All the powers of the old-world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal States and dictators, banks and FANG, regulators and speculators.

Where is the State that hasn’t attempted to muzzle freedom of communication and information, or to expand surveillance of its own citizens? Which major online service hasn’t monetized their users’ data without their knowledge or closed user accounts without possible recourse? Which banker hasn’t publicly opposed the right of everyone to have personal and absolute ownership of one’s assets through cryptocurrencies?

Two things result from this fact:

1- Peer-to-peer is already acknowledged by all world powers to itself be a power.

2- It is high time that peer-to-peer supporters should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies; that they counter oppressive forces with their diverse and energetic initiatives. To this end, peer-to-peer contributors will assemble in Paris from the 8th to the 12th of January 2020 at the Paris P2P Festival, the first event dedicated to all forms of free interplay between peers: technical, political, cultural, social, and economic.

If we indulge in allusion to a much more famous Manifesto, it is because we believe that p2p technology projects (Bitcoin, blockchains and Web3, distributed Web and Solid, self-sovereign identities, decentralized protocols…) need to be put in perspective.

In 2019, people’s protests and social demonstrations have flooded the streets of every continent: Sudan, Chile, Hong Kong, Catalonia, Algeria, Iran, India, and of course, in France, our Gilets Jaunes. In many cases, governments reacted not only through police or military crackdown but also with censorship of electronic communication: the internet shutdown in Iran, the censorship of social networks in Hong Kong, the prohibition of decentralized identity systems in Spain… Unfortunately, it is now well-established that internet censorship effectively protects the police states that use it.

Therefore, it is no surprise that we’re seeing an increase in infringements of freedom of the press and physical attacks against those who spread information. Antoine Champagne, journalist and co-founder of reflets.info, will come to the festival to talk about the current state of the protection of journalists and whistleblowers.

Along with the cypherpunk tradition, we believe that cryptography and decentralization are essential means to protect individual and collective civil liberties. We hope that talks on the history of the cypherpunk movement and on the history of decentralization will spark conversations about this point of view among the festival participants.

Peer-to-peer technology is a concrete way to arm the resistance against oppressive powers by providing the resilient and confidential communication channels needed to coordinate social movements in hostile environments. Multiple initiatives in this domain will be presented, from the research work of the LIRIS-DRIM team (CNRS) on streaming and Web request anonymization, to Berty‘s decentralized messaging protocol, to talks and workshops on libtorrent and ZeroNet, Ethereum’s network protocol, cjdns, ZKP and identity, and homomorphic encryption.

For the general public less comfortable with the nuts and bolts of p2p cryptography, the documentary Nothing to Hide will give evidence of how mass surveillance impacts everyone and why we have come to accept it so easily. The festival will also host a show on mentalism and social engineering and a serious game which aims to help everyone learn about effective cybersecurity practices.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are another branch that stems from the cypherpunk movement. Over the last few years, the importance of having a form of money that is independent from political powers and financial institutions became obvious. At first it was ignored, then it prompted only laughs and sarcasm, and finally, open hostility. Now states and mega-corporations try to compete with their own digital and centralized currencies.

Hence the necessity of articulating and educating the public about what makes decentralized currencies so special! We will tackle this challenge in many ways: a talk on Bitcoin by the founders of Cercle du Coin, a screening of the documentary Protocole with its director in attendance, workshops introducing how to use wallets and cryptocurrencies, presentations and workshops on Libre Money (Monnaie Libre), Dash, Ark…

Since the inception of Ethereum, the scope of the blockchain, this decentralized ledger which stores cryptocurrency transactions has exceeded its monetary applications. Blockchain-based Dapps, DeFi and DAOs refer to new ways to perform peer-to-peer interactions and new approaches for managing common resources in more open and less inegalitarian ways. The audience will be introduced to several programmable blockchains such as Ethereum, Holochain, Tezos, or Aeternity.

DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are a way to introduce self-governed and transparent rules in place of the arbitrary exercise of centralized power in organizations. We will review the most interesting DAO initiatives such as Aragon, DAOstack and MetaCartel, with a panel, talks and two workshops: co-designing a DAO using DAOcanvas and participating in a decentralized jurisdiction with Kleros. Lessons learned with iExec and Paymium will shed light on decentralized marketplaces and exchanges, another form of decentralized and programmable entities.

