We are convening one hundred fifty speakers from over thirty countries to meet each other, co-design, and learn about a wide range of topics: 

• worker power in the platform economy,
• antitrust,
• misogyny and racism in co-ops,
• ecological sustainability,
• best practices for cooperation including the allocation of startup funding,
• the potential of platform co-ops for data trusts,
• data co-ops,
• new models for distributed governance,
• and data sovereignty.

Highlights include Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All in conversation with Wilma Liebman, former chair of the NLRB.

Policy facilitators 

Kirsten Gillibrand, United States Senator; John Martin McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (opposition Finance Minister) of the Labour Party, UK; Dieter Janecek, member of the German Bundestag;  New York Assemblymember Ron Kim,

Platform co-op founders

Mensakas, Equal Care Co-op, Up&Go, Salus Coop, Fairbnb, Smart, 

Fairmondo, NeedsMap, Stocksy United, Cataki, Cotabo, Resonate, Core Staffing Cooperative, 

Scholars 

Juliet Schor, Mark Graham, Joseph Blasi, Jack Qiu, Gar Alperovitz, Sandeep Vaheesan, Koray Caliskan, Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, 

platform co-op incubators and other organizations providing infrastructure support

Start.coop, Unfound, Sharetribe, IDRC

Tech co-ops 

Sassafras, CoLab, Startin’blox, Cooper Systems

Allied community groups 

Sixth Street Youth Program, Techo, Peer to Peer Foundation, Young Farmers of America, Data 4 Black Lives, The New School Hip Hop Collective, The Fairwork Foundation

Union and co-op leaders

United States, Japan, Indonesia, France, Sweden, and India.

Coming to us from Zambia, Hip Hop artist PilAto, a.k.a Zambia’s Voice of Inequality, will perform a remake of Childish Gambino’s This Is America. The New School Hip Hop Collective will stage a night of Liberation. Prof. Daniel Blake and his Music for Political Action Fall 2019 course at The New School selected and researched the history of songs that relate to our event. You’ll hear them in the breaks. Stefania de Kenessey and vocalists Lisa Daehlin (soprano) and Waundell Saavedra (bass) will perform their live rendition of the platform co-op anthem! 

Lastly, the artist Gabo Camnitzer will stage a children’s strike with Sixth Street Youth Project, and a film screening with Astra Taylor (in person). 

Convened by

Trebor Scholz with support from Michael McHugh

REGISTER NOW

Lead image: spinning lights by aaronisnotcool 

The post Who Owns The World? The 5th conference on Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Toward what? Most of us probably aren’t sure. But the people involved in a Wellington, New Zealand-based network called Enspiral have done more than just about anyone to figure out — to figure out where we’d want the future of work to be headed if the better angels of our nature were in charge. I’ve had the chance to visit them (and lived to tell the tale for Vice). Now, a trip down to Wellington, although I absolutely recommend it, is a little less necessary. The Enspiralites have created a book, Better Work Together, which chronicles in conversational stories and pictures their attempts to create a kind of community worth working toward.

Enspiral is fairly small, as organizations go — a few hundred active participants, a modest budget. Rather, it’s lean. Most of the Enspiralites’ businesses exist outside the organization, but attached to it, allowing Enspiral itself to take risks, learn lessons, and reinvent itself when necessary. It’s a community of early adopters. They offer themselves as beta-testers for a suite of collaboration software they’ve co-produced, such as Loomio and Cobudget. They relentlessly explore challenging governance frameworks like sociocracy and teal. They even funded the book’s production through a new blockchain-enabled platform called DAOstack (which still crashes my browser when I try to use it). These are not ordinary workers; they’re people with the passion, the patience, in many cases the privilege, and the fault-tolerance to repeatedly try stuff that may or may not work.

In the book, you’ll see why. There is a generosity and pleasure and even a spirituality in how they talk about their efforts that makes it all seem less like, well, work. There are typos, but these pale in comparison to the challenges we collectively face. The upshot is not a final theory or doctrine or destination, but a mode of working toward it, of declining to accept disguised versions of feudalism as good enough. Order it, digitally or physically, here.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website and on Medium.

The post Become better together with Enspiral appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

This video has been reposted from the HBO youtube channel.

The post The Future of Work – Jobs and Automation in Estonia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

The post Just another Cyber Monday: Amazing Amazon and the best deal ever appeared first on P2P Foundation.

GT’s model is an extensive overhaul of an orphaned open source governance protocol ^[1], which we have been substantially overhauled to better fit our needs. The adapted model explicitly incorporates the key practices of Open Cooperativism (a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the social tradition of the cooperative movement), Contributive Accounting (a form of accounting where contributions to a shared project are logged to ensure fair distributions of income and livelihoods) and, uniquely in this space, feminist economics and care work as essential elements ^[2].

After years of discussing the model, we decided to collectively reimagine it by convening a group of experts on decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, peer governance, distributed tech and mutualized finance. We called this process “Guerrilla Translation Reloaded“, which culminated in a new version of the model: The Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance and Economic Model (currently at version 2.0)

The full model can be read in the link above, but this article takes a narrative approach to answer two very simple questions: what is the model’s logic, and how does it work?

