groups: founders, investors, labor, and customers. For our cooperative, the labor stakeholder group became the employee class and the customer stakeholder group, became the community class. It took a lot of time and effort from both our team and the FairShares team, but we are now very proud to be the first U.S.-based and technology focused FairShares enterprise.

What are the steps you went through to set up your organizational structure?

The first step in our transition to becoming a cooperative was for the co-founders to agree it was the right action to take. I had discussed the possibility of a multi-stakeholder cooperative with my co-founders at different occasions and educated them on what I had learned over many years for why they were necessary.

This was before Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider coined the phrase Platform Cooperative and sparked the movement behind it. So it did take time for the others to understand the need for it, as it was a foreign concept to traditional start-ups.

When I came across FairShares, from one line in the Commons Transition ebook from Michel Bauwens and co., it was the final piece of the puzzle for the co-founders to agree it was the right move forward. FairShares being an external third party with a highly evolved model, legitimized the idea. Then came the work to make it happen.

FairShares has default bylaws, which needed to be updated to include what we knew was necessary from our experiences in growing high tech businesses. As this was the first time being done in the U.S., we also had to investigate that everything within the bylaws was able to be done legally. It took as nearly a year to get these pieces in place. It all took much longer because we were the first to do it.

Our existing bylaws as a Delaware C Corp, required director approval to enact the new bylaws. A board meeting was called and after the affirmative vote to change them, I have to admit I felt a real sense of achievement. This was an important milestone, but then the real work began to build a business that achieved our mission and become a beacon of light of how to run fairer companies in the future.

Why did you choose the FairShares multi-stakeholder co-operative model?

My personal experience in business had taught me the need for raising capital. Traditional cooperatives are usually limited to members founding capital or finances raised through a loan of some sort. Unfortunately, there are too many stories of cooperatives being under capitalized, especially in their early days and failing before they get to a stage where the benefits of a Cooperative help them thrive. This is solved by the investor stakeholder group within FairShares, which allows raising capital through investment, whilst still embracing the cooperative principles.

Most cooperatives members are either workers or customers. We wanted both of these groups in our business to be part of the cooperative. The employee and community stakeholder classes in our cooperative allow us to do just that.

One of the principles of the FairShares model is to license intellectual property under a Creative Commons license. We added a clause that allowed us to release software under the open-source license of our choosing. This allows us to contribute to the global commons, whilst building a profitable business. It is something we hope to see become the gold standard for profit-making ventures.

The experience FairShares Association has brought to the table and built into the model, is second to none. This combined with the fact that FairShares is an external body to ourselves, was a big factor in choosing the FairShares model for our cooperative.

How did you develop your model rules and constitution?

The FairShares bylaws can be modified as needed beyond the founder, investor, labor, and customer stakeholder groups and the requirement of Creative Commons or open intellectual property. We had to decide details around areas such as percentages for dividends and voting for the stakeholder groups had to be decided. It was also necessary for us to modify a range of clauses to enable us to help us develop as a high-tech business.

Perhaps the biggest deviation from the default FairShares bylaws, was our decision to add a fifth stakeholder group. We added the environment as a stakeholder group. After we reach 500 cooperative members, there will be a board position whose role is solely focused on the business’s environmental impact. Also, two percent of the dividends are payable to environmental and nature causes before the other stakeholder groups are paid their dividend.

As the first U.S.-based FairShares enterprise, there was a considerable amount of effort put into making sure that everything in our bylaws was legal in the U.S.

A big part of this effort focused on the Blue Sky laws in the U.S., which had impacts on the employee and community classes being able to purchase investor stock up to a percentage of their contribution.

Can you share worksheets, templates, and policy documents?

Our current bylaws can be downloaded from our support website. They are Creative Commons licensed and can be modified and shared as per the terms of that license.

To date, most of our focus internally has been to develop our software and build our business. As time goes by, we will put resources into documenting processes and what we learn for others to learn from.

Are you really the first business in the U.S. where all people can have a voice and stake in the collective outcome? There are many multi-stakeholder co-ops in the U.S. already.

We believe that we are the first “complete” cooperative in the U.S. Beyond giving a voice and a stake in the collective outcome of the cooperative; we’ve added the environment and nature stakeholder class as well. Every business has an impact on the environment, and it was important to us that our environmental impact is a positive one.

The research we undertook before publicly stating [that] we are the first U.S. “complete” cooperative was extensive. We communicated with the National Cooperative Business Association, the Cooperation Works listserv, the Library of Congress, and other academic and development bodies. We asked if there is record of any other cooperative in the U.S. including all stakeholder groups. So far, there has been none presented, so [we] are comfortable saying we’re the first.

If anybody can think of another stakeholder class we haven’t included, we’d love to hear from you.

Header photo: Screenshot of AnyShare website

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Event convener Trebor Scholz opened proceedings by talking about how platform cooperativism provides an alternative to the extractive on-demand economy dominated by platforms like Uber which millions of people increasingly depend upon for their livelihoods, but “which are owned by a group so small you could fit them all on a Google bus.”

Trebor Scholz opens the conference discussing the prospects of Platform Cooperativism. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

Day one showcased an international group of practitioners and policymakers to discuss regulation, investment, legal, and design implications of the cooperative internet. Kristy Milland, community manager of TurkerNation.com, spoke passionately of the precarious conditions faced by crowd workers on Mechanical Turkwho perform “human intelligence tasks” that can’t be done by computer. The work pays little and is physically and mentally taxing. It can include processing images of extreme violence and porn, which can result in trauma. Mechanical Turkers can’t talk to each other or requestors on the platform, but are banding together on forums like Turker Nation to support each other and demand better conditions. Kristy hopes to launch an ethical version of Mechanical Turk to overcome the isolation and powerlessness experienced by many digital laborers.

