Nathan Schneider kicked things off with an excellent introduction explaining some of the history of cooperative ownership. Nathan also questioned where our movement sits relative to the mainstream, for-profit startup world, and in what way the development of platform co-ops and member owned businesses are disruptive …

Lynne Davis, CEO of the Open Food Network UK, introduced their growing platform co-op and explained how they now share the cost, and responsibilities, of developing code across several federated organisations throughout Europe.

Maru Bautista, Director of the Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York, introduced Up&Go, the immigrant-led cleaning services worker cooperative in NY which, unlike regular capitalist platforms, delivers 95% of its income to its workers.

Peter Harris, the Founder of Resonate – the excellent music streaming co-op, explained how he might be their first CEO but also hopes to be the last, by putting the members in complete control.

Alexandre Segura and Lison Noel from Co-op Cycle shared their inspirational journey to develop an open-source alternative to Deliveroo made up of a community of couriers in cities throughout France and Belgium. Aside from all the presentations on the Main stage, the workshop sessions and the open space gatherings the main benefit, that people who attended highlighted, were the connections that were made at the event. Our mission brings together so many people from inter-related fields and networks, who predominately work remotely or in distributed teams, so simply being in the same physical space initiated numerous face-to-face meetings between people that have communicated, planned, plotted and schemed, as well as worked together, online – but never met before – and a multitude of new connections and interactions.

The 26th and 27th of July were some of the hottest days of 2018 in London, so a lot of interaction took place outside the venue. It may well have been cooler in Red Lion Square under the trees but there was widespread agreement at the event that we all need to do more to address global warming.[/caption]

Ambassadoring

At events like this there is always talk of “setting up a new network” but, being wary of this, I brought up the ideas of Joshua Vial – Founder of Enspiral, who recently suggested that instead of founding new networks, we need to find ways to connect all the existing networks by developing more and better ambassadors to circulate ideas and updates. This came up in Francesca Pick‘s section of the Networking the Networks session, in which she introduced the idea of “ambassadoring” as a verb; something which all of us can do. We agreed it’s an ugly word, but an essential concept for the development of our movement.

Ela Kagel, Co-founder of SUPERMARKT in Germany, Indra Adnan of The Alternative UK, and Ruth Potts from Schumacher College and Red Pepper, discussed the latest developments and outcomes from their work, CTRL Shift, Transition Together… and the general need for societal transitions and systems level change

Alice Casey from Nesta, who work covers areas such as how technology is transforming communities and civic life, kept things on track in the workshop space, together with David Brent and Simon Borkin from Co-op UK – check out all the videos from the Workshop space and Open space.

Iris Schönherr led a workshop on ‘Everyday Participation’, based on the New Citizenship Project’s toolkit which introduces Seven Modes of Everyday Participation. See the video, and download your copy of the toolkit from everydayparticipation.info

Rich and Nati from Loomio and The Hum ran an excellent workshop on Patterns for decentralised organising.

Rich and Nati bringing the group back together after much discussion.

At the end of Day One, (from left to right) Nathan Schneider, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, whose forthcoming book is about “Real” Democracy as expressed, demanded and manifested in Spain from 15-M to Podemos, Cadwell Turnbull, and Francesca Pick explored the transformative power of narrative in creating a world of abundance and inclusivity.

Framing, values and a new ontology – Politics is about caring

As part of the session on ‘The transformative power of narrative’ we discussed our use of language and methods of using stories instead of “us vs them” framing. This dovetails with the ideas we have been discussing with Indra Adnan who, through her work with The Alternative, is helping people develop a “series of values and ideas, methods and practices they buy into – a new community oriented political culture.”

We also explored some of the ideas from our work on creating a new ontology, in which we argue:

If we want to change the way the world works, and address the inequalities and suffering from a systemic level, we can not build ideas and ‘further reasoning and arguments’ on an invalid axiom, and a broken ontology. We have to start afresh and build upon new foundations.

Laura James makes a great point in her write up on OPEN 2018 that:

Collaboration is not always built on a shared discursive framework, but might involve parties with very different world views and ways of communicating.

Too true, we need to constantly be aware of that whilst we work on developing a more unifying world view, (possibly one based on the idea that ‘people and planet come before profit’?) in order to create the world we want.

Another take-away for me was the concept that Cristina brought up a few times, which has been brought to light by both Manuela Carmena, the Mayor of Madrid who often reminded voters “To govern is to listen” during her campaign, and Ada Colau, the Mayor of Barcelona who both propose a more feminine politics. Both women have put forward the idea that “politics is about caring” which is not only a far-cry from the male-dominated ideals of Westminster but, somewhat uniquely for a politician’s phrase, makes perfect sense. Everyone at OPEN 2018 seemed to agree; we need more of that.

Gary Alexander kicked off Day 2 with a session on ‘A shared social vision’, including a few instant polls to get a sense of where those present agreed and disagreed about ‘what our collaborative, sustainable society might look like’, ‘how a global cooperative might be structured’ and ‘what we might need as the initial platform offerings…’

During OPEN 2018 we used Slido to survey attendees about their values. The above represents the values which people selected as being important to them…Louis Cousin from Cooperatives Europe, Laura James Co-founder at Digital Life Collective, Colm Massey from the Solidarity Economy Association, and Tom Ivey from domains.coop discussed mapping projects. This introductory session provided the overview of mapping objectives and the challenges many groups have already experienced when trying to “map the ecosystem”. The session continued in workshop space – see the video. We will continue to monitor and report on progress from the various mapping projects.

The shift from Platforms to Protocols

We introduced the Platform Co-op concept and were treated to presentations on the Open Food Network, Up&Go, Resonate and Coop Cycle, all of which demonstrated great progress through making members owners of their businesses.

But a real ‘wake-up call’ for me was the seemingly unanimous agreement that we should be moving away from platforms in favour of shared protocols. This is an essential concept – and one that we have very possibly been slow to realise, as it is a subtle but significant difference. The basic premise is that, although platform co-ops are a step in the right direction, which make members owners and place them at the heart of decision making within commercial organisations, they limit progress by maintaining the role of the ‘middle-man’. By comparison and, more importantly in terms of a completely liberated peer to peer economy, open protocols connect different services and networks and enable truly distributed communication and collaboration at scale.

Claire Tolan dumbed-down her inner-geek to explain how Rchain, (a cooperative building a blockchain platform and tools to enable social coordination in robust, secure, and scalable ways) works and relates to what they are building at Resonate.

Mark Harding from Minds presenting their work on developing a new, open source, social networking platform.

Mayel De Borniol from Social.coop explained some of the challenges they have faced setting up a truly federated alternative to twitter…

I put the question “should we be moving away from the idea of platforms, towards protocols instead?” to the panel of the Open source social networks, protocols and platforms session and was surprised to get a swift and resolute “Yes” from each of the participants; Claire Tolan from Rchain, Mark Harding from MINDS and Mayel de Borniol from Social.coop – which seemed especially promising since they are all working on significantly different projects but recognise the need for deeper inter-connectivity.

Growing the co-op economy – incubators, equity and tokens.

As part of his excellent introduction explaining some of the history of cooperative ownership, Nathan Schneider questioned where our movement sits relative to the mainstream, for-profit startup world. The development of platform co-ops and member owned businesses are certainly disruptive in comparison to the standard VC model of business growth but not necessarily in the same way as we have come to use the term. If we are going to succeed we need to grow the number and size and reach of cooperative businesses and the movement has clearly recognised this by founding a number of cooperative incubator projects to help provide funding and startup support to aspiring platform co-ops and businesses: Platform6 (see the open space video explaining this new platform), start.coop, incubator.coop, Solidfund (which provided bursaries to help people get to OPEN 2018 for free), CoopStarter, UnFound (from our friends at the excellent STIR mag) and more. Hopefully this will provide fertile ground for more cooperative seeds to flourish.

Emma McGuirk, a social anthropologist from New Zealand, offered some really interesting perspectives on timebanking including how they often die out – and are often perceived to have failed – when in reality the people they initially connected often become friends who start doing favours for each other, and hence no longer need a timebank.

Michael Linton, designer of LETSystem presented his ideas about “circular money” and how this could facilitate a new economy.Matthew Slater, Co-Founder of Community Forge polled the room to ascertain interest in establishing an ethical credit exchange in the UK, and sources of seed-funding for this… which delivered some interesting results. If your organisation would be be interested in finding out more about trading via mutual credit please contact us for an update on the latest developments.

To my mind, one of the most productive sessions was led by Vivian Woodell, ex CEO of The Phone Co-op and now head of The Foundation for Co-operative Innovation, to tackle “The capital conundrum” (see the last of the videos from the workshop space). The session questioned methods and strategies for financing platform co-ops, which are not compatible with VC funding, and explored ideas to help co-ops attract the number of users and market share required to get to scale. Numerous ideas came out of the session (all of which are openly available in the notes) including; ‘Fostering clusters of cooperatives that support one another’, ‘running ICOs that blend equity and tokens’ and ‘rethinking the meaning of ‘value’ and the purpose of investment…’ because ‘Money is not value, it’s a claim on value. We need to renew traditional forms of exchange…’

Francesca Pick, Co-founder of Greaterthan & OuiShare Fest, led a deep-dive into people’s personal relationship with money. The Money Game was invented by the Findhorn Community in the highlands of Scotland and has been played around the world as a way to help people think about and deconstruct their relationship with money.

Since OPEN 2018 several organisations have approached us that are working on the Tokens concepts including the intriguingly named Co-opCoin – A decentralized Asset-Based Token platform which “helps to create and manage non-fungible ERC Tokens (Asset-Based Tokens, similar to a Security Token) representing real-world assets in a legally binding way.” Their ideas seem to offer one solution to the “capital conundrum”, which dovetail with our musings from last year about a possible co-op coin and we’ll report more on this as things develop.

Matthew Brown, Cabinet Member for Social Justice, Inclusion and Policy at Preston City Council discussed the latest advances and successes of “the Preston model” which works to keep money circulating in a local economy, delivering huge benefits for both the people and organisations in the community.