The best way to understand it may seem counterintuitive at first. If Guerrilla Translation is a co-op, think of the co-op members as shareholders. Okay, like in an evil corporation, but bear with us. Each member is an owner, holding different types of shares in the collective. These correspond to tracked “pro bono” (commons-oriented voluntary work chosen by the translators) and “livelihood” (paid) work, as well as reproductive or care work. Shares in these three types of work determine how much is paid on a monthly basis. Where does the money to pay shares come from, and how are they paid? From the productive work performed by the worker-owners — in GT’s case, that work is written and simultaneous translation, copyediting, subtitling, and related services. We will explain the “how” below.

In short, the more effort and care put into the collective, the larger the share. This is not a competitive, game-theory influenced scheme; it’s a solidarity based strategy for economic resistance that allows all members to contribute according to their capacity. All members create value; part of this value is processed through a market interface (the agency) and is converted into monetary value, which is then pooled and distributed to benefit all value streams. We call this value sovereignty. And, although the default decision making protocol is virtually identical to a traditional coop’s “one member, one vote” principle, your shares can influence decision making in critical situations, such as blocked proposal.

How is this type of share-holding a contrast to that found in a corporation? Let’s break down the differences. While shareholders in a corporation accrue power through money, in our model, power is treated differently. The descriptions are power-to and power-with, accrued via productive and reproductive work taken for the health of the collective and the Commons. A corporation (or a start-up, or any capitalist business) employs wage labor to produce profit-maximizing commodities though privately owned and managed productive infrastructures. By contrast, in an Open Coop, we work together for social and environmental purposes while also creating commons and building community, locally and/or globally. The model allows us to turn our talents to worthwhile, not dead-end, causes. This is how we are practicing economic resistance.

The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: How does it work?

We have established that Guerrilla Translators perform two types of productive work: pro-bono and paid (more about reproductive or care work later). If we take written translation as an example, both types are essentially identical. They are performed by the same team, using the same methods, working collectively, and sharing both the work and the eventual rewards. So, what are the differences?

Pro-bono translations are the ones we choose to do ourselves, based on our enthusiasm for the original material and well aligned with our values. This doesn’t make us unpaid volunteers, though. It all boils down to the way we choose to distribute value. To us, a pro-bono or a paid translation has the same value – literally. We assign a (cost) value for all work we do, whether it’s a self-selected pro-bono piece for publication on our blog, or work contracted by a client. Our model of income distribution diverts a portion of every paid/contracted job towards fulfilling the value of the pro-bono work shares accrued by our members. This has several functions. First, it allows all members of the collective to gain an amount of income from their productive work, whether it was pro-bono or paid. Second, collective members are not put into competition among themselves for paid work, nor for the “best” paid work (based on the per-word rate). All work is valued internally at the same rate, regardless of the external prices which are variable.

We have several pricing tiers for our clients. Metaphorically, there’s a pay-it-forward spirit involved here on the client side, but it’s more like pay-it-backward-and-forward internally in the collective. Clients with the greatest financial means who are aligned with our principles and wish to provide support for our knowledge commons are offered the top tier rate – this is still quite competitive, in fact at the lower end of typical translation pricing. There will be a penny or two per word that these clients are directly donating to our pro-bono shares and also towards any contract jobs we accept for clients with minimal or bare-bones budgets (including small co-ops, activist collectives, non-VC startups, and others). This sliding scale helps us nurture relationships and help support collectives and initiatives with the least financial means so it is fair for everyone.

The soft stuff is the hard stuff: the importance of a care work

So far, we have mainly spoken about productive, tangible work: translations, editing, formatting. These tasks are mostly word-based and therefore, easy to quantify and assign credits. But what about everything that leads, directly or indirectly, to paid work? Searching for clients, project management, quality control, relationship and trust building, etc. – all the invisible work that goes into keeping afloat? This is reproductive work, or care work.

In GT. we distinguish between two types of care work: that for the health of the collective, and that for the living beings within.

When talking about caring for the health of the collective, we conceive it as a living entity or system, even a commons. The emergent values of this system are encoded in the governance model and embodied by the collective’s practices and legal-technical structures ^[3]. To maintain a healthy collective we choose to honour our collective agreements, maintain our communication rhythms, and distribute the care work needed to make the collective thrive. Other ways to care for the health of the collective include coop and business development, seeking and attending to clients, making sure our financials are up to date and everything is paid, maintaining active relationships with authors, publishers, following through on our commitments… everything that you’d consider as “admin” work in a traditional agency or co-op, and on top of that, everything else that’s easily forgotten if you’re not doing it yourself. It’s literally invisible work to those who don’t acknowledge it, and work that many feel unjustifiably obligated to take on.

The difference is that in Guerrilla Translation, these activities aren’t assigned to set roles. Instead, all “caring for the health of the collective” aka care work items are modular, easily visualized, and can be picked up by any collective member. In fact, those members may belong to one or more work circles, which steward certain areas, such as community, sustainability, networking, training, tech, etc.

Additionally, when we speak about care work for the living beings who make the collective, we refer to the individual Guerrilla Translators who mutually build trust and intimacy to care for and support each other. Our cooperative practices should never be solely dependent on technology or protocols, including the governance model. These are only tools to facilitate and strengthen our collaborative culture.

We believe that cooperative cohesion is primarily based on healthy, consent-based heterarchical relationships. To foster these we have committed to certain regular practices, such as mentoring — where we practice and document peer learning in the collective’s tools and practices — and mutual support — where we look after each other and care for our mutual well-being, attuned to everyone’s moods, needs and larger realities beyond the collective.