Kristy Milland of Turker Nation: From Digital Worker Subsistence to Organized Resistance. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

The afternoon session on how to build platform co-ops featured presentations on free software, lean product development, and community-centered design. Una Lee, founder of design studio, And Also Too, spoke about her design work with communities that advance social justice. Una facilitates the Design Justice Network, which aims to connect design practitioners with people who have been historically marginalized by design and center them in the creation of platforms, objects, and systems they rely on.

Jason Weiner tells the story of Green Taxi Co-op in Denver

Douglas Rushkoff closed day one with a talk that boiled down to a question — what if Donald Trump’s election represented an opportunity for platform cooperativism? After all, platform cooperatives support workers and local economies, a position not far off from Trump’s pro-worker and anti-trade rhetoric. Rushkoff also offered a media analysis of the election and our historical moment. Rushkoff reflected on the media bias of the net, how it enabled the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which is great for disrupting the establishment, but so far terrible at building an alternative. He suggested that the Democratic Party has become a platform monopoly where “true participation in the party was about as real as participation in Facebook.” According to Rushkoff, we are transitioning from a TV media environment to a digital media environment. The TV media environment was globalist in nature and epitomized by a global public imaginary. On the other hand, the digital media environment is discrete and dominated by a binary logic of yes or no, up or down. Trump is a digital media candidate: “let’s build a wall, let’s divide the lines.” The other digital bias is memory, as in the random access memory (RAM) of a PC or server: “let’s make America great again.” Rushkoff ended with a provocative thought experiment: what if instead of protesting Trump’s victory, progressives applied for positions in the new administration? Rushkoff’s suggestion that Trump’s victory could be an opportunity for platform cooperativism was met with skepticism if not rejection, though it did spark a lively debate.

Later that night, Trebor Scholz officially launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC), a global network of researchers, platform co-op enterprises, independent software developers, artists, designers, lawyers, activists, publishing outlets, and funders. The ceremony was held in the Orozco Room at the New School, which houses rare frescos depicting worker struggles completed by the Mexican public art muralist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) in 1931. The PCC supports the cooperative platform economy through research, experimentation, education, advocacy, documentation of best practices, technical support, the coordination of funding, and events. Built upon the concept of platform cooperativism, the consortium is anchored in collective ownership, democratic governance, and a decisive commitment to the global commons, inventive unions, social justice, as well as ecological and social sustainability. You can check out the collaboratively written founding documents here to learn more about the purpose and function of the consortium.

Launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at the New School. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

Day two discussions focused on global opportunities for convergence among worker resistance movements, unions, and cooperatives. Discussion focus on the question, how can online co-ops help workers and the labor movement cope with or build their own platform economy? Yochai Benkler opened day two on an optimistic note, “One of our major hopes is that there’s significant ability to do things below the level of national government.” Benkler characterized Brexit and Trump’s election as victories for xenophobic economic nationalism in rejection of globalism, free trade and cosmopolitanism. Benkler paints platform cooperativism as a form of “network pragmatism” at the vanguard of the next economic paradigm, what Benkler calls the “open social economy” where ethical commitment shapes technological deployment. Benkler continued, “History suggests that cooperatives can be sustainable where accepted and will neither kill or be killed by investor-owned firms. Slack in markets offers ample room for ethical, socially-embedded markets.” Benkler ended with a discussion on the commons, which he argued offers an opportunity to organize the economy through cooperative models built on diversity and polycentricism.

Yochai Benkler: Towards an Open Social Economy

This was followed by a panel on the union co-op model panel moderated by Trebor Scholz. It brought together cooperatives, unions and worker associations with representatives from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, SMart, 1worker1vote.org and the United Services Union (ver.di) in Berlin. Unions have steadily declined over the last few decades, but have at least one new and important role to play by helping workers to form cooperatives, representing members of union-formed cooperatives in government, and creating a healthy cooperative ecosystem where cooperatives collaborate and share resources. There was also a strong call from multiple panelists to embrace a diversity of strategies for supporting workers.

Evgeny Morozov opened the following panel on cities by talking about how the sharing economy, as popularly known, epitomizes five characteristics of late capitalism and is at the vanguard of the latest wave of capitalist adaptation. The first of these is globalization where low-cost labor settings improve profitability. The second is financialization where firms create new financial instruments and abstractions to boost profits. The third is flexibilization which shifts labor-related risks and costs from employer to employee. The fourth is monopolization — an increasing tolerance of monopolies due to changes in anti-trust law and acceptance of market fundamentalism. The final characteristic is informationalization where data is commoditized and leveraged for ever-increasing market power. Morozov applied this analytical framing to platform cooperativism by concluding that “if we want to talk about the -ism, we have to deliver on the economics and the politics.” Shareable co-founder Neal Gorenflo followed with a talk about the need to collaborate on policy at the local level and create an effective policy exchange to support platform cooperatives and the commons in general in cities around the world. A highlight of the panel were Mayo Fuster Morell and Francesca Bria of Barcelona whose talks taken together offered an inspiring vision of “rebel cities” powered by citizens, the commons, sustainability, and feminist values. Their vision comes out of their pioneering commons-based technology policy work with Barcelona’s city council and mayor Ad Colau.

On Sunday, day three of the conference, Micah Sifry and team at Civic Hall hosted an unconference that featured an open stream of project proposals for the platform co-op space. This open format surfaced an impressive diversity of proposals including distributed manufacturing, the psychology of cooperative conversion, youth education, founding and scaling co-op investment, the Buy Twitter campaign, media and communications infrastructure, tools to lower the barrier to start a co-op, democratic mass communication, blockchain applications, co-op commons licenses, public sector partnerships, trade union engagement and worker politics, industrial-level issues, drivers of systemic change, health data co-ops, startup metrics adapted for co-ops, holocracy and open source.