Emma Hoddinott, Labour Cllr for Wickersley Ward Rotherham and Local Government Officer for the Coop Party gave OPEN 2018 her thoughts on “the Preston model” and how other local government strategies could be deployed to create a thriving cooperative economy across the UK.

Developing an open app ecosystem

In parallel to trying to figure out a more unifying politics OPEN 2018 got hands on with the tech, and we’re proud to have brought together people from CoTech, the Free Knowledge Institute, happy-dev.fr and others from the Open App Ecosystem Loomio Group, many of whom had never met before. The discussions span out from the working and open space sessions into Red Lion Square outside the venue and involved several other groups who are interested in developing a suite of open source, cooperatively owned and managed tools to rival Google and Apple; a shared technical infrastructure to enable co-operators to move away from the standard data harvesting monopolies.

In 2007, Art Brock (above) and Eric Harris-Braun formed the MetaCurrency Project in order to apply insights from nature to the design of software and social patterns, so that we can enable the next economy — one that is distributed, equitable, and regenerative. At OPEN 2018 Art ran a very well attended 1.5 day session on building apps on Holochain and the Holo project.The Square Pig provided the venue for a Holochain introduction and exploration into how this new, mutual-credit-based, peer-to-peer, app hosting framework, paves the way for an entirely new, agent-centric design for the decentralised web. Our discussions with Art Brock since the event have confirmed Holo as a definite ‘one-to-watch’, alongside Rchain who, as a co-op, are also offering a fundamentally more progressive approach to creating distributed systems than pretty much every other “crypto” / ICO project we’ve seen. Stay tuned for more on both of these.

Reflections

Before the conference, in the preview, and in the introduction to the event, I explained that:

OPEN 2018 is not just about platform co-ops. It’s about the ownership revolution and forging a path to a collaborative, sustainable economy.

I said:

It’s about creating new organisations which are member owned and democratically governed so that we, the people, have control over the institutions we rely on.

What I’ve realised since the event is that a lot of people really agree with that objective – but a lot more have no idea what I am on about.

So, I want to try and explain a few of the basic ideas and objectives of The Open Co-op and a few of the concepts and technologies which we are working on in order to create the world we want.

Why are you doing all this? What is The Open Co-op and OPEN 2018 all about?

We’re seriously worried about the state of the world and its fundamental, systemic problems. We recognise that humanity faces a multitude of inter-related issues such as climate change, inequality, poverty, species extinction and environmental destruction and are trying to encourage systemic solutions.

We are trying to encourage fundamental systems change in the inter-related fields of ownership, governance and economics *at the same time*, because none of these can be “fixed” without addressing the others.

We believe that open source, decentralised technologies provide some of the best tools available to disrupt the present corrosive systems. Our present systems of governance and economics are built on out-dated and exploitative protocols (official procedures and rules) which benefit the ‘haves’ more than the ‘have nots’ and pay no credence to planetary or environmental limits whatsoever. Money itself is just another ‘protocol’. So we advocate the development of new, inclusive, open and fair protocols which define the rules of a new, collaborative and inclusive economy. Software, especially the kind used to run platforms, where people interact and trade, often ‘encodes’ specific protocols (e.g. who can do things, who owns things and who gets charged etc) so we see the development of new software as essential to our mission.

In short:

We’re trying to layer the cooperative principles on top of the development of the decentralised web. We see this as the best possible route to a truly democratic and inclusive economy.

If you’re not sure exactly what it is and why it’s important read this Guardian intro to the decentralised web, and then imagine that the majority of organisations transacting there are cooperatives, of which anyone can become a member, and you should get an idea of where we’re trying to get to.

The purpose of The Open Co-op, defined at our outset in 2004, is: To build a worldwide community of individuals and organisations who are committed to creating a collaborative sustainable economy.

OPEN 2018 was our second attempt to bring people together into one place with the specific objective of growing and strengthening that community, and to discuss the ideas outlined above.

Just some of the people at OPEN 2018 – the ones that stuck it out to the end. The rest were mostly already in the pub…

Where is all this heading? What do you hope to achieve?

In the preview and the intro to OPEN 2018 I said:

Our vision is of a world in which people and planet come before profit. It’s a vision of a generative economy supporting a world of abundance in which common resources are ethically and equitably stewarded for the benefit of all.

I asked people at the event if they had a better definition of our collective vision and was surprised and encouraged by the overall enthusiasm and unity behind a “a world in which people and planet come before profit”.

But I worry that people struggle to identify with “a world of abundance in which common resources are ethically and equitably stewarded for the benefit of all.” We’ve all been born into a world with a shared ontology based on the ideas of scarcity and competition, which is why part of our work, and discussions at OPEN 2018 focuses on “the changing narrative”. We want to encourage a new ontological framework, a new world-view, in which the ideas of equity and abundance are as common as capitalism is pervasive today.

In his article on “Why today’s internet is broken — and how we can do better next time around“, Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood explains how, as the global economy went online, we replicated the same social structures that we had before. The same ontology and the same capitalist thinking was used to create privately owned, un-democratic, monopolies as we had in the real world. But the internet doesn’t have to work like that. It could be designed as a decentralised, cooperatively owned, democratic and inclusive system which works for the benefit of all people, not against them.

Our best attempt to outline what this world might look like is encapsulated in PLANET – our vision for an open source operating system for your mobile phone. Since people are used to navigating the world through their phones we’ve attempted to outline our vision through a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to give an idea of what it might be like to live in a world in which “we, the people, have control over the institutions we rely on”.

If we could make one thing happen we would love see PLANET, or a system like it, become a reality. PLANET incorporates all of the elements of democratic, member-owned, governance and economics that we hope to see become reality. It is a conceptual vision of a system built on fundamentally different protocols, designed specifically to encourage a world of abundance in which common resources are ethically and equitably stewarded for the benefit of all.

Matthew Schutte, Director of Communications at Holochain, delivered a thought-provoking presentation on Holochain, the distributed peer-to-peer framework his team are developing. Holochain has huge potential for the cooperative economy. With it’s agent-centric architecture, mutual credit system and distributed app marketplace it could be the perfect framework on which to build a system like PLANET – to enable decentralised cooperation at scale…

Conclusion – lessons learned

If you’re trying to encourage fundamental systems change in the inter-related fields of ownership, governance and economics at the same time, it’s never going to be easy. We attempted to address the challenge by curating a highly specific series of presentations and debates from experts in various fields. In retrospect, what we learned at OPEN 2018, is that the people who can and will make the system change are coming from many different perspectives. And many of the voices that should have been represented, those from marginalised and un-represented communities, were not. People need time to meet each other face-to-face and talk. Coming together, in the real world, is what this is all about after all – and we should probably have allowed more time for that than prescriptive sessions. The value that is generated through spontaneous meetings and group work was not liberated as well as it could have been by pre-organising the open space sessions.

I also hogged the mic way too much – and would have enjoyed being involved in other open space groups as much as the audience would have no doubt enjoyed hearing from another voice on stage.

But, that said, we have had amazing feedback about OPEN 2018 – on average people rated the event 8.5 out of 10, and 90% of people said they learned something at OPEN 2018 which will allow them to improve their business / projects, so we don’t feel like we did a terrible job! If you attended and have not left feedback please do so here.

As promised you can find all the notes from the sessions online – and also the list of questions that were asked on Slido – some of them did not get answered but, they paint an interesting picture of the thoughts in the room, and if you really want an answer to any particularly burning questions just let us know and we will do our best to help. There’s also this interesting little snap shot of the most popular questions.

We will continue to plan and plot and progress our key projects and would love it if you want to collaborate on any of these.

There are some other great write-ups about OPEN 2018 on Coop News. We will be thinking hard about the lessons we learned at OPEN 2018 and working out how best to put them into practice for OPEN 2019 which promises to be a very different and hopefully even more inspiring and impact-full event.

Thank you to everyone who came, supported, sponsored, exhibited, facilitated, chaired, volunteered, spoke and listened – you were all amazing, especially Thomas Heiser from Focalpoint.events, without whom OPEN 2018 would not have been possible. All photos are by Jon Craig.

In our final session at the end of Day 2, Niki Okuk, the Founder of Rco Tires and Guy Watson, the Founder and Chair of Riverford Organic discussed ideas to challenge the dominant model of capitalist business and the de facto pyramid structure of management in order to enable a more equitable society. We heard how Guy is handing over Riverford to the employees – having resisted the best efforts of the VCs – and how Nikki has built a thriving, carbon positive business which is owned by its members. Despite coming from very different backgrounds and working in distinctly different sectors and geographies, both speakers had arrived at the same less-capitalist, more cooperative conclusions – They are the proof that a more ethical, more equitable economy is not only possible, but is on its way.

The post OPEN 2018 – Review appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Oliver Sylvester-Bradley: What do you do and how did you get to where you are now?

Cadwell Turnbull: I’m a science fiction and social fiction writer and a member of Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO).

CT: The writing thing started when I was a kid. I wrote essays for school, and stories and comics that I would share with friends. I got my Bachelors in professional writing from La Roche College in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Then I moved on to get a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing and a Masters in English with a linguistics concentration from North Carolina State University. My stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed and Nightmaremagazines and I have a science fiction novel coming out next spring.

My involvement in co-operativism came much later and rose out of my interest in utopian fiction and social systems. I always had a social justice bent to my writing but recently I’ve spent a lot of time envisioning alternative social systems. My upcoming short story in Asimov’s Science Fiction is about an imagined planet where the system of government is global panarchism and governments compete for people’s citizenship. The process is voluntary and people can change governments, be a citizen of multiple governments, or opt out of government altogether as long as they follow agreed-upon laws. It is an ambiguous utopia, since large international governments have the power to manipulate smaller local ones in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways.

O S-B: You use the term “social fiction” – can you explain that, and how you think it can be used to influence social development?