Every member, whether in training or longstanding, is supported by a specific person who has their back. Every member has someone else’s back. Supported members have a safe space to express themselves to be cared for and heard within the collective. In this relationship, they may also be reminded of their commitments, etc. Conflict resolution is handled through the mutual support system, ensuring the distribution of personal care work. This has been a very basic overview of the model’s structural (credits and shares) and cultural (care work) qualities. If it raises more questions than it answers, or if you’re simply curious, you can read the full model. In the following sections, we will visualize the ways in which the model can work.

What this looks like in practice

Meet “Jill”, a Guerrilla Translator. Today she’s got a little bit of a time and has chosen an article to be translated. Maybe she proposed it, or maybe she picked it up from an existing list of material waiting to be translated. She contacts the author to let her know that GT would like to translate and publish the article, and asks for any required permission if necessary, etc.

This describes a pro-bono translation. Jill will work alongside “María”, a copyeditor, and “Deb”, who’ll take care of the web formatting and social media promotion of the article.

The article is 1000 words long. This wordcount is processed through GT’s internal credits protocol, with this pro-bono translation valued at 0,16 credits per word. Once completed, 160 Love credits will be created. This is how they are split:

• 80 for the translation (Jill)
• 40 for the copyediting/proofreading (María)
• 10 for pre production (Jill, as she chose the article and contacted the author)
• 20 for formatting (Deb)
• 10 for post production (Deb, as she will be promoting the translation doing social media, etc) ^[4]

Let’s imagine that this is the first time that Jill, Maria and Deb have done a pro-bono project for GT. Once the project is accounted for, their respective pro-bono shares will look like this:

• Jill has accrued 90 Love Credits
• María has accrued 40 Love Credits
• Deb has accrued 30 Love Credits

A week passes, and an author or client wants to contract GT to translate an article. This is called livelihood work. The material is chosen by the client (obviously), and the deadline negotiated with the collective. Coincidentally, the text to be translated is also 1000 words long (amazing how our examples are identical!). GT’s agency side uses a sliding scale for prices. This client is a small, open source-oriented NGO, so the price is quoted at 0,12 € per word. The team will be Jill as the translator and María as the editor. Note that unlike the pro-bono translation above, there is no web formatting to be done. Once the translation is completed, the client owes GT 120 €, but this money will not be paid directly to Jill and María as income. This money will be held until the end of the month in a digital trust dedicated to maintaining health of the collective. Meanwhile, once the translation is complete and sent to the client, Jill and Maria will have accrued the following Livelihood Credits:

• Jill has accrued 80 Livelihood Credits
• María has accrued 40 Livelihood Credits

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that these are the only pro bono and agency translations undertaken in the history of the collective. Now it’s getting toward the end of the month and the Guerilla Translators are ready to distribute! There are exactly 120 euros in the bank account ^[5]. This is how they will be distributed:

• 75% of the funds will fulfill Livelihood credit shares
• 25% will fulfill Pro-bono credit shares

These percentages have been chosen to balance the time needed for paid work while not forgetting to set aside some time for the vital pro-bono side. Now, we will divest those 120 € within the trust and into two “streams”:

• The Livelihood Stream receives a total of 90,00 €
• The Love Stream receives a total of 30,00 €

This is now divided among the member’s shares in the following way:

Livelihood Stream: Jill holds 67% of the “shares” (80 credits of 120 total), while María has 33% (40 credits of a 120 total). So out of 88,80 € allocated for the Livelihood Stream, Jill will receive 60,30 €. María receives 29,70 €.

Love Stream: Jill holds 56% of the shares (90 credits of 160 total). María has 25% (40 out of 160) and Deb has 19% (30 out of 160). So, out of 30 € allocated for the Love Stream, Jill will receive 16,80 €, María 7,50 € and Deb 5,70 €.

Totalled up, this is the money that gets paid to the three active members:

• Jill receives 77,10 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)
• María receives 37,20 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)
• Deb receives 5,70 € (Just Love work, as Deb hasn’t performed any livelihood work this month)

This totals 120 €. Magic!

One example among many

This is one situation. During another month, María may have done much more editing work, which takes less time than translation. Deb may have done more care work (more on that later) in both the Love and Livelihood streams. New people may have come in, maybe there’s been a windfall! The model can account for all these and other possibilities while also being dynamic in changing circumstances. It’s a “Team Human” model where the technology is kept flexible, and updates to serve the qualitative experiences of the collective, not just the measurable ones.

The secret life of Livelihood, Love and the ways of measuring credits

As you may have noticed, if 1 love credit equals 1 euro, in the example above we’ve only paid down 30 Love credits (25% of distributed funds) in euros. As 160 Love credits were created with the pro-bono translation, this still leaves 130 which haven’t been paid in money.

The credits that have been converted into money and transferred to individual’s accounts are called Divested credits, ie: they’ve been paid down. The unpaid credits are considered Invested credits: active credits that have yet to be paid. If you think about it, on a month by month basis 75% of Love credits will be “invested” rather than divested/paid. In essence, the coop has an ongoing debt with its own pro-bono/Love stream which will be paid back on a rolling basis. ^[6]

The same situation is also applicable to Livelihood credits. As 75% of earned credits are divested, 25% will remain invested. Both types of credits (Love and Livelihood) can be divested or invested. Meanwhile, the sum of both are considered Historical credits.