One of the sessions I attended was on public sector partnerships convened by Becky Michelson from Engagement Lab at Emerson College in Boston. Participants brainstormed key challenges and opportunities for city engagement in platform cooperativism. The group split into two topic groups for a deeper dive into how to build the research evidence base for city partnerships and practical questions related to city procurement of services. The policy group I participated in with Annette Mühlberg from United Services Union (ver.di) in Berlin discussed how to shift the narrative in city government to better serve the public good via support for platform cooperatives, social enterprises and responsible sharing startups.

Public sector partnership session at Platform Cooperativism Unconference. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

The second platform cooperativism conference signaled a clear shift from the movement building of 2015’s event towards much deeper engagement by mature actors concerned with practical questions of appropriate co-operative business models, financing, design and legal considerations, and partnerships with unions and city governments for greater scale and impact. The launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and follow up events planned for the UK, Canada and Australia in 2017 will help to advance the case for the cooperative platform economy globally.

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These questions framed the opening of an event with Nathan Schneider, journalist, author, co-convenor of the first platform cooperativism conference (NYC) and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Nathan’s visit to Australia was capped off by a workshop in Melbourne Australia on 10th June 2016 called ‘Sharing Value and Ownership for the Common Good: Building the Commons Economy’.

Nathan Schneider began with his keynote on the transformative power of an Internet that we can co-own and co-govern together. From Nathan’s introduction: “we are in a period of transition to a platform society one in which we carry out the economy less from fixed workplaces and more through tools of connection – an infrastructure of online tools that enable us to connect with each other and create value together. We are moving from an economy which has this cool toy called the Internet to the Internet orchestrating this cool toy called the economy. One of the features of it, is continuing a pattern the offline industrial economy has been following in recent years. We’re seeing this continued process in this online platform economy, in which we are increasingly disconnected from the benefits of the very economy we’re creating.”

Sharing Value and Ownership for the Common Good, Church of All Nations, Melbourne Australia.

Nathan continues: “In the wake of the economic crisis there’s been this urge to share, the sharing economy. Wouldn’t we all love to share the stuff that we all have too much of, like cars and housing and all this stuff. This energised a lot of young people to take part in a positive new economy. But then, there started to be some cracks. We start to see workers with very little security in the context of what’s called a ‘sharing economy’. We start to realize that what we’re doing is not so much sharing as micro-rental all the time and that nothing is being shared in this process. Instead the profits are being directed to a very centralized organization. And these companies in the so-called sharing economy have a shocking disregard for the public good. We have a choice between this really positive vision of the liberated freelancer, people who control their working hours and don’t have to have the same job to control their security for the rest of their life. But then there’s also this vision of the precariat, who loses control over work and has to deal with a completely unaccountable global corporation that has no interest in their interest.”

Nathan Schneider asks: “what can we say yes to?”

Nathan on the cooperative platform economy: “This leaves us with a question. There’s lots of good stuff and there’s lots of bad stuff. So what can we say yes to? In a lot of cities around the world it often feels like those in government have to say no to this emerging platform economy and they don’t seem to have a lot of choices about what they can say yes to, what they can encourage. One of the ways to think about what we’re doing when we talk about a cooperative online economy is creating a choice, a choice that’s actually worth having. What if there were a real sharing economy? Fortunately there are some pretty good precedents to draw on. Alongside the development of industrial capitalism has been this vision of a cooperative economy, and practice of a cooperative economy, that has thrived around the world in many industries through open membership, democratic control and ownership, shared profits, autonomy, and a deep concern for community. This is a tradition that has spread and I think more than many of us even recognize because it’s not something that we learn about in school very often, or that’s talked about in public debate, but this is a very powerful and widespread sector of the global economy, and it’s a source that we can draw upon. If we’re talking about a sharing economy, this is the gold standard, the co-operative economy. Meanwhile we can also draw on practices that have developed from tech culture that contribute to and develop the tradition of co-operative enterprize.”

Nathan’s keynote presentation can be heard in full here.

A great overview of ‘Building the Commons Economy’ by @PaulaSgherza

A panel of local innovators including Serenity Hill (Open Food Network), Eric Doriean (AnyShare) and Antony McMullen (Employee Ownership Australia and New Zealand) came together with Nathan to discuss how the Commons Economy is taking shape in Australia. The panel discussion can be heard here.

Panel featuring Nathan Schneider, Serenity Hill, Eric Doriean, Antony McMullen and Darren Sharp.

The second half of the event was a Design Lab facilitated by co-convener Jose Ramos for AbilityMate, a Sydney-based social enterprise creating affordable assistive devices for people with a disablity using open design and 3D printing. The Design Lab was run to help co-founders Mel Fuller and Johan du Plessis and designer Kin Ly collaboratively workshop ideas in development and seek fedback from fellow practitioners related to funding and scaling their social enterprise.

Jose Ramos introducing Kin, Johan and Mel from AbilityMate.

Human-centred design was used to understand the key design challenges (pain points) faced by AbilityMate, identify opportunity areas and create a series of how might we questions used for brainstorming and ideation.

Seminar participants were given three How Might We Questions to brainstorm together in small groups:

1. How might we attract and scale investment from $500,000 in 2 years to $30 million in 4 years, while maintaining co-op principles of equal voting power and fair return on investment? (There are constraints around equity crowd funding in Australia. If an entity has more than 50 shareholders that aren’t employees it has to be publicly listed, which has very onerous protocols and tax implications).
2. How might we use the cooperative model to both support AbilityMate’s social impact mission and remain globally competitive (access to capital, markets, customers and speed)?
3. How might we run and find funding to test an AbilityMate platform co-op trial which includes investors, employees, customers and founders in order to validate/prove the benefits of platform co-ops?

The Design Lab group presentations can be heard in full here.

Design Lab with AbilityMate on converting to a platform co-operative.

This event was part of a global conversation about the future of value, ownership and governance in the emerging platform economy. The Melbourne workshop explored how social enterprizes like AbilityMate can become platform co-ops and developed practical ideas for how ventures can attract investment and support while maintaining their social mission. These discussions are relevant to any organization developing commons-based solutions to ensure that prosperity and decision-making can be shared between value creators working together for mutual benefit and the transition to a more equitable platform economy.