CT: Social science fiction isn’t new. My favourite authors all write speculative fiction with a focus on exploring social alternatives. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a social science fiction novel, as are Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other. There are a lot of books within this larger sub-genre of science fiction, and many novels that would fall into utopian fiction. But often these stories are set in the future, after a collapse or on a distant planet. They show the world after a new status quo has already been implemented.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge comes close to what I would consider to be social fiction. Though it is set in 2065, the novel builds realistically off of the world we have today, imagining a best case scenario for our current societal model, putting caps on income disparity and strong reform aimed towards a sustainable green society. Many of these reforms are done primarily through legal means (a revolution of lawyers and activists), while maintaining a recognisable social structure. Robinson’s later Mars trilogy explores similar themes with added science fictional elements.

When I talk about social fiction, however, I am talking about fiction that inhabits the middle space between the present and imagined futures status quos. How do we get there?

Science fiction has a history of star-spanning empires and intergalactic wars, but it is the practical application of ideas that have inspired scientific advancement: artificial intelligence, cloning, life extension, terraforming, the possibility of space travel, long distance wireless communication, global information networks. All of these things were imagined long before they were thought achievable, and we’ve been moulded by the long-standing echo chamber of science’s conversation with science fiction. They feed back into each other endlessly and our present is directly due to that conversation with what can be done and what can be imagined.

Some of the best science fiction deals with the ramifications of a great discovery. These stories ask: how does the world change if we discover human cloning? How does the world change if we’ve developed the ability to communicate through telepathic means? Fiction on the edge of change is extremely powerful.

This has led me to wonder: why don’t we have the equivalent in the form of social fiction? I haven’t read every book ever written, but I can count on my hand how many books explore how social inventions can influence the world as they are happening. I can’t even list one movie about co-operatives. I have no knowledge of any television shows dealing with the speculative future of the commons. Why is that? Imagine the feedback loop that could develop if we actively created these fictions.

Fiction on the edge of change is extremely powerful,” says Cadwell Turnbull

O S-B: Where do you stand on the “let’s try to fix what we have / “work within the present system” vs “… we’re going to need a revolution to get out of this mess …”debate?

CT: I don’t think these ideas have to fight against each other. I’m a fan of a diversity of tactics. We have to build the world we want to inhabit. And I don’t think we need anyone’s permission to do so. That’s a revolutionary act: to not ask permission. It rejects traditional notions of power. We can act as free people. Of course we have to be smart about it, and that’s where working within the system may sometimes come in. Sometimes. We have to use the tools at our disposal. Other times we can make brand new tools. In the end, we’ll need both to fix the mess we’ve made.

Revolutions are tricky. History has taught us that usually they end up being a passing of power to different hands, and often there are casualties of this transfer. Some people are more vulnerable than others and they suffer the most when revolutionaries don’t look where they are planting their feet. Revolutions should be creative, not destructive. It should have something to offer first, something for others to choose. That is what excites me about the solidarity movement – it is about creating something and it is about consent. For me, there is nothing more revolutionary.

O S-B: How could social fictions do more to develop a more co-operative culture?

CT: It is a mistake to underestimate how powerful narrative has been in the historical development of societies. It is our primary form of linguistic persuasion and the major way we transmit culture and meaning across generations. Beyond just the sharing of ideas, narrative allows the sharing of concepts through analogy, through contextualising ideas within a story.

A good test of the power of narrative is this thought experiment. What separates popular culture and academic knowledge? More specifically, what does one possess that the other typically lacks? And how do academics make their ideas popular? Narrative is the answer to all these questions.

The arts are a powerful form of culture creation and so often academic knowledge enters the popular culture through story, sometimes fiction and sometimes non-fiction, but always through being contextualised within a narrative.   

Social fictions not only give an opportunity to contextualize these ideas within narrative, they also can act as an avenue for these ideas to germinate within the popular culture. The Overton window of our current news infrastructure is very narrow, but social fictions can widen that window. If the leftist solidarity economics movement presented their own fictions, they could develop their own culture through aspirational story-telling as well as provide a point of access for a vast amount of the general population.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Think about how social fiction could be used as a form of funding for leftist education and research projects about solidarity economics. Think about how many new industries could be developed through solidarity media. Not only can it shine a light on solidarity movements, it would build alternative structures to support the solidarity movement: publishing co-ops, theatre co-ops, streaming platforms, co-operative representation agencies, co-op film and art festivals, co-op actors’ guilds, along with a broader co-op film and art industry.

The biggest contribution social fiction would bring is the opportunity for self-critique. Through narrative we can better locate the places in the movement that need work. We can show people grappling with shortcomings of the movement in the present and the future in a positive context. We can also imagine possible future problems so that the movement can be proactive about them.

But the biggest advantage social fiction brings is the opportunity to push already good ideas forward. Narrative doesn’t only help others access ideas. It provides a space for ideas to live and to grow and develop within context. This fits very well with co-operative ideals.

O S-B: If platform co-ops and the generative economy take hold, we could be living in a very different world in the future. Can you describe what you think this world might look like?

CT: I imagine vast open networks of individuals, co-operatives and commons, forming a strong web across the planet. These networks will be deeply political and rooted in their local politics as well as concerned with the state of the world.

Community councils will abound and decision-making will be focused on concrete problems within communities. The global network will invest in struggling communities by listening to their needs and sending them resources in solidarity. Basic necessities will be accessible to everyone and there will be a strong safety net for people who can’t work or choose different forms of community contribution. Work itself will be viewed differently and expanded to areas often labelled as hobbies or passion projects. Physical commons will be built within communities and intellectual commons will be a form of innovation. The specifics will of course be very diverse and only as standardised as necessary for communication across networks.

O S-B: I like this vision – it sounds like you are describing a state where we have managed to transition from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. What do you see as the main barriers for moving towards the vision you describe?

CT: The main barriers are cultural and ideological. People don’t believe that sort of world is possible – many haven’t even considered it as a possibility. The other issue is that so many are trapped in cycles of poverty and/or desperation. They can’t leave their awful jobs. They can’t raise the funds to start co-operatives. They don’t have the time to fully engage politically.

We could probably support each other more in order to build a future like this, go lean until the system is robust, but people need to know that it is possible, they need to see where and how it is being done.

O S-B: Do you think there is scope for the concept of ‘self, us and now’ to be developed into a more collaborative narrative, which could help galvanise action towards a sustainable world …?

CT: There are a few examples of shared worlds, where many writers contributed to one work of fiction, or a series. The Wild Cards series was a shared universe that has had more than 30 authors contribute to it, including George R.R. Martin. Thieves’ World was a fantasy shared world that was also created by multiple authors. There are examples of collaborative fiction. But there should be many more.

How could those projects feed back into communities? How could they function as a means of aspirational future-making? If creatives work closely with actual worker-owners, academics, and activists, there’s really no limit to what could be collectively imagined. It would provide the perfect excuse for global research and information networks, non-fiction and fiction working together in a way that raises both ships. How else has knowledge ever been transmitted? How else have we ever generated change?

The Wild Card Trust (the group of writers that wrote The Wild Cards series) coined the term mosaic novel. This kind of novel tells a whole story, but via a number of perspectives and narrative styles. It is a story about people within a larger context and it doesn’t centre on just one perspective.

Co-operative media could also take on mosaic narratives to tell larger stories. These stories would be filled with personal accounts, but there would also be accounts of groups and movements, featuring prominently the obstacles that we must collectively overcome.

The Wild Cards series is an example of collaborative fiction writing

I think people would want to experience these kinds of stories. We may not have to wait for movies or film. Multi-cast audio projects could provide the perfect middle ground for collaboration along with affordability.

Imagine a long-running podcast fiction series that has multiple contributors. A budget for that would be reasonable and could also provide the perfect opportunity for an expansive work exploring co-operativism.

I love the idea put forward in StarHawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing, in which she quotes Dion Fortune: “The ends don’t justify the means. The means shape the ends. You become what you do.”

“You become what you do.” Those words speak to a practice of revolution, not just the making of it. We have do things on a personal level to be the people we need to be to make the big changes. We start at the deed and we work our way out.

O S-B: What do you think about experimenting with new axioms to help unite the progressive / solidarity / peer to peer / commons / permaculture etc. movements into an effective force for change?

CT: I love the idea of new axioms to help unite the various movements. It is useful to focus on commonality in a diverse movement like this. So often we focus on what makes us different. Pinpointing where we agree can lead to mobilisation on those issues. I believe we would find a lot of places to work together.

If we see progressive movements as an interconnected emergent system, we’d realize that we’re all providing key roles in helping to build a diverse infrastructure of leftist change. Knowing that infrastructure, learning how to use it, would be valuable. No, we don’t always agree on approach or belief. But I think we can counterbalance each other. We tend to think of society as something that has to be standardised. We’ve never lived in a monoculture. We shouldn’t treat our movements as such.

If we could see a map of our movements, study their intersections and where they diverge, we might be able to strengthen the movement by filling in the gaps between different movements, creating cross-ideological approaches, balancing out the rougher edges.

Our media could be a good opportunity to do this. Find the problems. Write about them. Consider additional/alternative systems that help fix the areas where we’re weakest. We can unite while maintaining diversity of opinion. It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Our axioms can come out of the areas where we align.

Originally published by The News Coop.

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Photo by torbakhopper

The post Holochain – The commons engine for cooperation at scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

Holochain is a new technology project with huge potential for the cooperative economy.

Members of The Open Co-op have been promoting the idea that new software could, potentially, revolutionise both our failing democracies and our predatory capitalist economies, since 2004. Back then we weren’t quite so clear on exactly how the required information architecture should be designed – but we knew what we wanted it to do and how it should work. In 2004, I published a paper entitled Participatory Democracy Networks, which explained how I thought some new information architecture could facilitate participatory democracy worldwide.

The above diagram illustrates the undemocratic nature of the current system and the required power relationships of a truly democratic system. The extent to which any ‘player’ controls any other is represented by the extent to which its colour encapsulates any other. For example, in the current situation individuals influence business to some extent (by buying things) and the government to some extent (by voting) but do not control them, individuals only control the NGOs.