“Why so many? So confusing!” Yeah okay, but complexity allows for dynamism, nuance and catering for the different life circumstances and preferences of Guerrilla Translators. Reality is complex, and we want this to work in many real situations.

For now, it’s important to make clear that the total amount of historical credits you have accrued reflect your investment in the organization. Whether it’s productive or reproductive work, it all gets tracked: this informs our governance.

While in typical daily situations, all Guerrilla Translators have what amounts to “one member one vote” rights, historical credits come into play when making critical decisions such as blocked discussions, large structural changes to the governance model, and legal structure changes. In these rare yet important situations, votes can be weighed against an individual’s historical credits.

Meanwhile, the invested/divested ratio helps clarify which members are prioritized for Livelihood work. Given that livelihood work gets divested at a 75% higher rate than Love work, we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to perform it, and that incoming work is offered to those with a higher invested ration first. Similarly, when measuring care work the invested/divested ratios helps clarify when individuals may be benefitting monetarily in lieu of caring for the collective (and its members). In these cases, the ratio is used to determine whether to divest less and agree to a renewed commitment to care work.

In essence, care work is measured in hours, not credits, but it is only entrusted to members who have already gone through a 9-month “dating” phase before becoming fully committed members. All care work hours are instantly turned into historical credits. The Governance Model also describes two scenarios for care work hours: one in which these are paid from an seed-funding pool and a second when once the Open Coop is stable, it is entirely demonetised, with members committing to a set amount of hours each month and adjusting accordingly when there are any discrepancies. ^[7]

Why have we chosen this model?

Imagine that María is single mother with two kids to take care of. She wants to do socially useful work, but her material realities don’t allow her that privilege. By working with Guerrilla Translation she a) can perform paid/livelihood work for causes that matter and b) will not “lose” income by doing pro-bono work – ie, translations that would not otherwise get funded, but which should still be translated.

In fact, she could spend most of her time just doing paid/livelihood work, and it would still benefit the pro-bono/love side (and vice versa). The model addresses the possibility of internal competition for “paid work” overshadowing the social/activist mission of the collective. In short, contributing to the Commons also makes your livelihood more resilient. In turn, you make the Commons more resilient by creating new commons and facilitating communications. The same can be said about care work. The more you demonstrate care for the collective, the more resilient and healthy it will be. If any member can’t contribute a similar proportion of care work as the rest, the member will simply have a proportional amount of their credits deducted and will be encouraged to compensate by committing to more care hours.

In summary, the model is designed to find an optimum balance between paid, pro bono and reproductive work, with equity and continued dialogue at the center.

And much, much more

Here we have touched on some of the characteristics of the model. The full version looks at every aspect in detail, including roles and responsibilities, onboarding and mentoring, the legal/technical backdrop, community rhythms, graduated sanctions, payment mechanics, decision making, and much more.

If you are interested in joining or collaborating with Guerrilla Translation, or are researching or writing about new forms of commons-oriented accounting (and accountability!), you are now much better prepared to grasp the model in its entirety:

Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance Model V 2.0

Meanwhile, for easy reference we are providing below a summary of the model’s main featured and a list of the materials that influenced its creation.

Open Coop Governance Model TLDR

In short: Guerrilla Translators undertake both pro-bono and paid translation/editing work. These types of productive work are accounted for in internal credits (1 credit = 1 Euro), creating shares. Net funds held in GT’s account are then distributed on a monthly basis: 75% of these are used to pay down members’ agency (livelihood) shares. The remaining 25% is used to pay for pro bono (love) shares. Reproductive work is tallied in hours and distributed according to each members ratio of benefits vs. contributions.

Below is the protocol for the model’s main characteristics. These can be applied as a bare-bones formula for other commons-oriented service collectives. Hyperlinks direct to specific sections of the full governance model text or to the Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki.

• The Open Coop performs socially-oriented pro-bono and paid work.
• Pro-bono work creates relationships and social capital which (can) lead to paid work.
• Both forms of work are tallied into credits.
• Net earned income is distributed to fulfil members’ shares, allocated as: Paid (75%) and Pro-bono (25%).
• Client prices are on a sliding scale but members’ credits accrued are stable.
• Higher (client) prices lead to surpluses, used to accelerate pro-bono credit payment.
• There are three levels of participation: Casual/unpaid (commons-based peer production); Dating/partly paid (Commons/coop onboarding process); and Committed/paid (Commons and Coop full membership).
• Casual members have no responsibilities and Committed members review their work for inclusion, or not
• Dating members have ongoing responsibilities (pro-bono and care work) during a nine month trial periodbefore mutual decisions are made about becoming Committed. They are peer mentored by the collective and continually evaluated.
• Committed members have ongoing responsibilities (pro-bono and care work), evaluated quarterly. Members unable to maintain these are downgraded from the Coop.
• Care and reproductive work is valued as highly as productive work. “Care” means caring for the health of the collective and also caring for its individual members.
• Care work is valued in time and entrusted selectively by committed members.
• Decision making is made by consent. Committed members’ votes are binding.
• Reproductive care work and productive pro-bono and paid work affect each member’s standing in the coop, as seen in their total credits over time.

Suggested Reading

First is a summary article of our GT Reloaded event, documenting the main discussions and takeaways from the encounter, where we picked apart and reimagined the governance model:

• Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism (article) “The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values.” See also the Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Workshop Report for a more detailed account.

