I like your approach a lot. The reason is related to the “ownership” and democratic governance issues that Nathan and Stacco are worried about: I was going to write something very similar to what Bob Haugen has already said about federation. Starting to build these things from **protocols** instead of platforms is much, much more easily scalable and much more resilient, in the long run. A LOT.

In addition to that, wrt governance: in order for these visions to reach the critical mass that keeps them self sustainable, you have to make space from the beginning for people who do NOT want to participate in governance, or cannot afford to do it. Using ride hailing as an example, whatever its governance is, it must be able from day 1 to cope with, and serve, even people who need rides, but simply do not want any mental hassle or (even perceived) responsibility than what comes with using Uber or similar.

An awesome article indeed. So glad that you (and others) are starting to take open protocols seriously in applying them to creating a better world for all.

You say you “haven’t seen this [open protocols] thinking applied in the platform cooperativism space”. Actually, I think you possibly have but perhaps didn’t know it at the time. During the Impact Economy Summit in Whistler October 2015 I created a brief document to answer some issues that Michel Bauwens was grappling with. I wrote about an “Open Protocol to Interoperate People”. You may have not seen it. Michel did get what I was talking about after some explanation. You can see it here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jQenVEXzn8S8BpLXLgqai3t7EOX21D1Unl7bS3nBgCA
Unfortunately, I have yet to upload my presentation from the Summit but you’ve kicked me to work on it and get it up there hopefully next week! But in the meantime you can see what I was saying back then here:
https://youtu.be/HjTW2nZNa6s?t=4m30s
Many of the original ideas came from CollabCamp in Amsterdam 2014, by the way.

As you know I run Freewheelers, an international ride-share website. At OuiShare, in previous years, I have spent many days talking to other ride-share companies about creating an open protocol for ride-sharing. Unfortunately there has been little enthusiasm. I am so excited that you have similar ideas. There is a lot of work that has been done already by many, many, many organisations and groups to formulate the technology. So much effort for so little results. But at least we can build upon their technology. And I have 50K users we can play with. What do you say?!

The fact is that open protocols are part of the solution. But the real issue; the real gremlin in the ointment is not the technology, it’s the adoption. I’ve seen far too many projects (Kendraio included) have amazing dreams and/or amazing technology but without people actually using it, what’s the point? Although, of course, even ruins can be built upon. I love Floris Koot’s quote “leave good ruins”!

A point to note, just before everyone jumps on the “open protocol panacea solves everything” bandwagon (hold on a mo, we haven’t finished the “blockchain panacea solves everything” bandwagon yet! 😉 services cost money/resources/something to run. I ran an ISP (Internet Service Provider) back in the mid 90s. [Yes, I sold it with my partners for 4 odd million. Yes, I am a raving capitalist. And before that I studied art at Camberwell for a year. So, I’m also an uneducated artist! ;-)] Anyway, to the point, we ran an ISP and it used an open protocol TCP/IP. But the open protocol had to run over copper or fibre and sometimes the roads had to be dug up and all that cost money. And we had to pay our staff to provide customer support when things broke or got dug up by mistake. Running an ISP is actually a very grounding experience which puts you back in touch with the earth and cable ducting! 😉 Anyway, open protocols are just part of the solution. You also need software and infrastructure and neither of those are free baby!

So, my task now is to drive adoption to the ideas that I was talking about in Whistler. By some miracle Kendraio has just received European and Google grants totalling 690K EUR for the next 3 years. So, I’ll have some resources to build it after all. And also my task over the next 3 years is to raise a lot more funding to ensure our ruins are good!

Have fun!

Cheers Daniel

We want a protocol where they can all join together in a larger cooperative economy. We don’t think one platform will work for that, but a common protocol and vocabularies might.

It’s more federation than total decent, in my opinion

“If we look at the enclosures we see that people’s with no property or common property, were considered to have no property (terra nullius) and were therefore appropriated, as were the lands of the indigenous people colonized by the West. This is also often done with immaterial resources such as knowledge and culture, which are appropriated and then copyrighted or patented (the biopiracy of traditional Indian seeds for example). We also have the very strong tradition of totalitarian state-socialism, where so-called collective public property created absolute power in the state and its managerial class. Although property was the instrument of monopolisation by private or state forces, non-property was clearly not a protection against this.

On the other hand, if we look at the successes of the contemporary commons movement, in free culture, in free software, in open design; and the relative success and staying power of cooperative ventures, they are all done by ‘hacking’ property or distributing property. The GPL license for free software is a form of common property, protected by law; Creative Commons similarly protect the sharing of cultural goods by law. In the case of cooperatives it is done by distributing shares and guaranteeing one share, one vote.”

Source: The Commons as Property.

The internet is an open protocol, and what turned it toward centralization was ownership models, suggesting protocols alone are not enough (eg, decentralized email has become surveillance gmail). We see this again with the all-holy blockchain, which had much potential, but without democratic structures it is mainly reinforcing the speculative and unequal economy of the outside world. I’m also unsure about why what you’re talking about should be referred to as “cooperativism” at all, since there’s little trace of the international definition of that term, which involves democratic economic participation and governance.

Already, it’s worth noting, we’re seeing platform co-ops use federation to spread; in a sense, federation is a protocol strategy very familiar to the cooperative tradition.

Barlow’s world never happened. Decentralized tech will centralize without decentralized ownership. This is the world we’re contending with now.