Not long after that we founded The Open Co-op and designed some screenshots of our “dream communication system” which we called PlaNet, to illustrate how the new software we wanted might work, and developed a presentation using some fictional cartoon characters to illustrate how a system like PlaNet could help people live together in a collaborative sustainable economy.

In 2017 we updated the PLANET screenshots – presenting the idea as An open source operating system for a collaborative, sustainable economy incorporating a range of interlinked apps on a smart phone. PLANET is still not a software project, it remains a vision which aims to illustrate some of the concepts and advantages of a collaborative, user owned and managed economic platform.

The purpose of the PLANET concept is to illustrate, through a Graphical User Interface, what it might be like to interact with a new economic system which has been built collaboratively as an open source project. PLANET would be owned and controlled by its members, giving them complete control over how it is run via proposals, and votes on other members’ proposals. PLANET incorporates concepts such as: Agent-centric architecture, Personal data licenses, Portable reputation, Alternative currencies, Group management, Local relevance and Delegative voting – all the same ideas we were proposing in 2004 to help build participatory democracy networks.

So, for 12 years PLANET has remained a dream. And then we discovered Holochain.

Whilst everyone has been getting very excited about the potential of blockchain we have remained skeptical for a variety of reasons;

1. You cannot store all the data in the world in a blockchain
2. The blockchain is a spectacular waste of energy that could instead be used to improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world – just see the insane energy consumption of Bitcoin. If growth continues at the present pace, researchers estimate that Bitcoin mining alone would consume more power in 2020 than the entire world does today.
3. A system that is designed to enable total anonymity is actually not very appropriate for building collaborative, trust-based systems and organisations.

Sometimes technology gets over-hyped and there’s a growing body of evidence explaining why you don’t need to use blockchain. This paper by Karl Wüst and Arthur Gervais from the Department of Computer Science in Zurich, gives a good outline of whether a blockchain is the appropriate technical solution to solve a problem.

Whilst blockchain has and is being used on some great projects, this amazing story from inside a Jordanian refugee camp that runs on blockchain to help Syrian refugees regain legal identities that were lost when they fled their homes, is the perfect example of how the technology is failing to deliver. To quote the conclusions “the transactions were slow and the fees were too high” … ” so “Instead of cutting the banks out of the equation, [the World Food Programme] has essentially become one”. Haddad, who runs the programme acknowledges that—“Of course we could do all of what we’re doing today without using blockchain…”. But, he adds, “my personal view is that the eventual end goal is digital ID, and beneficiaries must own and control their data.”

Owning and controlling your own data. That’s what we want. That’s the fundamental idea behind PLANET.

But trying to force a system like blockchain, which was designed to enable anonymous transactions, to help you own and control your own data is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Wouldn’t it be better to start with a system which is specifically designed to enable you to own and control you own data? That also, by design, encourages trust between peers and, as well as that, enables giant volumes of transactions at low transaction costs?

That’s what Holochain does. And it does it very well.

Whilst some people have been embarrassing humanity by creating mind-numbing concepts such as Crypto-kitties and trying to force tomatoes on a blockchain, the team at Holo have been figuring out the fundamental information architecture for a new, sustainable, collaborative and cooperative economy. Such a valiant and laudable mission is clearly not for the faint-hearted and the Holo team brings together brains such as Eric Harris-Braun, Arthur Brock, Jean Russell, Jean-François Noubel, and Matthew Schutte to name just a few. They are an incredible group of system-thinkers whose ideas have evolved out of the metacurrency project and CEPTR and synergised as Holochain, a new applications framework that they are giving away to the world for free.  To help subsidize that effort, they are also launching the first flagship application built using Holochain, a peer-to-peer web hosting platform, confusingly named Holo host, for which they recently raised over $20 million through a crowdfunding campaign and an Initial Community Offering.

In order to explain what Holochain is, how it works and why co-operators everywhere should take note, we interviewed Matthew Schutte, their Director of Communications.

OSB: What is Holo in layman’s terms?

MS: Holo is a peer to peer app hosting marketplace. Today app hosting is the domain of big business. If a developer builds an app, they serve it via a hosting company like Amazon or Google and pay to use their big data warehouses – huge sever farms which present the app to end users. Holo makes it possible for normal folks to make use of the idle storage and processing capacity on their computers to get into that business… For example, when I’m writing an email, my machine is doing some work but it has the capacity to do 1000 times more work – so HOLO enables you to rent some of that extra capacity.

OSB: OK, that sounds great, but I can imagine people worrying it might slow down their computers. Is that something users will need to think about?

MS: You can set your own parameters. You can specify the settings for how much of your machine you allocate to Holo – Our goal is to prioritise your use over Holo’s use (although this may not be included in the initial version at launch) so you never get slowed down. Some people will be dedicating whole machines to Holo hosting… but if you’re using Holo on your main computer you don’t want it to be annoying… you just want it to make use of the spare capacity. If it’s reducing your quality of life – that’s not a cost most people are going to be willing to pay.

OSB: Will it be secure? I can imagine people worrying that if a Holo service or app is running in the background on their computer then maybe it can access parts of their machine that they don’t want people to see.

MS: Yes, it’s secure. It only has the ability to interact with certain parts of your computer. This is similar to the way in which a web site can change pixels on your screen but can’t read your private files. Technically it’s called “sandboxing”. Holo will use a cordoned off section of your computer. We’re not inventing new stuff there, the technology to do this securely has existed for a long time.

OSB: Will people need a special computer, or a certain specification of computer to run Holo?

MS: No. Any Mac or PC, desktop or laptop will work but mobile devices are slower and so not so suitable for serving websites to others.

OSB: Why would someone want to host HOLO apps on their computer? How is that going to help build a collaborative, sustainable economy?

MS: It’s kind of like the way AirBnb and Uber work. Their model enables them to make use of spare bedrooms – to help people pay off their mortgages. Holo makes use of the spare space and processing power of your computer to help you pay for your internet connection and maybe even the cost of the computer itself…

There is a massive amount of unused computing power in the world, more than any one company controls… Amazon is king of hosting at the moment, though there are others that are neck and neck, like IBM and Google.

Amazon is the third most valuable company on the planet and their web hosting division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes up 10% of Amazon’s revenues but more profit than the entire rest of the company combined. App hosting is the cash cow of the third most most valuable company on the planet!

Holo is aiming to do to Amazon’s cash cow what Uber did to Taxis – but instead of taking 20 or 30% of the money from the drivers (like Uber does) with Holo 99% of the revenues go straight to the host who’s computer is doing the work.  Holo takes a 1% or less transaction fee.

OSB: I see, so Holo has the potential to disrupt the hosting industry and divert money back to the people who join the network and host apps on their computers. But, if you’ve invented a way to do that why wouldn’t you take more than 1%?

MS: We don’t need it – because we’re distributing everything… just like Airbnb was able to grow from two guys with air mattresses to a company that books more rooms than any other… because they didn’t have to build and own locations – we’re catalysing existing assets instead. We’ve invented a really efficient accounting system – and a 1% transaction fee is our business model for Holo. And that helps subsidize the larger Holochain ecosystem. This is just a first step in a larger plan to shift how humanity communicates.

OSB: OK, I thought so – there’s clearly more lurking under the hood! But before we dive into that I want to take a step back and try and get a real understanding of what Holochain is and how this idea works. You’ve told us a bit about Holo, which is a Holochain app.  Can you explain the technology behind Holochain itself a bit more?

MS: Sure. Peer to peer app hosting is not a new idea. Just like BitTorrent offers peer to peer file sharing, Holochain makes use of some of the same technology.

A few decades ago people realized that it would be useful to be able to store a file on a network of computers, but not have to depend on having any single computer be up and running at a particular time in order to access them.  Note that with the web, when you look up a website, you are looking up content based on which machine it is stored on. That means that if that machine goes down, you can’t access that content. That kind of sucks. It’s also a major reason why most people don’t host their own websites anymore.  If for any reason your computer goes down, no one can reach your website. This “server maintainer as second job” thing was a pain in the neck, so most folks opted to pay others to “do that hosting work.”

With BitTorrent, it’s different. When you reach out for a file, you don’t ask for a specific machine. You ask for the file. Other machines on the network share information about which files are stored where. Within a split second, you’ve got your file (or at least have started to download it). This even works if every computer that originally received the file has since gone offline.  That’s because if a computer notices that one of its neighbors has gone offline, it starts making backups by recruiting new machines to hold onto a copy of that file.

For example, if I send a tweet – it might get stored by 200 different computers. If one drops offline, the system looks for others to make backup copies to ensure 200 copies remain online – these nodes are “gossiping” with each other – if they don’t hear back when they check in with the ‘Oli node’, they say “oh no, we lost him!” and then look for the next nearest node (what “nearness” means is a bit too technical for this interview). Jimmy is the nearest – so they get Jimmy’s node to make a copy to ensure 200 copies stay online. It’s like a self healing network.

That’s great for file storage – but not to run apps, you can’t run Airbnb like that. You can’t run Uber like that.  Apps need to build sets of relationships and transform resources. Holochain takes the file sharing concept and adds more functionality. Borrowing from three different technologies in the process:

1. From BitTorrent – self healing storage, the Distributed Hash Table (DHT)
2. From Blockchain and other things – the concept of an immutable, unchangeable, tamper proof data log. A hash chain.
3. From Git, the most widely used system for collaborative software – the Agent centric model, where there is no one global truth.

In the Git world, I have my version of the code. If I make a copy and add a green button, altering the code, I can suggest the change to you. If you like the change and accept it, you sign it with a cryptographic key, just like track changes in a Word doc. When you suggest changes it shows them to me. If I accept this change, and I sign that acceptance with my cryptographic key, it updates my chain to include the changes I accept. But you can’t change my stuff. I have to update my stuff. As a sovereign agent.

Holochain is an agent centric model which is very different to the data centric model of blockchain. There are no miners, and no company in the middle deciding and enforcing the rules.  Instead, the participants of a particlar of the network running it as a community. By pooling together our computing resources we make possible an entire network of distributed apps that are free from centralised, corporate control. By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance and community.