Following is a list of articles, papers, videos on things that have influenced our governance model and general philosophy. They also explore some of the tensions we have tried to reconcile: between metrics and the immeasurable, system design and lived experience, and productive and reproductive work.

• Patterns for Decentralised Governance and why Blockchain Doesn’t Decentralise Power… Unless You Design It To (Video and article) “There is a lot of anticipation for how blockchain and other decentralising technologies are going to drastically reshape society, but do they address power? “If you take a step back from the technology, if you look at the challenges we face in wider society, and you look at the history of social change, if you step back and just consider for a minute: “how can we decentralise power?”, then “build a better database” feels like a pretty weak answer. To me, it seems obvious that some of the most urgent power imbalances fall on gender, race, and class lines.”
• Patterns for Decentralised Organising (e-book) “I’m not so interested in what you’re working on together, I’m just going to focus on how you do it. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to build a better electric vehicle, or develop government policy, or blockade a pipeline; whenever you work with a group of people on a shared objective, there’s some stuff you’re going to deal with, some challenges. How do we decide what we’re working on? who does what? who can join our team? what are our expectations for each other? what happens when someone doesn’t fulfill those expectations? what do we do with disagreement? how do decisions get made?” ^[8]
• The Financialization of Life (article). “Do we want everything in life to be a transaction, as the market totalitarians propose? Or do we want to be citizen-commoners, co-creating shared value in freely associating communities? These differences matter, and Salvatore Iaconesi has written a brilliant analysis of the potential dangers of uncritically applying the blockchain to human life.”
• Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (booklet). “What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. This report explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things — and the political agendas we pursue.”
• There is an alternative: participatory economics (interview) In this interview, Michael Albert — co-founder of Znet — reflects on the vision of participatory economics, and how it could take us beyond capitalism. “For the Occupy movements, and for other projects and movements which are rousing and continuing all around the world, to all together merge into a massive project that is truly oriented to engender a classless, feminist, inter-communalist, participatory future — I think their membership will have to be in command, not some elite at the helm. And I think those memberships will have to know the broad defining attributes of where they are trying to go, so they use tactics and strategies consistent with getting there.”
• From Platform to Open Cooperativism (article) “Two cooperative movements are important in this discussion: Platform Cooperativism, and Open Cooperativism. One may be more publicly visible right now, but they have much in common. These movements marry the power of digital networks with the rich history of the cooperative movement. How do these approaches compare? Are they redundant, complementary, mutually exclusive? What exact problems do they solve, and what outcome do they seek? In this article, we explain their origins and characteristics, and see how the actions proposed by these movements can work together, helping us form resilient livelihoods in our networked age.”
• Why do we need a contribution accounting system? (article) “With the advent of the Internet and the development of new digital technologies, the economy is following a trend of decentralization. The most innovative environments are open source communities and peer production is on the rise. The crowd innovates and produces. But the crowd is organized in loose networks, it is geographically dispersed, and contributions to projects follow a long tail distribution. What are the possible reward mechanisms in this new economy?”
• Blockchain technology : toward a decentralized governance of digital platforms? (academic paper) “In the same way, blockchain technology has enabled the emergence of new projects and initiatives designed around to the principles of decentralization and disintermediation, providing a new platform for large-scale experimentation in the design of new economic and organisational structures. Yet, to be really transformative, these initiatives need to transcend the current models of protocol-based governance and game-theoretical incentives, which can easily be co-opted by powerful actors, and come up with new governance models combining both on-chain and off-chain governance rules. The former can be used to support new mechanisms of regulation by code, novel incentivization schemes and a new sense of ownership over digital assets, whereas the latter are necessary to promote the vision, and facilitate the interaction of commons-based projects and initiatives with the existing legal and societal framework.”
• Holo: The evolution of cloud computing (article) “This is an attempt to communicate Holo in simple, clear language (with a bit of playfulness to keep it entertaining)” and A Futurist’s View on Holochain, The Evolution Of Blockchain, (video). An easy to understand video walk-through on Holo’s architecture and potential.
• Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be (article). “Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left —anarchism, mobility, and cooperation— even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups — applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.”

Footnotes

The post The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: an Overview appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the heart of our supply partner chain is a sewers cooperative from Croatia. With a fixed percentage of our net sales we support garment workers in South Asia in their fights for better working and living conditions. This way, we want to create a positive impact for both workers in the alternative and in the mainstream economy.[1]

After two successful crowdfunding campaigns[2] and almost three years of business experience, we are now planning to take the next step by developing an innovative web platform which ultimately shall be collectively owned and governed by every party involved in the value chain; from the producers of the raw material all the way to the people who buy the clothes.

From platform capitalism to platform cooperativism

Never was it more obvious than today that capitalism fails to deliver on its promise of benefiting the many and not just the few. By grabbing after the internet, capitalism has given birth to business platforms that increase inequality, undermine democracy and lead to monopolies. The likes of Airbnb, Uber, Amazon and facebook are transforming our workplaces, relationships and societies and we have virtually no control over them. While nearly all aspects of our lives are being shifted online, a new and fairer model for the digital economy is needed. A promising model in that regard is co-ownership, transparency and democratic governance as promoted by an emerging number of so-called platform cooperatives. Contrary to venture capital funded platforms and their systemic flaw having to excessively extract and maximize value only for their shareholders, platform coops seek ways of including everybody who is affected by the platform’s activities in the equation.[3]

Applying the platform coop model to the buyer driven and undemocratic garment industry

How the industry works

Global fashion online sales are expected to grow massively from €415 billion in 2018 to €615 billion in 2022.[4] Approximately 75 million people are employed in the textile, clothing and footwear sector worldwide. Most of them are women. The industry is buyer driven which means that corporate giants such as H&M, Inditex, Primark or Kik usually do not own any of the factories they produce with, yet they basically control them. Their buying power lets them dictate where to produce, what to produce and at what prices. This, together with the rise of fast fashion, a business practice where the brands change their collections in very short time frames, puts enormous pressure on farmers, factory owners and workers. Supply chain transparency is another big issue.