But blockchains are not the only way to decentralize the internet. The Solid standard, created by Tim Berners-Lee, aims to re-decentralize the Web, which today lies under the control of a small number of global mega-firms such as Google and Facebook. In France, this standard is actively supported and extended by several teams gathered in the Digital Commons Consortium, present at the festival. They will give talks and workshops covering the Virtual Assembly and Startin’Blox.

Blockchains and distributed Web are closely associated with open source and free software, considered a type of digital commons. More generally, the question of the commons, is defined as a shared resource that is co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms and is an essential aspect of peer-to-peer networks.

The P2P Foundation, which will give one of the opening talks of the festival, claims the autonomy of the commons with respect to both the private and public sectors. An event within the festival, the Public Domain Day, organized by Wikimedia France and Creative Commons France, will invite open conversations about multiple aspects of intellectual property in the age of the commons: open science and open education, free licences and development aid, and the implications of IA and blockchain on art production. We will also screen a documentary telling the tragic story of Aaron Swartz, the freedom activist behind Creative Commons, and Hacking for the Commons, a brand new documentary about the clash between supporters of intellectual property and those who stand for open and free knowledge. Several members of the Coop des Communs will also participate, such as the Digital Commons Consortium and Open Food Network. Finally, a talk by The Commons Stack will show how blockchain, DAOs and commons can be tightly coupled.

The last major theme of the festival will be shared governance and peer collaboration, as these are critical to all the other topics mentioned above, from blockchain upgrades to management of the commons to the ability of people to act as free citizens and economic agents. We will open the festival with the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the first experiment of direct democracy embedded in the institutions of the French republic, as a response to the demand for real democracy expressed the Gilets Jaunes, in the context of climate emergency. The association between climate and collective intelligence will also be discussed during a talk and workshops on the Climate Collage. Tools, practices, and ideas for distributed governance and collective sense-making will be discussed and experienced with Jean-François Noubel, Open Source Politics, the Open Opale collective, and a Warm Data Lab by Matthew Schutte.

In short, peers and commoners everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as a leading question in each, the intellectual and physical property question, no matter its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for a unanimous agreement on initiatives supportive of civil liberties and the construction of the commons.

Peers and commoners disdain the concealment their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of the prevalent logic of concentration of power, wealth, and information.

Free Peers of All Countries, Unite!

Lead image: Close view of Hong Kong Lennon Wall by Ceeseven under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Special thanks to Kirstin Maulding.

The post The P2P Festival in Paris: Unite the Peers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.

But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote  (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger)  in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.

Needless to say, all of this has raised some eyebrows, among both financial analysts and crypto-activists. A Zero Hedge commentator calls Libra “Facebook’s Crypto Trojan Rabbit.” An article in The Financial Times’ Alphaville calls it “Blockchain, but Without the Blocks or Chain.” Economist Nouriel Roubini concurs, tweeting:

Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”

From Frying Pan to Fire?

To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:

This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …

The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …

What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.

Pros and Cons

Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.

But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.

United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.

Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?

Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?

Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.

“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.

Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”

The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:

This is like starting a bank without having to go through any steps to do it. …  We can’t allow Facebook to go to Switzerland and begin to compete with the dollar without having any regulatory regime that’s dealing with them.

A Stateless Private Central Bank or a Publicly Accountable One?

Facebook may be competing with more than the dollar. Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, writes:

[It] seems that the company is not seeking to compete with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Rather, Facebook is looking to replace the existing global financial system with an all-new setup, with Libra at its center.

At least at the moment, the Libra is being designed as a form of electronic money linked to many national currencies.That has raised fears that Libra might someday be recognized as a sovereign currency, with Facebook acting as a “shadow bank” that could compete with the central banks of countries around the world.

Long thinks Bitcoin, rather than Libra, will come out the winner in all this; but Bitcoin’s blockchain model is too slow, expensive and energy intensive to replace fiat currency as a medium of exchange on a national scale. As Josh Constine writes on TechCrunch:

[E]xisting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum weren’t properly engineered to scale to be a medium of exchange. Their unanchored price was susceptible to huge and unpredictable swings, making it tough for merchants to accept as payment. And cryptocurrencies miss out on much of their potential beyond speculation unless there are enough places that will take them instead of dollars. … But with Facebook’s relationship with 7 million advertisers and 90 million small businesses plus its user experience prowess, it was well-poised to tackle this juggernaut of a problem.