By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance and community.

OSB: That’s awesome, it sounds like you’ve developed a system to run something like PLANET, the open source OS we’ve been thinking about for so long. But if this is going to work the peer to peer network will need to grow pretty quickly, is that where the HoloPorts come in?

Aside:

As well as running possibly the world’s first ever ethically (rather than purely finically) motivated ICO, which raised £20 million, the Holo team also recently closed a crowdfunder for Holo ports, which raised over $1 million. The supply of ‘Holo Tokens’ which were sold in the ICO was calculated by a fixed formula based on data from the crowdfunding campaign for HoloPorts. HoloPorts are “plug and play” devices which come with software already installed and are optimized to run Holo. When they arrive with the 2114 users who purchased them through the crowdfunder people can just plug them in, follow the instructions, and start hosting the network and earning Holo fuel.

MS: Holo is a bridge between the old internet and the new internet. The people who are running holo are the bridge builders who get paid for building the bridge. So, normal internet users don’t have to do anything new – they might not even know that when they visit a website, on the backend, there is a community rather than a company.

OSB: I love the fact that Holo’s currency, Holo fuel, is both backed by computer processing power and designed to work as a mutual credit system.

MS: Holo also provides a new accounting process, which solves two problems: giant volumes of transactions and low transaction costs. We don’t even need to own the structures to do the accounting – we’re using a distributed app for that too – a payment system, so we are able to offer payment processing as well as hosting – for less than anyone currently offers. We’ll be able to process millions or billions of simultaneous payments – and have them work even when the transaction value is 1 cent or less. I’m not going to send you 2p if it costs me 20p to do so… We think we’ve solved an important issue.  The cost of accounting needs to be far less than the values exchanged.

OSB: Absolutely. I’ve seen that very problem plague existing blockchain projects, so I really hope it is something Holo solves. Speaking of finances, you seemed to take great care to ensure the ICO was ethically managed and you’ve now raised a huge amount of money! What are your first plans with your new resources?

MS: Our goals were clear:

1. Get this off the ground – launch the change
2. Make sure the humans get taken care of for their part in that…

It’s a principle we’re going to follow with the whole community of hosts, and ICO investors. We’ve been trying to design the architecture so people end up better off by participating. We’re taking care of our staff and the community that are trying to get the software built. But we’re not trying to become billionaires.

Our people have been living on $1000/month stipend and volunteering their time.

Two years ago I was sleeping in my car to be able to work on this full time. I hard to rent out my bedroom on Airbnb, so I could work on this without having to work on other stuff.  That generally meant that I would sleep in the car. Now our project has market cap worth hundreds of millions. But we’ll let that happen… it’s just people betting that we’ll be successful. The point is that now we have the resources we need, the ability to pay people and pull in deep knowledge.

OSB: How is the Holo organisation going to evolve?

MS: We’re in a transition period. We didn’t do anything in the normal way. We didn’t give any equity in the company to investors. We didn’t even give equity to the employees. I don’t have equity, for instance, because our intent is to hand over control of the resources to the community over time.

We’re aiming to start by using a CoBudget-like process so that our community will control 1 to 3 % of the revenue. There will be a learning process, so the community can build up it’s ability to make decisions and exercise judgement about how to allocate resources, towards training / UI / development / security tools etc. Over time the plan is to increase the amount of the revenue which the community controls until the community controls all of the revenue.

We’re also launching a Trust that controls Holochain. That trust receives 50% of Holo’s revenues and that will help to support Holochain and nourish the growth of the network. Basically we’ve managed to hack together a funding mechanism for Holochain, despite the fact that we are completely giving Holochain away for free.

OSB: So, do you think Holo will help liberate decentralised co-operation at scale?

MS: We’re hacking business structures in order to try to change what types of business models are possible in the world.

We’re hacking business structures in order to try to change what types of business models are possible in the world.

This concept of putting users in the middle will completely shift how co-ops can function. It will enable them to make use of the advantage that they have, which is diversity. What we are calling platform co-ops and protocol co-ops – coming together in alignment to create an ecosystem rather than just a network. So we can try new things and if they prove useful, they can propagate across the community and perhaps beyond. The “beyond” comes from the fact that users can bridge between different networks.  That means that I can draw data from 5 or 10 apps and combine them together to create a more coherent user experience for myself. And I don’t need anyone else to agree to also use that particular configuration. If it works for me, I can put it to work. No group meetings and voting required (for that sort of issue, anyway.),

No more top down, or one-size fits all application experiences, that’s centralised corporate architecture. New ways of digital commutation are going to harness the diversity of co-ops and help give them a learning advantage. This will allow them to experiment and learn faster than centralised organisations – a collaborative advantage in a world that changing fast.

Part 2 of this interview – exploring more of Holo’s plans to enable decentralised co-operation at scale is coming soon…

Matthew Schutte and Art Brock from Holochain will both be speaking at the OPEN 2018 Platform Co-ops conference in London in July – as well as running hands-on workshops on how to download the source code and design apps to work on Holochain.

We’re not the only people who are starting to get excited about Holochain, the concept has caught many other eyes. With developers like Nicolas Luck explaining how Holochain is reinventing applications and how it “works and performs better than Ethereum by several orders of magnitude”, and Jean Russell sharing 5 Ways Holochain can save democracy, momentum is starting to build.

In his post about Holochain reinventing applications Nicolas shares his vision, explains the shift from data-centric to agent-centric architecture and proposes building a Holo browser:

“I am talking about a browser for the Holochain app ecosystem that is not opening HTML documents but instead is facilitating communication between the user and other users, groups, teams, organizations and the network as a whole. Think: decentralized WeChat. Basically a very generalized address book/team chat/social network/collaboration UI with no specialized functionality as that is to be filled-in by those many apps which are meant to work together as micro-services.”

That is exactly what we have tried to illustrate with PLANET, which is why this is all so exciting. If the users co-own and co-design the browser which Nicolas describes we will finally have a framework within which we can build a democratic, collaborative, sustainable economy – the perfect framework for decentralised cooperation at scale.

Cross-posted from open.coop

Read part II of the interview: “Holochain – The commons engine“

Photo by torbakhopper

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But no matter how much we try to ignore the corporate machine it ploughs on regardless and at various points in all of our lives we are forced to interact with the unsustainable, greed-based economy whether we like it or not. We all need to travel, buy energy, we like presents and holidays and now we are buying more and more of these goods and services online, from people we do not know.

As local banks close in favour of apps, local taxis are driven out by Uber and the likes of Airbnb and other holiday and comparison websites offer us ‘guaranteed savings’ – the brave new world of digital platforms is being thrust upon us, whether we like it or not.

The dominant form of business in our economy has not changed, but the method of delivery has. Platform businesses which reach further and wider than conventional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses, that are able to ‘scale up’ and attract customers in their millions are forcing out the smaller players, just like supermarkets killed the traditional garden market. Except these “platform monopolies” are taking things to a new level – often unbeknown to us they’re gathering our data and using sophisticated algorithms to work out how to sell us more things, that quite often we don’t need or want. They’re aggregating data and dissintermediating in ways that we never knew were possible. Uber is valued at over 60 billion dollars but does not own a single taxi…

From monoculture to platform co-ops

To someone practicing permaculture, there is something almost offensive about vast fields where businesses cultivate the same single crop and, in a similar way, the exponents of ‘peer to peer’ and ‘open source’ technologies get equally offended by monolithic platforms that dominate the digital landscape.

Peer to peer, (where individuals share content with other people, rather than relying on centralised servers) and open source software (which is free to use and adapt, without requiring a licence fee) are like the digital community’s own versions of permaculture. They provide a pathway to greater independence, autonomy, diversity and resilience than is offered by the dominant system.

David Holmgren’s ideas about creating small scale, copyable, adaptable solutions which have the power to change the world by creating decentralised, diverse, and more resilient systems have huge parallels with open source, collaborative software projects, which are developing as a response to the monolithic, proprietary and profit driven enclosures that dominate today’s Internet.

The end goal of this work is to create ‘platform cooperatives’, as alternatives to the venture capital backed platforms. Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled – allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed. Co-ops are an inherently different form of organisation than Limited or Public companies, which place community before profit, hence have entirely different principles than their corporate rivals. For this reason they are more resilient in downturns, more responsible to their communities and environments and more effective at delivering real (not just financial) value to everyone they interact with.

Platform co-ops provide a template for a new kind of economy built on trust, mutual aid and respect for nature and community. By placing ownership firmly in the hands of the people and applying democratic forms of governance they offer a legitimate alternative to the defacto form of business. There are several platform co-ops that already provide comparable, and often better services than their corporate rivals and with more support others will continue to develop.

On 26 and 27 July the OPEN 2018 conference at Conway Hall in London will showcase platform co-ops such as The Open Food Network – which is linking up local food producers and consumers through Europe, Resonate – the music streaming co-op, and SMart from Belgium which provides support for a network of thousands of freelancers throughout Europe. The beginnings of a viable, self-supporting and sustainable economy are stating to emerge and OPEN 2018, along with similar events in the US and across Europe, is bringing together the people with the ideas, the tech developers and the legal experts to help catalyse the transition.

Shared values and the network effect

By Dmgultekin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8273108

There are so many similarities between permaculture’s philosophy and principles and the works of other progressive groups that hope to encourage a more sustainable, more resilient and equitable future. From Occupy to Open source, Permaculture to Peer to Peer and Collaborative Technology to the Commons Transition groups there are clearly overlapping values.

David Bollier, writing on the Peer to Peer Foundation blog has suggested that “…permaculturists and commoners need to connect more and learn from each other…” and the idea that these communities are ultimately working towards the same objective seems especially important to recognise if we are to accelerate the development of a more sustainable world.

There is already an evolving “shared narrative” between these various, disparate initiatives, but it is often sidelined by our self-selecting filters which lead us back into the communities we know and trust. Collaboration and cooperation can be hard work and as groups get bigger they can become harder still but that’s no reason not to try. The fact that Wikipedia provides a better encyclopaedia for free in more languages than Britannica ever managed proves that online, open source collaboration can deliver greater value than proprietary, closed source systems.