Ways to gain power for workers

One way for workers to turn their often poor labour conditions into good or at least better conditions, has always been by organizing in independent labour unions and subsequently force the employers to negotiate collective agreements. However, this is easier said than done because anti-union practices are widespread in the global garment industry. Even though fundamental rights to join a union and bargain collectively are guaranteed in the big brands’ code of conducts and through various certification schemes, reality on the ground often looks very different.[5] Hence, the percentage of unionised garment workers in today’s main producing countries is very low.

Another way for workers to gain collective power and a higher level of self-determination is by organizing into worker cooperatives. Here, the workers collectively share the ownership of their workplace. Consequently, their work benefits themselves and their local communities rather than just filling the pockets of external shareholders, bosses or factory owners. However, there are currently just very few garment factories operating as a worker cooperative. In the first step of the value chain though, there is already a considerable amount of smallholder cotton farmers who are organized in cooperatives, primarily because together it is easier for them to sell their product and it also allows them to reach a higher price.[6]

Revolutionizing our garment value chain by becoming a platform coop

As of today, our immediate supply chain consists of three main partners. We buy 100 percent organic cotton for our fabric via Fair&Organic from India. The Social Cooperative Humana Nova receives these fabrics and sews them into t-shirts. Printex finishes these shirts with screen prints using water based eco-colours. Counting in the employees of the small manufacturers Fair&Organic works with, the combined number of people working for these three partners is likely to be around 50 to 60. It is safe to say that at least half of them in one way or another work for us during the realisation of a certain project. We should of course not forget all the additional people involved in logistics and transportation as well as in the raw material production. The products offered on our platform/website are only possible through the combined efforts of farmers, mill workers, fabric cutters, patternmakers, sewers, truck drivers, just to scratch the surface.

Now, imagine if all these hard working people were to become co-owners of the dna merch platform.

The co-ownership model would not only allow them to raise their voices concerning issues that affect them (e.g. delivery times, labour costs/wages and working hours), it would also make them eligible to a share of the surplus revenues generated by the platform.

And now try to imagine if all the other people in the value chain will become co-owners as well, those who will be using the platform to buy t-shirts and other garments either for their own use or to source and retail. If implemented properly in a truly inclusive way, this will lead to a fully democratised value chain in which both consumers and producers are empowered likewise. The technology for them to finally meet on eye-level and practice solidarity through direct interaction and trade is available. With the dna merch platform we want to put it in practice.

But why would it be so empowering to facilitate that sort of direct interaction between consumers and workers/producers? Two popular beliefs in today’s mainstream sustainability debate are that a) consumers have the power to make globalization fair and sustainable by shopping ethically and consciously, and b) that companies, to build trust in consumers, should certify their supply chains and guarantee universal standards through the means of independent audits.

While there is absolutely no doubt that our day-to-day shopping decisions matter and can drive companies to adjust and change their policies in a progressive way, it is way too easy to put all the responsibility in the end consumer’s pocket. We think it is hardly possible to always filter all products according to their social and ecological footprint and always make a conscious and ethical decision without going crazy, especially when the majority of products are known to be produced under poor conditions. What’s most important though, is that an approach which solely relies on the consumer power tends to treat workers in the global south as passive subjects who depend on our goodwill and help. Hence, it hinders us from seeing them as people just like us and makes it harder to create relations on eye level.

Audits are problematic, too. The vast majority of them has proven to be merely a paperwork exercise and does not lead to sustainable improvements of working conditions. A study from 2016 titled “Ethical Audits and the Supply Chains of Global Corporations” concludes that audits “are ineffective tools for detecting, reporting, or correcting environmental and labour problems in supply chains [and] they reinforce existing business models and preserve the global production status quo.” As with the consumer power argument, the biggest problem with audits is the passive position that the workers are put in.

We believe that it is the people themselves who know best what needs to be improved at their workplace or their favourite product. So, equipping people with the right tools to connect directly with each other, and putting them in a position where they no longer depend on powerful and manipulating intermediaries like most of today’s corporations are, they will figure out ways that benefit all those involved. With the dna merch platform coop we are determined to set out and prove it.

Lean proof of concept: Focussing on our status-quo

With our platform we want to address three dominant problems of the garment industry, i.e. lack of fairness and democracy, non-transparent prices and supply chains that hinder buyers from making informed decisions, and the fact that there is currently no easy way for workers and consumers to directly connect with each other.

To get things going we will make use of what we already have, a transparent supply chain for t-shirts with a self-organised sewers cooperative at the core, our existing website with a lot of transparent information and a network of customers comprising of trade unions, music bands, retail shops and crowdfunding supporters. We have various functionalities planned for the platform and will add and test them step by step along the way. First, we will add options to start one’s own crowdfunding campaigns and group orders. The idea is to make it possible for bands, organizations and individuals to initiate t-shirt pre-order campaigns to collectively pre-finance the production costs. If wished, users can add a margin on top of the costs to raise money via a public campaign.