For Libra to scale as a national medium of exchange, its governance had to be centralized rather than “distributed.” But Libra’s governing body is not the sort of global controller we want. Jennifer Grygiel writes:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg . . . is declaring that he wants Facebook to become a virtual nation, populated by users, powered by a self-contained economy, and headed by a CEO–Zuckerberg himself– who is not even accountable to his shareholders. . . .

In many ways the company that Mark Zuckerberg is building is beginning to look more like a Roman Empire, now with its own central bank and currency, than a corporation. The only problem is that this new nation-like platform is a controlled company and is run more like a dictatorship than a sovereign country with democratically elected leaders.

A currency intended for trade on a national—let alone international—scale needs to be not only centralized but democratized, responding to the will of the people and their elected leaders. Rather than bypassing the existing central banking structure as Facebook plans to do, several groups of economists are proposing a more egalitarian solution: nationalizing and democratizing the central bank by opening its deposit window to everyone. As explored in my latest book, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age,” these proposals could allow us all to get 2.35% on our deposits, while eliminating bank runs and banking crises, since the central bank cannot run out of funds. Profits from the public medium of exchange need to return to the public rather than enriching an unaccountable, corporate-controlled Facebook Trojan horse.

Reposted from Truthdig. Header image: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Mike Deeroski / Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)

The post Facebook May Pose a Greater Danger Than Wall Street appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Image credit

As much as it may seem that the nuts and bolts of resource and waste management is about sorting machinery, storage, bins and collection systems, it is really ultimately about people.

We know that if people are to use resources mindfully, to manage them well, and to both demand and correctly use appropriate end of life systems, then we need to design systems that they are easy and convenient to use.

There are two ‘muscles’ that can be flexed in relation to resource and waste management – the Circular Economy muscle, and the Access Economy muscle. A lot of muscle-building effort has gone into the former, and the latter is a muscle we’ve only just discovered we can build.

Image credit

The Circular Economy is a concept and model which has been around for some time now, but is increasingly gaining traction – the UK’s leading waste & recycling organisation, WRAP UK have recently rebranded themselves as ‘Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency Experts’.

The Circular Economy seeks to shift activity from a linear to a circular model by making better use of materials, by keeping materials in circulation through reuse and recycling, industrial symbiosis and other efforts to divert material from landfill.

It displaces some demand for new materials, but does not address the rate at which materials enter the circle, as evidenced by total material demand continuing to grow faster than recycling rates improve.

It is vital to maintain a focus on bending the Linear Economy (‘take-make-waste’) into a Circular Economy, but it is not enough.

There is an entire, parallel area of territory yet to be explored, which I will call The Access Economy (aka Sharing Economy, Collaborative Economy) – or being able to access what we need by better using what we already have.

Image credit

The Access Economy seeks to minimise the demand for materials, and is as – if not more – significant than The Circular Economy. There are also overlaps between the two eg. reuse could be considered Circular and Access.

The rapidly-gaining momentum of the collaborative (aka sharing) economy holds huge potential for addressing how we consume resources, and ways it could result in less waste.

The Access Economy is focused not on managing material at end-of-life, of better managing ‘waste’. It is focused on designing systems that facilitate more efficient, cost effective and in many case, community-enhancing ways of enabling people to meet their needs by tapping what is already available and leveraging idle assets (be they stuff, time, space, skills).

This means looking at the design of our living systems – how we grow food and prepare it; how we clothe and transport ourselves; how we meet our daily needs. We need to look at how we can solve the pain points of people’s lives – cost of living, time poverty –in a way that also delivers on environmental objectives.

The systems for The Access Economy are different from those for The Circular Economy – and significantly they may be more appealing to people who don’t see themselves as ‘green’, or really care about recycling. 

Successfully meeting sustainability challenges means we need to stop focusing on ‘reducing’ and ‘managing’ energy, emissions, water, waste and everything else (which are symptoms, outcomes of how people live) and start looking our systems through a lens of design (not just physical design) and social innovation.

Ultimately, environmental organisations and programs are not really about ‘environment’ at all – they are social innovation, because they set out to create new patterns of behaviour among human beings in order to lessen our impacts on the ecological systems which sustain all life. And social innovation is a design process.

We are now far from the traditional, familiar territory of the Circular Economy, but into an exciting new realm we have scarcely begun to explore that is fast gathering momentum around the world.

What would we be capable of if we combined the existing strength of the Circular Economy with the emerging juggernaut of the Access Economy?