Nathan’s Australian visit also included a public seminar on platform cooperativism at ACMI in Melbourne with Janelle Orsi on 7th June.

I look forward to sharing details of Australia’s evolving cooperative platform ecosystem at the second platform cooperativism conference being held in New York 11-13 November.

Photo by aKs_phOtOs (Pixabay)

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This expert consultation on “The Digital Economy: Potential for Disruptive Contributions to Urban Decarbonisation and Resilience” was organised as part of the Visions and Pathways 2040 project.

Digital Economy Consultation Report by P2P Foundation

Photo by xdxd_vs_xdxd

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In this interview, conducted by Darren Sharp and originally published in Shareable, John discusses ideas from his latest book How To Thrive In The Next Economy, which celebrates the power of small actions to transform the bigger picture.

DS: What’s the central premise of your new book?

JT: The book is about the proposition that taken together, the myriad and still growing swarm of small projects around the world in which people find new ways to meet their daily needs, that the total of these is greater than the sum of the parts. That is to say something big is happening which isn’t per say visible, it’s a coherent single story, but that in 1001 different contexts and situations people are not waiting for a big idea or even a label for a movement to do stuff, they’re doing things to meet needs on a daily basis. So the structure of the book is ten chapters about aspects of daily life such as moving, eating, clothing and so on, and in each chapter I tell some stories about people meeting the need for food, or moving around, or clothing themselves, in different ways which either explicitly or implicitly include the notion of doing less harm to the planet and in the most significant cases leaving the planet a healthier place. So I describe these stories partly to just prove that there’s a lot happening, because some people say well, it’s only a few isolated cases of people doing stuff, but I’m one of those people who believes there is a swarm of things happening that not many of which are visible if we have other things to think about, and then look at the ways in which design skills, service design thinking, notions of cooperation and sharing, notions of solidarity, can be a frame to help those individual projects connect to each other. And what the book does is to select from the projects that I’ve learned about over the last five years or so, write about them and then suggest – how they connect to each other and importantly, what kind of design actions could one imagine that helps them connect, scale, spread and multiply.

How can we accelerate the transition from an extractive economy based on endless growth to one that rewards stewardship of living systems?

Well, I think that is the single most important question, and the fact that you ask it, to me is a sign that we’re all looking for focus on that exact question, because I think the missing element of this fantastically inspiring and joy bringing activity is that it doesn’t necessarily have a shared meaning as a collective action, and indeed, it’s very easy – and what of course happened, is that lots of people can describe their activities as being green or restorative or regenerative when they’re not really anything of the sort. So I think there are two steps, one negative and one positive. I think the negative thing is for us all to focus on the fact that there’s a fundamental difference between doing less harm in a growth-oriented economy, where actually the net result is to do more harm because if you grow and do less harm that’s what happens, the bad stuff grows, and it ends up being bigger than the good stuff. In the book there’s a whole section in reference to a big furniture company which was an epiphany about that, but that is again a part of the ‘why we’re in trouble’ narrative. To me the thing that has opened my eyes and finally made sense is the notion that if we think that doing less harm is not a meaningful or terribly exciting project, but actually leaving the world a better place being specific, I think the soils and the living systems of which we are a part, is the one thing that finally, to me made sense as a reason for doing all this work.

So most people and including me, have not thought very much about the soils and the waters and the biodiversity and the rocks of the world, but I think as soon as one starts to look at that, and not just to look at it and think about it, but engage with it, connect with it, suddenly everything makes sense, oh, that’s what leaving the world a healthier place means… it’s not an idea, it’s not a statement of morality, it’s a practical thing. Is the soil where I live healthier, yes or no? Is the river healthier, yes or no? Is biodiversity flourishing, yes or no? And yeah, that to me is the point at which it all begins to make sense.

Isn’t part of that challenge around getting a handle on both negative externalities, in terms of pollution that we’re pumping into the atmosphere, and also positive externalities which just equally don’t get measured or talked about in some circles around the shared value that’s been created and these other positive externalities that don’t get measured by the prevailing economic orthodoxy?

Yes. It’s to do with how you imagine measuring things being an actionable task because – I’m sure we’ve both looked at and studied and reflected on the notion of putting a value of nature, for example – and I’m one of those people who says, oh, that’s a good idea, this is what ten years ago when the TEEB Project – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity – when that started I thought that is a good thing because that means rather than just taking living systems for granted as something we can use in our economic activities, we have to actually take account of it. Except that what then happened was that the money people, the hedge funds, the fast moving actors, in a matter of seconds it looks like in retrospect, ah, good, here’s another form of value that we can package, speculate on, slice and dice and sell to each other or preferably sell to somebody else for a profit. So that it almost literally seemed to be like months between the notion of the huge institutional effort to put a value on nature being announced and being introduced to the world, before you could blink an eye the financial speculators, and the hedge funds, and the people who are looking for new things to monetize, were on to it far quicker than anybody else. The lesson I draw is that putting a value on something by itself, it’s absolutely capable of making things worse because then the people in the world of investment and securitisation [get involved] for whom value is just an opportunity to turn it into something else.

So it’s not enough just to give something a value, you have to say, it is not acceptable under any circumstances to make this physical place unhealthier. And so this whole new industry filled with consultants emerged very quickly called biodiversity offsetting which is a parallel and sort of bastard child of the natural capital industry and so the whole thing was based on abstracting nature from its context and saying, okay, it’s value, but you can move it somewhere else, which if it were true, would be possibly one response, but of course, it’s not true because nature evolves over very long periods of time and is by definition unique to its place, so even if you can comfort yourself by saying, or… no, you dig up a meadow in once place to build a factory on it but to compensate you plant another meadow somewhere else. That’s to oversimplify. And when you do that you’re just kidding yourself because the new meadow is just, so to speak, artificially created and may have certain parameters that are similar to the meadow you just dug up and built a factory on, but it’s not the same thing because the value of ecosystems and the connections between lifeforms and the connections between ecosystems is as, if not more important than the individual lifeforms themselves. We are only beginning to understand that so the fundamental myth about offsetting is that you can recreate nature at will because we’re clever human beings, but that’s just not true.