Over time, we want to extend the product portfolio and offer not just customized printing on standardized garments but also enable e.g. young fashion designers to realize their first collection through the platform.

In terms of our organizational restructuring process from a German civil law partnership towards a platform coop with a legal structure yet to define, we aim to have an established organisation by mid of 2019 with at least 5 co-owners each from our producer part and the consumer/retailer part of our value chain (e.g. 3 workers from the sewers cooperative, 2 from the print shop, 1 band, 2 crowdfunding supporters, 1 fashion designer, 1 graphic designer)

Our biggest challenges and questions

1.       How exactly could a membership and governance structure look like in practice?
2.       How can we convince our stakeholders to embrace the undertaking of becoming a platform coop?
3.       What are the arguments and incentives that are valid for everybody?
4.       Which ones differ between the various actors?
5.       How will we ensure real participation of the coop members?
6.       Which tools and forms of communication will we need?
7.       How exactly will the business model look like?
8.       Transaction fees, membership fees …
9.       Coop shares
10.       Sales of own collections
11.       Consulting services for onboarding further producer partners
12.       Commission fees for fashion designers who win contracts through the platform from other users?
13.       How exactly can we make use of the Blockchain technology and other recent inventions that foster decentralisation?
14.       Which tools are readily available that we can make use of?
15.       Which impact on membership will the power imbalance in our supply chain most likely have, e.g. the fact that other than the     sewers cooperative all other partners are conventionally structured businesses?
16.       Should co-ownership of the platform become a prerequisite for being able to access all services and functionalities of the platform?

Call to action

We need and want more people to get involved in this!

Please get in touch by briefly mentioning what aspect interests you the most and where your expertise lies. We definitely need people with a technical background, people with experience working in coops, people with knowledge of the garment industry, social media and marketing experts, organizational theorists and probably a lot more that we cannot think of right now : )

Also, please feel free to reach out if you just want to comment on the idea as such or on one of the questions and challenges mentioned above or if you would like to add another one.

We are grateful for every input and consideration that you share with us!

You can best reach us via email or you can directly comment on the document here.

Doreen & Anton

[1]

[2] See https://www.startnext.com/dnamerch and https://www.startnext.com/dna-merch-vol-2

[3] For more info visit https://platform.coop

[4] See https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/ecommerce-fashion-industry

[5] See e.g. http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Global-Brief-1-Ethical-Audits-and-the-Supply-Chains-of-Global-Corporations.pdf

[6] See e.g. https://www.ica.coop/en/media/news/small-scale-farmers-achieve-a-26-higher-share-of-consumer-price-when-organized-in

The post dna merch: A Platform Co-op in the Making appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

The post Holochain – the perfect framework for decentralised cooperation at scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview we caught up with Felix Weth, founder of Fairmondo. Fairmondo, a co-operative social business, is a fair mass marketplace that aims to fight corruption and give power back to the consumer and crowd. 

Felix Weth talks about Fairmondo, whom we recently profiled in our Commons Transition Primer. This interview was originally published by TBD.

What was your motivation for founding Fairmondo?

There were two main motivations for founding Fairmondo, both probably not what you might expect. First, I had been thinking for long time about how we can really address the problem of corruption. After giving it much thought, I realized we will have to change the way our economy works. So why not try by creating an enterprise that works differently, and at the same time, raises funds for anti-corruption activists.

Secondly, I was travelling through African countries in 2011 and realised that everywhere the Internet was spreading quickly, yet the notorious online monopolies from the US, Europe, and Asia had not yet fully grabbed these markets. To me it appeared that there is still a chance to keep these markets locally owned. So I thought, why not try to start a global network of user-owned companies that will face the financial power of the large online multinationals through the power of the crowd. Here we have a true common interest of the “normal people” from “North and South”.

Fairmondo used to be Fairnoply, why the switch? What’s different now?

We had legal issues with the name Fairnopoly. But also, it did not really fit to the next step we wanted to take: Making our marketplace more mainstream and developing it into a mass-marketplace – just with a fair, crowd-owned business behind it. There is still a long way to go, but with Fairmondo we widened the target group from the proactive “changers” towards conscious online-shoppers.

Over 1,900 people are currently part of the Fairmondo co-op – can you explain how it works and what the benefit of this model is? Is there any downside?

In short, our coop allows any user to become an owner and make sure that we live up to our principles. One important aspect is that no one can buy larger shares – Fairmondo is not designed to make anybody rich, but to benefit society. We also have defined a maximum salary range. The highest salary can be at max three times the lowest. These measures are designed to ensure that even if Fairmondo grows big and starts generating massive revenues, it will never be interesting for people whose goal in life is making the most money possible.

One downside is that we have a special challenge in raising sufficient scaling capital (which would normally be several million Euros for a project like ours). It is not impossible, it just requires convincing a lot of people. In some moments, we have done quite well in convincing the crowd that we need to push together to create something big. At other points it got much more difficult, in particular when things took much longer than we had expected.

This poses quite a significant challenge, you need sufficient funds to create a product that fascinates the crowd and you need a reasonably convinced crowd to raise these funds. However I think we are on the right track, thanks to the enormous support of many people and in particular, the enormous efforts invested by our team and external volunteers.

How do you measure your social impact?