Further references:

Circular Economy – Ellen Macarthur Foundation – a series of articles about the circular economy model, its principles, related schools of thought, and an overview of circular economy news from around the world.

Shareable – an award-winning nonprofit news, action and connection hub for the sharing transformation.

OuiShare – a global community empowering citizens, public institutions and companies to build a society based on collaboration, openness and sharing.

Collaborative Consumption – comprehensive online resource for collaborative consumption worldwide and network for the global community, curating news, content, events, jobs, studies and resources from key media outlets and industry blogs, as well as original content.

If you’d like to get Cruxcatalyst via email, click here to subscribe to this blog.

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Originally published in 2014 on cruxcatalyst.com

Header image: Matthew Perkins, Flickr

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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.

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On Sunday 9th of June, four selected makers presented their agricultural solutions at Tzoumakers, our rural makerspace in Kalentzi (Ioannina, Greece). The workshop has enabled participants to explore a new dimension in making, to increase their competences and to discover that open source solutions in agriculture can be developed through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for mutual benefit.

Here are photos of the four solutions:

The project will continue with a final promotion of two developed prototypes in a European design event. Updates will be provided on our Facebook page.

We want to thank all the participants and wish them all the best for their future!

The post End of the open source agriculture workshop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

mondora is a software services company and a benefit corporation. They care about how their software products are being crafted and used, considering how both people and planet are impacted. For example, they track the paper (and trees) that are saved in the use of their application that allows banks to easily keep digital records.

mondora role models creating benefit for the world and its workers

Their social impact extends beyond outward acts, mondora proposes to change how work is done in Italy by demonstrating a way of working where employees may choose to be as remote as they like and have flexible hours. mondora believes in creating value for their community of workers as well as the world.

mondora was founded with these values in 2002. As they grew from 10 to 60 employees in the last 7 years, they evolved their ways of working to better fulfill their purpose. They have developed a culture of openness and transparency and a flatter organisational hierarchy. They have implemented tools, such as Loomio, so that anyone can share their ideas and everyone decides together.

Loomio helps move discussions to clear outcomes and action

Kirsten Ruffoni, mondora’s Benefit Officer, spoke to a number of the obstacles mondora was facing prior to adopting Loomio. She shared how, “discussions would occur but nothing would happen”. With people working remotely and on flexible hours, it was “hard to move conversation to conclusion”, and, generally, “hard to keep a conversation going as you always run into different people at the office”.

Kirsten reported that they’ve come a long way in this regards, and Loomio has played a role. “Decisions that used to take months now take a week”, Kirsten told me. mondora takes full advantage of the variety of voting and decision tools that Loomio offers, and appreciates not losing messages on Slack and—unlike email—having the ability to indicate deadlines to increase accountability.

Kirsten described a challenging decision that was made on Loomio: making the salaries of mondora transparent to everyone in the company. The CEO had some reservations, but decided to use Loomio to consult everyone in the company. After the input—unanimously in favor—the CEO decided to trust the group and implement the policy. Not only did nothing bad happen, but they were able to do something really positive in the eyes of everyone in their company. They identified, and fixed, a pay gap between women and men, establishing equal pay for equal work. Kirsten commented, “Loomio makes it easier to voice our opinions in front of our boss”. Using asynchronous decision-making tools can make it easier to have thoughtful conversations and hard decisions, whether the team is remote or meeting regularly in person.

Loomio supports collaboration between organisations and across teams

mondora has also been using Loomio to bring customers into the design process to produce better results and strengthen relationships. They involve customers in the process as early as possible and establish open communication between their customer and every person on the team.

Beyond supporting internal communication and decision-making, Loomio allows mondora to invite guest users into specific threads or groups; mondora uses this to improve their interactions with investors and university researchers. According to Kirsten, Loomio supported mondora to “get information they weren’t expecting from stakeholders.”

After acquisition by TeamSystem, a larger IT company, mondora has introduced Loomio as a decision-making tool within TeamSystem’s R&D department.

In their efforts to better the world and cultivate employee happiness, mondora is leading Italy and others into a future of work where there is a new model of employment—a “new employee” where all workers can fully participate with flexibility, remote work, and effective communication and decision-making. mondora leverages Loomio to get better outcomes with less time and effort, supporting every employee to fully participate in all aspects of the business and to deepen their interactions with customers. Want to create more benefit in the world? Look to mondora as a valuable example.

By John Gieryn at Loomio, read the original post here.

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Can we create big, ambitious projects without corporations, governments, and bosses?