The true value of a collaborative, open networks only really manifests when its members communicate, and work together, through connected systems. Sharing ideas, discussing problems and addressing challenges in larger networks creates positive feedback loops via the network effect – a term which describes how the value of something increases in proportion to the number of people using it (like a phone, or social media network) – something all the various ethical and progressive networks could benefit from enormously.

Parallels between collaborative, open source software development and permaculture principles:

1. Observe and interact

Progressive software projects often utilise ‘user focused’ design strategies to ensure they meet people’s needs. Taking time to understand how users interact with software systems via user experience testing groups and an ongoing, iterative design processes are recognised to deliver higher quality solutions which suit specific user needs.

2. Catch and store energy

Peer to peer networks don’t rely on centralised servers but instead make use of the latent capacity of other user’s machines. Imagine how much more efficient it would be than deploying huge server farms if our computers were not shut off at night, or left idle, when they could be providing valuable processing power for others. The Holochain project aims to make it simple and secure for anyone to join a truly peer to peer network and to share files and processing power in this way – and to even earn credits for hosting other people’s files and applications.

3. Obtain a yield

The Peer Production License provides a means by which open source developers can make the code they develop available for free and still benefit from it’s use. Sites like the Internet of Ownership, which contains a directory of cooperative platforms use the PPL to “permit reuse exclusively for non-commercial and worker-owned enterprises” thereby helping to grow the commons. The ultimate goal of the PPL is to enable mechanisms so commoners can support themselves and ensure their own social reproduction without resorting to capitalism.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

This principle is particularly integral to open source development since the concepts of ‘user focussed’ and ‘agile development’, ‘branching’ and ‘forking’ are all designed to ensure that software projects are self-regulating by listening to the users needs, driven by user feedback and that they are able to be adapted to changing needs.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services

Open source technology is inherently more renewable in the way it enables the reuse and repackaging of code for new purposes. Ethically minded hosts and developers such as Green Net power their servers with renewable energy.

6. Produce no waste

As above, open source code is often re-used and repurposed but progressive developers still have a lot to gain from better collaboration. There are often multiple teams working on identical problems and ideas and whilst this has benefits in terms of developing strength and resilience through diversity it also leads to waste, mainly in terms of time. At least the waste ‘product’ of web development is only digital and so old technology and code doesn’t littler the streets or pollute the environment as much as physical products can, especially if archives are stored on renewably powered servers.

7. Design from patterns to details

Genuine online collaboration has been slow to evolve, with the best examples being Linux (the open source operating system), Firefox, the open source web browser and Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. It is only recently, with the rise of monolithic capitalist gardens such as Google and Facebook and Amazon that the hive mind of the internet is recognising the need to step back and redesign its’ systems according to new patterns. The push for “Net neutrality” and Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project are examples of this in action as is the Holo project, a very exciting and truly peer to peer “community of passionate humans building a distributed cloud, owned and run by users like you and me.”

8. Integrate rather than segregate

The move from centralised to decentralised, to distributed and federated technology is a a key element of open source and collaborative technology design. The entire Peer to Peer philosophy is based on the recognition that the connections and relationships between nodes (people or computers) in a network is what gives it strength and value. Collaborative technologists still have a lot to gain from developing deeper and wider integrations, like we see in nature, and which permaculturists know so well.

9. Use small and slow solutions

Designing a computer system to be slow is not something you will normally (ever?) hear a programmer talk about but they often talk about small, in many guises. Small packages (of code), small apps, “minified” (meaning compressed) code and even small computers, like the Raspberry Pi are key features of collaborative technology which all aim for increased efficiency.

10. Use and value diversity

Diversity is intrinsic to open source and collaborative technology. The plurality and adaptability of open source solutions ensures a highly diverse ecosystem. Users are free to adapt open source code to their needs and the open nature of most open source projects values contributions from anyone, irrespective of race, gender, age or any other factor. It is true that the majority of contributors to open source projects are normally young, white and male but the reasons for that seem more to do with societal inequalities and stereotypes rather than any specific prejudices or practices.

11. Use edges and value the marginal

The explanation of this principle places most value on “the interface between things…” and this is a central component of web design. Web services have now realised the necessity of providing intuitive user interfaces, to allow users to navigate complex data and to investigate deeper informational relationships but, more interestingly the latest developments in linked open data enable users to interface with more specific, more granular and more timely data to provide increase value. The Internet Of Things will facilitate a massive increase in the number and type of products which can interact over the internet. Whilst it is not the norm, drawing diverse information from the edges and valuing the marginal is something the open internet can really facilitate.

12. Creatively use and response to change

Most open source, collaborative projects use some kind of agile development, which advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Permaculture and open source see eye to eye on this principle which bodes very well for a growing, symbiotic relationship in our rapidly evolving world.

Lead image by Dmgultekin, Wikimedia Commons.

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Hull is one of those cities, like Swindon and Slough, that’s long been the butt of jokes – like the one about the guy that typed ‘Hell’ instead of ‘Hull’ into his Sat-Nav, but still got there – it’s not that funny, or even really justified.

In the 2003 book of Crap Towns Hull came in at number one but so did London in 2013 whilst Hull dropped out of the top 50. This year, though, Hull is the UK City of Culture but it still has some major needs: a 2015 survey by the City Council found that over half the population lived in the most deprived areas of the country.

“Most deprived areas” don’t normally spawn innovation and the City Council’s main solution was to throw £100 million of its capital reserves into civic improvements to overhaul Hull’s image, and to cosy up to Siemens in an attempt to secure more jobs. Meanwhile, while other people poke fun about #CityofCulture2017, a small group of truly community minded ‘hactivists’ have set to work at the real cutting edge of social development to “unlock the hidden value in Hull’s economy”.

Enter David Shepherdson and Lisa Bovill, from Kaini Industries, an initiative which sprang out of a 2014 piece of research, funded by Hull City Council, that explored how the disruptive technology underpinning bitcoin could be facilitate a local currency to support communities in Hull affected by poverty. After a few years of development and community outreach they launched Hullcoin which enables people who engage with charities and community groups across the city of Hull to earn digital coins by volunteering and undertaking activities that benefit themselves. Hullcoins can then be redeemed as discounts against all sorts of things at over 140 participating retailers across the City. Hull City Council and the NHS are both supporting the project, as is the University, Hull College group and the Department of Work & Pensions.

How does the Hullcoin economy work?

Kanini Industries ‘mined’ 10 million Hullcoins – a quick non-energy-intensive process that took about 30 minutes (because it did not requires the competitive ‘proof of work’ process associated with Bitcoin). Kaini Industries then run due diligence on any local community groups that wish to issue coins, to ensure they promote activities which “create a better community”, and allocate them “bundles” of coins – normally in batches of 500. These community organisations, health and employment services then issue individual coins to people for volunteering or helping themselves or others to “create a better community”. People with Hullcoins can then redeem them at participating retailers across the City in return for discounts on goods and services of between 5 and 50%. The retailers can then choose what to do with the coins, either re-issuing them as employee rewards, to loyal customers as discounts on future purchases, or they can donate them back to a community group or charity to help stimulate the local economy even more. Kiani industries monitor the amount of coins in circulation and have an agreement with the council to take some offline, if required, to help manage supply and demand.

It’s a truly novel idea which uses the blockchain to empower Hull’s real assets, it’s people, by placing a direct and tangible value on community support, self betterment and volunteering – the key aspects of mutual aid which are so critical to community development but so often ignored or undervalued in modern society.

Hullcoin is the first initiative of its kind to utilise blockchain in this way. The project is still only in private beta at the moment and the developers are keen to “iron out the glitches” which will prevent the system from scaling. But if their forthcoming crowdfunder, scheduled for April 1st 2018 (hopefully the date won’t be too off-putting!) is a success they have plans to white-label the system for other cities at which point it could really provide a pathway out of poverty for millions of people.

The concept of Hullcoin has many similarities to Covestment, a term coined by Jordan Bober and Michael Linton, the inventor of LETS, to describe a means of “financing the future and creating economic resilience by weaving innovations in network currencies, crowdfunding and community microlending”. In Covestment, companies issue currency (or ‘discount vouchers’ if you like) to a Community Covestment Fund from which members of the community can buy the local currency with regular money. The Covestment fund uses the cash to provide loans to local entrepreneurs and businesses, and people use their local currency to obtain discounts when they shop at the businesses which backed the currency at the start (see diagram below). In exactly the same way as Hullcoin the result is a stimulation of the money supply and hence local economy.

The recent surge in interest in new forms of money makes experiments like Hullcoin and ideas like Covestment highly topical and what’s most exciting is that we don’t need to wait for the government to wake up to the possibilities. These are ideas which we can start experimenting with right now – to take control of our local economies and make them work for the benefit of everyone.

Lisa Bovill, one of the developers at Hullcoin will be speaking at the OPEN 2018 conference on “collaborative technology for the cooperative economy” in July and it will be fascinating to hear how the project is progressing and the impact it is having for the people of Hull. If our hunch is right it has probably already had a more direct impact on less privileged people’s lives than a single cent of the £100million the City Council “invested” in beautifying the city. Watch the 3 min video featuring Bob Clark from the BBC to see how chuffed Bob is to get 15% off his brisket pie – that’s the real “hidden value” – right there.

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A cooperative cloud would also provide a clear stepping stone towards the open source, collaborative working environment we have described as PLANET and could help form the basis of an entire open source suite of apps for the cooperative economy.

This Internet of Ownership ‘Clouds directory‘ explores and documents efforts to form free, open source alternatives to corporate cloud infrastructures, especially through cooperative business models and is a very useful resource for anyone thinking about building something similar.

As ever, at The Open Co-op we are keen to encourage as much cooperation and collaboration in this area as possible because it seems crazy for new initiatives to re-invent the wheel and greater gains, and network effects, will be easier to achieve if more effort is focused on one larger collaborative effort than many disparate initiatives.