Let’s turn to a discussion of energy and resource constraints, because you write in the book about the fact that we don’t face an energy crisis so much as an exergy crisis and you describe this new story which is emerging, one that’s based on social energy in an economy that needs to use only 5% of the worlds resources, can you reflect on that?

So energy is at the heart of everything, arguably. Well, energy and debt, it took me a very long time to understand that those two subjects were connected, but certain writers like Gail Tverberg and John Michel Greer, say well why is the crisis so continuous when we seem to come up with partial solutions. When one understands that energy and debt are basically part of the same story, then it begins to become clear why the whole system has smoke coming out from under the hood.

I spent basically the best part of 20 years responding to the concept of ‘Factor 20’ by a man called Leo Jansen, who is one of the original Club of Rome people who was involved in the Limits to Growth project. He told me 20 years ago or more that the true measure of sustainability in the world is that we reduce our resource consumption by a factor of 20 times. He said, when he told me that, “but of course, 20 sounds impossible therefore we made it four because that sounded doable, but actually the true number is 20”. So that was quite a startling fact and that is when I became a fairly confirmed doomer as I say in the book, for many years because I couldn’t imagine any circumstance under which any sort of society could voluntarily evolve to 20 times less resource intensity per unit of activity.

Then what happened was from the mid-1990s onwards when I started travelling more in Asia and in India in particular, it finally sunk in that 80% of the world lives on factor 20 resource efficiency today, it’s just that they’re called poor or undeveloped, or in needing of our help. From that period onwards, I suddenly understood that actually it’s not such a big deal if you look at patterns of living in the world over thousands of years which are ‘sustainable’ versus the rather short period of time that we’ve had an energy fuelled one now, and so then you just turn the whole thing upside down.

So 80% of the population is more or less living sustainably, albeit under very trying circumstances, whereas 20% or less is not, therefore we need to learn from… to regain the understanding of what it is to live that lightly and to refashion our expectations about energy accordingly. So that, so to speak as a kind of social understanding begins to merge with this notion of local or distributed or micro or neighbourhood energy projects, which have been cropping up like mushrooms all over the place as part of this swarm of activities. You suddenly realise that actually that’s really fantastic that most of the kind of nuts and bolts of tools and certainly concepts that we need for an energy regime that is Factor 20 are already out there. And indeed in many parts of the world people are hacking together local energy systems which provide the majority of their energy needs from today’s tools and technologies. What they can’t do and nobody else can do is to magically run the industrial society on that kind of thing, but that’s because we can’t have industrial society, we won’t have it in the future. But that’s one of the other reasons that I became an optimistic person again because I said it’s actually all happening, not just at the level of people making clothes out of hemp, but rather sophisticated local energy projects of which there are tens of thousands.

Barefoot College solar lighting system.

At Shareable, we’ve been promoting this idea of sharing cities for four years now and obviously over half the world’s population now live in cities and that’s projected to get to something like 65-70% by the middle of this century. Cities are obviously an important level of scale in terms of trying to address a lot of these challenges. What is your view on this notion of sharing cities and its potential to support some of these projects that we’re talking about?

What I think has become quite exciting is the sense in which the issues of different sorts of sharing systems are becoming clear around this idea of platform cooperativism. I think over the last two years we’ve all celebrated the notion that sharing platforms like Uber or Airbnb enable us to share resources more effectively and it’s a bit like natural capital. I remember when I took my first Uber five years ago I thought this is amazing, we will now do away with the wasteful use of cars and we’ll just use them when we need them and the cities will be rendered healthy again by this fantastic invention, and then what happens is, it doesn’t work out like that because the business model of Uber and those sorts of platforms is predicated on growing to infinity like any other form of capitalist business and so there’s nowhere in the Uber resources sharing model called making public space car free. That is not its model, its core model is to provide a very high quality service which in practice has ended up increasing the number of car journeys in the places where it’s most intensely used, so that’s in New York now, they are discovering there are more car journeys because of Uber than there were before it was invented. So you end up with this rebound effect. That has taken people like me a while to figure that just because something is sharing resources does not mean it’s protecting common goods such as space, unless the protection of the space and the common good, is so to speak of a higher value than the success of the company.

And that, I think, is what platform cooperativism is about, is that Uber is a brilliant invention technically because it enables use of the technology that’s coming into radically improve the resource sharing of something which we know is bad, like cars, except that we didn’t put into the equation the city shall be healthy and have clean air and it will be safe to walk around, and in particular – and this is the biggest thing – the low carbon environmental and energy footprint of the city is, so to speak, the higher reality below which the convenience of Uber should be a subsidiary thing.

We’ve all been in different degrees of coherence, saying this seems to be fantastic but it’s not quite as beautiful as we thought, and that’s what the platform cooperativism and that whole cloud of initiatives begins to address. If Uber is actually an extractive industry that takes the value out of equations and local economies and has all sorts of negative consequences, what can we do about it? And I think that’s what’s so exciting, is that all sorts of answers are there, ready and waiting to be used, such as either the kind of cultural, the political concepts of the health of the world, the health of the public, the health of public space, is a higher value than the health of Uber, but secondly, the tools that people in different groups have been busily developing, like the blockchain technology and new forms of contracts and all that stuff which is pretty deeply nerdish and hacker-ish to most people, suddenly you realise what they’re useful for.