Nathalia Scherer wants to try. Her organization, DAOstack, is using Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to make tools for self-organizing. Last year DAOstack raised $30 million in a 60-second token offering, but genuinely participatory governance may be easier to raise money for than to actually achieve.

MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech.

Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Originally published on KGNU.org

The post Looks Like New: How Can We Self-Organize at Scale? 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.

Around four years ago, after Bath lost it’s charity support agency, the founders of 3SG stepped in to quickly build an organisation that could act in its place—facilitating funding from regional sources and helping to unify charities with similar missions.

Taking action

When it started, 3SG had no building, no governmental support and essentially no budget—but what they did have was a passion for connecting charities. Its founders had worked for numerous nonprofits in the past and getting the ball rolling was as simple as recognising a need.

“A lot of people had talked about it, but no one had done anything. I think it was just a case of ‘well let’s start it’. And that’s the key—just doing something.”

In a smaller city like Bath, there are limited funding sources, so different charities focusing on the same cause would end up competing with each other for money.

3SG facilitates connections between the non-profits that are planning similar projects and gives them an opportunity to collaborate, instead of having to compete for funding.

Managing growth

In the past two years, 3SG has quickly grown from 10 founders into a community of around 200 members that consist of representatives and leaders from the majority of charitable organisations in Bath.

The growth is exciting but it also made organizing events, arranging meetings and making community-wide decisions difficult. He explains that all 3SG members are busy people who volunteer their time to 3SG on top of their existing jobs.

“We were doing it all by email and it was getting really confusing. People felt like they were missing out on being able to contribute.”

Avoiding email confusion with the help of Loomio

James says that Loomio helps them organise and keep track of communications so that their members are never struggling to catch up on information they missed throughout the day or battling the confusion of a reply-all email chain.

He likes the way Loomio provides summaries of every conversation, which cuts down on reading time so they have more time to do the work that matters.

Listening to the voice of the majority

The polling feature on Loomio is another winner in his book. The 3SG team recently used it to decide the theme of their next big meeting and James was surprised by the outcome. He hadn’t realised that so many members were interested in the topic that was chosen.

The voice of the majority, he explains, can sometimes get drowned out by big personalities. People who don’t want to ruffle feathers often miss the opportunity to voice their opinion. With Loomio polls, it’s a less intimidating process.

“It’s more democratic,” he says, adding that it’s also satisfying to be able to see who is engaging.

Future-minded

James’ longterm dream for 3SG is to develop a community hub where charities can share space and work together.

He says that they will need to broaden their scope and potential for funding before that is possible but he hopes that with the structure that Loomio provides, they will be in the position to achieve all of their goals sooner than expected.

And with 3SG’s tireless dedication to taking action on behalf of those who need it, we have no doubt that anything is possible.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight on Loomio, you can see the original post here

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How do you role-model a democratic workplace?

This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

Purpose and community

For more than 30 years, CAN, a workers’ co-op, has catalysed the movement of cooperatives and social enterprises across the UK, helping people work better together through principles of democracy, autonomy, and concern for community.

As a visionary organization committed to empowering and supporting other co-ops, it is important to CAN that they effectively role-model an “active democracy”, where their workers have a voice.

How do we move forward together?

However, as the organization grew, this was proving to be difficult. CAN’s team is geographically distributed across the UK and the time delay in-between meetings, combined with the chaotic nature of email, was leading to big losses.

Austen, a Director and Worker-Owner of CAN saw an opportunity for their board of directors to be more effective and efficient by adopting an online decision-making tool to aid with governance. They chose Loomio.

The power of making decisions online

“Quality of directorship is dependent on the quality of decisions we make, so Loomio has been game-changing for us,” says Austen.

Using Loomio helps CAN to do their decision-making online and organize different threads of conversation, while Loomio’s proposal tool helps CAN move conversations to clear outcomes, creating shared understanding and impact.

Austen adds that using Loomio enables CAN to “effectively have a director’s meeting open all the time,” which not only increases productivity, but also saves money for the organization.

“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year” —Austen Cordasco

More effective co-ops in the UK and beyond

Overall, incorporating Loomio into their company toolbox significantly improves the speed and efficiency of their working together. Undoubtedly, as CAN becomes more agile in their decision-making, they will be able to help even more organizations in the UK put purpose and community at the heart of their work.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight, John Gieryn. You can see the original post here! and learn more about CAN on their website.

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