By the size of the market share that we have taken over from Amazon & co. Thus so far not a whole lot…

But we have achieved other positive impact, for example by spreading our model. There are four more coops 2.0 now, and we continue consulting other young startups who pick up the coop-model, despite its still dusty reputation in Germany. (While being the most progressive legal structures our society has yet developed).

And in 2014 we did our first balance of common goods “Gemeinwohlbilanz”, a tool to measure the social impact of any business though a variety of indicators.

How are you financed and how do you plan to finance yourselves long-term?

We are financed through the shares of our 1900+ members plus some private loans by our members. More than half of the shares we raised through crowdinvesting campaigns.

Of course, on the long-term Fairmondo needs to sustain itself fully through its business. To achieve that more quickly, we have just launched a new product, a system of monthly subscriptions to baskets of fair and sustainable goods. Behind the baskets are a strategy that involve local shops and transport by cargo-bikes, if you’re interested in learning more, you can check it out here.

You’ve earned substantial sums through your crowdfunding campaigns, how do you motivate people to support you?

We asked our members, and by far the most important motivation for them is our vision: To create a fair, democratic large-scale enterprise that becomes a true alternative to the currently dominating online-marketplaces.

I think it also helps that we try to be as transparent as possible, including talking about our mistakes.

Every endeavor has its ups and downs, was there ever a low point and if so, how did you overcome it?

Oh yes, we had ups and downs and many more will come! A low point was at the end of 2013, when we had just launched our second big crowd funding campaign to finance the next year. The problem was not so much that we had run out of money or that our trademark was challenged. It was rather a collective low in the motivation and energy of the team. Which then had negative effects on all other issues, in particular our campaign. We had worked unpaid before and we had taken absurd challenges before, but you need some inner strength for doing that.

The whole of last year we worked on an extremely tight budget and finally had to radically cut paying ourselves again. Some people left, but with the remaining team we have a much better spirit than in the last crisis. This makes me optimistic that we will eventually succeed.

What are three learnings you would share with other social entrepreneurs?

First: Don’t overwork yourself. If you get into that situation, it comes at the expense of the strategic overview. And that weakens every aspect of your project.

Second: Have the courage to delegate and let people help you. But never forget that you are still responsible for the things you delegated and for making sure they work in the end.

Third: Carefully reflect on the expectations you create. Not what you actually say, but what others understand. Managing expectations once they are there (even if you never promised them) is much harder than (unintentionally) creating them.

The post The New Cooperatives: the case of Fairmondo appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Since 2015 Outlandish have spent £192,450 in Cobudget across 34 buckets.

Kate Beecroft interviews Brian Spurding, from the web services coop Outlandish about their use of Cobudget. Originally published in Greater than/finance. 

A web services consultancy based in London, Outlandish is a worker owned cooperative.

They use Cobudget to democratically distribute dividends to all cooperative members as a way to invest in new projects they care about, for example new tech products, social impact projects that need software, match funding of international initiatives.

We talked to Outlander Brian Spurling about how they have been using Cobudget.

How does Cobudgeting work at Outlandish?

At Outlandish the Cobudget process works like this: every quarter, the surplus is distributed proportionally according to the hours that people have spent working for Outlandish. This money goes to everyone’s Cobudget accounts. From there, these funds can be allocated to different ‘buckets’ — buckets are projects that people from Outlandish have proposed.

Anyone who is either a member of the cooperative or close collaborator — called ‘Outlanders‘ — can create proposals for projects to be funded.

Mandatory information for these proposals is the description of the project goals, as well as the people who will be working on the project and the estimated time and money needed for the work. The projects should all in some way or another serve Outlandish’s mission and theyshould not be core expenses or costs of the business.

What have been some of your most funded projects?

Featured amongst the funded projects have been a prototype for the site schoolcuts.org.uk. This site features an interactive infographic to show how your local schools are being de-funded. It turned from a successful Cobudget project into a commercial project in cooperation with the National Union of Teachers and won silver at the digital impact awards 2017.

Another big investment by Outlandish has been Daugher of Social Monitor, a project to develop an existing system into a product offering. With no sales opportunities in the pipeline, this is a great example of how Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.

“Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.” — Brian Spurling

One of our favourite clients (a research organisation fighting corruption in Papua New Guinea) brought us a great project idea. We identified some additional tech we could build — stuff that would be good for them and interesting for us — so we match-funded their budget (£32, 250). This was a huge success.

Screenshot of one of the projects Outlandish funded on Cobudget

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What has changed since you started using Cobudget to spend your surplus?

Before Cobudget, it was easy to spend small amounts of surplus (<£5,000), because an individual member could sign this off themselves. But it was hard to do anything bigger than that because there was no defined framework on how to make those decisions.

“The way Outlandish makes decisions about our surplus has changed dramatically. Pre-Cobudget, there was a lack of transparency and the authority to spend the surplus was limited to the co-ops members.” — Brian Spurling

This could have been defined without using Cobudget, of course. But with Cobudget, not only is the spending of the surplus now transparent, but anybody working at Outlandish can propose projects, and funds can be distributed directly to individuals. It is the combination of these three elements that make it so transformative for how we manage our surplus.

Thanks for reading!

If you would like to learn more about the tool Cobudget, read more here.

For further resources and use cases, check out our Guide to Collaborative Finance.

The post Investing surplus for impact: Cobudgeting at Outlandish appeared first on P2P Foundation.