I think the single most exciting thing that I’ve learnt about from the recent Platform Co-ops Conference is this project out of Israel called La’Zooz which is basically another transport sharing platform but with the explicit objective that the benefits of platform sharing or ride- sharing shall be shared equally amongst the people who benefit from it and not by some third party. And so you have something called the common good of sharing transport resources like existing vehicles, where the platform is owned by the people who use it, and where you can actually begin to see a non-monetary form of value sharing very practically implemented in something which has been until now pretty theoretical. So in other words, if you have a car and you drive well and you share it well you get zooz tokens, where a community of people are sharing a resource but agreeing to rate each other’s contribution to the whole in a peer-to-peer way which is on a large scale, actuates and cannot be gamed or faked, but absolutely crucially where the modern technologies, such as blockchain, answer the question that has bedevilled the commons for the last 500 years, then how do you deal with people who don’t play fair or don’t really do their bit? How do you deal with the incredible social complexity of groups of people casting judgment on each other? We know that that has just been the problem of the commons as we know for a long, long time. So I’m not saying that blockchain technology will magically resolve the free-rider problem, because as far as I can tell it’s a pretty powerful bit of the answer. In a city complex where you’re sharing, I don’t know, transport or rooms or whatever, you can actually begin to see in a live project which is out there right now today, answering questions which have bedevilled theorists and philosophers for generations. So that’s why I think it’s pretty exciting.

 
What is the relationship between platform cooperatives and sharing cities, and the main tensions that arise in your view?

I was in Vienna a few weeks ago where I saw the presentation of a platform called Moovel, which is a company set up by Daimler to enable the sharing of transport resources. I keep touching on transport a lot but I think that it’s something that most people recognise. So Moovel is a platform that you can, so to speak, with your smartphone press a button and it will tell you which bus, which tram, which walkway, which e-bike, which car share, a whole variety of different options are all integrated into one journey and by the use of that platform the citizen or the visitor doesn’t need to run around buying tickets for lots of different things, it can be done for you and you pay, for example, by the distance covered, and it’s all automatically done and you don’t have to pay getting on or off vehicles and so on.

Now this is an amazing this because it’s a very complicated piece of integration, not to mention the politics, not to mention local government regulations and so on, but it is offered to the world as a turn-key solution by a private company, Daimler, the Mercedes company, and the debate that we had in Vienna was, this is amazing but is it actually what we want, that a private company shall be the provider of integration of resources when again, as we saw with Uber or Airbnb, it will be in their interest to maximise the use of this platform because they get paid a cut of every transaction.

Whereas, maybe the city of Vienna or Berlin should be the owner and the user of this platform because then they can, so to speak, tune it to optimise the amount of vehicles moving around in the context of the greater good, namely, having a liveable city or a healthy city. My point is that that is happening right now, today, in Europe and other countries where probably half a dozen big players that develop these integration platforms are going to all of these cities saying you need one of these. And it’s tremendously hard for a city to say no because it’s like a complicated, expensive thing to develop. So I think Moovel has 200 odd people developing this prototype platform – and there’s another one in Finland being trialled right now – whereas the city of Vienna’s transport integration department has five people in it. It’s not a poor city, Vienna, it’s a rich city – and they have a brilliant public transport system. But at the end of the day it’s this huge cultural and social and technical shift towards sharing platforms, it’s very hard to say no if somebody like Daimler comes along and says, don’t worry, we’ll do it all for you.

The point is until now if somebody said there’s no use dreaming about the commons or dreaming about sharing everything with no money, that’s not possible, that’s just hippy-fairy tale stuff. That was sort of true until recently, but with these parallel approaches and tools, like platform cooperativism in which the commons as the shared and ultimate good is explicitly written down in black and white, so to speak, combined with tools like blockchain so that communities of people can actually share value without using money. It’s all out there now so we’re not far away, maybe we’re there now, embryonically with something like La’Zooz, we have all the bits of a shared commons, including the technology, including the philosophical problems of whether human beings are capable of acting fairly or not, that answers that question, because these guys, that’s what they’ve been thinking about for the last ten years, is how to do it. This is why I choose to be optimistic, because if we can get into the public discourse very clearly the notion that the public good and the shared good of commons is in all our best interests, then when somebody says, it would be nice but it’s not practical, they say, no it is practical, it’s happening now, we’ve got these prototypes throughout there and if you think it’s a good idea lets go and use them.

I want to get your thoughts on questions of scale because obviously bigger is often seen as better in an endless growth economy, but in nature small is beautiful, to use the term, and when it comes to things like social innovation and the bottom up change that we’re talking about, it’s often the small changes that are connected up that can make all the difference. So I’m keen to hear your views on the so-called need to scale a lot of these grassroots transition projects, and what living systems can teach us about scale and transformation at the local level?

Well, it’s a very fundamental question and there’s a new book that has been published by Civic Systems Lab called Designed to Scale, is a major intervention into the answer of that question in the sense that it’s five years of work, again, by the team mainly in the UK, but with projects in different parts of the world, very practically, what are the nuts and bolts under which, for example urban farming could be increased to be this quite a serious part of the nutritional requirements of a city rather than being as they perceive to be at the moment, a very small hipster-ish kind of micro part of the story.

And so you have in this incredibly dense piece of work, a whole variety of explanations of how a city could make the sharing of resources or the collective growing of food or the caring for older people, a mass and significant part of the story leading to the majority part of the story rather than, it would be nice, kind of thing. The only question I have is that the scale is also being driven by people who consider themselves to be service provides who say it, as I just said with Moovel, and also with all sorts of social services, there’s a very powerful business interest in saying, we understand scale, you need a large organisation, you need a large enterprise, a large network in order to deliver this valuable service efficiently and professionally etcetera. Which is at the same time very persuasive and also based on the notion that you cannot multiply as well as scale up projects. How can a multitude of things work well together?