The post below is the latest update from the CommonsCloud project from the Free Knowledge Institute which helpfully details a lot of their technical decisions and subsequent setup.

Members of the CommonsCloud project will be speaking at OPEN 2018 in London in July – come along and say “Hi” if you are interested in collaborating on a common solution.

Photo by neXtplanaut

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Although Rochdale is normally credited as the “birthplace of cooperation” records show that in 1761, sixteen weavers in Ayrshire set up “The Society of Weavers in Finnick”, arguably the first co-operative organisation of the industrial age. It was some 83 years later, in 1844 that the infamous Rochdale Pioneers opened their store in Toad Lane, Rochdale and devised the principles which became the model for cooperatives worldwide.

Regardless of the dates, both groups had the same objectives, and the Fenwick charter required members to be “honest and faithful to one another … and to make good and sufficient work and exact neither higher nor lower prices than are accustomed in the towns and parishes of the neighbourhood”.

Fenwick survived on tweed and muslin weaving, shoemaking and farming and its tradesmen depended on patronage by the local elite. The late 1700s were a period of rapid change in the textile industry, with increasing pressure from agents and manufacturers to lower prices. Inspectors were employed to check the quality of work and prices, and it could be disastrous for a village to gain a bad reputation for quality, over-charging, or late delivery.

It does not take much imagination to see the parallels between the pressures placed on the Fenwick weavers and the perils of today’s “gig economy” workers whose livelihoods can be ruined by a few bad ratings and a damaged, digital, reputation.

The weavers’ society began by buying and sharing materials and looms in an effort to reduce operating costs for their members whilst still delivering a quality service. Together they were weaving threads into cloth, creating the materials the nation required for clothing and linen, quite literally weaving the ‘fabric of society’.

Today the term ‘thread’ has taken on another meaning and even the Oxford English Dictionary includes a second definition, after sewing and weaving, citing a thread as “a group of linked messages posted on an Internet forum that share a common subject or theme” and it is here, in this new digital domain, that a renewed essence of cooperation is emerging.

As the body of collective knowledge available via the internet, and technological developments, expand exponentially delivering unforeseen changes to the fabric of todays societies, the digital threads of collaboration are being teased out, untangled and woven into something better by a new type of co-operative weaver.

The internet has spawned a myriad of collaborative projects, the most notable of which are still Wikipedia, Firefox and Linux itself – the open source kernel which supports majority of the internet – but, in general, effective large-scale online collaboration has been extremely slow to evolve. Instead we are presented with a cacophony of voices all vying for our waning attention and, despite our best efforts, we naturally gravitate into internet silos which hamper the cross-pollination of ideas and opinions. Plus, now publishing one’s ideas has become so easy, there is often huge overlap between disparate groups who share exactly the same vision, purpose and objectives but remain ignorant of each others’ existence, or unsure how they could collaborate when they do discover each other.

This is the realm in which  The Collaborative Technology Alliance highlights the objective: “There are many groups around the world working to deliver a more open, more collaborative and inclusive society. These groups are intention-aligned but remain disparate initiatives, which means they fail to benefit from the network effect”.

Imagine how much more effective we could be if the members of the Transition Network, NEON, Occupy, The Solidarity Economy, The Internet of Ownership, The WWOOFers, The Eco village Network and all the other hundreds and thousands of like-minded networks were actively collaborating on creating the type of society to which they all aspire. The network effect would be unstoppable.

The good news is that there are people working on uniting these groups and they are the new co-op weavers: People like Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholtz from the Platform Cooperativism movement, Michel Bauwens and all his excellent collaborators at the Peer to Peer Foundation, Fransesca Pick and her fellow connectors at OuiShare, Arthur Brock and the other boffins behind Holo (the new alternative to blockchain), and Pia Mancini and the other hackers and makers behind Democracy.earth. These are just some of the people that are using the warp and the weft of the world wide web to to weave a new fabric for our society; A fabric woven from the cooperative spirit which has been missing from our world for too long. We are extremely proud to be hosting most of the above names, as well as a hundreds of other would-be-weavers to the second Platform Co-op conference, OPEN 2018, which will take place in London in July.

Once the original Fenwick weavers got together in 1761 it was not long before they branched out into food and “victuals” by buying a sack of oatmeal at wholesale to sell to their members in smaller quantities at cut prices. Very soon they began lending money to needy members and their families making the Fenwick Society the first recorded credit union in the world. The story in Rochdale was very similar. The Pioneers decided it was time shoppers were treated with honesty, openness and respect, that they should be able to share in the profits that their custom contributed to and that they should have a democratic right to have a say in the business. Every customer of the shop became a member and so had a true stake in the business. When you think about it like that, and what transpired as a result of those pioneers, we would do well to recognise the new co-operative weavers of today and to assist them in every way we can.

Come to OPEN 2018 on the 26th & 27th of July to meet many of the people named above and help co-create a cooperative future.

Photo by cobalt123

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But what does this mean for fans of cooperation and a more sustainable, steady state, or circular economy? Is this is an opportunity to rebuild the resilience and community bonds that the original co-op coins offered our societies, by utilising new digital technology?

These days, the term “crypto currency” seems to have become synonymous with blockchain based currencies and the idea of an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) seems to be seen as a way to raise millions in “investment” from nothing more than a website and a white paper. At the Open Co-op we’ve been talking about alternative economic models, and digital currencies, for decades because we believe an alternative economy, which places people and the planet before profit is an essential part of the future. If the neoliberalist capitalist system remains the only option the future looks very bleak indeed. So we’re excited about all the experimentation that’s going on – and the range of alternative currencies being created. But we’re equally worried about the “crypto bubble”, sordid speculation and the insane energy consumption of Bitcoin, which has been (possibly dubiously) estimated to consume more power in 2020 than the entire world does today.

To be clear, a crypto currency does not have to based on the blockchain. A crypto currency is simply a currency that is cryptographically encrypted (meaning: encoded) to make it secure. So when we talk about crypto currencies here we do not just mean systems that use the blockchain, we mean any alternative, digital currency.

Equally, an ICO does not have to aim for wild increases in valuation, it’s simply a term that is used to describe the initial launch and distribution of a new, alternative currency. So when we talk about ICOs here we do not mean “ponzi schemes” or a means of raising huge amounts of money through crowd funding via speculative tokens, we mean launching and distributing a new, alternative currency.

These distinctions are important because if alternative currencies are to be taken seriously and facilitate a path to a more sustainable, steady state and circular economy then it is essential that these terms don’t get totally tarred by the Bitcoin bubble and blockchain brush.

A well designed Co-op Coin could catalyse the co-operative economy

The idea is simple; to run an ICO and create a co-op coin, with the specific purpose of facilitating the growth of the commons and the co-op economy.

There are so many alternative currencies out there already it seems important to do a quick review of the existing options:

• RChain co-operative is is building a platform for ‘scalable blockchain applications’. The Co-op is the organisation that develops the open-source RChain platform software, whilst RChain Holdings is a for-profit entity whose mission is to grow the ecosystem around the RChain platform.
• Colu Local Network is a blockchain based payment network that allows communities to issue their own currency and use it to incentivise merchants and consumers for buying and selling with fiat currency.
• Steem is an incentivised, blockchain based, public content platform. Their first app, Steemit, is a blogging platform featuring tokens which are distributed to content creators and curators daily as rewards, based on community voting.
• Slightly more on topic, Boyd Cohen is working on an ICO for the Collabor8 token with the goal of raising funding to create major platform coop infrastructure that can be used by platform cooperatives to shorten the runway to viability. The collabor8 ‘social currency’ seem particularly  interesting because it includes an element of social reputation…
• Bill Olivier also seems to cover a lot of the right ground in his doc on Co-operative Exchange Token, although he seems hampered by the belief that ICOs (as they commonly work) are not a plausible option for co-ops, whereas we believe an ICO can be designed to work ethically.
• FairCoin is one of the more ethically minded alternative currencies, which aims to “implement fair value exchange on a global level” using a unique “proof-of-cooperation mechanism”. Again, this is a blockchain based system but one which uses “collaboratively validated nodes” (CVNs) to secure the network. It’s a clever system but one which is still prone to speculation which undoubtedly undermines their proud claim that “FairCoin now is the the most ecological and resilient cryptocurrency”! Since their “air drop” (basically, dumping a load of coins around the internet to be picked up by whoever gets there first, with some limitations on claims per person) the “value” of a Faircoin has increased hugely and the community “claims” one Faircon is now worth €1.2. These claims about Faircoins’ value must be decided at  a General Assembly via “consensus reached through an open, participatory process of discussion. Not the invisible hands of the market…” and the other Fair ventures like the marketplace and their growing community of local nodes do make this a valid and vibrant economy. But since everyone involved in Faircoin obviously has a vested interest in its increasing valuation and since Faircoin can be traded on at least two exchanges it is just as prone to speculation as gold, or Bitcoin. In fact, their page on “value” includes a slightly humorous request for speculators to leave Faricoin alone: “If you just want to get rich soon and intend to “pump and bump” – please consider other AltCoins to speculate on.” Not the most robust means of securing a stable, inflation and speculation proof system!
• Coinsence is a platform for social collaboration that aims to “empower social and ecological engagement and support [by] building a collaborative, fair and sustainable economy”. Coinsence is new and only has a small community at the moment, but they seem to have a identified a clever model via which they issue different tokens to represent community currencies, voting rights and asset shares. Tokens can then be allocated by communities to provide incentives for ‘projects’, as well as being used as a means of exchange. These ‘social currencies’ have a limited store of value (making them less prone to hoarding and speculation) since they include high demurrage and transaction fees. The fees can be democratically re-invested into selected community projects. It’s not entirely clear how Coinsence secures the transactions, or if their technology is at all scalable but their model includes a lot of the right ingredients for a vibrant co-operative economy.
• Duniter is a crypto currency software system, which means it provides the ability to create currencies. Again, it’s blockchain based but its’ currency code includes a Universal Dividend (for currency creation and distribution) and is based on a clever concept; a Web of Trust via which each member is recognised (its identity is trusted – not its actions) if they satisfy the WoT rules which require the members to have enough signatures (links) from other members. These signatures (links) expire over time so the WoT is a clever way to ensure that people are who they say they are via social validation.