I think there’s a difference between enabling, for example, a city, or I prefer to use the word region, or a bioregion, needing the majority and indeed a growing majority of its needs from local resources, that I think, is something we could discuss as a desirable and necessary part of a healthy future and whether that has to be done by large enterprises, social or otherwise, rather than lots of small ones collaborating, I don’t know. All I do know is that the push for the scale comes from people in organisations who, in my judgment, have an interest in being the providers of these services. So I think that and I’m worried about the notion if only the large entities can do it, you get the problem of do they therefore have to be private entities? Does the cost of co-ordination on a large scale mean that you need to monetise services that have otherwise been provided free, and so on?

So I think the alternative to the scale question, that we must scale up things and make them huge and integrated and therefore rather expensive, is well, by the way large numbers of social needs are being met by small scale activities collaborating together, in other words, the multiplier effect, perfectly well already. And this is where the care economy is such a powerful alternative to the massively scaled social economy. I think that the care word, I think, is the word that explains practically why large scale is not necessarily an automatic requirement, i.e., people who look after each other on a daily basis, whether for food, or with children, parents, loved ones, sick people, that is already a vast global and very powerfully meaningful activity which isn’t scaled up from something, there’s just a lot of it happening in lots of different places.

Western Cornwall, Penwith Bioregion

Finally, what are you most optimistic about when it comes to the emerging futures that you describe in your book?

I think I’m most optimistic by my experience of people realising that shaping and organising the commons is not as hard an idea as it sounded, like when you read books about it. The fact that organising a city so that space is shared and that the quality of the air is more important than the economy, or that it’s actually not a bad thing for weeds to be growing up through the cracks of the pavement and that by the way we don’t have to render taxi drivers impoverished in order to share transport. All of these things are coming together right now and I don’t know how it’s going to unfold but I’m genuinely sure that some kind of big unfolding is happening right now and I just try and kind of train myself to look for these very positive signs and I think they’re pretty significant.

How To Thrive In The Next Economy is published by Thames & Hudson and is available now.

The post John Thackara on How To Thrive In The Next Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sharing Cities have been generating a lot of attention recently thanks to the Sharing Cities Network and the announcement of Shareable’s upcoming book on commons-based urban solutions for municipal and civic leaders. Interest in Australia and New Zealand is growing too as evidenced by some recent events like the Melbourne Conversations panel on Smart City Leadership that I spoke at for the launch of Melbourne Knowledge Week last year.

In a recent interview with Wallace Chapman for RadioNZ Sunday, I talked about the rise of Sharing Cities,platform cooperativism and the shift from extractive to generative forms of ownership and value creation. This led to a series of invitations from Kiwis across the country keen for me to speak on sharing cities including a warm welcome by the Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, a city devastated by the 2011 earthquake and going through a period of experimental urban regeneration (see Gap Filler for inspiration).

The Commons in Christchurch is located on what used to be the site of the Crowne Plaza hotel which was demolished in 2012. The site is now a hub of transitional activity and home to a number of post-quake organisations.

Widespread interest in Sharing Cities makes perfect sense. In 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. This figure has climbed to 50% today, and the global urban population is projected to reach around 70% by 2050. We are clearly living through the urban century and human civilization will either make it or break it in cities. The need to develop innovative thinking to address the climate crisis, resource constraints, inequality, and energy descent is greater now than ever.

That’s why Sharing Cities is a refreshing antidote to the top-down, technologically deterministic vision of the future we so often hear about in discussions of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things – a vision dominated by sensor networks, data mining and myriad opportunities for corporate and government surveillance.

Too many cities have been quick to embrace ‘smart technologies’ that attempt to overlay a city-wide digital operating system. Where integrated water, energy and transportation networks track and respond to the movement of people and objects. Who wins and who loses in this scenario?

It’s reminiscent of a scene from the 1969 Philip K. Dick novel Ubik where the protagonist gets into an argument with his “money gulping door” which demands payment every time he needs to enter or exit the building as his terms of service contract makes clear.

Chinese city opens ‘phone lane’ for texting pedestrians via The Guardian,

Sharing Cities on the other hand provide citizen-centric alternatives that focus on increasing the sharing capacity of existing infrastructure like public buildings and free wifi; provide access to idle or underutilised assets for ridesharing, coworking or urban agriculture; and strengthen the social fabric through deliberative decision-making like Citizen’s Juries, Participatory Budgeting and other forms of active citizenship.

Sharing Cities are an interesting hybrid between the public, private and community sectors and rely on a range of public goods and commonly owned resources to operate effectively. These include everything from the internet and road networks to open data and vacant public land. Cities are at the vanguard of the sharing movement as hubs of disruptive innovation, knowledge transfer and creative communities. Sharing Cities are about creating pathways for participation that recognise the City as Commons and give everyone in the community the opportunity to enjoy access to common goods and create new forms of shared value, knowledge, and prosperity.

The Agrocité urban commons project in the suburbs of Paris (via The Guardian).

The time has come for cities everywhere to emulate Sharing City trailblazers like Seoul and Amsterdam who recognise that sharing builds urban resilience, economic interdependence and social cooperation. City governments can help strike a fair balance by putting citizens first, supporting platform cooperatives and protecting the public realm. Cities can design the infrastructure, services and regulations that enable sharing in all its forms and strengthen the urban commons through policies for sharing cities that support food, jobs, housing and transportation initiatives to keep and grow wealth in local communities.

Sharing Cities give everyone who wants to participate in the sharing economy the opportunity to have a fair go. Government and business must work together with citizens to develop policy solutions that make sense for people, cities and sharing platforms. Sharing Cities provide a framework to make this vision for an inclusive sharing economy a reality.

This article originally appeared in Shareable. 

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First the Good: Twitter provided shocking first-hand accounts of the fires and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd used his profile to direct followers to donate blood and cash to the Red Cross appeal. Other interesting uses of Twitter included this clever but unauthorised scraping of Country Fire Authority (CFA) updates. Google lent their support by creating a mashup of the CFA fire map which was buckling under the pressure of soaring demand. An Internet marketing agency created the Bushfire Housing site, a bed-sharing service which matches people in need of emergency accommodation with those willing to offer somewhere to stay.

This leads us to the Bad: according to a CNET report, the Victorian Government refused to provide data for Google’s fire map mashup due to Crown copyright provisions which restrict the use of government-produced information without explicit consent which apparently “runs contrary to data protection provisions in the US, where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public domain.” This question around the ownership of public sector data has been widely debated in Australia for years. In this article Professor Brian Fitzgerald of QUT makes the case for freely releasing government data in the interests of spurring economic growth through the development of innovative applications and industries: “People have started to question whether charging at the front – in a sense having a gate – is the best model, or whether it’s best to allow more people to go through the gate and then try to multiply the downstream quantifier: allowing the data to flow; allowing new industries to emerge around the data, thereby raising more economic value for government and the community.” In the case of the bushfires it’s also about the social value that’s created when people can spontaneously self-organise knowledge resources to help each other respond to an unfolding situation.

In terms of the Ugly: a man suspected of setting a fire near Churchill Victoria, which killed at least 10 people and destroyed 200 homes, faced the wrath of an angry mob on Facebook where a number of groups were set up calling for the man to be tortured and killed, with one even offering a $10,000 bounty for his murder. The social networking site subsequently pulled the groups offline due to violations of its terms of service.

Bushfires continue to burn around the state of Victoria. A centralised approach to the production, distribution and ownership of information is a risky strategy as non-linear changes (like a bushfire) exerted on a closed system (public sector data) diminish that system’s capacity to offer an agile response to the situation. Let’s hope we can put these tools to better use in the future as clearly the community, government and emergency services teams have much to gain from working together in times of crisis using the opportunities the social Web enables for sharing, collaboration and more distributed forms of disaster response.

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I just returned from 3LK Paris where I presented an academic paper drawing on Smart Internet CRC research on user-led innovation, Web 2.0 and participatory media from an upcoming report. My paper titled “Citizen Innovation: using participatory research for knowledge discovery”, discussed how user-led innovation provides new concepts and methods capable of extending the field of knowledge about participatory research. It explored how practice-based methods such as Participatory Action Research and Community-based Research have facilitated the rise of Citizen Innovation which provides opportunities for citizen empowerment; supports the co-creation of new public-sector services and scientific knowledge discovery; and utilises knowledge that is embodied, experiential and collaboratively produced. The presentation also canvassed pathways for public-sector organisations to leverage the participation of citizens and amateur scientists in the interest of co-creating new forms of knowledge.

I got to meet some wonderful people including Eric Seulliet, a Paris-based foresight consultant and founder of La Fabrique du Futur (The Factory of the Future) and we discussed his interesting new book project on user-led innovation. The Inauguration Plenary launched the conference with a fascinating discussion on the co-production of knowledge partnerships between researchers and civil society for a more just world. The philosopher Isabelle Stengers had to withdraw at the last minute due to an injury and was replaced by the outspoken American scientist Ignacio Chapela whose thought-provoking presentation proved to be a surprising highlight of the three-day event. Chapela has raised the ire of the University of California Berkely, at which he is tenured, for openly criticising UCâ€s signing of a $500-million research contract with the petroleum company BP. Chapela refers to these circumstances as “the loss of space to make science” and voiced concern that BP and other corporate sponsors are engaged in “the wholesale buying of the entire University of California Berkeley”.

Hats off to Claudia Neubauer of the Fondation Sciences Citoyennes, for organising 3LK and coordinating the 300 attendees and over 100 oral presentations. I was not familiar with the Living Knowledge Network before the conference and was impressed to learn about the Science Shops Network that was launched in 1999. According to the European Commission, Science Shops are grass-roots research organisations that provide an interface between scientific researchers and citizens of the local communities they serve. Science Shops can be found in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. Canada, Israel and the USA have developed similar initiatives outside the European community. Science Shops help non-profit clients like NGOs solve scientific problems and carry out research that measures the effects of pollution, as well as investigating social and environmental problems.

I see these exciting policy developments as another aspect of the peer to peer transformation currently taking place across the world in a variety of disparate fields, as Michel Bauwens has so elegantly documented. Like Open Source software, Wikipedia, user-generated content and peer production, citizen innovation through Science Shops provide another opportunity for people to become empowered by participating in the co-creation of scientific knowledge that is personal, relevant and commonly shared by the local community. The Living Knowledge Network is playing an important role in bringing scientific researchers, citizens, universities and government agencies together for this very purpose and I look forward to exploring opportunities for trialing similar activities in the Asia-Pacific region.

The 4th Living Knowledge Conference will take place in Dublin, Ireland in 2009.

Jens Bonk made a cute video of the 3LK conference which he posted to YouTube.

Paper presentations will soon be made available at the Conference website which can be found here.

For more on the Living Knowledge Network follow this link.

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News from The Washington Post this week that 4 consumer-created advertisements will be shown during this year’s Super Bowl. This is the first time such amateur ads will be broadcast during the nationally televised event. The most highly coveted 30-second spots will cost US$2.6 million and will be shown to over 90 million viewers. The article points to the fact that advertiser’s are embracing this new medium thanks to the “YouTube effect” which has given mainstream audiences a taste of this new medium. The cost savings from using non-professional actors and writers are also very appealing to the advertisers. It’s not unusual for a typical agency-produced ad to cost around US$1 million but the user-generated versions cost virtually nothing and give unknown talent the opportunity to showcase their work to a huge national audience.

Some of the earliest experiments in this “genre”, if one can call it that, include the two guys who dropped a certain mint into another certain soft drink to create silly soda fountains which managed to grab the attention of vast numbers of Web watchers. NBC also invited viewers to create spots for the new season of The Office (American version of the BBC original). To read more about user-generated advertising check out this great article from last year in the International Herald Tribune which discusses how agencies are trying to re-invigorate their tired sector with the help of the Web/phone/video-enabled “anarchic” masses.

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