Then there’s a range of other middy interesting (again, all blockchain based) crypto currencies which are ‘backed’, or at least vaguely related, to other assets like solar panels and mangrove trees:

• Solarcoin is issued to owners of solar PV systems, for free, for every 1MWH (Megawatt hour) of electricity their PV system generates. Anyone can register their solar PV system with the SolarCoin Foundation and a typical 4kW domestic PV system could expect to earn just over 5 SolarCoins a year, every year over the 40 years the project will run. As government support for feed-in tariffs are withdrawn SolarCoin could become an important incentive to help encourage people to adopt greener energy – and/or another means to engage in wild speculation.
• The HCP coin for mangrove trees was helped into life by an ex JP Morgan banker and a guy who runs a “net positive” surf board company that is buying HCP coins to help his company become carbon positive. It’s another novel idea with clear, carbon reduction objectives but with worrying possibilities given a companies ability to ‘cash out’ from their carbon reducing investments.
• There’s not really anything co-operative, or particularly sustainable, about the TIME token but a list of this nature would not be complete without making reference to ChronoBank, who raised $5.4 Billion via their ICO. Aiming to “disrupt the HR / Recruitment industries” with a crypto currency based on the blockchain, they claim that “labour is abundant enough for everyone to have access to it, yet scarce enough to be valuable. It is the most tradeable resource in the real economy. Labour Hour tokens will tokenise this resource. Because they are backed by real labour, they are absolutely inflation-proof and have next to zero volatility” At the time of writing an hour of TIME was worth about $36 but the day before it was worth $32… Looking at the fluctuating value of the token over time seems to slightly undermine their “zero volatility” claim.

If you’re aware of other crypto currencies which are of interest to the co-op economy please let us know in the comments below.

What is clear from this list is that creating crypto currencies does not seem too hard. We can dream up a million ways to ‘back’ or link a currency to something, and there are just as many ways to distribute.

The hard part of currency design seems to be incentivising the type of economic activity which leads to the kind of world we want to live in and avoiding hoarding and speculation. The list above does not seem to include a single currency that is “speculation proof” or many ideas to addresses the speculation issue, other than Coinsence’s mention of high demurrage, which can cause other issues.

What’s wrong with speculation anyway?

Fans of crypto seems to be missing the fundamental point that any increase in value (of any cyrpto currency) is not really “money for free”. It is money we are borrowing (yet again) off the planet and future generations.

OK, so this “money” is not created as interest bearing debt (like most “normal” money) by banks. It is created by human perceptions instead. The global mindset imbues these newly created digital assets with virtual value via our subconscious belief in scarcity and our grotesque affinity for greed.

But when we “cash in” those perceptions by converting our digital coins to GBP or USD and spend them on (often finite) resources like land, or building materials, or solar PV – all of which have an environmental impact – we are using up those resources, quicker than we would have been able to do without crypto currencies.

You could argue that Solarcoins are incentivising the installation of PV, and that is a good thing

but, when their value increases, they are still extorting real tangible, natural, value (things like birds and forests and trees) into a mythical pool of financial value – and ultimately that will only ever speed up the destruction of the natural environment.

So let’s not get too hasty about imagining a scenario where PV is “more than free”. All our actions in the real world have environmental impacts and just because crypto currencies have found a new way to externalise those costs it does not mean we should be slapping ourselves on the back about it! It is our children and grandchildren that we are forcing to pay for this new, naked emperor.

It is essential to keep the true “costs” (including the power consumption issues) in mind when thinking about ethical alternative currencies.

Beyond blockchain – thinking outside the blocks

Of all the current crypto currency options Holo stands out because it based on the Holochain (a more efficient way of encoding transitions)  and it’s currency is not only going to be based on “mutual credit” but its also going to backed by computer processing power. It’s well worth watching this great video from Philip Beadle to get an idea of how blockchain works and the differences between Bitcoin, Etherium and Holochain – especially from an app building point of view.

Holo are just concluding a very successful crowdfunder which aims to provide the ‘bridging technology’ to bring holo into the mainstream. The ‘hosting boxes’ (holo ports) people have bought through the crowdfunder will allow non-technically minded people to simply plug a spare hard drive in to their router to provide storage capacity and processing power on the Holo network.

The Holo network is nothing short of true peer-to-peer. Meaning that users can access each others computers directly, without the need to go via Google’s or Amazon’s servers. In fact, they can host and runs applications on the Holo network, in much the same way as BitTorrent works. This provides incredible opportunities for scaling (as more peers join the network, everyone benefits from ‘the network effect’) and, equally as importantly, the opportunity to re-define how the applications that run on the network are designed to work; it solves the entire “net neutrality” issue completely. Holo, and the people behind it, have designed the Holo network to work in a more “user centric” way than the way the web works today.

The Holo ICO is a very HOT topic. Art Brock, one of the founders of the project, has written about building responsible crypto currencies and agrees that

Cryptocurrencies do not have to be gambling tokens created from nothing. They can be responsibly connected to assets, promises, or real-world value. They don’t have to re-create all the speculative money problems that they were supposed to be solving.

Currencies can be optimised to be a useful means of exchange, or a useful store of value, but rarely work well when trying to be both at the same time. “Holo fuel” (also known as HOT, or Holo Tokens) are designed to provide a medium of exchange on the Holo network. Their ICO requires users to buy HOT with ETH (another crypto currency).

Given that buying in to the Holo ICO with ETH will be at a specific price, we were keen to understand how the value of HOT has been calculated, how it hopes to avoid being linked in value to ETH and other crypto currency prices in the future, and how HOT will avoid suffering from speculation? We put the question to Jean Russell, project lead for the Holo ICO, who answered as follows:

HOT is set as 10k x ETH for the launch. But that is just the initial set. Once the network starts, then 1 HOT = 1 Holo fuel. And Holo fuel is about the value of hosting in Holo.

Surely there will arise an exchange that will convert ETH to Holo fuel, so they will be relational in some way. However, even if the Ethereum system collapses, Holo can continue and the value should not be negatively impacted. We believe that we will be much more than 10,000x faster/cheaper than Ethereum (mostly because that system in some ways was designed to be difficult and slow as part of the security). Our system is designed for scalability and resilience (DHT) so it should get better as it scales. Anti-fragile in fact.

The initial price (and the practical network value the community gives it) will be a gap that speculators can guess at. Thereafter though, it should remain fairly stable as it is really about the asset and the value of that asset in the marketplace.

I can’t give the deep philosophical explanation that Art can, but what I hear from him is that mutual credit along with asset-backing pretty much assures that it can’t be a gambling game of high stakes. Those who invest early when there is high risk of the platform getting off the ground will gain some benefit, yes. But then it should achieve a meta-stable state.

We have high hopes for Holo. With Holochain offering a viable alternative to blockchain it should, naturally, benefit from “second mover advantage” by learning a lot of lessons from its predecessor. The way it has been designed from a holographic, and sociocratic perspective seems to fit the requirements of a co-operative economy which distributes ownership and governance to the lowest possible levels.

If their ICO, which they are calling an “Initial Community Offering“, goes well it will be very interesting to see how this first major alternative to the blockchain based systems develops.

Launching a Co-op Coin?

If Holo is successful and a vibrant peer to peer community emerges, perhaps the Holo Network would be the place to launch a dedicated co-op coin? Much of the hard work, in terms of underlying infrastructure, will have been done so a launching a co-op coin on holo should not be as hard as starting from scratch. The main issues would be achieving agreement between a sufficient number of stakeholders about a co-op coins parameters, mainly it’s issuance and the management of supply and demand.

It seems to make sense that a co-op coin could only ever be spent at co-ops, thereby facilitating Principle 6 (co-operation between co-ops) by giving co-ops a specific currency in which to trade. Mutual credit also seems to provide a sensible means of managing supply and demand.

One idea for co-op currency creation could be to issue a set amount of Co-op Coins each month or year, to every member of every co-op that registers with the coin issuer. This would mean the coins are created and distributed as far and wide as possible, and provide a basic “co-op citizen’s income” whilst, at the same time, it would create a global directory of co-op members – something which would massively benefit the co-op economy.

Another, additional, idea to create co-op coins would be to issue an amount of co-op coins (again, to every member of every co-op that registers with the coin issuer) which have to be ‘spent’ into existence. If these coins could only be allocated to commons-building and co-op projects the Co-op Coin would incentivise the growth of co-ops and the commons. And once Co-op Coins have been “earned” in this way, the workers who completed the projects’ tasks would be able to spend the coins in any co-op, breathing further life into the co-op economy.

There are probably other, better ways to issue Co-op Coins and we’d be interested in your thoughts.

How should we enable the creation and distribution of new currency within the co-op economy?

Avoiding the speculation issue seems the hardest nut to crack. Even if there is no way to “cash out” a Co-op Coin via a currency exchange hungry co-operators might still look to exploit discounts on goods they could buy with co-op coins and sell elsewhere in traditional currencies. The only sure-fire way to avoid speculation seems to be for an economy to be ubiquitous and all encompassing, by providing everything a person needs and a method of transacting that is more efficient than all other options. Designing complimentary currencies, which satisfy the different needs to provide a “store of value” and a “medium of exchange” which work together in efficient symbiosis also seems essential for a sustainable economy.

With the right design it seems clear that a well managed ICO for a Co-op Coin could provide incredible funding opportunities for the co-operative economy. Imagine if the surplus of every co-op was converted into Co-op Coins and allocated to co-op building and commons-creation projects… Together we could create an alternative economic model to the extractive version that exists today; a clear path to a more co-operative world. Ignoring the possibilities of crypto currencies is no longer an option for anyone with an interest in a better future.

Photo by mulberrymint

Originally published in The Open Coop

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